Ranking an e-commerce site is not easy. It requires more hard work than most of the other sites, and, you compete against some of the biggest companies out there in the world, including Amazon, eBay and many others. The backlinks to product pages of e-commerce sites are also not found easily. In such a situation… how do you rank your site highly to attract organic traffic?
The answer to this question is not too straightforward, but it still exists. You can manage to win over all these issues and have your website ranking high in SERPs of Google. How? Here goes the answer, broken down in 7 simple and doable steps:
#1. Do your keyword research
Any good SEO campaign starts from keyword research. You too should do some keyword research for your e-commerce site, and various tools are available to help you with that. You must not skip this step, because if you do, you’ll either be targeting keywords you can’t rank for; or you’ll not be targeting any keywords at all. Both these things are hopeless for your e-commerce site. There will be some keywords for which you can rank easily, and some keywords for which you can’t rank. Identify both through keyword research, and then plan your SEO campaign accordingly.
#2. Optimize product pages
Once you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to tweak some of your product pages to optimize them for ranking on those keywords. The first thing that you should do is hitting on the low-hanging fruit – that means working on those pages which are already ranking highly for any keyword. For instance, some of your web pages may be ranking on the 1st page of search results for any keyword, but they may not be among the top #3 results. And there’s a good chance that this may be happening due to some on-page SEO related factors, like site speed, lack of content or something else. You can fix such issues to optimize those pages for ranking in the top #3.
#3. Optimize your images
Images rank more easily than text, and they also make a significant part of any website. Therefore, it’s important to pay some special attention to them. Include proper titles, descriptions and alt tags in all images on your e-commerce site. Use large images wherever possible, but also ensure that they’re not so large that they start slowing down your site. There should be a balance between both. Tools are available that can help you in maintaining this balance: they can tell you about images which have important attributes missing, and about which images are too large. Most SEO optimization suites come with these features, and you should pay attention to what they’re telling you.
#4. Install an EV SSL certificate
Google rarely talks about the signals it’s using in its search algorithm for ranking web pages, but HTTPS is one of those rare signals which company revealed itself. In a blog post published last year the company announced that it’s using HTTPS mode as an important ranking signal in its algorithms, and websites that are not on HTTPS are being pushed below in the SERPs. So, if your website does not have an SSL certificate installed, you’re creating a problem for customers and SEO also. Install a cost-effective SSL certificate to make your site rank higher. In order to get higher authenticity and protection against phishing, you can easily go with Extended Validation certificate.
Moreover, you can find numerous vendors who offer same EV SSL as you purchase from direct certificate authority. One of the most reputed vendor naming SSL2BUY has been providing reliable all types of SSL certificates. EV SSL from SSL2BUY will not only boost your ranking but provides highest reliability over your site.
#5. Use the power of content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most powerful types of marketing in today’s era. It’s cost effective, universally applicable and least risky method of acquiring traffic. If you too want some quick traffic that also comes with quality backlinks and a ton of social shares, you need to build some special types of content that can attract these things. Setup a blog, publish some meaningful infographics on it, some research reports based on data collected from your users and other similar content that can make people share it. You can also try long lists, videos and pieces of useful information in form of images extracted from your existing content.
#6. Build links
The importance of backlinks has always been paramount in the field of SEO, and it remains like that to this day. If you want to rank higher in SERPs, you’ll need many good quality backlinks. And there are many ways to build those backlinks – guest posts, partnerships, scoring some broken links by contacting webmasters, create fresh, link-worthy content based on data collected from your customers, and so on. The list of link building methods is endless, but the basic idea is same – you should get links from high quality websites which have a domain authority (DA) of at least 60.
#7. Measure and repeat
Some of your methods will give the best results. Some will give slightly fewer exciting results, and some will not give any results at all. You should measure the performance of various methods through tools like Google Analytics, and repeat those methods which are bringing the best results for your e-commerce website. On the other hand, methods that are not producing any meaningful results should be abandoned immediately. There’s no point wasting your time, money and other resources on methods that are bringing a handful of non-converting visitors.
Conclusion
These 7 steps can help you ensure that your website ranks high enough in SERPs for some meaningful keywords. The organic traffic that you can get by following these steps will be enough to build a strong foundation for your e-commerce business, and the best way to implement these steps is with the help of a digital marketing professional. Putting a professional in charge of your SEO campaign eliminates all chances of mistakes and allows you to achieve better results in time.
Now finally, if you feel that this article gave you a direction in which you can move to increase the sales of for your e-commerce website, thank us by leaving a comment below. And if you still have any questions, leave them too in your comments. We’ll try our best to answer them!
Kim Marks 
Rhydian Choi