Semalt: Successful E-commerce Referencing

E-commerce SEO is not a mere formality but a real growth tool for online businesses. By implementing effective SEO strategies, businesses can reach new customers, increase sales and improve their reputation.
To do so, it is imperative to understand how E-commerce SEO works and how to apply digital marketing best practices. This article explains the fundamental concepts of E-commerce SEO and provides some practical tips to help you improve your online visibility and achieve SEO success.
Why use SEO for an E-commerce website?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for an e-commerce website because it improves the visibility and discovery of the site by potential customers via search engines. This can lead to increased traffic and sales, which is crucial to the success of the online business. In addition, good SEO can also help improve the user experience by making the site easier to find and navigate.
Possible SEO mistakes in E-commerce
New online stores tend to make the same mistakes when it comes to SEO for an E-commerce site. The following issues can affect your search result ranking:
- Using unoptimized URLs: URLs containing alphanumeric characters and dashes are considered more optimized for SEO.
- Not optimizing metadata: Metadata is essential for SEO and should be optimized with relevant keywords and attractive descriptions.
- Not optimizing images: Images should contain ALT tags that are read by search engines and help improve SEO.
- Not creating internal links: Internal links are essential to improve SEO and help search engines understand the structure of your website.
- Not using quality content: Quality content is essential for SEO and should be optimized with relevant keywords and useful information.
- Not setting up a robots.txt file: The robots.txt file is essential for defining what information search engines can and cannot index.
- Not setting up redirects properly: Redirects are essential to help search engines understand where you want them to send users when they visit your site.
- Not optimizing for mobile devices: With a large portion of searches done on mobile, it is important to optimize your site for mobile devices.
What are the steps to prepare your E-commerce SEO strategy?

There are several steps to prepare an effective SEO strategy for an e-commerce site. However, in this article you will discover the most important ones to implement to have good results:
- Determine relevant keywords
- Optimise the site's pages for the targeted keywords
- Create quality and regularly updated content
- Improve page load speed
- Make the site suitable for mobile devices
- Establish relevant internal links
- Establish quality external links
- Monitor the results and adjust the strategy accordingly.
By following these steps, you can maximise your chances of success in E-commerce SEO.
So, let's take a look at how to implement each of these steps to make your E-commerce SEO successful.
1. Analyze E-commerce competitors
Analyzing your E-commerce competitors is important to understand how they approach SEO and how you can differentiate yourself to attract customers. Here are the steps to analyze your E-commerce competitors:
- Identify competitors: Find E-commerce sites that sell similar products to yours and have high rankings in search results for relevant keywords.
- Study their SEO strategy: Examine their site to see how they have optimized them for the target keywords, how they have created quality content, how they have built internal and external links, etc.
- Analyze their content: Analyze the content of their product pages to understand how they describe their products and what sets them apart from others.
- Evaluate their site quality: Evaluate their site's load speed, mobile friendliness, design, etc. to determine if they have implemented SEO best practices.
- Compare your strengths and weaknesses: Compare your strengths and weaknesses with your competitors' to determine how you can differentiate yourself to attract customers.
By analyzing competitors, you can understand how they approach SEO and how you can differentiate yourself to attract customers to your e-commerce site. In addition, it is important to do competitor analysis with a qualified tool such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard to get accurate information from your competitors.
2. Determining relevant keywords
Determining relevant keywords is a crucial step in a successful SEO strategy for an e-commerce site. Relevant keywords are the terms and phrases that potential customers use to find products or services similar to those offered by your business. It is important to select keywords specific to your niche and use them strategically on your site to improve your SEO. You can use tools such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard to help you identify relevant keywords for your business.
3. Optimize site pages for targeted keywords
Optimizing your site pages for targeted keywords is an important step in improving your E-commerce SEO. This involves strategically placing relevant keywords in different sections of your site, such as titles, headers, product descriptions and body content.
It's important to use keywords naturally and avoid overusing or over-including them, as this can result in SEO penalties. By optimizing your pages for targeted keywords, you can improve your visibility to potential customers and improve your SEO.
4. Create quality and regularly updated content

Creating quality content and updating it regularly is important to a successful SEO strategy for an e-commerce site. Search engines place a high value on quality, frequently updated content to determine site rankings. Your content should be relevant, unique and informative to your potential customers, and should include relevant keywords to improve your SEO.
It is also important to publish new content regularly to keep your customers interested and show search engines that your site is active and relevant. Creating quality content and updating it regularly can greatly improve your SEO and attract potential customers to your site.
5. Improve page load speed
Improving page load speed is an important factor in a successful SEO strategy for an E-commerce site. Search engines place great importance on page load speed, as a site that loads quickly offers a better user experience. A site that takes longer to load may discourage potential customers and cause them to leave your site before making a purchase. So it's important to make sure your site loads quickly on all devices.
You can use tools such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard to assess your site's loading speed and make changes to improve load times. Improving page load speed can improve your SEO and provide a better user experience for your potential customers.

6. Making the site responsive to mobile devices
Making the site responsive to mobile devices is important for a successful SEO strategy for an E-commerce site. Search engines place great importance on the quality of the user experience on mobile devices, as an increasing number of users are shopping online via their smartphones. A site that is not optimized for mobile devices can lead to navigation, load and conversion issues for potential customers on mobile.
Therefore, it is important to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly to provide a smooth user experience that is optimized for mobile users. It's also important to regularly test the site on different devices to make sure everything is working properly. Making your site responsive to mobile devices can significantly improve your SEO and provide a better user experience for potential customers on mobile.
7. Establish relevant internal links
Building relevant internal links is important to a successful SEO strategy for an E-commerce site. Internal links allow users and search engines to easily navigate through your site and find relevant information. They also help strengthen the structure of your site and improve its SEO. Relevant internal links should be placed strategically and logically, based on the information you want to convey to your potential customers.
It is also important to ensure that internal links are of high quality, as search engines place a high value on the quality of internal links in determining site rankings. Building relevant internal links can significantly improve your SEO and provide a better user experience for potential customers.
8. Building quality external links

Building quality external links is also important to a successful SEO strategy for an e-commerce site. External links can boost your site's credibility and improve its SEO by telling search engines that your site is relevant and trustworthy. Quality external links should come from reliable sources that are relevant to your target market.
It is also important to ensure that the external links are natural and relevant to the information you want to convey to your potential customers. Avoid using unscrupulous external linking techniques such as purchased links, as this can have negative consequences for your SEO. Building quality external links can significantly improve your SEO and enhance your site's credibility with potential customers.
9. Tracking results and adapting strategy accordingly.
Tracking results and adjusting strategy accordingly are critical aspects of a successful SEO strategy for an e-commerce site. It is important to track your site's SEO and traffic performance to understand what is working and what needs to be improved. Site analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you monitor trends in traffic, bounce rate and page views. It's also important to monitor your search result rankings to understand how you measure up to your competitors.
If you find that some of your pages aren't ranking as well as you'd like, you can make changes to your strategy to improve them. By tracking the results and adjusting your strategy accordingly, you can continue to improve your SEO and maximize your site's visibility to potential customers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SEO is a key element for the success of an e-commerce site. To prepare a successful SEO strategy, it is important to target relevant keywords, optimize the site's pages, create quality and regularly updated content, improve page load speed, make the site mobile-friendly, and establish relevant internal links and quality external links.
By tracking results and adjusting your strategy accordingly, you can continually improve your SEO and maximize your site's visibility to potential customers. SEO can take time, but by following good practices and taking a strategic approach, you can achieve significant results for your e-commerce site.