It’s always heart-pounding to start a business. When laying all the paperwork constituents like a business and economic plan framing, marketing arithmetic, etc. aside there is at least one main ‘headache’ named a website.
Creating a website is always intriguing, as you can either give rise to your business or cast a long shadow on. Delving into all the website architecture details would have no sense without a clear understanding of SEO mechanisms and techniques. Only knowing how it works you will manage to drive traffic to your web pages and get a good ranking position.
What do I need to be ranked high on Google?
Ranking factors differ a lot for each particular e-commerce category. The question has been debated within the SEO industry for years. Thousands of optimization techniques have been tried out to improve website ranking and only some of them have survived to nowadays. So, let’s consider the basic essentials:
#1 Advertisements: set the balance
Sometimes advertisement is used as a secondary marketing tool for e-commerce web pages. However, you shouldn’t underestimate its power in ranking optimization. Thus, according to the latest report in the sphere, only 3% of the top-rated e-commerce pages apply AdSense or Adlinks. In such a manner, you’d better avoid external ads, but not lose sight of organic traffic achieved via the most popular social nets.
#2 Social nets: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest…
Although it’s much more difficult for e-commerce websites to run pages in such popular social nets as Facebook, it is still worth doing. You can easily say it’s too tiresome, as you can’t just post your products there, but need to supply the profile with some media materials. Sometimes it requires the hiring of a social media specialist to run the social media campaign to success. However, the social networks allow e-commerce newcomers to learn their potential customers better, define their needs and build a marketing policy correctly from the ground up.
#3 File Size: the larger the better
Today all webmasters know the ranking power of content. However, having loaded your pages with too much information you are risking to make the page load too slow or simply frighten the customers. But still, the practice shows e-commerce website landing pages are much larger than the general tendency across the web. Thus, the average size of top e-commerce landing pages is 30% larger than the average file size on the internet.
#4 Interactivity: motivate customers to act
Yet more menus, buttons and other interactive elements that can call customers to click and zoom. A higher density and an absolute number of interactive elements will allow you for better Google ranking and customers engagement. Thus, in reference to the conversion research, average e-commerce websites have at least one interactive element every 7.12 words. Moreover, web pages supplied with the elements have less probability of leaving it once it’s loaded in customer’s browser.
#5 Bullets per list: will be encouraged
Content marketing has changed a lot since the beginning of e-commerce era. It has undergone many changes and now it seems that the simpler is a text structure the more customers will have a minute to explore it. Thus, bullets, infographics and maximum simplification of content structure run things. So, make your clients satisfied with the timely chopped and seasoned with the latest hot news e-commerce content.
#6 Internal Links: only reasoned and logical
More internal links are peculiar for e-commerce web pages. A high number of internal links is not a problem, though you should be careful about the thing. The matter is that has increased the number of internal links artificially, you shouldn’t wait for a great result in search engine ranking. For getting there you should see to not just quantity, but also quality and structure of the internal links on a domain.
#7 a .com TLD: significant for the US e-commerce activities
When launching an e-commerce website in the US or expanding a local one where you need to take into account the fact that a .com TLD seems to be the only viable option for an online retail business located there.
#8 URLs: words count matters
The URL topic has been an issue among SEO professionals for a long time already. In line with the latest researches, the main showing you need to learn about URLs structure are the following:
- aim for an average length (37- 45 characters);
- keywords don’t play a paramount role in URLs structure;
- subfolders included into a URL are rather a used-to-be story;
However, appropriate keywords won’t hurt your ranking.
Final word
So, the situation is as follows:
- Give up on AdSense/Adlinks, but don’t forget to see to your brand recognition via external advertisement;
- Blow the brand abroad using the most popular social networks. Create a unique company’s account and share news with your potential and regular buyers there;
- Think over a larger landing page size and tools for loading speed-up;
- Motivate customers to ‘touch’ and ‘feel’ all your product by supplying your web pages with multiple interactive elements;
- Let customers skim the content, provide your texts with bullets, tables, infographics;
- Make an informed decision of internal links usage;
- Use a .com TLD when sharpening your business in the US;
- Take your URLs structure under control.