Improve your organic search rankings and increase website traffic, brand awareness and conversion with these eCommerce S.E.O strategies:

1. Reduce Load Time

Fast load times aren’t just essential for a great user experience – they also significantly impact search rankings. In our experience, 100-200s of milliseconds load time is a solid benchmark.

Although there are many ways to improve site speed, image compression can typically make an immediate impact. We also recommend checking Google Tag Manager or other eCommerce S.E.O tools to take inventory of active scripts on your site. If the list starts to look more like a novel, you might want to remove excess calls that may be slowing down your site.

2. Optimize For Mobile

If your site isn’t mobile optimized, you’re at a serious search disadvantage. Evolving user habits make responsive design essential from both an S.E.O and user experience perspective.

If you’re looking to take things a step further, Google’s AMP format can further optimize mobile experiences by reducing load time and improving mobile search rank. HubSpot has a great tool called Website Grader that has Viewports configured and can check if your site is mobile responsive.

3. Resolve Site Errors

Keep your site clean by continually monitoring Google Search Console (formally known as Google Webmaster tools). Site errors may include broken links, indexed 404 pages or errors in sitemap files to name a few. Although not all errors are created equal, resolving them improves Google’s ability to index your site and can positively affect search rankings.

4. Enable Canonical Tags

Canonicalization, also known as canonical tagging, tells search engines that a page URL actually represents a default master page. This is especially useful when you have pages with more than one URL.

5. Add Customer Reviews

Search engines treat customer reviews as new website content and engagement, which are all factors that influence rankings. Improve your eCommerce S.E.O strategy by adding customer reviews to significantly improve the user experience by adding third-part credibility to your business.

6. Use Markup to Enable Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graphs

As an e-tailer, you can give search engines detailed product information to display – such as price, availability, and review ratings – right on the search page. Google and other search engines are aggressively rolling out new formats for search results.

Sites that get featured in the Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graphs are now the first place where visitors tend to click. Getting featured in this part of SERP will help attract clicks and, ultimately, more visitors to your page. Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see if your pages are properly using Schema.org markup formatting.

S.E.O is just one important part of the inbound marketing methodology.