SEO & E-commerce: how to optimise your site?

SEO is a very important acquisition lever for e-commerce sites that are very dependent on their online visibility. Working on SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) has become almost mandatory to develop the sales of your e-commerce site and your referencing on search engines will allow you to attract more customers.

What are the main marketing levers for e-commerce? What are the benefits of SEO for e-commerce and how to implement a good SEO strategy? In this article, we take a look at the key elements to take into account to boost your e-commerce site and sell more!

What are the main marketing levers for e-commerce?

E-commerce marketing consists of using different levers and strategies to :

• Increase traffic to your e-commerce site
• Convert these visitors into customers
• Retain these new customers

There are different type of content marketing and methods to increase the performance of an e-commerce site:

• Emailing is one of the main levers of traffic acquisition. Your audience expects news and promotions to be sent by email. Think of making a newsletter or prospecting email campaigns. For this, you can turn to an email sequencing tool like LaGrowthMachine.

• The blog that will allow you to feed your website with content. It improves your search engine ranking and can be part of an inbound marketing strategy.

• SEA (or Search Engine Advertising) with Google Adwords will allow you to obtain immediate visibility on search engines by paying. It is a cost per click and allows you to get quick results with high transformation rates if the keywords are well studied beforehand.

• Social networks will allow you to communicate directly with your audience and this will impact your reputation. Using them also allows you to be close to your customers and to measure their satisfaction (comments, opinions, etc.).

• Retargeting (or advertising retargeting) will propose to the user to come back to your website if they have left it previously. This technique uses the user's browsing data (cookies) to consult their visit to the website. Thanks to retargeting, you can offer tailor-made advertisements (e.g. products that the user has looked at).

• SEO is a long-term investment and must be worked on consistently and regularly. Results will start to appear at least after 3-6 months. It will allow you to acquire quality traffic in addition to gaining notoriety thanks to your good positioning on search engines.

Now that you know the different marketing levers for e-commerce, the hardest part remains. Indeed, the levers presented will only be useful if a strategy with precise objectives has been put in place. Remember that the number one objective is to obtain quality traffic. Indeed, if your visitors arrive on your site and leave it 5 seconds later, it is useless (bounce rate).

In the following, we will use the example of SEO to list the advantages of this strategy and how to implement it to get the maximum benefit.

What are the advantages of SEO for e-commerce?

A well-referenced e-commerce site is like a shop on the Champs Elysées. There will be a lot of traffic in front of the shop and it will therefore have a better chance of attracting customers. On the other hand, a poorly referenced e-commerce site is more like a shop hidden at the end of a street with little traffic.

The first page of Google has a click rate of +90%. This means that if you are on the 2nd or 3rd page of a search engine, you have very little chance of being seen. Internet users trust Google for their search results and as they are increasingly looking for quick information, they will consider the first results as the most relevant.

With a relevant SEO strategy on your e-commerce site, you will be able to

• Increase your brand awareness
• Capture more traffic to your online shop
• Win over new customers
• Increase your turnover

SEO is also the most profitable acquisition lever. Indeed, it has the advantage of bringing you customers for free. It is true that to improve your natural referencing, you will have to use a lot of resources in time and money but once you are well positioned on different keywords, the traffic you will get will simply be free!

Here are some of the benefits of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):

• Having visitors interested in your products
• Improving conversion rates
• Increasing your visibility and therefore lowering that of your competitors
• Anticipate sales through constant traffic on different keywords

How to implement an SEO strategy in e-commerce?

In order to implement an effective SEO strategy that will allow you to appear in the first results of search engines, it is important to follow the following steps:

Research effective keywords

This step is essential to ensure that you rank high in search results. Choose keywords that are relevant to your business and long-tail keywords can also help you rank quickly in certain niches where your competitors are not yet present. Think in terms of user requests and you can also use tools like answerthepublic.com which will allow you to know what is or is not searched for in your sector of activity.

💡 Bigblue Tip

Semrush offers the "Keyword Gap" tool that allows you to find the keywords used by your competitors that you will need to rank for in Google searches!

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Optimise SEO with links and navigation

To rank your pages, Google crawls them with the help of robots that will go to your site. Linking your pages together will facilitate the exploration of your e-commerce site. This is called internal linking. Try as much as possible to position links between pages that may be complementary.

Optimise the content of your site's product pages

When a customer wants to buy on your website, it is important to understand that they cannot see the item in real life, nor can they touch it. The aim here is to answer any questions they may have. First of all, write attractive product descriptions. They should be very detailed and mention all the features of the product you are selling. You can also add presentation videos, assembly or user guides to your customers to advise and help them.

💡 Bigblue Tip

As they can change regularly (especially in the clothing sector), do not waste too much time putting many keywords on your product pages. We recommend you instead to optimising your category pages!

Creating a blog

The aim of the blog is to help users choose their product. It will also have a role to play in your search engine positioning. Update it regularly, offering visitors to your site content related to your sector of activity. Above all, do not use duplicate content. Google doesn't like it and you risk losing a lot of visibility on your website.

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Improve the user experience and usability of your e-commerce website

It is important to design your e-commerce site well so that navigation on it is as smooth as possible. Think UX and UI design so that your visitors stay on your site as long as possible and get to the end of the purchase process. A slow loading page, a misunderstanding in the sales path can frustrate the consumer and make him leave your online shop.

💡 Bigblue Tip

By June 2022, the share of mobile traffic reached 65.5%. Moreover, about 30% of e-commerce visitors don't make it to the bottom of a page. If your customer have to scroll, you're likely losing an equivalent potential revenue with each visit! If you are looking for inspiration, we recommend you to have a look on websites like 900.Care one's.

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Measure the results of your strategy

The implementation of SEO marketing operations must be measurable to know if you are going in the right direction. Google Analytics will allow you to analyse your traffic and see where it is coming from. This way you can see if the increase in traffic has led to an increase in turnover and you can then monitor your strategy with the help of statistics.

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Conclusion

If you are looking at an SEO strategy for the first time, the first thing to remember is that it is a medium to long term acquisition strategy. The ROI (or Return of Investment) of SEO will not be immediate and is part of a process of continuous improvement of your web presence. Move forward regularly and be patient!

Forget the quantitative and focus mainly on the qualitative aspect to attract an audience that is most likely to become your customers. Capturing an unqualified audience can be detrimental to your website's SEO.

Finally, think mobile. Adapting your website to mobile phones has become essential as more and more people buy from their phones. Your website must therefore be responsive design and offer a smooth shopping experience on smartphones.