I’ve identified the most important eCommerce SEO hacks 2018 for Your business. This list does not claim for completeness but it guides you through the first steps of what to optimize in your online shop.
eCommerce SEO Hacks
Keyword analysis
Really nothing new but still one of the most important SEO actions is a proper keyword analysis. Prioritize your keywords based on search volume, transaction likelihood, potential cart value, and the question: how realistic is it to rank as position number one?
Your keywords are not advised for simple copy and paste on your shop pages but helpful to add those in your product descriptions and texts to communicate with your potential customers. So, adapt your language to the target group, avoid duplicates, and create holistic content combining long tail and short head keywords in your texts.
Meta Information
Of course, it’s nothing new but so important to have meta information including your keywords. This matters also for images. There are still too many images online without alt texts. Don’t forget that many users prefer the Google image search to find a specific product. It could be your chance to become visible for your customer.
Sitemap
It’s exactly what the name indicates. The sitemap provides users an overview but it’s mainly thought to provide search engines the structure of your sitetree. Less is more – not all your pages need to be included in your sitemap but the conversion relevant pages have to be there. Please consider the right format. In HTML it looks nice but Google and Bing prefer the XML format. It simplifies the process of indexing. Of course, you don’t want to wait for day X to get crawled by search engines. So speed up the process and upload your sitemap link on the Google Search Console and on Bing and other search engines as well.
Loading time
Some actions to optimize your loading time are onpage related like to minify your javascript and css and also reducing image sizes. Moreover you can apply a CDN to host your images on an external system (some of the best CDNs you can find here). This makes sense in case you have tons of images what can happen quite fast for every online shop. Last but not least you should use a high performance server solution to speed up your page.
HTTP/2 Protocol
Combine your https protocol with HTTP/2 to reduce the server capacity and speed up your online shop. HTTP/2 is a revision of the http network protocol. Launched in 2015 it’s still not used for every website but we promise you it will make a difference.
Mobile optimization
This calls not only for a mobile responsive version, but also layout optimization for your ecommerce solutions. In case your desktop version is very long and calls for intense scrolling action, it’s not perfect but for your mobile version it might be a real conversion killer as well. Try to create a AMP version for mobile devices.
Backlinks
This is a very time-intensive task but you should focus first on your internal links. As soon as you optimized your internal link structure, you should increase external backlinks. Of course, as long as you get the external links without doing something for it, just let it go. For the most websites it requires some motivation and action to build up external backlinks with partners, clients or blogs. It’s a slowly process but stay tuned and patient.
Every step of improvement is even more fun if you establish a professional tracking and reporting system to see your achieved results black on white.