You have a well-designed online store that showcases your products perfectly. Customers manage to navigate your site in a user-friendly way, and the payment process is incredibly smooth. While these are essential components for effective online sales, just having a well-designed website that lists your products in an attractive way is not enough. Consumers should be able to find you on search engines and view information that will direct them to your online store to explore your products. This means that you need to optimize the organic referencing of your website. We present to you the basics of SEO to know to optimize the SEO of your e-commerce site and appear in the search results; so your customers can find you online.
SEO amplifies the reach of your site
This is where SEO comes in. SEO refers to search engine optimization; it is a process bringing together a set of practices to follow to improve the ranking of a site in search engine results.
SEO services are extremely important; this is what allows product pages to appear on the first page of search results. We know that:
- 81% of consumers research online before buying. They are actively looking for solutions, and you have to show up in the results to reach them.
- 71% of consumers generally click on a link on the first page of the results. Less than 6% of consumers click on links on the second and third pages.
- A good ranking in search engine results can, therefore, allow you to receive more free traffic on your site and reach more potential customers.
SEO for beginners: the fundamentals of the optimization process
There are over a billion websites on the Internet. Search engines like Google have to analyze countless numbers of web pages when a user enters a request. To increase the fluidity of the search process – and return relevant results – search engines use formulas to rate websites and web pages. Google formulas try to determine the relevance of a given web page following a search query by a user. The purpose of SEO is to send signals to search engines indicating the value and relevance of a specific website. The more user-friendly and optimized your website, the better the ranking you will reach in search results – and the more traffic you will receive on your site.
Once you have identified the queries to target, you can start thinking about optimizing the content of your site to improve the relevance of your search results. Here are some practices to follow:
Avoid over-optimization of keywords. Search engines are more sophisticated today than they once were. A few years ago, it was possible to rank higher in search results by repeating the same expression in an exaggerated way. But today, search engines consider this spam; the over-optimization of keywords signaling that the quality of a web page is very poor.
Organize your site. The structure of a site has a significant influence on SEO since it impacts the user experience. A good structure also makes it easier for search engines to “understand” and index your site more easily, thereby increasing your likelihood of achieving higher rankings in the results pages.
Consider the speed of your site. The loading speed of your site greatly influences its ranking in search results. The slower a site, the lower the search engines consider it to be.
As a merchant, you need to think about mobile. 63% of millennials, the first generation connected, buy on their smartphones daily.
Your site must, therefore, be optimized for mobile. Start by making all online components of your site mobile- friendly.
If you use pop-ups in abundance on your e-store to capture traffic or offer offers, deactivate them for mobile. Google is currently penalizing sites that overuse these kinds of mobile practices.
Do you need help? Use a tool like HubSpot’s Website Grader (interface available in French, choose the language in the footer on the far right) to assess the current performance of your site based on indicators such as speed and SEO, so that name just a few.
The tool will not only tell you what is missing or what is detrimental to the performance of your merchant site, but it will also provide you with very specific recommendations for improving it.