The 2021 E-Commerce SEO Checklist for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

In today’s digitized world, entrepreneurs and small business owners can’t get away with not knowing SEO strategies. In fact, e-commerce and SEO tools have become fundamental aspects of online marketing.

Research suggests that people prefer mobile browsing over laptop or desktop searches. This growing trend has created the need for online business owners to ensure that their website is optimized for mobile device viewing and has a user-friendly interface.

As simple as this may sound, many entrepreneurs struggle to implement SEO strategies effectively. The result is poor search engine rankings and foregone opportunities to make profits.

How to Optimize Your E-Commerce SEO?

You must strike when the iron is hot. Global events like Halloween, Christmas and Black Friday are prime days for e-commerce businesses to make profits and improve the visibility of their brand. However, you can’t yield the benefits of these events if you don’t even have an SEO strategy set up in the first place.

Everything from the content you post online to how your website is designed can play a crucial role in how well your business capitalizes on opportunities and converts them into a loyal customer base.

Nearly 35 percent of customers come from organic search engine results. This means that there’s a broad market you can tap into if you occupy any of the top search result ranks. So how do you rank better on Google?

At Global-marketing Inc., we’ve mastered the art of SEO marketing. We’ve been offering our award-winning digital SEO services to clients all over the world and can provide you with optimized tools to help your business thrive!

Here are some of our best tips on a mandatory SEO checklist for small business owners and entrepreneurs aiming to go big this year!

Part A: Website Architecture and Design

The architecture and design of your website refer to the overall structure of your site, including the hosting server and the plug-ins and applications installed in it. Your website’s structure makes a huge difference in terms of how big your e-commerce store is.

A six-page website will likely load and operate faster compared to a thousand-page one. Using a Content Management System, however, can take the burden off of you to take care of your website since the design and operations are already programmed.

Here are some things you can do to improve your website design.

1. Simplify your Website’s Structure

A complicated homepage structure can chase away even the most enthusiastic customers. Your website should always be UX and UI friendly. This means that your site visitors should be able to navigate their way to the product page under 3 clicks. Also, keep in mind that a responsive website design that’s adaptable to mobile device viewing will improve your chances of getting visitors to stay on your site. This is known as dwell time and it works wonderfully to improve your business’s SEO rankings.

2. Incorporate Breadcrumbs on Your Site

Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that tells the visitor what part of the website they’re on.

This feature should also be beneficial for your business since the right breadcrumb tags can make you more searchable.

When you first read about breadcrumb navigation for your site, it can sound rather confusing and abstract so let’s break it down.

Basically, the term comes from the tale Hansel and Gretel, in which Hansel leaves bread crumbs behind him so that they can navigate the path that they have walked to get to where they are.

Subsequently, breadcrumb navigation on your website is specifically designed to help your website visitor understand what path they have followed on your website’s pages to wind up on the page that they currently are at.

It’s akin to having left a trail of breadcrumbs behind them to navigate their path.

Traditionally the breadcrumb navigation feature is placed at the top of the web page so that the user can easily see it.

It will look something like: Home > Blogs > Breadcrumb blog piece > Contact Us Page.

In this above case, the page that the user ended up on was the Contact Us page, and the breadcrumb tells them the story of how they navigated through the site to get there.

This ultimately helps the user understand your site structure and therefore navigate your site more easily to the pages that they want to access.

The key “secret sauce” which makes the breadcrumb navigation system work is that each “crumb” is linked so that the user can immediately skip back and forth to pages that they want to go to.

You may be wondering: how can this practice improve an Ecommerce site’s SEO for entrepreneurs and small business owners?

The answer is that Google actually uses breadcrumb navigation to crawl your website and place it into categories.

Therefore, if your site already has an effective breadcrumb navigation system in place, Google is much more likely to rank it on the first page.

 

3. Optimize Links to your Site

When it comes to organic searches, site links can help your visitors easily navigate the most important pages. These are usually the most frequently visited pages on your website.

It helps to add internal links to related products on your ecommerce site or even products that your other customers bought with the product in question.

This helps you up-scale your revenue and sales through up-selling your customers more products.

A smart way to include internal links is to use your keywords as the “call to action” rather than a generic phrase like “click over here.”

A key way to increase your authority as well as get some good internal links in is to create an About Us page.

This helps your target customer understand your company better, and if your mission is something they resonate with, they’re much more likely to regularly support you as a brand.

If you have specific product types that you specialize in, you can definitely link those pages in your About Us section.

Therefore, an About Us page is definitely something to add to your Ecommerce SEO checklist.

Part B: On-Page SEO Tactics

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing each page on your site, including the codes and content, to make them readable as search engine result pages. Small businesses that wish to boost their SEO rankings can and should definitely work on SEO page tactics.

Here’s what to focus on:

1. Keywords

Prepare a list of keywords you’d like to get ranked for.

Remember to own the keyword you choose; don’t spread your content so thinly that you don’t get ranked for anything.

Website crawlers are always on the lookout for content that features the right percentage of keyword-to-text ratio.

A keyword strategy that you should definitely take advantage of is to target long-tail keywords as much as possible.

This is because long-tail keywords are not only lower competition overall but also have a higher chance of bringing you conversions because of the sheer specificity with which a user is searching for something.

Find keywords that are relevant to your e-commerce store but don’t stuff them in meaningless prose. Search engines are a lot smarter than you think.

2. Increase Your Page Speed

We’ve talked about improving the loading speed of your website; now it’s time to talk about the operational speed of each page on your site.

Loading and buffering speeds are key indicators to Google’s algorithms on how to rank your page.

You can get in touch with Global-marketing Inc.’s website development department to help you with this feature.

Having slow loading speeds definitely does not do favors for your Ecommerce SEO as an entrepreneur.

3. Create Localized Landing Pages

E-commerce stores can benefit from creating specific pages that target a particular kind of promotion.

The holiday season is specifically useful for this endeavor, since there are more searches guaranteed for particular keywords around those dates.

Aside from holiday events, it can also be beneficial to your site to create category pages with specific keywords.

An example of this could be “Women’s Soccer Shoes” or “Men’s Date Night Shoes,” depending on your keyword research.

The biggest keywords should definitely have a category of their own under which you can place smaller keywords that fit into the larger category.

If your landing page features something exciting like a giveaway or a competition, your visitors are likely to share your page on social media—earning your authentic links that will boost your SEO rank.

You can optimize your localized landing pages by immediately showing your visitors your most popular and most bought items within that genre.

This can immediately get the proverbial sales ball rolling.

Sales start flowing in using this technique because it gets people interested fast.

4. Add Descriptions for Product Pages

Promote your products by adding small description texts to entice potential buyers. Feel free to write descriptions however you want them. Here are some tips to keep in mind while writing them:

– Keep your description in the 300 to 700 word range.

– Pepper your text with internal links to other pages on your site.

– Add a customer review section to your product pages. Anytime someone types ‘reviews’ in the search bar can get linked to your product description pages.

– Communicate any and all special offers or discounts on your products.

When you’re writing your product descriptions and titles, make sure to create a sense of urgency.

This applies even to crafting your meta descriptions for your organic search results on Google and other search engines.

A useful pro-tip for your Ecommerce SEO checklist for 2021 to create that sense of urgency is to use a countdown clock for specific deals and prices.

A bonus pro-tip that a lot of ad-copy writers use is to take full advantage of powerful words in your product descriptions and titles.

These specific words are timeless and have been tested to psychologically prime your visitors to invest in products.

While there are many power words out there for you to research, this should help you get started.

Part C: Off-Page SEO Strategies

No Ecommerce SEO checklist for entrepreneurs and small business owners is complete without off-page SEO Tactics.

A lot of the work that goes into improving your e-commerce business’s search engine ranking happens offline. Off-page SEO is slightly different from writing a blog or optimizing your web page.

Here, we deal with topics like offering sponsorships for certain events, partnering with local businesses within your industry and improving your outreach with white hat link building techniques. Let’s discuss each one of them in a little more detail.

1. Link Building Strategies

The simplest way to build authentic links is to promote a product, service or event.

Insert them into all of your content, but in ways that make them look like a natural fit and not a forced block of promotional text.

You can also embed links into the images you upload onto your website. Google’s algorithms will take that into consideration when they’re building your SEO rank.

One key strategy to find places that can link to your site is to see which sites are linking to your competitors.

You can easily build links on forums and directories that your competitors have built links on already.

A key place to also find an easy backlink is to get in touch with your manufacturer and ask them to link to you as a merchant for their product on their website.

If they aren’t forums or submission-based directories, you can also reach out to the websites linking to your competitors and ask for a link to your site.

If you ship your product internationally, it can also help you to check international competitors in the countries you can ship to.

Then repeat the same practice for the websites that are linking to your international competitors’ ecommerce websites.

2. Develop Industry Partnerships

This is perhaps the most important element of off-page SEO marketing. Get in touch with local industry e-commerce website owners and build a reciprocal promotional deal. Ask them to link your business on their content and offer them something in return.

You can even hire some already high-ranking online businesses to serve as licensed distributors for your products. From white hat link building to the chance to reach out to a larger consumer base, there are many benefits to expanding your industry partnerships.

3. Embrace the Sponsorship Culture

Getting your products sponsored by a third party website is actually easier than you think. There are many blogs that would happily promote your products. You can also opt to sponsor an event and request your partners to promote you on their website and on-ground activities. This should help put your e-commerce brand’s name on the SEO map.

4. Reach Out to Bloggers

Bloggers bring in loads of traffic and a loyal fan base with them. Get your small business’s name out there by having bloggers feature you on their blogs. You don’t even need to get anything major done for a promotion—simply ask them to link back to your home or product page and you’re surely going to have a lot of their traffic directed to your pages. Many bloggers would be willing to promote you for free; however, some will ask you for some compensation. The choice is yours.

5. Start Guest Posting

Backlinks are crucial for improving your SEO rank. You can use those and harness the power of online influencers to create a solid SEO marketing strategy for your small business to bloom. Ask popular blog owners or local industry groups to let you publish a guest post for them. You’ll be able to convince them better if you already have a few topics in mind. Try to work on something that benefits both of you. In most cases, your partner will agree to guest posting since the backlinks benefit their SEO rank as well.

Final Word

Memorize these e-commerce SEO marketing tips and strategies and maximize your gains during any major shopping season!

A simple, user-friendly and responsive website can help increase your visitor dwell time, while the right kinds of links and promotional pages can help boost activity on and off your page throughout the year.

While SEO tips for Ecommerce stores, startups, and entrepreneurs can be challenging to understand, you are already ahead of the game by taking the time to understand this blog’s points.

A good business person also knows when to delegate work so that they can focus on what matters most in their ecommerce business.

If you’re looking for professional website design, SEO marketing or content development strategies, feel free to get in touch with us today!

Global-marketing Inc. is one of the leading white hat SEO marketing agencies in the United States and offers some of the most affordable rates to get you started on your way to the top of search engine result pages!

Call us at +1(833)405-1025 to learn more about our packages!