SEO: Best Practices For Getting Your Products And Store Found

by Larry Kilroy (Unlicensed)

Sep 25, 2018

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For online retail, success often depends on new customers finding your store and your products. How a merchant and their products perform in search engines will dictate how many new customers will find their way to that merchant's shopping cart. A store or its products landing on "Page 1" of search results can make a large contribution to that store's bottom line. But how can a merchant make sure their store and products are positioned to succeed in Google, Bing, or other searches? Today we will dive into some of the basic practices necessary for a strong and ongoing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. 

First, it is critical that you build your eCommerce site with SEO performance in mind preferably on a platform that has the infrastructure to support the following best practices.

The basics for SEO success:

1.) Help search engines understand your products

• Accurate, descriptive product titles 

• Rich product descriptions

• Proper categorization of products (type, country, region, appellation, varietal, vintage, and brand)

• Use of structured shopping data (price, size/pack, store location, hours) 

• Product reviews

2.) Optimize Product Images

• Use standard image formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP)

• Size your images to be delivered to the browser quickly

• Use "Alt Tag" text for all images with product name

3.) Make your site mobile-friendly

• Use responsive design practices ( Responsive web design is a setup where the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and Cascading Style Sheets are used to alter the rendering of the page on the device based on the screen size available and the type of device. So there is only one version of your site. It just has the ability to look and act differently based on what device the user is viewing it on).

4.) Promote your products

• Paid promotions (Google Adwords campaigns for example)

• Utilize shopping feeds with dedicated structured data URLs (Google Shopping, Wine-Searcher, eBay)

5.) Build a good online reputation

• Handle online customer service quickly and effectively

• Use email marketing tools to stay in touch with customers and drive traffic to your site

To learn more how the Bottlenose platform can help your eCommerce site perform better in search engines, read more about how we approach SEO.