eCommerce Search Engine Optimization

When your online store is showing in the top 2-3 spots for product searches that you sell- it is a game changer. Traffic and sales sky-rocket. Gravitate Online enjoys watching the graphical ‘Hockey Stick Effect’ take place when your sales really start to shoot upwards. Over a decade of experience in driving customers to eCommerce stores sets Gravitate Online apart. We know what it takes to get you sales online.

What Makes eCommerce SEO Different?

Getting search engine rankings requires focused and consistent work regardless of the site. eCommerce Search Engine Optimization add a few additional wrinkles to the equation and a dedicated team with experience optimizing specifically for eCommerce is required to get rankings that will actually sell products. The major difference between the SEO required for most service based companies and those selling products reside in the nature of the terms being searched and the type of content likely to be on the site pages.

eCommerce Keyword Phrases: The targeted terms that being optimized for generally differ greatly when comparing service company and product  SEO campaigns. eCommerce companies usually don’t care as much about geo-targeted phrases. They will sell their products to anyone- globally. Service companies (plumbers, attorneys, etc.) often are going after customers within their geographically limited location. The national and global phrases are usually much more competitive, while the local phrases, although often competitive, can be obtained more quickly.

eCommerce Page Content: Often with sites that are selling products, due to the number of products- the vast majority of pages are product images and descriptions. Service based companies often include descriptions of their various offerings and services, making the balance much more weighted towards pages with a lot of specific text focused on the keywords that are being optimized for. eCommerce pages are usually less focused as products are diverse. Descriptions of products are usually small and have a clear focus on marketing, rather than informing. Google generally rewards content over commerce pages- meaning that eCommerce sites need a lot more instructional and educational type of content added to increase the proportion of content on the overall site.

eCommerce Specific SEO Issues

Many other factors make eCommerce sites more complicated to optimize. Below are some of the areas we address in an online store campaign.

Lack of content or quality content: Most of the content on online store sites are rich with product images and short descriptions, but lack robust content that fosters inbound links that will mover your site up the rankings. Adding many pages full of instructional and engaging content will beef up your eCommerce store in the eyes of search engines and customers.

Back-end infrastructure: Many eCommerce site infrastructures are not conducive to search engine crawlers trying to interpret the content and products on your site. An SEO friendly backbone to your site will make a big difference in the usability and rank-ability of your site.

Duplicate content issues: When Google sees two versions of your content or product pages it may have a hard time determining which one to rank- and often the end result is the page equity is split between the two pages- hurting both. Focusing the juice to one page will help with your rankings, rather than allowing pages to dilute each other.

URL structure: Poor URLs for your site’s sub-pages are a good way chase search engines away. A well-constructed, descriptive URL is an easy way to let Google know what the page is about, so it can be indexed correctly. Many shopping cart infrastructures produce ugly, database driven URLs that are loaded with numbers and special characters. Replacing these with keyword rich URLs will greatly improve online store rankings.

Site load times: Google has made it very clear that a site’s load time now plays a role in how well it will rank. Online shoppers have long hated slow loading sites, so optimizing for speed will greatly help your sales, but now will impact your rankings. Older eCommerce structures are notoriously heavy and take time to load, while more modern and updated systems are coded more efficiently, use images more efficiently and greatly improve the overall speed of a site.

Getting Traffic, Now What?

Gravitate Online not only will drive eye-balls to your site, but we know that’s only half the battle. Now, we’ve got to get visitors buying. We understand that rankings are only valuable if it’s improving your bottom line- via sales. Getting people to purchase products on your site requires experience in driving visitor behavior and some of the strategies for doing this include:

3 Distinct calls to action: Every page should have specific, layered goals, or 3 calls to action. For example, on your product landing page, what do you want the visitor to do the most? Usually it’s to click the ‘Buy’ button. What if they don’t do that, do you have a lesser action that would still help your business? Perhaps you want them to call your 1-800 number and speak to your sales team, allowing you to upsell them on premium services and products. If they don’t do this, maybe you’d like them to click the ‘Live Chat’ button to begin interacting with your customer support team- because they are so skilled at driving sales and earning business. Either one of these is a success, but obviously, each success is rated differently in your eyes. We help identify the top 3 actions you want to induce on each main page of your site and create a design and infrastructure that will best point customers to the top layer success first, and the others as a back up.

Bounce rate monitoring: Bounce rate is a metric that we monitor in Google Analytics to help identify pages that are driving your customers away from your site. Basically, the metric means that a visitor came to the site- didn’t like what they found there- and left your site altogether. The lower the bounce rate for a page the better. We watch these pages very closely. When we see a critical page with a high bounce rate we pull in our conversion experts to eliminate any barriers that are driving visitors away. We may make some basic edits to the page, or reconstruct it entirely to keep customers on your site and buying your products.

Conversion rate drivers: Certain best practices, in regards to imagery, terminology and services, can help increase conversion significantly. Imagine if your site is getting 5,000 visitors each day and you have a conversion rate of 1%. An effective way to quickly improve your bottom line is to increase that low number to a more respectable 2%.  Sales double overnight, with a small bump in this metric. We look at your product pages, checkout processes and user behavior to drive this number up- making a huge difference to your sales.

Conversion rate killers: Customers are very fickle and the littlest things can drive them away from your products and site. We know what drives them crazy and eliminate these barriers. Additionally, we monitor their behavior to find out what your niche customers are bothered by- and identify what prompts them to leave a full shopping cart and leave the site.

Images, images, images: When shopping, customers are not going to spend a lot of time reading through your content. Instead, they want to see clear, clean and crisp images of your products. We know what types of images customers want to see and help you to get your products looking their best. Also, load times can be sabotaged with heavy, large images. Gravitate Online can help to optimize the file size of your images making them load quickly- so your customer will be more likely to view and buy your products.

Focus groups: All our experience and expertise aside- often we need to ask online shoppers directly for feedback about your site’s buying experience. We host feedback groups and compile their feedback and deliver an outline of specific changes. Additionally, we’ll be there to help you implement these changes.

Heat map analysis: Often, a focus group requires a larger investment then you can make, or is too anecdotal for the feedback we need. In these cases, we can glean a lot of helpful feedback by conducting a comprehensive 30 day long heat map analysis. A heat map is applied to your site, capturing the click behavior of every visitor to your site. At the end of the month all this data is compiled into a very informative heat map with colors indicating the most and least clicked areas of any specific page. The information captured is priceless as we can connect the dots and begin to predict user behavior on your site- allowing us to make changes to cater to and leverage their interaction with your site.

Why is Gravitate Online so good at eCommerce SEO?

Gravitate Online is passionate about eCommerce Search Engine Optimization- we eat, drink and sleep the stuff. Watching your rankings improve and your sales following suit is what makes us tick. We are different than other marketing companies because we put our heart and soul into your product sales, our experience, creativity, transparency and urgency have created fiercely loyal customers and we’d like to do the same for your site.