Do you have an online store and do not receive enough visits? Do you have many products, but these do not appear well positioned in search engines? Do you want to increase your sales using SEO strategies and you don’t know how? These are my 10 SEO tips for online stores :
If you still do not have your online store, we recommend reading the following article to find out how to start: How to create an online store in 10 steps, 3 months and without investment .
1. Create long and original product descriptions
As you already know, content is king on the Internet, and of course, it is also king for online stores. To get the maximum possible number of visits, it is essential to have a good positioning of all your products , or at least the most important ones, since each well-positioned product will attract independent visits that will add to the total. To achieve this, you must start by ensuring that each product has a long description, optimized and above all, 100% original .
I see that many online stores directly use the descriptions given by wholesalers or suppliers, making a quick dump of photos , texts and technical characteristics, and leaving the products as they are. Without a doubt, the time saving is considerable, and it is not entirely a bad option to start with, but having duplicate content will not help us at all, so little by little the descriptions should be changed to completely original texts.
We cannot have in our online store the same content as the vast majority of the competition, nor that which the manufacturer shows on its page, since it will be practically impossible for us to convince Google that our store is more important than all the others, for what our products will not appear in the first positions and we will not receive visits. In addition, Google penalizes duplicate content, so it would sink us a little further in the search results.
Therefore, the contents have to be retouched. Product descriptions should be as long as possible , over 200 or 300 words if possible. They should also include the keywords or the name of the product that we want to position prominently. At the SEO level, we must treat them as if they were blog articles. You can add the technical sheet of the product, explain how to use it or how to assemble it, or even give examples of its different ways of use. Use your imagination.
Add the option to insert comments or ratings by customers. They will add original content to your products and will give your pages a high degree of updating that will help you in positioning, since pages that are updated frequently are rewarded by search engines.
2. Use internal links logically
One of the ways that our pages gain notoriety and relevance in search engines is that several links point to them. But I’m not just talking about external links, internal ones, of course, also count.
We must design a link strategy so that the most important products, categories or subcategories receive enough links . We can for example:
- In each product card, add links to other similar products, or others that complement them, creating a circuit through which you can “jump” from one product to another continuously.
- Write articles on the main page or on the blog with links to products or categories.
- Distribute press releases with links to inside pages.
We must ensure that there are no broken links , and in case of variations in the products or in the store, check and keep the links always updated .
As in all cases, in the links you should always use the keywords both in the link text and in the “title” property or field.
3. Create a blog that accompanies the online store
In some cases, due to the type of product that is intended to be sold, it is practically impossible to make long descriptions or to provide valuable content to our online store. In these cases, it is essential to create a blog to attract some traffic to the store.
In any case, it is advisable to create a blog that provides relevant content to your target audience, talking about our sector or what surrounds it. It also serves us to promote our products in some way, directly or indirectly. Hiring an SEO blog writing service can be an excellent solution for creating high-quality, targeted content for your blog that engages your target audience and promotes your products or services. They can also help you create a content strategy that can align with your business goals and objectives and help you achieve better results in the long run.
4. Get external links
As in all websites, getting links from other sites that point to your pages will make you gain popularity and relevance , and therefore you will gain positions within the search results. Of course, the links will also attract new visitors to your website directly, by clicking on those links.
There is no ideal number of links, the more you get the better, but they should be as natural as possible, because if, for example, Google detects that you are “forcing” to win these links, it will penalize you for it. Natural links, links that come from websites in our same sector or links that arise from social networks where our brand has a certain presence are more relevant.
There are different techniques, which we will study in depth later, to get the precious external links or also called backlinks . Here is a list of some of them:
- Add your store to online store directories.
- Upload your products to Google Products and other product search engines.
- Exchange links with sites of the same theme.
- Post ads on free ad pages.
- Make it easy for the user to share your products.
- Post some of your products and articles on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
- Participate in forums and blogs in your sector and use the signature to leave links.
- Post quality content and wait for them to link to you naturally.
5. Optimize your product pages
If we get many of our products to appear well positioned independently, we will get a large number of visits that together will multiply the traffic in our online store.
To achieve this, we must apply all our SEO knowledge to each product , and optimize them as if each one of them were the main page of your store: with its title, description, friendly url, h1, h2 tags, bold, italics, images, links…
I recently wrote an article with several SEO tips , which can be perfectly applied to your product pages, use them.
6. Create a store sitemap
Using a well-structured map of your online store will facilitate the indexing of all your products and help in its particular positioning and that of the store in general. Don’t forget to upload your map to the Google Webmaster Center to speed up the process.
Block pages that you don’t want Google to index. Using the robots.txt file, you can block URLs that we don’t want search engines to access, such as the admin panel or some duplicate products.
7. Create videos of your products
Video is the preferred format of users . From websites, there is no better way to get an idea of what a product is like, or how it works, than with a demonstration video, so making videos of your products will be a way of capturing the user’s attention and attracting them to that you end up buying.
But it is also that Google gives a lot of importance to the videos uploaded to YouTube, so if in addition to having the video in our store, we upload it to YouTube and use the correct techniques to position your videos on YouTube , they will appear bounce on Google search results thus providing you with new visits from potential customers.
It is estimated that users currently spend more time on Facebook than searching Google or visiting any other website. And the case is similar for many users on other social networks. Therefore, it is vitally important to have a presence on all the social networks in which it may be useful for you to be present.
Because it is not only about having a presence, you have to know how to take advantage of it and get some benefit beyond the knowledge of your brand.
It is not necessary to be in the networks in any way, it is important to define a strategy in social networks within our marketing plan.
9. Create as many categories and products as you can
As I have commented on several occasions, each page must be treated individually, since by itself it can attract traffic, and if we add all the “small” traffic of all our internal pages, we achieve a large number of visits. It is the so-called “ long tail ”.
Well, one way to get more visits is by having more pages. I’m not talking about repeating or duplicating information, which is frowned upon and penalized by search engines, but about showing the products you have from all possible points of view .
Apart from the categories that the store has, you can create new families of products related by something in common , or that share characteristics. We could have, for example, categories by brand, by type of material, by type of product or even by type of customer. The same article can be seen from different points of view. Think of all possible.
On the other hand, don’t forget to add as many different products as you can. In online stores where the system used is dropshipping and there are no investment problems in stock, it is mandatory to show all the products available to our supplier or wholesaler . It is not much use limiting our catalog voluntarily. People want variety when shopping in a store, to be able to choose between different products. Don’t limit your experience.
10. Use a Framework or CMS that is “SEO Friendly”
Today, practically all online stores are built on a framework , CMS or content manager for online stores, such as Oscommerce, Magento, Prestashop, Virtuemart, Opencart…
Due to its ease of use and low cost, it is the preferred option for most entrepreneurs who want to have their own online store. I personally recommend using a good framework or CMS for your store , for the reasons stated above, but you should make sure, for example, that you don’t add useless code to your pages by using some useless plugins, modules or widgets, as well as poorly designed templates. , which will simply dirty your site, making it difficult for search engines to read the information properly, overloading your page, and thus damaging positioning.
You can also use a wordpress hosting and set up the store with Woocommerce. We recommend Hostinger for being the cheapest hosting with the best quality, you have hosting from only €0.99 per month ($0.99) with free domain included and other very cheap options if you need more resources.
