Thousands of sites are selling the same product as you.
How can you differentiate your site and be one of the top sites listed?
The following are 7 things you can do to get the leg up over your competition.
1. Related links (internal links)
Never forget to create as many internal links as possible.
Amazon, undoubtedly one of the two major players globally in the ecommerce space, does this at length.
Links such as “Customers that bought this also bought these” and “Similar items” are not on their site by accident.
Adding features like this give you an advantage to rank higher on Google as well provide the user more options when they are browsing on your site.
Other pages you can create can be press releases and guides like these.
2. Pruning websites
This means to combine your not so popular pages together and add some muscle behind it.
For example, there is bound to be a lot of pages you have that has little to no backlinks.
Find a way to combine them under one URL and redirect anyone who lands from the old page to the new page.
In the new page, add more content and optimize it more for the search engines.
3. User generated content
The quintessential example of this are reviews.
Reviews play a major role in providing social proof for the user.
Enable this feature and constantly ask for reviews after delivery.
You can also incentivize reviews by creating a gamified system whereby the most helpful reviewers get redeemable points in exchange for gift vouchers.
4. Transcribe your video content
Google has yet to have the ability to crawl videos, so having your video transcribed will give it an added advantage.
This is especially helpful if you create video content like how Zappos and eBags does it.
5. Use a fast server
While Google may not necessarily penalize your site for slower load times, it may still hurt your rankings in other ways.
Having a slower load time discourages users to continue using your site resulting them to bounce after getting impatient.
This will lower your rankings over time.
Opt for a fast server if you can afford it.
6. Translation
If you are an international ecommerce company, it pays to do translations.
Not all countries speak just one language.
Provide the option for different languages when browsing your site.
It is also helpful to register domains specific to the country e.g. domain.de, domain.co.uk.
When it comes to linkbuilding from an international SEO perspective, always build links from their respective country domains e.g. domain.de links for domain.de sites.
It would usually take 6 months to a year to see the difference in rankings, so be patient.
7. CRO
In some cases, CRO and SEO are interrelated.
CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization.
Sites such as Conversion Excel, Conversion Rate Experts and Unbounce are great sources for you to learn about CRO.
In conclusion, the 7 things you can do for better SEO for your ecommerce site are:
1. Create more internal links
2. Prune your website
3. Encourage user generate content
4. Transcribe your video content
5. Use a fast server
6. Translate for international SEO
7. Learn up on CRO.
Author : Ben Sim, LLB
Ben Sim is an online marketer and blogger. When he is not reading up on business strategy and persuasion, he spends his time writing about growth hacks. He currently works for iPrice group.
