In this article we are going to deal with the first steps you must take if you want to position your online store among the first results of Google. This post is the first of a series of contents about for ecommerce and it will be the most basic of all, where we will begin to lay the foundations of our project.
So let’s get started!
1. Analyze your competitors
The first and most important step is to detect and analyze your competition in the SERPs. That is, websites that are ranking for the same keywords why you want to appear on Google.
Why is this important?
In SEO we can consider that there are certain “bases” or good practices that any project should follow, but each sector has its peculiarities. A technology website, with tens of thousands of references, does not work the same as a health product store, for example.
Must analyze our competition to put ourselves in context.
Analyzing the main competitors we can get an idea of how should we approach our website. In addition, we will be able to extract common patterns of good practices or aspects that are working poorly.
What are the elements in which we should pay more attention?
- way to categorize your product catalog
- Filters they use in product listings
- way of working the paginations and facets of the web
- structured data in categories and products
- Way of working internal linking
- External links profile they receive
- Contents that receive more traffic
Among others.
If we carry out a good analysis of our competitors, the next steps to take with our project will be easier for us.
2. Know how your customers look for you
The second step is to perform a study of keywords of our sector and products that we offer, to know the main search intentions of our clients.
It is even more important than the previous step. Here I recommend taking as much time as necessary, since this study will help us make the rest of the decisions about the project.
We will detect what are the most searched contents, expressions that are repeated, concerns of our customers…. And all this will help us make decisions about how to work the SEO of our website. In our keyword research we’ll note the terms along with their monthly search volume.
However, by itself this information will not help us more than to see which are the most searched terms. The important thing is how that information is processed.
Behind every search there is a .
That is, there is a person who has a concern or a problem and wants to solve it. In the case of ecommerce, the most common is the need to buy a product or compare different options.
What we must do with all those terms that we have extracted is to group them by search intentions that will determine the content that we have to create. The same search intention can be expressed in many different ways. In other words, a search intent groups different keywords together.
We don’t have to create content for every keyword. That would be bad practice. We must create content for each search intention.
3.- Determine what the contents of your online store are
In every online store there are certain contents that are “required” by the product catalog itself. For example, in an online technology store, it is almost essential to create a category for computers, another for monitors, another for mice…
Nevertheless, there are other contents that we will discover thanks to this keyword study preview we just did. For example, searches for brands or product types.
Continuing with the same example, we may not have initially considered the option of creating a category of “Computers for teleworking”. However, keyword research can tell us that this is an interesting search and we need to create content that offers a specific range of products. Ultimately, what resolve that search intent.
4.- Plan the web architecture
In an eCommerce it is essential to have defined a structure that guides the relationship between the contentsthe links that will take us from one to the other and their hierarchy. For this, we must plan the web site architecture. In this way, we will have defined all aspects related to web browsing.
Another important task is structure content into categories and subcategorieswith the levels that we consider opportune or necessary, and the products that compose them. Each category or subcategory must target a different search intent.
It is recommended to implement breadcrumbs to make it easier for search engines to understand the architecture of our website and for users to navigate. In short, a series of decisions must be made about the structure and content, which will affect the navigation of the web and its usability. And, of course, SEO.
5.-Establish the priority url
The next step to manage your ecommerce is define which are the priority urls. That is, knowing what content you want to give more importance to make the appropriate decisions.
Within large ecommerce, it is impossible to position all the products and all the contents of the web, especially when the project is new. There will always be a series of products or categories that the company has priority to position. This will depend on the benefit of the products, their price compared to the competition, the available stock, the level of difficulty to position…
Therefore, it is necessary to know what are the urls to which we are interested in bringing more trafficin order to link internally more frequently and that search engines understand that they are the priority ones.
6.-Work the internal link
In relation to the previous step, we must work the links within our site. If your ecommerce has a blog, a good option may be to link to specific products from blog content. For example, you can work on the priority content that we mentioned in the previous point. The way to link these contents is use an anchor text with the keywords in which we want to position ourselves and its synonyms.
Internal linking plays a very important role in the positioning of a website. In addition to improving the user experience, it allows us to channel authority to the most important parts of the web and makes it easier for search engines to track. It will also be of great help to us to avoid content cannibalization.
7.- Optimize your content
Once the keywords of our sector have been defined, we must optimize content.
We should not only try to incorporate the main keyword. It is positive to include synonyms and related terms to improve semantic density. In the title and description it is recommended that the main keyword to appear in bold when someone searches.
As for the headers, they must follow a hierarchy order. As a general rule, there should not be more than one h1, and then as many headings as you want should be used, but always in a hierarchical manner (h1 → h2 → h3 → h4 → …).
Another very important aspect, especially in ecommerce, is the marking of structured data, which we will talk about next.
8.-Make a markup of structured data
With structured data markup, what we get is provide more specific information to search engines about the content of our website. In this way, we make it easier for search engines to interpret our content.
The most common way to do this marking is through json-ld. With structured data markup we can get Google to show rich results in our content.
The rich results appear in the SERPs as a visual enhancement to grab the user’s attention and encourage clicks. It is important to understand that data markup does not ensure that your results appear as enriched.
9.- Register Search Console
Search Console is a free tool from Google that provides information about the organic positioning of your website. In addition, in Search Console we can also find specific data on indexing of your website or the errors that the urls that make up your website have. This tool can give you reports on the current state of the web, such as the performance, coverage or usability of the web.
To register your website in Search Console, the process is very simple, just register in the tool and follow the steps indicated by the Google Search Console page itself.
10.-Improve the popularity and authority of your website
Finally, a key point to improve the positioning of your online store is based on link building or, what is the same, get external links on quality websites that bring you traffic.
One of the basic conditions for these links to be considered quality is that they the themes of the websites are related to your content. You also have to take into account the quality of the websites themselves. In general, Google will value more positively a link from a specialized website that has more visits than if it is from a small blog with hardly any visits or whose content has nothing to do with the subject.
Links to products or categories of your store, therefore, will be considered positive reviews towards your website, and Google will value it positively.
Therefore, we recommend that you follow these steps to achieve a good SEO position. With this we do not mean that if you follow this small guide you will be in the first positions of Google, but they will serve as a good starting point.
We will continue uploading posts about SEO that will help you position yourself based on your needs. Stay tuned!
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