One common mistake ecommerce site owners make is they try to optimize their site for highly competitive keywords. However, ranking for those keywords is often an impossible task. A better approach would be to target individual product and category pages.

So, ask your SEO consultant, SEO specialist or digital marketing agency to focus on a few, selected pages. This works better in the long run. We already shared some ecommerce SEO tips in the previous post. Here are some more tips.

1. Use long tail keywords
While everyone is busy optimizing for exact keywords, you can beat the competition instantly by focusing on loan-tail keywords. For instance, a long-tail variation of the popular keyword “kids bags” could be “comfortable school bags for kids.”

The competition for the latter would be low. Yet, it can give you decent traffic to your site.

2. Write unique meta-descriptions
Since ecommerce sites usually have a bazillion of pages, it might forever to write unique title tag and meta-descriptions for each of them. However, the results you get by having unique descriptions for each page is worth the time and effort.

Alright, if you still think it is not feasible, take the middle way. Create a few templates for certain categories but also create some unique descriptions for your top priority pages.

3. Use clean URLs
This is easier said than done. That’s because some CMS will make your product or category page URLs unorganized by default. Ideally, you should use short, clear URLs. For instance, a good example of a clean product page URL is as follows domain.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name.

This type of clean URL helps Google locate the right page for the right search term. Eventually, it helps boost your ecommerce SEO. If your CMS automatically creates messy URLs, you can use certain plugins to fix the issue.

Those inspiring ecommerce success stories do not tell you a simple truth. Ecommerce is changing fast – blazing fast. What worked even a few months back may not work now!

In fact, SEO for your ecommerce store needs a complete overhaul right now! You still need an SEO consultant or digital marketing agency. But make sure they are using the latest ecommerce SEO techniques vetted by experts in the field. Otherwise, all your efforts, time and money could go waste. With that in mind here are some of the top ecommerce SEO tips for 2021.

1. Use HTTPS
Most ecommerce sites by the nature of the business need to collect sensitive customer information. For instance, one needs to type their credit card details when making a payment on your website.

Evidently, you need to encrypt all that information for secure transaction. This also helps improve your SEO. In fact, Google recently said not having HTTPS could jeopardize your site ranking.

2. Increase page loading speed
Imagine clicking on your shopping cart and waiting forever for the page to load! What will you do? Perhaps, you’ll abandon the site. After all, you don’t have a lack of options to buy from.

So, this is obvious. Sluggish page loading speed would only increase bounce rates and eventually affect your SEO.

3. Do keyword-research for each page
Granted, ecommerce sites are notorious for having lots of pages. Maybe you have hundreds of category pages and thousands of product pages. But you still need to find relevant keyword for each page. This could be a cumbersome task. But that’s why you need an SEO specialist by your side.

In truth, there’s no way you can rank your site with highly competitive keywords like women’s shoes or kids bags. Instead, try optimizing a few product or category pages using relevant but less-competition keywords.

The sad truth about SEO is that most people do it the wrong way. Then they don’t get the desired results. And then they complain, “SEO is dead.”

But search engine optimization, if done the right way with an SEO expert or digital marketing agency, can still work wonders for your online presence. So what do the experts do differently? In most cases, what sets them apart from others is their ability to avoid certain SEO myths. Without further ado, let’s debunk some of those myths.

1. The title and meta-description don’t really matter
A title tag is exactly how it sounds like. It is the headline of a search result. On the other hand, a meta description is a short summary of the web page that appears just below the link of a search result. In theory, the title tag and meta description do not influence search rankings, but they still matter.

For instance, if you insert the main keyword in the title tag and meta description, it helps Google know what information is available in the webpage/website. Plus, a well-written meta description could help persuade the reader to click and visit the webpage. That way, it also helps with SEO.

2. SEO is a one-time venture
On the contrary, SEO is actually a long-term game. Granted, SEO can sometimes help improve your search ranking within a few weeks. However, if you want to sustain the good results, you need to put constant efforts that’s what an SEO consultant do.

For instance, not refreshing your content for some time can result in link rot and hamper your overall search ranking.

3. Keyword research is not important
Keywords are still important for SEO, although the way you use keywords should change. Without proper keyword research, you may end up optimizing your content with wrong keywords – the ones that have low search volumes or are difficult to rank for.

However, just using the right keyword isn’t enough. You should also consider the search intent behind a keyword or key phrase.

Quality content is the foundation of quality SEO. The more consistent you’re in adding high-value content to your website, the better for SEO.

However, just posting content isn’t enough. Otherwise, no one would need an SEO consultant or SEO expert.

The job of these professionals is to optimize your content for search engines. Ideally, SEO works should start from the planning stage of content creation. However, if you already have loads of content on your website, you can still take some steps for better SEO.

Here are 3 more ways to improve SEO of your existing content.

1. Improve click-through rate
Even when your webpage shows up on the first page of Google search results, not every searcher is going to click on it. Your click-through rate is the measure of how many searchers actually clicked through to your page, this is one of the secrets of a digital marketing agency.

Needless to say, the whole purpose of SEO is to get more people to visit your website or webpage. So, improving your click-through rate is the ultimate goal.

Interestingly, it is also one of the factors that Google considers when ranking your webpage in search results. So, how can you improve your CTR? There are many ways but mainly try to improve your title tag and meta-description for the page. If possible, insert the main keyword in the title tag and make it useful for the reader.

The description should clearly mention the purpose of the page in maximum 150 characters.

2. Update old content with declining traffic
Evergreen content is a myth. A piece of content that users absolutely loved two years back could see almost no traffic now. That happens all the time. With time, the information becomes outdated.

Or sometimes you simply need to upgrade the format or structuring of the content to make it relevant for today.

In most cases, you don’t have to rewrite the whole content. Just updating the outdated sections would suffice. In any case, updating your existing content is a great way to boost your traffic.

Don’t get this wrong! Publishing new content to your website has no alternative. SEO is a long-term game; and seeing your efforts come to fruition could take months, if not years. To that end, you must keep adding new content to your website at regular intervals.

However, the top SEO expert or SEO consultant also use certain quick-fix techniques to boost website traffic. These techniques, if employed the right way, can help improve the search ranking of your existing content within weeks. Here are some ideas.

Optimize page loading speed
By now you know that user experience is critical to good SEO.

Imagine someone clicking on your page but the page won’t load (or take forever to load). That’s bad user experience, right? And that is exactly why Google factors in the loading speed of a webpage when ranking it. As a digital marketing agency, the first thing we check in a website is its loading speed.

For that, we use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Once you identify slow speed issues, you can take a few steps to increase your page speed. For instance, if your content has images, consider reducing their size.

WordPress users can easily do that using the ShortPixel plugin. Another good idea would be to enable browser caching, using tools like W3 Total Cache.

Use internal linking to your advantage
Internal linking is when you link one page in your website to another relevant page in your site.

But how does that help boost your SEO? Let’s explain. Simply put, when a webpage has a lot of relevant internal links, Google boosts it PageRank. If you don’t know what PageRank is, it is a complex calculation, which helps Google identify high value pages by looking at the number of quality pages linked to it.

Because Google considers PageRank as an important ranking factor, internal linking would be a great way to boost your SEO, without having to add new content to your website.