E-commerce is the way of the present and the future, as online shopping is only expected to continue growing. Overall search volume has increased as more and more people venture online, which offers brands more opportunities to reach new customers. So, how can you be sure your e-commerce store reaches the right customers and answers the right search queries? Through a fine-tuned SEO strategy! NetElixir’s SEO team helps your brand carefully cultivate your SEO strategy and stay current with the latest trends and updates so you can effectively and responsibly engage your customers in the moments that matter most.
Let’s dive into some prominent SEO trends brands should know to give their digital storefront a little boost in the search engine result pages.
A SERP SEO Strategy That Goes Beyond the Ten Blue Links
Most retailers have significant market share to capture when it comes to organic search engine results features. While a spot on the traditional list of ten blue links is still coveted, there’s so much more to gain on that results page. In fact, zero-click searches in Google rose to nearly 65% in 2020, reports Search Engine Land.
Your brand can feature prominently in the “people also ask”, “featured snippets”, “image search”, or “knowledge panels”. Optimizing for featured snippets can help drive brand awareness and increase your authority as an expert within your industry. Create content that specifically answers questions people may be searching for to increase your SERP visibility and provide authoritative information that can rank well.
Benefitting from SERP exposure doesn’t necessarily mean getting a click. As the SERP expands beyond simply providing a list of ten other websites, your brand has ample opportunities — through ads, featured snippets, images, and more — to appear on potential customer’s screens. Brand awareness can go a long way in eventually cultivating brand loyalty that ensures repeat customers.
How is Structured Data Markup Important to E-Commerce?
Structured data markup is important for e-commerce retailers because it tells search engine crawlers what the content and purpose are of a webpage. For example, structured data helps differentiate between a webpage selling a specific product and a blog post sharing information. Accurately understanding and portraying these different context elements of a webpage helps search engine crawlers know what can and should be considered for featured SERP results. And, as noted above, having prominent placement in those featured SERP results can generate increased brand awareness and clicks. Together, this helps brands make more of an impact in capturing the competitive share of voice.
If you are selling products, you may want to show more than just a product description in the search result. Rich results are boosted by structured data that pulls ratings, reviews, product images, pricing, availability, and more. When a customer is fully informed about the product they are searching for, they can make the best buying decision for themselves — and learn to trust what a brand tells them. With that, ensure that your product information (especially stock and inventory) are up-to-date.
Optimizing Your Page Experience
In recent updates to core web vitals scores, Google prioritizes user experience. Sites with good user experience will typically rank better than sites with poor user experience, especially if the content is similar. To evaluate a good page experience, Google considers mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, and page speed, among other factors.
Free tools provided by Google can help compute your core web vitals score. Your grade is scored out of 100 and offers insights into how you compare to industry averages.
NetElixir boasts a suite of free tools to improve your SEO, as well, such as:
Once you have a baseline understanding of how your page performs, you can begin taking the steps to improve the overall experience. Try compressing the size of images on your webpage, use static imagery when possible over dynamic content, and ensure your meta descriptions accurately reflect the web page’s content. All these are relatively quick and simple fixes that can make a difference in your user experience and thus your ranking.
Does Google See All the Good SEO on Your Site?
With all these factors that could negatively impact your SEO — such as too many pop-ups, broken and low-quality links, improperly formatted tags and metadata, and more — you may be wondering if Google sees the good SEO as much as the bad. The short answer is of course! A lot of factors determine your ranking across a variety of search engines. Staying on top of the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates is important to ensure your content reaches the right audiences.
Your SEO strategy is a rich-multifaceted science that needs a balance of strong content and technical implementation; one without the other won’t mean much. While content is queen, technical SEO is the crown that gets her noticed.
The crown jewels, if the metaphor may continue, are tweaks and insights that help search engine spiders properly crawl and index your website. Some quick tips to improve the indexation of your site are:
- Check your crawl status within Google Search Console about once a month or so to highlight and remedy any errors.
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Consistently and continually update content to signal to the search engine spiders your website is being updated and thus should frequently be crawled (and share this content on social for greater visibility!).
- Decrease on-page resources to help spiders crawl your page faster (as well as help your page load faster).
- Eliminate duplicate content.
You can use Google’s URL Inspection tool (or third-party tools like View Rendered Source) to learn more about the current index status, inspect a live URL, troubleshoot a missing page, and more.
How NetElixir Empowers Your SEO Strategy
NetElixir’s SEO team is here to help your brand succeed online. Request a consultation for a deep dive into your SEO strategy, benchmark analysis, and potential growth opportunities. Our solutions range from technical implementation to strategic overview.
Our cross-channel approach to SEO means that we don’t silo your digital efforts; every approach works together for one, holistic e-commerce strategy that bolsters your online presence. NetElixir’s cross-channel SEO strategy helps to strengthen your overall content across platforms, increase brand visibility, and build out your link profile that in turn can improve your ranking. We help you responsibly and effectively engage with your high-value customers at each and every touchpoint along their shopping journey with insights into how and when they search and shop online.
