E-commerce is here to stay, and grow. By the end of 2020, the sales figures through e-commerce are expected to reach 600+ million in the United States. Currently, over 300 million worth of sale is taking place via e-commerce. The online selling and buying concept is growing by leaps and bounds as evident with the above statistics. Close to 40% of Americans buy online products at least once a month. About 25% does online purchase once or twice in a week.

So, whether it is a business to customer (B2C), business to business (B2B) or customer to customer (C2C), there is room for expansion. Given the competition in the virtual world, Search Engine Optimization or SEO can help your e-commerce business stand out. Here are five tips on using SEO to help your online business thrive.

Keywords or content

Research shows that about 700,000 searches are done on Google per minute. Everything that a customer needs is usually researched online, from mobiles to motors. While earlier, one or two words were used to search (such as “healthy recipes”), the trend now is to put in long sentences with specific requirements. An example of a long search or a long tail search as it is called would be “Recipes using broccoli, mushroom, and spinach”.

Making a list of both short and long tail keywords and keeping the content relevant would help optimize traffic to your e-commerce. There are many free online SEO resources available to find the list of keywords.

Website structure

SEO is affected by the structure of a website and vice versa. The way the website is structured affects how easily search engine crawlers find it. The links on the website, the different pages are some of the factors that impact SEO. A user-friendly and easy to navigate website will be uncomplicated and also can be well-indexed by search engines. SEO tools help in building a user-friendly website that requires minimum clicks to find anything on the pages. 

Page URL

A brief and apt address to the website is most likely to be SEO friendly. The URL of the website should contain the keyword to optimize search engine results. 

Static URLs fare better since they can contain the required keyword while dynamic URL’s can be confusing to the customer. In static URLs, using hyphens or dashes instead of underscores (which can be read as a single word by search engines) will help. Similarly, choosing the right title that describes the nature of the business, makes it more SEO friendly. The URL should ideally have lower case letters to help with SEO.

Alt-text

Using alt-text would enable search engines to decode the images on your e-commerce websites.  Product images and descriptions should contain keywords to drive more traffic. 

Title-tag

The search engines display the meta tags also under the links in the result page. Content used in meta description should be catchy and compelling to direct more visitors to the page in order to maximize converts.

Effective search engine optimization can really help your business to be more visible and bring in more sales.

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