The e-commerce industry is growing at an exceptionally fast pace. The report "E-commerce in Poland 2021" shows that in 2021, as many as 77% of Internet users will have made purchases via the Internet at least once. It is estimated that the value of the entire e-commerce market is currently over PLN 111 billion. All this means that in order to achieve success in e-commerce, a number of measures need to be taken. First and foremost, we are talking about SEO optimisation. These are all actions that will result in your website being ranked higher in search results on Google and other search engines. In the following article, we present 6 elements of SEO optimisation that every e-commerce business should bear in mind.
How do I optimise the URL and meta tags?
What are the most important principles of SEO for e-commerce? Let's start with the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. This is a method used to identify and name the location of various resources. Such a resource can be any page available on the internet - web pages, files or documents. Each resource is assigned a specific URL.
In order for the individual sub-pages within our e-shop to be ranked as high as possible in search results, they must be optimised accordingly. Above all, URLs should be properly defined, i.e. contain those words that reflect the content of the page in question. This is referred to as a "friendly URL". This will be appreciated by both search engines and users themselves. A good address must not be too long - a maximum of 100 characters is recommended. In addition, a URL should not contain special characters, e.g. ">", "?", "(", "$", etc., as this results in search engines having trouble indexing them.
The friendly URL should look like this:
addressstrony.co.uk/modameska/pants/tracks
Such an address is good because it contains the right number of characters, there are no special characters and any user who reads it immediately knows what the exact content of the page is. This is something that everyone operating within e-commerce should definitely be aware of.
In contrast, an example of an unfriendly URL is:
adrestrony.pl/kategoria/2/545665556626/5662
Proper optimisation of meta tags is also very important. These include, among others, the meta title - this is the title of the sub-page appearing in search engines. It is recommended that the meta title should be between 10 and 70 characters long, should contain the main keywords and should describe the content of the site as precisely as possible.
The meta description, on the other hand, is a slightly longer description of what is on a particular subpage. Although it does not have a direct impact on positioning This affects the click-through rate of links. It is recommended that the meta description contains between 160 and 300 characters.
How important are unique product descriptions
What can be done to make a shop's offer appealing to customers? Is it enough to insert pictures and the names of individual products on the e-shop website? In the current environment, the right optimisation of e-commerce websites plays an extremely important role - especially when a company offers branded products that are also available in dozens or hundreds of other e-shops. What are the SEO guidelines for e-commerce in this respect?
Above all, it is worth ensuring that a unique description is included with each product. This will be informative for both customers, as they will learn a little more about a particular product, but search engines will also appreciate it.
What does it mean that a product description is unique? It means that such a description cannot be found on any other site - either within our e-shop or on competing sites. Of course, some may say that drawing up your own product description misses the point, as "ready-made" ones are provided by manufacturers. However, it is worth bearing in mind that Google places great emphasis on the uniqueness of published content. In a situation when a product description appears in our e-shop, which was previously published in identical form on dozens of other websites, it will have a negative impact on its position in search results.
Google places a premium on those websites that take care to offer their users original, eye-catching content that provides some value to users. One thing is certain - a description copied from a manufacturer will certainly not bring us a higher position in Google.
For this reason, we encourage you to create the product descriptions completely on your own. When writing them, pay attention to the specific features of the individual goods, their colour, functionality etc. A description that is interesting and unique will be appreciated by users and search engines alike.
Please note - you also need to bear SEO requirements in mind when drafting your product descriptions. You therefore need to ensure that they contain the right number of keywords and H2 and H3 headings.
Internal and external linking
SEO for e-commerce is also about linking. In optimising the SEO of our e-shop, a very important role is also played by internal and external linking. The former consists of placing links to individual pages within our website in various places. Most commonly, internal links are placed primarily in the main menu and also in articles, with the note "Read also".
A website that has adequate internal linking is easy for visitors to use. There are then no difficulties in finding particular products or information. Internal linking is important from the point of view of discovery and visitation of new pages by Google's robots and indicates important elements on the page.
External linking, on the other hand, consists of other websites linking to our e-commerce site. This is very important because Google takes this into account when determining the position of individual sites in search results. The more quality sites link to a particular site, the greater its chances of being ranked higher in the results list. It is very important that quality is far more important than quantity in external linking. Ideally, links to our e-shop should be placed on reputable portals that have a sufficiently high number of unique users.
Which elements of extended search results to use?
In addition to the basic, i.e. so-called organic (free) search results, Google allows website owners to place their websites on so-called extended results. What does this consist of? There are several options available, which bring tangible benefits. These include:
- Answer box. This is a special column with a listed section of text where the precise answer to the user's search question can be found.
- Local Pac. This is a category of results appearing when a query related to a specific location is entered, e.g. 'restaurant Gdańsk'. In this case, an excerpt from Google maps appears along with the most important information about businesses meeting the specified criteria.
- FAQ. This is an additional panel which lists the most frequently asked questions and answers on a given topic from various websites.
- Rich snippets. In most cases, this is a panel containing free search results together with additional elements of a single page - these may include images, product availability, price, user reviews and so on. This allows our e-shop to stand out strongly from the rest.
Page loading speed
The speed at which a page loads is also an important element that Google and other search engines take into account when determining a page's position in search results. Some time ago, Google introduced new guidelines called Core Web Vitals, which also specifically mention the loading speed of individual page elements. It points out:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - is the loading time of the largest element within the website,
- First Input Delay (FID) - the time from the first interaction with a page (e.g. clicking on a link) until the browser starts processing this and responds to such an action.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - is an indicator of the movement of elements on the page as it loads.
How important is page speed? This is not revealed by Google. However, it is important to remember that SEO for e-commerce is a river topic and in order for our shop to achieve a high position in search results, we should take care of all the elements that are taken into account by the indexing robots when determining the position. Then our chances of success will be significantly higher.
