Applying Search Fundamentals to your eCommerce website
Do you know how well your eCommerce site ranks on Google? Ever wondered what your competition are doing to outrank you?
In this article I'll look at why you should improve your organic search performance, and some tricks that can help you do it.
Why worry about organic search performance?
The truth is that for most sites, strong search performance and a high-quality user experience are the same thing. Your users want to land on a page that's easy to use, well-written and helps them to do whatever they want to do. Google's aim is to send them to the website best able to give them what they want. Your aim is to be the site that Google prefers to send those users to, so they can buy your product.
How Google assesses your website
This breaks down to four key points:
- Your site’s technical performance
- How your users behave
- Correct use of structure and high-quality backlinks
- Well-written content
How to look at your website’s technical performance (for free)
Getting insight into your website’s performance often comes at a premium, so the good news here is that Google offers a free way to check on technical SEO essentials like page loading speed and cumulative layout shifts (CLS). If you’ve ever noticed the text that’s in front of you being pushed down the page as a header image loads, that’s an example of CLS.
The bad news is that fixing the issues it flags usually requires having a good developer on tap. You probably know what’s coming next - we can help with that.
Here’s the link to the Google PageSpeed Insights tool: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Finding out how your users use your website
There are multiple layers to this, and again, you can get some of the information you need for free, provided you have Google Analytics setup on your site. If you don’t already have it, put it at the top of your to-do list - it offers essential insight, and the only cost would be if you need a developer to implement it. Google offers lots of guidance on how to do it, although as it increases in complexity as a tool it has become a lot more technically demanding.
Google Analytics offers tons of information about how your users are behaving on your site, and can help you understand how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they look at while they’re there. It also offers some basic tracking of scroll depth, which is how far they move down the page - if they never get past the bit they land on, don’t visit other pages and leave immediately, that’s all going to be used against your site when Google decides how it should rank.
How should you structure a webpage?
While there’s not a precise format to building a good web page, there are definitely some best practices to follow. Some of them might not seem linked to SEO, but it’s really all self-supporting - do a great job of selling your page and you’ll get more visitors as a result, which then improves the page’s rank.
Firstly, use the Meta Description to sell your page. The Meta Description is the little precis that appears next to your page name in Google Search, like this:
All websites will allow you to write your own for your pages, although the method will be different for each.
Next, make use of the different header options. Most sites will offer Headers 1-5 as standard (usually referred to as H#, e.g. H1), some may have more. These offer two benefits. They tell Google’s search robots how important the different headlines are when deciding to rank your page. H1 means it’s the most important header on the page, and all other headers should be considered as less important, but still more important than the copy that makes up the rest of the page.
You don’t have to use all of them, and the ones you don’t use don’t have to be in order - just remember that the highest number will be the most important.
They also act as a visual cue for your visitors - the biggest headline is the most important, but you’re drawing attention to all the important topics in your article.
Why do you need backlinks?
The rule for backlinks is that higher profile (reputable) sites have better quality links - the fact that they’ve linked to you is seen as a kind of endorsement by Google, and as a result you get improved ranking for your own pages. This works in reverse, too - lots of links from low-quality sites will make your site’s performance worse.
For most sites, it’s a balancing act. There are steps you can take to stop the bad links from being counted, but building your collection of good links can be a challenge. Have a think about any connections you might have that can help, which might be clients, industry connections or accrediting bodies.
The secret to well-written content
This one is much tougher to quantify, but sits across all the other factors. A well-written site will be more appealing to customers and Google’s search robots. It also increases your chances of taking one of the search features that will give your organic search performance a boost by featuring some of your content at the top of the page.
Copywriting is definitely more art than science, so if it’s not your forte then it might be worth looking at outsourcing it. There are also tools that will help with the basics, like Grammarly - it won’t write the copy for you, but it will help make it more readable.
The weapon of last resort here is of course GPT. Catapulting from being virtually unheard of to being the subject of at least 50% of the articles in my news feed at any one time, used the right way, GPT can be incredibly helpful with content creation. The vital thing is to remember that it’s only part of the puzzle - it’s not taken long for people to recognise the distinctive style of content written by GPT, so it should only be part of the process. Use it for research and content ideas, but not to produce anything that’s used without serious finessing from you or your team.
Ask for help if you need it
It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to do everything yourself, but the fact is, agencies like ours exist because this work is difficult, technically finicky and really intensive. If you’re hitting brick walls everywhere you turn, give us a ring or drop us an email. We can quote for any or all of the work you’re struggling with, and in the long term finding a quicker resolution could well end up saving you money.
