e-Commerce sites, a (new) Google guide to SEO optimization
We are increasingly in the age of digital shopping, in the world and also in Italy: the latest international data certify that the B2C market alone will generate a value of almost 5 trillion dollars in 2021, while in Italy we are approaching 40 billion euros (between products and services). The growth in purchases has inevitably also generated a proliferation of e-Commerce sites and an intensification of online competition, and so the struggle for visibility is becoming harder and harder: now more than ever, therefore, Google’s official advice comes in handy, which with the latest episode of the Ecommerce Essentials series takes us to discover eight SEO interventions that could increase the positioning of an e-Commerce site in Google Search.
Google’s SEO tips for e-Commerce
This is not the first time that the search engine team has devoted space to SEO tips for e-Commerce, both at the level of a strategic and philosophical approach to ensure a positive experience with online shopping, and with real technical best practices that can help improve a shop’s performance and its sales.
In recent days it was Alan Kent who returned to the topic, describing in the video eight valuable SEO tactics that could help increase an e-commerce site‘s ranking in Google Search, ranging from the technical details, including the management of product variants and offer pages, to ensuring the right breadth of content on the site to meet the needs of customers at all stages of their journey and put the site on the right track and in front of the right people.
There is, however, one aspect that should not be underestimated – and it is no coincidence that the Developer Advocate says so at the very beginning of his speech: the real challenge is that competitors also aspire to the top position in Google’s search results, so the work is certainly difficult and demanding.
SEO challenges for e-Commerce
Complicating the scene even more is the fact that there is not just one type of SEO, because the work of optimising organic visibility on search engines can have different objectives depending on the type of site. For example, Kent reminds us, a website that generates revenue from display ads generally wants to increase the volume of traffic to the site, but e-Commerce sites more commonly aim to increase sales.
Basically, ‘a large number of visitors who do not make a purchase is less useful than a smaller number of visitors who do make a purchase’, he summarises in the video. Similarly, it is important to think about which products it is useful and strategic to direct traffic towards: for example, is it better to have low-cost, fast-selling products, in the hope of receiving return visits from customers, or products with a higher profit margin? There is no optimal answer for all sites, because these considerations derive from individual business strategy, and this helps us understand the importance of setting goals for the site in order to measure and optimise support to enable the business to achieve these goals.
8 tips for e-Commerce SEO
With this in mind, the expert guides us to the work of SEO optimisation of an e-Commerce project through 8 tips and areas to devote attention and effort to, covering various aspects of the work of running a site.
- Refine the technical foundations of the site
The first piece of advice is to perfect the technical foundations, which are precisely the basis for hoping to achieve the hoped-for traffic goals and for making sense of the excellent content strategy we have studied – because ‘if Google can’t crawl your website, it doesn’t matter how good your content is,’ Kent reminds us.
As in the other episodes, in this video the Googler suggests that owners of e-Commerce sites use the Google Search Console to find technical problems on the site and, through the various reports, visualise the potential problems encountered (with directions for resolution). For instance, in the case of problems with individual URLs, the URL Inspection tool reports problems that have not yet been resolved, just as important is to check that URLs and internal lin