As eCommerce has grown over the years, WordPress has become a very popular option for many store owners. An eCommerce store is generally intended to make sales online. But only a few make big sales. If you run an eCommerce store, then you will agree that traffic generation is the single most important issue that you face.
If you’re an eCommerce blogger and you’re not using the best SEO practices for your WordPress blog, then you’re losing a lot of organic search traffic that you could be using to increase your sales. The top five search results on the first page of Google get 67.6% of clicks, while the remaining receive 3.73%.
This blog will go over the essentials of creating an eCommerce site on WordPress and how to optimize it for search engines with a step-by-step checklist so you can rank higher in the SERPs.
Step 1: Focus on core web vitals.
Google has rolled out a new update that focuses on enhancing the user experience through core web vitals. The search engine will rank the pages on interactivity, loading speed, and visual stability.
Make your eCommerce blogs rank higher with optimized by making it swift. One way to do that is to remove unnecessary third-party scripts. Second, you should upgrade your host speed and implement lazy loading for a greater user experience.
The bottom line is that keeping up with the Google algorithm updates can be the differentiating factor that elevates your ranks. These are rolled out by the search engine with an aim to upgrade user experience, so adhering to these guidelines can highly improve the quality of your website.
Step 2: Optimize for featured snippets.
Next on the checklist is preparing your eCommerce blog content such that it can appear in the featured snippets of the search results page. Featured snippets are usually short descriptive pieces of information that provide an answer to a particular query.
Featured snippets are a pathway to organically ranking higher on the SERPs. In comparison to ranking number one for a keyword, optimizing your pages for featured snippets make the goal relatively manageable.
You can target long-tail keywords to improve your chances of triggering a featured snippet. Alongside this, answer questions related to eCommerce with your blog content. Approximately 77.6% of search queries start with “why,” generating ample opportunities for you to cater to the search algorithm.
Step 3: Make the most of the visual search.
With visual search engines like Google Lens being used 3 billion times per month, optimizing your eCommerce website for them becomes inevitable. The market demand has given rise to visual search tools like Pinterest Lens, Bing Visual Search, and Amazon StyleSnap.
As an eCommerce retailer, you should not hesitate to jump on this bandwagon. Use multiple relevant images in your blogs and optimize them with Alt text, product titles, and descriptions. The image filenames, sitemaps, and superior quality can result in a higher ranking on search pages.
Moreover, adding unique images that represent the value of your product can drive sales along with the search results ranking. Optimizing the images can tend to increase organic conversions for eCommerce retailers. Alt-text is used as an anchor by Google; therefore, try to be as descriptive as possible when using images as hyperlinks.
Step 4: Enhance Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T)
You must be wondering what Google’s algorithm update of focusing on E-A-T for ranking search results got to do with your eCommerce blogs. Let’s dive deeper. The search engine is always extra cautious while ranking “Your money, Your life” pages, especially eCommerce websites, as people visit these sites to spend their money.
You can focus on writing blogs with reliable information that engages the users. Trustworthy content with high-quality and relevant external links works wonders for improving rankings. Ensure a valid SSL certificate for your eCommerce website to build trust.
Building a reputable brand through positive reviews with eCommerce micro-fulfillment, prompt resolution of negative feedback, and active social media also influence the authority and trustworthiness of your eCommerce website.
Step 5: Understand the searcher’s intent
Your eCommerce blogs should be crafted in a way that they understand and satisfy the searcher’s intent. The semantics help garner an audience out of users who are searching for something specific as well as those who are simply browsing through your catalog.
When you enhance the keyword targeting to mirror search intent, your blogs become relevant and decrease the bounce rate, pushing your pages higher on the search rankings. The best way to implement strategies to optimize the WordPress blog is to match metadata and content type with the intent.
You can analyze the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords for better SEO. Google identifies them as essential, semantic-related terms that any decent article on a niche topic must possess.
Step 6: Update on-page SEO
Though this aspect is listed as the last box you need to tick; it does not mean it is insignificant. In fact, this pointer can have its own checklist of steps needed to completely optimize the eCommerce blog.
A few on-page SEO tasks you have to perform periodically include:
- Fine-tuning your URL structure – SEO-friendly URLs are short and usually have a keyword. This underrated element is an essential ingredient for high rankings.
- Using External links – Add highly authoritative external links to your eCommerce blog. Extensive research shows that sites with external links outrank the site without them.
- H1 and H2 – Compose your blog title with the H1 setting and keep it shorter than 60 characters. Structure your content with an H2 subheading to increase engagement.
Conclusion
These steps will help you make your WordPress eCommerce blog SEO friendly, rank higher in search engines, and grab a huge chunk of the eCommerce industry’s online traffic. SEO is a crucial aspect of your WordPress blog that is often overlooked. It can be tough to stay on top of all the new updates to Google’s algorithms, but the checklist will allow you to keep track of everything. It covers all the areas Google looks at when determining the ranking of a store on its search engine.
