The five pillars of SEO for ecommerce

As an e-store owner or ecommerce manager, acquiring relevant traffic from search engines is pertinent to driving sales to your store. Prominent search engine rankings for the products you stock in your e-Store is the holy grail of ecommerce success.

With ever changing algorithmic changes by Google (which accounts for close to 90 per cent of UK search engine share according to Experian) competition has never been so fierce for prominence.

To help my agency has put together the Framework for understanding SEO for ecommerce.

1)     Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves these key areas:

- Indexation: this is how well search engines are able to access or ‘crawl’ the web pages on your website you have granted public access. It also involves ensuring that ‘crawled’ web pages are added to the index database of search engines.

The key areas in ensuring maximum indexation involves:

•    Generating XML sitemaps (that are submitted to each search engine),
•    Optimising internal linking within web pages in your site
•    Managing how deleted pages (otherwise known as 404 pages) are handled (as they could generate crawl errors),
•    Resolving duplicate content issues
•    Other indexation issues to be aware about when managing an e-Store are Query Parameters, Canonicalisation and Pagination  – the end goal is to have your entire publicly available site in the index of search engines.

- Speed: Website speed is an essential part of technical SEO and user experience. A slow loading e-store is frustrating for both shoppers and search engines spiders. Endeavour to keep your site’s page load time under 3 seconds.

- Micro-data Mark-ups:

Micro-data is a means of marking-up content in your e-Store to define usable & sharable data like: price, location information, stock availability, product reviews, product descriptions, etc.

- Information Architecture: Defining the categorisation structure of your e-Store is akin to defining aisles in a store. Structure is critical for user experience as well as for search engines. Information architecture should tightly tie in with keyword research.

- Bing & Google Webmaster Tools: Google, Yahoo & Bing provide webmasters with website administration interfaces for managing indexation, site speed, micro-data, search queries and a lot more.

2)     User Experience

User experience is an essential pillar of SEO – creating an intuitive store that makes it easy for shoppers to find items and navigate keeps shoppers on your website for longer and makes them come back again and again.

Metrics such as average time on site and bounce rates (percentage of visits that stay on only a single page and then leave your site) indicate whether your website offers value to visitors. The entire experience for users should be the best you can possibly offer.

3)     Content Marketing & Outreach

Building a site that offers superior user experience with technically sound SEO is not sufficient for search engine dominance.  Creating and promoting content that aligns with your store’s product is the next step. Think about how you can offer complementary content to help sell products in your store.

For an eCommerce store, consider running not only video reviews/demos but also TV shows (check out photography online Store; Digital Rev’s YouTube photography show – which is the most subscribed and viewed photography show on the internet).

Content does not only come in form text – content can be consumed as audio (podcasts), images, Infographics, whitepapers, competitions, webinars or hang-outs, guest blog posts, mobile apps, email newsletters and research.

Establish a content marketing engine that supports your brand and e-Store. Promoting your ‘high-quality’ content on the internet would encourage publishers and bloggers to talk about and link back to your website as a reference for the quality content your have published.

4)     Public Relations

PR is still hugely relevant and arguably the most effective way of getting your brand out to the widest audience possible. A point to bear in mind is that old media has also evolved and taken an online form with the old rules of influencer engagement and outreach still holding true.

New players: Bloggers have emerged in the PR space and are critical for all SEO campaigns. Media sites still rate amongst the most authoritative and trusted sites to acquire reference backlinks from for search marketing.

PR by its very nature is very people focused and it ensures that a broad or targeted audience see your store or brand.

5)     Social Media

“Content is fire, and social media is gasoline” – brilliantly coined by Jay Baer.

Social media is people driven. People talk about products, make recommendations, pass on vital information on their experience and use social media platforms as communication tools to reach out to other people.

Content you produce on behalf of your store and brand would be like a tree falling in a forest with no one there, without the aid of social media. Social media should be used as a means of communicating with influencers, your audience and driving attention to your content.

Kunle Campbell is a digital marketing strategist and founder of Fuzz One Media, an Oxford, based agency that offers integrated digital marketing and specialist SEO, social media, pay-per-click, online PR, and content marketing services to eCommerce businesses.