How Bad SEO can Lead your Store to Poor Conversion

Quite often, even titanic store optimization efforts can’t guarantee you eCommerce success. Your website can be perfect in design, navigation, checkout process, etc. while your conversion rate may be close to zero!

Why? Because of bad SEO.

Poor search engine optimization leaves you far way behind your competitors. When similar rivalry products are rated higher in Google, most of your potential customers won’t even reach your store, buried somewhere on the 10th page of search results. Also, you may put a lot of efforссts into optimizing your store pages, however, when doneспасибо incorrectly, your site can either get banned for over-optimization or have a huge bounce rate.

Hence, it’s impossible to catch a positive long-term conversion rate trend without proper SEO that, in turn, can’t be done without the right SEO tools for your eCommerce platform (e.g. for Magento that is this Magento 2 SEO module).

Read on to learn how to do eCommerce SEO right.

First, let’s start with the category and filter pages.

The majority of searches are directly related to categories and have nothing to do with a specific brand or online store. Everyone, who looking for a ‘wireless smartphone charger’, is most probably seeking not for a certain model. In the majority of cases, they want to find a collection of options and choose the one that suits them best.

In other words, if you utilize both descriptive and relevant page names in the title tags, headings and navigational links, your category and filter pages will send the relevant signals to the search engines. That will result in better rankings and more targeted traffic.

The next stop is the product page.

First and foremost, make sure that each page has a visible and comprehensible headline that lets customers understand what its content is about.

Second, add Breadcrumbs and the ‘Related Products’ section. They will help customers navigate through your store. That will be of great help in cases when the search engine lands visitors not onto the exact page they need.

Before getting to the essence of this article — SEO tips for increasing conversion — let’s get the main problem most of the eCommerce store owners are facing these days. Unfortunately, most of us can’t figure out whether conversion rate is good or bad. Typically, that can lead to the wrong conclusions, incoherent planning and poor results.

For example, the average conversion rate of US eCommerce sites is revolving around 3%. Depending on circumstances, it can be a half-percent higher or lower, but hardly ever it goes beyond this level. Hence, your global task is to reach this level and stick to it.

Below are 5 SEO tips that will definitely improve your store conversion rate.

1. Weeding out Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the biggest SEO killers.

Most of eCommerce stores use product and category descriptions that can be rather similar (if not to say copy-pasted from page to page). This content similarity is dangerous because search engines can mark such pages as duplicates and get them out of search results.

The most effective way to eliminate duplicate content is to craft a unique copy of each description. However, in some stores it is not possible due to a large number of identical items. In this case you can think of canonical tag implementation that will direct your associated products to the original one.

2. Optimizing URL Structure and Sitemaps

Poorly optimized URL structure can significantly complicate the whole crawling and indexation process, building barriers for search engine bots when they are exploring your site.

That’s why creating a properly interlinked store should be one of your top priorities.

It’s important to provide access to all the pages you want the search engines to index and hide those that should better stay unnoticed (e.g. customer info pages, checkout pages, etc.). That can be done via creating robots.txt files or using the corresponding robots meta tags.

What is more, you can create an XML sitemap of your eCommerce store. This sitemap provides search engine crawlers with a proper routes through a site, so they can easily access all its important areas.

Also, good internal linking structure will be surely be appreciated by customers. It will improve their shopping experience and, as a result, general site conversion rate.

3. Using Markup Data to Generate Rich Snippets

Ignoring usage of markup tags means missing a huge SEO-tool for improving your store conversions.

Rich Snippets give your potential customer more info about your site’s pages. This information appears in search results and makes them stand out.

Rich Snippets are generated by the search engines on the basis of markup tags you add to your product or category pages. They can include product image, rating, review, extended description and even breadcrumbs.

Implementation of Rich Snippets can increase a CTR (click-through rate) by as much as 30 percents. Additionally, you can use analogues of Rich Snippets for social networks: Twitter Cards for Twitter and Open Graph for Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.

4. Optimizing Product and Category Pages

As it has already been mentioned above, product and category pages are crucially important for the overall SEO success of your store.

Each product page requires a unique product meta title, meta description, URL key, short and long descriptions, meta keywords, alt tags of product images and product SEO name tag. By filling in this information correctly you can make sure that optimization process will result in a better results for your pages.

Additionally, you need to enter a category meta title, meta description, meta keywords and category description. This activity can take some time but there are plenty of tools to completely automate this process or somehow even ease it.

5. Optimizing Filtered or Layered Navigation

Filtered (aka layered navigation) pages are also very important for SEO.

In some cases, customers can land on them, so nothing should make them leave.

From the search engine optimization point of view, it will be useful to utilize dynamic generation of meta title and meta description on pages of this type, and implement some special tags for better indexation and ranking.

Time to Think of SEO

With adequate conversion estimation and by improving SEO of your eCommerce store, you will be able to gain better quality traffic that see an increase in successful conversions.

Organic search traffic is too important to ignore it. That’s why the 5 tips above should move you forward in the right direction.

Vitaly Gonkov is a Chief Marketing Officer at MageWorx – one of the leading Magento 2 modules developer. Vitaly has been actively involved with online marketing since 2010. He has a broad range of expertise that spans many different types of eCommerce strategies and techniques. He is passionate about blogging, social networking and enjoys the challenges presented by the dynamic industry.