If you are selling products online, it’s very important that your e-commerce site is optimised for both Google and your customers. Otherwise, you are wasting the opportunity to attract more traffic and generate more sales. Stoney deGeyter, CEO at Pole Position Marketing, shares some tips on how you can improve the performance of your e-commerce site.
According to deGeyter, there are two key pages involved in optimizing your offerings for both search engines and your target customers. They are the product information pages and the product category pages. Improving the appearance and content of these pages can contribute to your efforts into getting more traffic and then converting that traffic into customers.
Create proper product categories
To optimise these pages, the first thing you need to do is to develop an effective categorisation structure for all of the products or services you’re offering online. This involves creating categories and sub-categories that will help your target customers narrow down their choices so they can easily find the product that will best meet their specific needs and interests.
Optimise every category page
Every category page should be treated as a landing page, deGeyter said. As such, they should be optimised for targeted keyword searches. To optimise the category pages, you must know what the purpose of each page is. For example, if you’re selling goods, the purpose of each page is to provide visitors with information that will fulfil the intent of their search query. And then from there, it should offer signals to guide visitors towards the next action, like visiting the next sub-category or a specific product page.
Customise the heading tag
To optimise the category pages, start by customising the heading tag. The heading tag should be able to fulfil two important requirements: if should confirm to the visitor that they are on the right page and it should convince them to stick around. When customising heading tags, you can just reiterate the product category and then use a secondary heading to entice people into staying.
Optimise your content
Every page needs content, even product pages. Without it, it would be difficult for your Google’s search spiders to crawl your site. In addition, adding content in every product or category page allows your visitors to obtain valuable information about products under certain categories. Also, it is to aid conversions because some shoppers are less likely to buy a product if they see that the page it is on doesn’t have content or product description.
Ensure product pages match searcher intent
To improve your conversion rates, ensure that the pages match the searcher’s intent. You should limit the amount of work your target customers need to do to find what they’re looking for. For instance, if a visitor is looking for a Nikon DSLR camera, ensure that they land on a page specific to Nikon DSLRs, and not a page for all brands and types of digital cameras.
