As part of the build-up to the next SEO edition of Digital Superchats, Tom Armenante, eCommerce Director at GTSE, shares a series of tips on how to improve your search visibility.

There is a huge amount of content out there around SEO advice and best practice. A lot of it will be helpful in creating a well-rounded SEO strategy for your website, to help Google realise the authority and trust provided by your domain.

Unfortunately, not every tool within an SEO’s arsenal will produce the same level of benefit. Within this article I’m going to try and breakdown some of the key areas that will really help your ecommerce website form the best foundation to start ranking for the terms that will drive traffic to convert on your website. This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but it provides some solid starting points for the main areas within an ecommerce SEO strategy.

1. Site structure

The structure of your website from an SEO perspective is hugely important, and if this is done correctly it can really help Google understand which pages should be ranking for which terms. The use of sub directories in the structure of the site, will help Google crawl, correctly index and assign the appropriate amount of authority to each section of the website.

Additionally, if you apply breadcrumbs on the site outlining the hierarchy, Google will pull this into the search results, as seen in the result below:

In terms of best practise for subdirectories, as with all URLs it is important to get the main keywords in there, however it is also important not to make the URL too long. So, if there are several directories, it is worth taking the length of the initial category URLs into account.

An example of this is below:

https://gtse.co.uk/tape/duct-tape

As with most actions within SEO, doing this well will also benefit the user, as they will have clear and easy to remember URLs.

If you are re-structuring your site to provide more structure, or better optimised URL, it is incredibly important to remember to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new one. This will ensure any link authority from the old URL is passed through and that any existing links to the old URLs are not broken.

2. Title Tags

Title tags are one of the few meta tags that still have an impact on search rankings, though this impact is reduced now that Google has so many additional ranking factors into account. Despite the reduced impact they are still a great way to highlight the keywords you are trying to target a page with. Researching and updating the title tags, so they are as well optimised as possible, is a simple job which would not usually require development resource, with most ecommerce platforms have functionality on the backend to enter title tags at a category and product level.

The first stage when optimising title tags is to do keyword research around the category / product, making sure you have taken every possible way of describing the product and any widely used descriptive words into account. When planning out which pages will be targeting which terms it’s important not to target more than one page with the same terms, as this could cause confusion within Google over which page should be ranking.

In terms of the actual layout of the title tag, best practise is usually to use 65-70 characters and to have the brand on the end of the title tag with a dash. Then have any terms that don’t make an easy-to-read phrase separated by a dash or a pipe. It’s incredibly important to make title tags read well as they are the first thing people will see when they see a Google search result and will therefore directly affect the click through rate.

Meta descriptions are no longer a direct ranking factor, so Google won’t take any of the keywords into account, however they are an indirect ranking factor. If your meta description doesn’t read very well then people will be less likely to click through into your website, which does affect Google ranking.

3. Internal linking

Internal linking is another action that can be completed with relative ease and can provide a positive impact in helping Google understand which page you’d like to rank and pass link authority effectively through your website.

The best places to do this on an ecommerce store are the category and product pages. As there are so many of them, it’s a great way to get more visibility to pages that might not be in the main navigation or just need extra help.

Product pages are a great place to link to content and buyers guide articles, these will usually provide useful information on the product. With the additional authority these content pages are then more likely to rank higher for informational terms within Google.

4. Guide articles

Another great way to help Google understand the authority of your ecommerce store is to provide helpful content on your product range, on everything from technical information to best use cases. This content will have benefits in two-fold, the content itself will start to rank quite quickly, providing long tail Google organic traffic from the more niche queries that the content will contain. The second benefit will be the longer-term view that Google takes of your domain, seeing your site as more of an authority on the certain subject matter, this will start to improve your rankings for more generic product related queries.

A great way to help Google understand which area of the website particular content is meant to help, is by placing that content on the same subdirectory as the category it benefits. For example, on our cable ties category at GTSE we have the guides in the same subdirectory, as seen below:

https://gtse.co.uk/cable-ties/cable-ties-buyers-guides/what-are-the-strongest-cable-ties-size-chart

If you think from Google’s perspective, if your website is a list of products, how can they understand whether your website is an expert in a given area without a demonstration of your knowledge. Doing this with helpful guides that visitors to your site really engage with is the best way of doing this!

5. Inbound links

The final piece of the puzzle in any SEO strategy is getting high quality relevant links back to the site.

Google still use inbound links as a major ranking signal, so any site wanting to increase their organic ranking should factor link acquisition in.

One of the most common ways to do this is using Digital PR, where relevant newsworthy stories are created and pushed out to journalists, where they usually (helpfully) provide a link back. If done well this can return an incredible level of high-quality coverage.

Articles created for these campaigns are often data-led using either data within the company, quotes from subject matter experts or by doing a survey. This gives the Digital PR teams statistics they can use to sell in a story to a journalist.

Other tactics to acquire relevant links that are easier to do inhouse include:

• Contributing expert opinion articles
• Links from suppliers & partners
• Trustworthy higher quality relevant directories
• Links from customers

Summary

As with most things in SEO all these actions are unlikely to provide an instant benefit. They are the cornerstone of activities that are needed to be repeated over time and accounted into every area of your site. This will then give you an incredible foundation to start targeting the correct terms and build up your organic visibility, hopefully resulting in traffic and conversations!

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About the Author:

Tom Armenante is the eCommerce Director and Co-Founder of GTSE. You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn here. GTSE is an online trade supplies store, that focuses on both B2B and B2C markets. During the life of the business we have grown it from a niche product category leader to an overall trade supplier covering a range of product ranges and demands.