What is your top tip for improving an eCommerce landing page to be SEO-friendly?
To help you make your eCommerce landing page more SEO-friendly, we asked SEO specialists and webmasters this question for their best insights. From updating and not removing your landing pages to adding customer reviews, there are several tips that may help you improve your eCommerce landing page to rank higher on search engines.
Here are 12 tips for making your eCommerce landing page SEO-friendly:
- Update and Don’t Remove Your Landing Pages
- Add Bulleted and Numbered Lists.
- Fix Broken Backlinks
- Invest in an Https
- Use Unique Content for Your Products
- Treat Your Ecommerce Category Pages as Content Clusters
- Optimize for Mobile Access
- Use Easy-to-Understand SEO Software
- Focus on Title Tags and Product Names for Certain Products
- Improve Page Speed
- Utilize Out-of-Stock Banners and Product Suggestions
- Add Customer Reviews
Update and Don’t Remove Your Landing Pages
If your landing page has been up for a while, refresh the content as needed. Your search rankings will suffer due to outdated material, which will result in a high bounce rate. If prices, dates, or contact information change, make the necessary changes to your landing page immediately.
It's advisable not to take down a landing page once it's been created.
Many people mistake deleting a page after it has met its conversion objectives. Nonetheless, that page served its SEO function, and it would be a shame to throw away what you've accomplished. When you create a new landing page, it's as if you're erasing all you've done and beginning again. Even if you're running a short-term campaign, eliminating the landing page will significantly drop visitors.
Muskan Rai, Web Hosting Advices
Add Bulleted and Numbered Lists
We did an A/B test where we broke some of our text up into lists on a landing page. Then, we compared its SEO performance to an identical page that presented the same information in chunky blocks of text.
The page with the lists out-performed by a landslide. The takeaway here is that search engines care about readability. Skimmable content also improves the user experience.
Stephanie Venn-Watson, fatty15
Fix Broken Backlinks
Gathering backlinks to your landing page can make a real difference to your SEO ratings and although it does take a bit of effort, the rewards can be substantial. It's relatively easy to persuade unknown bloggers to link to your page, but the real goal is to have quality backlinks from leaders in your field backlink to your page.
There are many ways to gain these vital backlinks, but one of the most rewarding is by fixing broken links. All you need to do is find those broken links on other websites in your niche, and tools are available to help you do this. Once you have located one, contact the webmaster to point out the link is broken, then suggest alternatives, of course, include your own website. As you are helping the webmaster repair his page, he will likely use your link in return.
Colin Palfrey, JollySEO
Invest in an HTTPS
Building a secure and safe site for users is especially crucial when sharing payment details, but added security helps boost your SEO-friendliness, too. Google’s algorithm values “usability” as one of their ranking factors which added security can boost. Using an HTTPS in your web address gives more security than a regular Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP.
Because HTTPS makes data and financial transaction communications safer for users, Google favors eCommerce sites that use it in their ranking system. HTTPS is a relatively low-cost solution to improve your store’s performance and boost your Google rank simultaneously.
Scott Lieberman, Touchdown Money
Use Unique Content for Your Products
If your products are available to buy on other websites, ensure you are creating unique content for those products. Google wants its search results to be diverse and not full of pages that simply say the same thing. If your pages are using the same content that is available on 100s of other websites, such as a default manufacturer's description, there is nothing that is setting your site apart from these other sites.
If you add value and bring something unique to your page, then you will have a better chance to be rewarded by Google. You won't be simply duplicating the same content those 100s of other sites use. If you have a large amount of products you may need a way to prioritize which content to re-write. You can use metrics such as selecting best sellers, items with the highest conversion rate, biggest mark-up items, or items you want to push.
Max Peters, Technical SEO Consulting
Treat Your Ecommerce Category Pages as Content Clusters
In order to improve your eCommerce landing pages so that they are SEO-friendly, you need to treat them as if they were commercial content clusters (as you would with a services business). What that means is to make sure that the category pages answer the intent of the search: A detailed description of the category and sub-categories, broken down with the problems and solutions that they solve.
Multimedia is another consideration; we are looking for images, videos, and infographics that help paint the picture of this category. Frequently Asked Questions; a strong FAQ section with at least 15+ strong questions specific to that category which will help answer the users intent - Added SEO bonus: Add this to your FAQ schema for the page. Interlinking to existing blog content; have 2 or 3 specific blogs that are related to this category interlinked on this category page.
Shoaib Mughal, Marketix
Optimize for Mobile Access
As more and more internet traffic comes from mobile devices, more weight is given to mobile-friendliness in SEO rankings. If you are creating an eCommerce landing page, this is even more crucial as the limitations inherent to mobile (smaller screens, less precise keyboards, etc.) can become especially nightmarish when trying to check out.
Be sure to optimize your website's loading speeds and include adaptive layouts that rearrange the relevant elements of the page to match any screen orientation. Not only will it improve your SEO metrics, it will make it easier for potential customers to engage with your website in general.
Adrien Dissous, Babo Botanicals
Use Easy-to-Understand SEO Software
Make sure you have some excellent SEO reporting software like TrafficTravis, which is great for even beginners, to optimize your landing page. For small businesses without dedicated marketing departments or a small budget, free simple SEO software can improve your search engine results and customer attraction through the sales funnel immensely. Even without your having an in-depth understanding of how this new modern-day eCommerce market operates.
Evan McCarthy, Sporting Smiles
Focus on Title Tags and Product Names for Certain Products
Marketers often focus on keywords with a high monthly search volume. However, when you plug in Keyword Hero and look at what keywords really bring in conversions and revenue, it turns out that these are often very specific, known only in the industry, clusters of letters and numbers. What is "dlx6068pt9" to a layman? Simply a string of random characters. For a person in the construction industry, however, it will be "Makita DLX6068PT Cordless 18V 6 Piece Kit With 3×5.0Ah Batteries, Twin Port Charger And Tool Bag".
That is why I recommend that in shops with e.g. power tools you focus strongly on the title tag, product name, and alt tags as well as the model designation of the given product in the description. Traffic from such keywords can be counted on the fingers of two hands. The number of transactions on the fingers of one hand. And in view of this, we may be dealing here with a double-digit conversion rate.
Lukasz Zelezny, SEO ANT LTD
Improve Page Speed
Speed up the load time of your landing page to make it SEO-friendly. Note that the quicker a site loads, the higher it could appear in search results. This is because readers will opt to stay on your landing page to read information rather than bounce.
You can improve the page load speed by compressing images, reducing the number of requests, and removing redirects. It should take about 1 to 2 seconds for a page to show up on your screen, according to studies. Use available online tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check the load speed of your landing page and identify specific features to work on.
Max Hauer, Goflow
Utilize Out-of-Stock Banners and Product Suggestions
A big mistake in eCom SEO is deleting product pages when the item is out of stock or being discontinued. If your page is ranking, by removing it, you're throwing away traffic from people interested in your products.
Here's what you do instead. Add an 'out-of-stock' banner to your page and heavily promote similar items which you do have in stock. This way you still have the chance to convert these people into paying customers and you don't lose the organic traffic being generated from the old product pages. It's a win-win.
John Butterworth, Viddyoze
Add Customer Reviews
Placing customer reviews on your landing page makes it more SEO-friendly. Google treats customer reviews as new or updated content. This tells Google your business is active, and new content pushes your site higher up in search results.
If you don't update your content, you'll have a higher bounce rate, resulting in a lower search results ranking. So, adding customer reviews is a simple way to add fresh content, and it is social proof that helps customers decide to buy.
Kevin Huang, Ambient Home US