Search engine optimisation and e-commerce: 20 tips to avoid being penalised by Google
The SEO of an e-commerce site is essential if you want visibility, more traffic and a higher conversion rate. An SEO-optimised online shop appears in the top results of Google searches, and customers find it more easily.
Here are the top 20 e-commerce techniques and SEO tips for positioning your products well and optimising your natural referencing when you're an e-tailer.
Relevant keywords to gain a competitive edge over your e-commerce competitors
1. Target the keywords your customers are looking for
Keywords are the basis of natural referencing for an e-commerce site. Without them, there will be no visits, and therefore no sales. Keywords make it possible to provide useful information about your products and services online, both to Google and to your customers. The keywords you need to work on are the search terms that reflect the intentions of your potential customers, i.e. the SEO queries most frequently used by Internet users in your sector of activity.
2. Don't target just one keyword
The more products you have online, the more possible expressions are entered by Internet users in search engines. So think about exploiting as many long-tail keywords as possible and try to position yourself on several user queries to multiply your chances of being well referenced.
3. Spy on your competitors' sites
Analysing the traffic on competing websites is a good way of improving your e-commerce ranking. You need to find out what your competitors are doing best on their merchant sites so that you can exploit them to the advantage of your positioning and SEO strategy.
4. Equip yourself with a good targeting and monitoring tool
The Google AdWords Keyword Planner is effective for finding relevant keywords en masse, but to better target your SEO actions, you'll need a more precise tool.
Several solutions offering SEO packages are proving effective for your natural referencing techniques. Take Ranxplorer, for example, which allows you to detect your best-positioned competitors on the basis of a semantic approach to your site and to explore their SEO strategy. With this kind of tool, you get a real, tailor-made SEO audit and a list of priority keywords for gaining traffic.
Unique, high-quality product sheets for optimised e-commerce referencing
5. Avoid copying and pasting your product descriptions
Google strives to offer pages with unique and relevant content to Internet users, and does not tolerate duplicate content. So avoid copying and pasting product descriptions from your suppliers. Make sure you write them in a relevant way with real semantic value based on the keywords in your SEO strategy.
6. Don't duplicate your own e-commerce content
Duplicate content within the same e-commerce site is also problematic for search engines. If several of your shop's product sheets reuse the same text (or part of the text), Google will only index one page and ignore the others.
7. Don't write product pages that are too short
If your product descriptions and pages contain too little text, they simply won't be indexed. It is estimated that a minimum of 300 words is needed for Google to consider an e-commerce page interesting.
8. Use information management software
PIM software stands for "Product Information Management". In other words, a solution that makes it easier to manage your catalogues across all sales channels, without duplicating content.
One of the most advanced product data repositories is Afineo, which makes it easy to customise and differentiate the content of your product pages for each new distribution channel. To put it simply, you have a single description for your different marketplaces: one for Prestashop, one for Cdiscount, one for Amazon, one for Fnac, and so on. There are no limits, and you can count on an effective SEO strategy with no duplication!
Best SEO practices for optimising your online store's search engine optimisation
9. Authorise customer reviews and comments
Customer reviews and comments from Internet users rank particularly well in search engines. They also make it easier for your customers to make decisions. 70% of Internet users often look for product reviews before making a purchase.
10. Make the most of Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are additional information (such as ratings or reviews) that enrich the description of your products within the Google search results. They are highly effective for optimising your e-commerce SEO and increasing your click-through rate.
11. Optimise your SEO metadata
The metadata included in the title and meta-description tags is crucial for improving your search engine ranking. Make sure you feed them with your tail and head of tail keywords. The same goes for your images, via the alt attributes, title and description, to gain visibility and traffic via Google Images.
12. Take care with the structure of your URLs
The URLs of your product sheets play a major role in e-commerce referencing. Your web addresses must be well structured and contain the right keywords in order to indicate to visitors and search engines the theme of each page. If one of your products is classified in several categories, make sure that there are not several URLs. Google also considers this as duplicate content when positioning your products in the results.
13. Prioritise your pages with canonical URLs
The canonical URL, symbolised by the canonical tag, allows you to indicate to Google which pages of your online shop should be given priority for positioning, in the case of very similar content, in order to promote your flagship products.
14. Improve indexing with pagination and sitemaps
Use pagination for your product pages. This is important to enable Google to crawl your site easily and index your products. Similarly, setting up a content map sitemap file (sitemap.xml file) guarantees better indexing and ranking.
15. Optimise the customer journey
Optimise your merchant site by making it easier for customers to use and improving the user experience. Positive signals like these will also come back to Google's ears for your e-commerce ranking and visibility.
16. Ban dead ends and errors
If a product has to disappear from your site for good, put in its place a redirect (301) to a similar product or at least its category. This will enable you to avoid 404 error pages, which search engines consider to be signs of poor quality . Similarly, record the pages that should not be indexed in your website's robots.txt file.
17. Optimise your site's loading speed
Google has made it clear that site loading speed is now an extremely important ranking criterion if you want to be at the top of the search results.
18. Take mobile browsing into account
For good natural search engine optimisation of the mobile version of your e-commerce site, think about making your shop perfectly searchable on all devices, whether tablets or smartphones. Technical improvements are often necessary, and Google penalises non-optimised online shops in the rankings.
19. Control your internal linking
The overall structure of your site and the ecosystem of links between your product pages are very important for your natural search engine optimisation. Good internal linking not only helps to guide Internet users, but also informs search engines about the relevance and organisation of your e-commerce content.
20. Think about external links
External links pointing to your online shop increase your authority and the trust of users. They also help your site to rank higher in search results.
What are the best ways to optimise your e-commerce search engine optimisation?
For optimised e-commerce SEO, you need relevant, competitive keywords and an effective SEO strategy. To manage all aspects of positioning techniques as effectively as possible, think SEO packages and equip yourself with complementary SEO tools.
Good PIM software for managing your content and a strategic competitor monitoring solution help e-retailers to gain traffic and visibility, manage duplicate content and monitor the competition to position themselves better on their market.
Article translated from French