Ecommerce is red hot right now, and there’s no sign of it cooling down anytime soon. There are plenty of ways to measure your eCommerce performance, but the most important metric you need to focus on is revenue. To begin with, we will address the 5 major e-Commerce ranking factors that directly impact your shop’s visibility in search engines. Getting your SEO strategies for eCommerce websites right from the start is crucial for any e-Commerce store — after all, potential customers won’t find you unless they can find you online!
Title Tags
The title tags are the clickable words that appear in the search results. They’re also the most important ranking factor for e-Commerce stores. While you can’t directly impact the overall length of your title tags, you can make use of every character that’s available to you.
Your goal is to include as many relevant keywords as possible. The more times your products appear in the title, the more likely people are to click through and make a purchase.
Practically, you’ll want to use your primary product category as well as a few product-specific keywords.
A good example would be something like: “Women’s Winter Coats | Women’s Winter Jackets | Winter Women’s Coats | Winter Coats for Women | Women’s Winter Jackets | Winter Jackets for Women.”
Keep in mind that Google will truncate your title tag after around 70 characters. So, you’ll need to take this into consideration when crafting your title tags.
Product Images
Product images are crucial for eCommerce stores, as they showcase your products in detail and provide visual cues. These images need to be high-resolution and visually appealing so that potential customers can easily see what’s being sold and make purchasing decisions based on what they see. In eCommerce, product images are often the deciding factor in whether a customer makes a purchase or not. If your images are low-quality, blurry, or poorly cropped, then you can expect a lot of customers to click away and shop at another store.
With that being said, product images are also the second most important ranking factor in eCommerce. If your images don’t meet Google’s standards, then they could drop your shop in the SERPs and severely limit your online visibility.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a navigation element that let users click through to different areas of your site — like your product category pages. You can use them to guide your customers through your site and make sure they’re seeing what they need when they need it.
Breadcrumbs aren’t a direct ranking factor, but they help Google understand the structure of your eCommerce site. This makes it easier for Google to index your products and display them in the SERPs. There are plenty of plugins that offer breadcrumb functionality. However, you can also implement them as static text links in your site’s footer.
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are visual elements that give your eCommerce store a competitive edge. They increase your click-through rate and make your site more appealing. Rich snippets are usually displayed next to your site’s product images.
They let users know things like the product name, price, rating, and other relevant data. This makes them much easier to understand and lets customers quickly assess whether a product is right for them or not.
There are many rich snippet markup schemas. Some popular examples include Google Offer, Google Price, and Google Review.
Schema.org markup
This is one of the most important eCommerce ranking factors that most people forget about. It includes information about your products like their description, manufacturer, and model number. Google uses this data to help people find the products that they’re looking for more easily.
It also makes your site a lot easier to navigate. If your eCommerce site is still unstructured, Google will have a hard time understanding your products and displaying them in the SERPs. If your competitors have structured their sites correctly and you haven’t, you could lose a lot of potential customers and revenue.
AdWords CPC and Ad Rank
AdWords is Google’s advertising network and an incredibly powerful source of targeted traffic. In fact, most people who shop online start their search with an ad.
However, Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving. This means that the strategies that worked just a few years ago might not work now. There’s one thing that has remained consistent with Google’s advertising model: ad rank. Ad Rank is a measure of how relevant your ad is to a specific search query.
It considers factors like your keyword’s search volume, your ad title, as well as your ad’s click-through rate (CTR), and cost per click (CPC). The higher your ad rank, the closer your ad will appear above the organic results. This means that more people will click on your ad and visit your site.
User Experience (UX)
Google’s algorithms also consider your site’s user experience (UX) when ranking your eCommerce store. This includes things like your site’s load speed, user interface, and overall design. If your site is slow and frustrating to use, it’s a surefire way to lose customers.
Google knows this and assumes that your site has poor UX if it experiences frequent slowdowns. If you want your eCommerce site to rank highly, you need to optimize your website for speed. There are plenty of ways to do this, like optimizing your site’s images and hosting your website on a fast server.
Conclusions
Ecommerce is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, with online sales predicted to increase to over $1.5 trillion by 2023. With the rise in eCommerce comes the challenge of competing with large online retailers as well as those who have just recently joined the game such as drop shippers. These new players often have an advantage over more established stores since they often start out with smaller inventory, lower overhead, and less competition. How can you survive and thrive in such a competitive space? By understanding your role in the eCommerce competition, and by focusing on the right eCommerce ranking factors.