5-Point Ecommerce SEO Checklist For 2021

Whether you have a well-established e-commerce store or still designing and setting up the website, it is essential to adhere to the website’s optimization. It will help ensure your website ranks in the top search engine results since day 1. You need a well-structured e-commerce plan to help you optimize the store, get more traffic, attract shoppers, and get more sales.     

Do you plan to improve the SEO of your e-commerce website? Are you wondering how you can achieve that? Here is a detailed checklist to help you grow your online store.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO lays the foundation of a strong e-commerce website. If you want to grow your online store’s leads and sales, SEO can help you achieve your goals. Here are five essential things to do for SEO:

1. Target the Right Keywords.

Keyword research is the foundation of a successful SEO plan. As essential as it is to use keywords, it is crucial to use the right ones. While everyone intends to find as many keywords as they can, it is wise to go for the target keywords that are sales driven.

You might want to select the keywords with the highest search volume, but they may also have high competition and fail to bring you traffic. It would be wise to look for specific keywords that may have low search volume and more conversions. Find out particular keywords for your product and product descriptions page to enable the users to get exactly what they are looking for.

 

2. Improve Loading Speed.

Today, the attention span of the viewers has reduced significantly. If your website for the online store doesn’t load quickly, viewers can get frustrated and leave midway. It can increase the bounce rate and adversely affect your rankings.

To ensure it doesn’t happen with you, check the loading speed of your website. Ideally, it must be 2 to 3 seconds. If your website takes more time to load, you can decrease it by reducing the redirects, HTTP requests, and developmental resources like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Getting better hosting might also prove helpful while reducing your e-commerce website’s loading time.

 

3. Make the Website Mobile-friendly.

Gone are the times when the audience accessed the website from their desktops or laptops. Due to the prevalence of smartphones, most people use it to research products or even buy them. While 79% of Americans have shopped online, roughly half of them use mobile phones to make a purchase.

In today’s time, websites must be responsive to cater to different audiences and their preferences. It means that the e-commerce website must automatically adjust to different screen sizes and viewports. This web development approach can help you create dynamic websites. It can make your website more visible, accessible and improve your ranking on search engine results.  

 

4. Remove Crawl Errors.

If you want your online store to grow, you need to improve your ranking in search results. A search engine cannot rank your website if it cannot crawl it. Crawling is the function used by a search engine to visit every page of your e-commerce website through a bot. The bot will crawl all the web pages and index the content for Google to use for search engine rankings. You aim to ensure the bot can easily crawl the pages. If it fails to crawl your website, it is known as crawl errors.

To remove the crawl errors, you can make sure each link on your website leads to an actual page. You can use the ‘Coverage’ report in Google Search Console to determine if Google is having trouble crawling any page. If it shows any error, you can quickly fix it.

 

5. Focus on Link Building.

Backlinks are among the three most effective strategies for improving the ranking of an e-commerce store. Backlinks are links from other related websites to your e-commerce website. All these links count as votes for the website and help build authority, relevance, and trust.

If you want to generate traffic through link building, you can get backlinks through these three ways:

• Guest blogging

Write guest blogs for other high-authority websites of the same industry to bring traffic to your website. 

• Podcasts

Podcasts are the same as blogs, where you can speak as a guest. You can help get a backlink to your website through the podcast website.

• Influencers

You can mention influencers on your posts or products and simply let them know about it. It will also help you get backlinks.

 

Final Verdict

SEO is a continuous process, and in the case of an e-commerce store, you need to keep a close eye on the activities. If you wish to increase your online business visibility and get more conversions, follow the checklist given above. It can help you achieve all the business goals for 2021.