Setting up an eCommerce store is a fairly straightforward process. The challenging part is enhancing your store’s online visibility, outperforming the competition, and engaging even one of the 2.14 billion online shoppers. The best way to get more visitors to your eCommerce store is to focus on your Search Engine Results page (SERP) ranking. SERP rank dictates how your website is perceived by the target market – whether it appears trustworthy and trustworthy or not. To improve your competitiveness, you first need to improve your site’s position on the SERPs.
What is SERP Ranking?
A search engine results page is a list of web pages that search engines like Google show users as responses to their queries. Every time a user enters their search with specific keywords, such as “sportswear”, the search engines crawl through millions of web pages searching for the right match before displaying their search results. The results tend to go from most relevant to least relevant, so most users just focus their search on the top results.
Among SERPs, you will often see two types of results, paid and organic. Paid results are clearly labeled ads that search engines show first. Organic results are next and you will want to focus on them to improve your rating.
Search engines show organic results according to relevance, site authority, page load speed, and mobile optimization,…If you want them to book a store If your eCommerce is among the top organic results, you will need to optimize your website and focus on delivering an exceptional user experience.
Optimizing content on your website can help your eCommerce store appear in sections like featured snippets, or even in “People also ask” results. Connect with your audience without having to go head-to-head with longtime competitors.
The importance of SERP ranking in e-commerce
More than 75% of users never skim the first page of their search results. Few people even look past the first two or three results. The main reason is users’ trust in search engines like Google.
Google places a high emphasis on user experience and meeting customer expectations. It delivers reliable, quality results that guarantee an excellent level of user satisfaction.
If your e-commerce site isn’t among the first few SERP ranking results, it’s a sign that search engines like Google don’t consider the site trustworthy. As a result, end users won’t trust your site either. Unfortunately, this lack of user trust also reduces Google’s trust in your site.
That ultimately means you won’t get high website traffic, nor will your organic marketing conversion rates be enviable. To improve your ratings and credibility, you must meet your customers’ expectations, prove your worth, and deliver quality content and information to your audience.
Improve your SERP ranking
Considering how much the SERP rating affects the performance of your eCommerce store, it is important to improve it. Take a look at the possible reasons your store isn’t competing on the SERP and find out what you can do about it.
Work on your site structure
Site structure (or site hierarchy) affects the ease of use and ultimately affects your rankings. It’s an integral part of the overall user experience, so you’ll need to make sure you get it right. In a nutshell, the structure of your site is the organization of your pages and products, and how they intertwine and link to each other. If your customers need to go through many rounds to find your product pages or understand your shipping policy, this is a mistake. Work on your site structure, making sure it’s intuitive and easy to navigate to help all your eCommerce store users find the information and products they need.
Improved URL structure
Like poorly structured pages, poorly structured URLs confuse customers and search engine crawlers. URLs help explain the content of your web pages, help users navigate your site, understand your content, and learn how different pages relate to each other. As a result, you’ll need to create concise, logical URLs that contain only relevant information.
For example, a bad URL for sportswear would look like this:
While the numbers may mean something to you, they mean nothing to the user. Instead, try to create a URL like this:
https://cloverbrand.vn/why-your-website-serp-ranking-is-not-high
It is clearer, easier to understand, and will positively affect the user experience, leading to better SERP rankings.
Do thorough keyword research
SERPs work by showing users relevant websites based on the search terms they enter. So, one of the most important things you need to do to improve your SERP ranking is to find the search terms, aka keywords, your target audience uses to find products in the market. your niche. You’ll then need to incorporate those keywords into your pages (including URLs) naturally.
Short, generic keywords such as “clothes” can be a good place to start. However, it’s best to use more specific long-tail keywords and lower-competition keyword phrases: “cheap women’s sportswear”
Provide relevant content
Relevant content helps you connect with potential buyers, nurture customer relationships, and build trust. It allows you to include your keywords naturally and show search engines that you have valuable information to offer your website visitors.
As a general rule, you’ll want to focus on two types of content, static and interactive. As the name implies, static content is usually immutable. It stays the same whenever a user of your site visits one of your pages. It can include blog posts, product descriptions, FAQ pages, or an “About Us” section. To create SEO-friendly content, you need to do your research, identify the best topic for your needs, use the right keywords, add relevant links, and focus on providing quality first.
Interactive content is more dynamic and therefore they are also more interesting. It can include types of content like online quizzes, interactive information, surveys, etc. It helps to retain your users, encourages them to spend more time on your site, and helps You generate more leads and increase conversions.
You’ll need both types of content to improve your eCommerce store’s competitiveness and increase your online visibility.
Perfect Offpage SEO
It’s not just what you do on the page that affects your SERP ranking; that’s also what you (and others) do. Any online mention of your brand will ultimately affect your ranking. Poor reviews on third-party websites, user posts on forums, and comments on your social media sites affect your reputation, affecting the perception of your target audience and search engines about your store.
While you can’t always influence how others talk about your brand, there are ways to improve your off-page SEO. You can partner with well-established, trusted sites to provide guest posting services.
Collaborate on content with other brands, have authority sites link back to yours, and post content regularly on social media to increase engagement.
Increase your inbound links
Closely related to off-page SEO is link building. Link building helps you build your website authority, making your eCommerce store appear more trustworthy. In essence, link building means getting links that lead from other websites to yours. The more inbound links you have, the more trustworthy your site will be and the higher your SERP ranking will be. However, it is not only about quantity but also about quality. Having low-authority sites lead back to yours can only harm your rankings as their poor reputation will reflect your brand. On the other hand, having reputable, well-established websites linking back to your site will reflect positively on your reputation and increase your credibility.
Pay attention to the download speed
Performance issues such as poor loading speeds will drive away more than 79% of your online shoppers. No one wants to waste more than a few seconds loading your pages. The longer your site loads, the higher your bounce rate. As a result, your conversions are lower.
You can do a quick site speed test to check your position and see if there is any room for improvement. If your site is unusually slow, you may need to reorganize your pages or remove some media. Reducing redirects, optimizing your HTML, compressing your images, and more can help. However, you may need to change or upgrade your server if nothing else works.
Optimize your website for mobile viewing
Over 62.06% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, meaning the mobile experience is becoming increasingly important. A website that is not optimized for mobile will only lead to user frustration, lower your credibility and rankings, and lead to poor conversions. In the past, mobile optimization was just a bonus that impressed some users. Today, it is one of the most important SERP ranking factors shaping your customer experience.
Ensures excellent website security
While it doesn’t directly affect your SERP ranking, website security affects user experience. No online shopper wants to leave their sensitive information (such as credit card information) on sites with questionable data protection. Untrusted users will indirectly affect your site’s performance and lead to lower rankings.
To instill trust and increase the security of your site, you need an SSL certificate, regularly update your site and perform security patches, install highly secure plugins, and ensure uptime. Website uptime is excellent. You should also back up your website, tighten your network security, have a strong firewall, and only use a secure web host.
Avoid Google Penalties
Finally, if you want to improve your competitiveness and rank higher in the SERPs you need to avoid Google’s penalties at all costs. Bad practices like black hat SEO, keyword stuffing, and link-building schemes will always lead to poorer rankings.
When you receive a Google penalty, one of two things can happen. You will either get significantly worse rankings for your selected keywords or have your site excluded from the SERP ranking list by Google. Either way, your website traffic will suffer.
Therefore, you need to familiarize yourself with the most common Google penalties and make sure you do everything in your power to avoid them.
Your eCommerce SERP ranking is an essential factor that affects your performance. Websites that rank high tend to attract more traffic, enjoy a better user experience, boost lead generation, and increase conversions. Therefore, you will need to continuously monitor your SERP ranking and work on improving it if you want to reap the rewards.