Here Are Paul's Best Practices for Ecommerce SEO...
What are the key on-page SEO elements for ecommerce sites and how can they be optimised?
One major key on-page SEO (?) element for ecommerce sites is specifically within the optimisation of headings (notably the H1 heading and primary H2 heading).
These are often overlooked or not well optimised, but the key is to target both primary and secondary keyword targets that have high relevancy and correct intent in these areas.
For ecommerce sites, it makes sense to target commercial intent keywords for things like PLPs (?), with the H1 going after something slightly broader in reach and volume. The primary H2 can then go after a longer tail keyword, not only supporting the H1 heading but also targeting a phrase with very precise intent.
You’ll tend to find it’s the H2 that starts to gather pace with rankings (if other SEO elements are well-optimised) before the broader term starts to lift too.
Can you share your top 3 tips for optimising product pages for better search visibility and conversions?
1. Breadcrumbs (?)
Central to any good strategy is internal linking, and what better way to pass authority between relevant groups of pages than to implement breadcrumbs on product pages. This allows us to show off to search engines our informed hierarchy of pages.
2. Attribute linking
So you’ve built an awesome product page that has excellent descriptions, FAQs, CTA’s (?), and well-optimised headings and page titles, but it’s not adding to your site visibility.
Attribute linking is your friend here, and will allow you to strategically link back to relevant categories based on set parameters/naming conventions in content descriptions.
Do you have a product attribute table on your PDP? (?) Make sure to link back to relevant categories from this table, so that Google can crawl these links and understand topical relevancy between pages – a major win for SEO.
3. Reviews
Now more than ever, a good product page MUST include genuine product reviews for a chance of not only ranking well, but also enticing customers. If you don’t have reviews for products, now is a good time to incentivise your customers so that you can begin to build up reviews for products.
Anything less than 4 stars will likely disincentivise customers engaging with the product. But anywhere between a 4.4 – 4.8 star rating is the sweet spot for capturing those all-important clicks and conversions.
N.B 5 star ratings across your entire product catalog could be borderline suspicious to search engines and to customers. It’s not worth the headache of Google updates catching up with this if your product reviews are suspiciously high across the board.
What's your strategy for creating SEO-boosting content, like blog posts, guides, and FAQs?
All good content strategies start with a keyword and content gap analysis. Without exploring what key competitors are doing with their content, what they are ranking for and why they are ranking for it, you can’t really begin to unpick valuable content opportunities for your own website.
You also need to be realistic. If, for example, you’re starting up an ecommerce site within the medical space, content will be highly competitive and likely dominated by highly authoritative and well-established medical domains that you have little chance of competing with in the short or mid-term (or possibly even in the long term).
Do your research, know your subject, find your competitive angle, and start building up topical authority (?) for your website.
What practical insights can we gain from Google's helpful content update?
Google doesn’t give much away when it rolls out updates, but what we can tell from 2023 more specifically is that Google keeps returning to its ‘helpful content updates’ to understand the value and relevancy of what websites are serving users within specific niches.
This started very high level a few years ago now, e.g. Is the content on a high ranking page relevant to the users intended search?
Over time, this has been finessed and we are understanding more and more the role that different types of content play for specific page types.
User-generated content (?) is a very powerful one that is running parallel to product review updates too.
If a customer leaves an unbiased review that’s positive and has relevant keywords that tie it back to the product it’s reviewing, then you stand a very strong chance of starting to get ahead of your competition.
How crucial are backlinks for SEO and what makes a good backlink?
Despite what some SEOs will tell you (and I’ve heard plenty say it), backlinks (?) are as important as ever.
A relevant backlink from a highly authoritative website within the same niche can work wonders to help you gain competitive edge and rankings.
Of course, without a solid technical foundation and an awesome content strategy, a link by itself won’t move the needle. But if you can conquer the key pillars of SEO, relevant and authoritative links will often decide the illustrious 1-3 positions on search engines.
Which technical SEO aspects are vital for businesses to enhance search engine performance?
There are many components of technical SEO, far too many to possibly list within this answer. But the first thing any site owner should be doing is checking for technical errors that prevent effective crawling and indexing of key site pages.
If search engines can’t crawl your website efficiently, over time they can slow down and give up repeat visits and crawls of your website.
I’ve seen this before many times and it can take time to recover from, so make sure your website is a lean, mean, crawling machine!
In 2024, how should our SEO approach differ from past strategies?
There’s no need to drastically alter the approach to SEO strategy in 2024. However, search is changing all the time and, with that, it is really important to be mindful of updates that Google keeps launching in order to stay up to date and on the positive side of any Google update.
Outside of this, don’t think of SEO as just Google Search. There’s a world of different search engines out there, with social platforms becoming increasingly more influential for ecommerce sites too:-
Make sure you’re optimising across different platforms, not just your website and for Google!
What are effective methods for performing keyword research specifically for ecommerce sites?
Everything comes back to competitor research. It really should be central to any keyword strategy. If you’re not familiar with the niche you’re looking to grow your business in, you stand a very slim chance of success. This is because the sites that rank prominently are already doing their SEO well.
You should be looking across their different page types, how they’re targeting, and getting more familiar with how Google perceives these brands based on their current visibility.
How can SEO be balanced with CRO tactics for improved overall performance?
There are many “tactics” an SEO will employ which can correlate to CRO (?). The key to rolling out changes to specific page types is allowing enough of a testing period to understand your data.
You can run split A/B testing to understand which option serves your customers best for things like navigation changes.
Without running such tests, you won’t understand the benefit for CRO in tandem with SEO.
What is the 80/20 rule for SEO, and which 3 areas should businesses prioritise?
The rule of 80% of your results or outcomes should come from 20% of your efforts still applies to SEO strategy.
Taking this mindset into your strategy can make everything more efficient, but it also requires patience. SEO is not an instant win for any business, even if you have someone promising otherwise.
You might implement 5 changes to your website and only 1 of those proves to be a true success for SEO – give it time and make sure you are led by the data.
- Once you discover something that works well, can it be finessed?
- Are there further opportunities to span out from this that are more beneficial than other ideas you originally had?
These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself.
