Top 10 Ways To Optimize Your E-Commerce Store (PART I)

KM Digital Creativz brings you this wonderful article that helps E-Commerce stores to identify their weak spots and optimize their online strategies for improving their sales numbers.

With frequent algorithm changes, new search engine feature updates and conflicting advice, many e-tailers are unsure of where to start with SEO. That’s why we’re pulling back the curtain on a few of our tried-and-true e-commerce SEO strategies that can drive serious results.

1. Reduce Load Time

Fast load times aren’t just essential for a great user experience – they also significantly impact search rankings. In our experience, 100-200s of milliseconds load time is a solid benchmark. Although there are many ways to improve site speed, image compression can typically make an immediate impact. We also recommend checking Google Tag Manager to take inventory of active scripts on your site. If the list starts to look more like a novel, you might want to remove excess calls that may be slowing down your site.

2. Optimize for Mobile

If your site isn’t mobile optimized, you’re at a serious search disadvantage. Evolving user habits make responsive design essential from both an SEO and user experience perspective. If you’re looking to take things a step further, Google’s AMP format can further optimize mobile experiences by reducing load time and improving mobile search rank. HubSpot has a great tool called Website Grader that can check if your site is Mobile Responsive and has Viewports configured.

3. Resolve Site Errors

Keep your site clean by continually monitoring Google Search Console (formally known as Google Webmaster tools). Site errors may include broken links, indexed 404 pages or errors in sitemap files to name a few. Although not all errors are created equal, resolving them improves Google’s ability to index your site and can positively affect search rankings.

4. Enable Canonical Tags

Canonicalization, also known as canonical tagging, tells search engines that a page URL actually represents a default master page. This is especially useful when you have pages with more than one URL (e.g. your homepage or blog listing pages). In this example, canonical tags transfer SEO credit from duplicate URLs to the default page that you want to rank. It’s a simple but necessary fix that can have a large impact on search rankings. HubSpot also recently unveiled a way to add canonical tags directly in the COS and blog posts, making tag implementation even easier for SEO experts and novices alike.

5. Add Customer Reviews

Search engines treat customer reviews as new website content and engagement, which are all factors that influence rankings. Customer reviews also significantly improve the user experience by adding third-party credibility to your business. If you’re using Bigcommerce Enterprise, you have access to hundreds of apps in their app store, including our friends at Yotpo. Also be sure to utilize Schema.org language so that your product reviews, stars and number of reviews show up on search engine results pages.

Stay tuned for PART II of this article tomorrow.

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