E-Commerce SEO: 4 Ways to Gain Organic Traffic to Your Online Store

There’s no other marketing traffic source that can be compared to organic traffic, where all site visitors are absolutely free, and each free session is a potential sale. Unlike traffic which is generated by paid search engine and social media campaigns, there are no immediate marketing costs associated to organic users.

However, many e-store owners get caught in a holding pattern for eCommerce SEO growth. They just can’t get the right formula in  terms of developing landing pages that attract quality traffic and perform well on SERPs. You see, improving your visibility organically isn’t as simple as increasing paid traffic, where it’s a simple matter of increasing your advertising budget.

If you’re stuck in a rut when it comes to choosing the right eCommerce SEO services, we’re here to bail you out. Here are 4 effective ways of gaining organic traffic for your online store.

Let Google Read Your Reviews

One proven way of attracting new customers and increasing online visibility is with informative, unique content on your product pages. If you have loads of product pages, you have all the bandwidth you need to constantly create fresh content. One option you have with regards to developing a steady stream of content is with product reviews and recommendations. This allows you to effectively convert your customers into sales people, whose reviews will convince other consumers to make purchases.

According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, which indicates the significant impact online reviews can have on your conversion rate. And highlighting reviews on your website isn’t only good for your visitors, but it’s also great for your eCommerce SEO. Reviews that are rich with content add something fresh and unique to your web pages, something that search engines like Google reward. The reviews also provide the context required by Google’s crawler to understand why it should place your product on SERPs instead of your competitor’s.

Insert Dynamic Meta Descriptions

Meta description is the text you see directly below a page title on search result pages. While Google doesn’t read what’s written in the meta descriptions, consumers certainly do. Besides the URL and the title, the meta description is the only information they have about your business before they decide whether they want to visit your website or not.

For e-stores with thousands of offerings that are replaced seasonally, it can be quite a challenge to write engaging, unique meta descriptions at a scale. While some companies can invest the time and resources to create unique descriptions for every page, it’s not feasible for all business, especially startups and small ones.

Experienced SEOs automate the creation of meta description by using Concatenation schemas and establishing a set of rules. This is a small piece of coding which uses a pre-established set of rules to automatically create relevant meta descriptions.

This schema automatically updates your entire website in a matter of minutes, rather than taking weeks and weeks to update a category. With a little trial and error, you should be able to come up with a description that increases your organic click-through rates.

Make Sure Your Product Descriptions are Unique

In addition to your meta descriptions, you want to ensure that your product descriptions are fresh and unique as well. After the release of Google’s Panda Update, uniqueness of the content has become a high SEO priority. This update also penalizes duplicate content that was copied from other pages.

When it comes to your eCommerce SEO efforts, identifying duplicate content on your product pages is the very first step you should take, especially pages that have the same descriptions as products offered by manufacturers or your competitors.

Your next step is to rewrite the duplicate content from scratch. This will ensure that you don’t fall foul of the rules established by the Panda Update, and the well-written descriptions will provide Google with additional context around the products you’re offering, resulting in an increased likelihood of your products showing in relevant SERPs.

If you have thousands of products and writing a unique description for each one is just not feasible, the best thing to do is create descriptions for your best selling or highest margin products first. Then, phase out the process of creating unique descriptions for all the products.

If you’re offering products through other platforms, such as eBay or Amazon, use the manufacturers’ product descriptions so the unique content you’ve worked so hard to create isn’t shared all across the web.

Prioritize Speed

Since July 2018, speed has been one of the most prominent ranking factors in Google’s mobile search results. The load speed of your website not only has a significant impact on your website’s user experience, but it also affects your eCommerce SEO. A high load time not only increases your bounce rate, but also adversely impacts the customers who choose to remain on your website. They will browse 9.4% fewer pages, and will be 3.5% less likely to convert.

According to Google SEO guidelines, a webpage should load within four seconds, and the faster your website loads, the higher it will rank on SERPs. Therefore, it’s imperative to identify and correct anything that’s slowing down your page speed.

You can get a firm idea of the health of your site speed by monitoring the load times, the bounce rate, and time on the site. There are also free tools available, like Web Page Test, which can help you identify the bottlenecks that are causing low page speeds.

Conclusion

The ultimate strategy isn’t about choosing one method, tactic, or channel. The key to gaining the highest amount of organic traffic lies in finding a balanced combination of strategies. Each of the strategies we have listed above work in combination to help you increase your e-store’s online visibility and boost your site’s SERO rankings