Insights

The air has that sharp autumn crisp to it and the leaves are changing colors before they fall off the trees. As we inch closer and closer to the holiday season, it is imperative to follow best practices when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When potential customers are searching for products that your business offers, you want to ensure you are being seen just as much if not more than your competitors! Ranking high in search engines and catching people’s eyes is essential to staying relevant in the world of ecommerce.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to organic traffic that comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. Usually people will go to a search engine like Google, type in a couple key words related to what they’re looking for, briefly scan the first couple of links and then click on one of them that they believe will give them the most pertinent information.

Making sure your business is being seen when people do this for products you sell is vital. View some of the points we have collected that should be part of your SEO strategy if they aren’t already:

• Mobile UX Matters:
  • Mobile phones have rapidly been taking over as people’s device of choice for quick, efficient tasks on the internet. You will be hard pressed to find someone without a mobile phone in their pocket or within arm’s reach in today’s digital world. Making sure that the experience mobile users have is enjoyable is just as important (if not more important) than how it appears on desktop/tablet. Google ranks and will continue to rank mobile-friendly sites higher than those only optimized for larger screens. This is a trend that you want to keep up with.

• Optimize images on your site:
  • Search engines rank faster loading websites higher than ones that take longer to load. Images and videos tend to be the culprits of slow loading websites due to their large file sizes. Running your images through an image compressor and then reuploading them in lieu of the original images can drastically improve the user experience for your audience while also ranking you higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Imgix is our tool of choice for swift, automated image compression.

• Make sure your website is secure:
  • Besides the obvious reason of keeping information secure on your website, having a more secure website will help you rank higher in the SERPs. Google rewards websites that utilize HTTPS rather than the unencrypted HTTP with higher rankings. If you aren’t familiar with the differences between HTTPS and HTTP, read through one of our past blogs that explains it along with other aspects of web security. Web security is something that should be taken seriously by everyone, especially in ecommerce.

• Internal linking strategy:
  • Internal links are any links on a page of your website that go to another page on your website. These are very helpful to users as it allows them to quickly click-through to content that is related to what they’re currently viewing. Aside from users, search engines utilize these links to find the relationship between content when they crawl your site. Coming up with an internal linking strategy can be very advantageous as it can help point search engines to your most important content and rank you higher at the end of the day.

• Formulate captivating title tags and meta descriptions for your pages:
  • Ranking high is just part of the puzzle! Once your website appears towards the top of the SERPs and you have eyes on your site’s link, you want to make sure people act by ultimately clicking on it! Two very key components in that decision people make to click on your link or another link is the title tag and meta description for that page.
    • The title tag is essentially the name of the page. It is what is seen as the clickable headline in the search engine results and it is what will appear on the tab when you click-through to the page. Make sure it is short, it is unique to that page, and it provides keywords for customers to quickly see what the page is about.
    • The meta description is another important factor in getting people to click on your link. It is the short blurb of text below your title tag in the SERPs. The meta description tag should give a small description of what will be on the page if someone clicks on your link. Again, it should be short, provide keywords, and be relevant to the material people would see.

Are you doing all that you can to rank high in the SERPs?