simple tips for boosting traffic and sales with Ecommerce SEO & UX

Imagine you walked into a grocery shop with a list in your hand and the products scattered on tables throughout.

There is a good chance that you will make a U-turn to find a better-organized store. It would be a waste of time to go through every product to find what you need.

This is also true for your ecommerce site. Good SEO and user experience are dependent on organization.

Imagine also having “toilet papers” on your list but the signs in the rows don’t say so.

According to this imaginary grocery store “toilet paper” can be called “tissue for you bottom”.

Is there anyone on your “tissue for the bottom” list?

No. It is simply called “toilet paper”.

Ecommerce mirrors in store browsing and shopping

Groceries have learned from traffic patterns that aligning products “like” makes shopping easier.

We all know that everyone is looking for milk, so the stores keep them at the back. “Let’s ensure that people have to cross all other items before they can get to the milk!”

It matters a lot in SEO what you call “Products” as well as where they are located on your ecommerce website (i.e. information architecture and taxonomy).

This hypothetical grocery store is similar to an ecommerce website that has “Shop” in its navigation.

• After clicking through, you will see a complete list of all products on the site.
• It is important to organize things (or categorize them). The categories must make sense.

My agency was responsible for SEO for a major HVAC manufacturer for many years.

When we first met them in 2005, they called their air conditioners cooling products. Google did not rank them for the term “air conditioners” in 2005.

Customer journey must be considered when designing user experience

SEO and UX are often linked. This is especially true when it comes to how an ecommerce website is organized.

One product may be associated with several categories. It’s easy enough to make sure the product is linked with these other categories.

You’ll find hot sauce near the chips, just like you would find it in the Mexican aisle.

You’ll make it easy for users and it will be for Google and searchers.

Where do you begin?

These tips will help you increase traffic to your ecommerce website and promote your products.

1. A solid site taxonomy is essential

Your main categories should be created first. Learn from your competitors if you are unsure of where to begin.

Semrush audits can verify that the SEO efforts are being successful and show the breadth and value to their organic keyword presence.

Your main navigation should include your main categories. Wayfair is a great example of solid architecture.

Here you can see that Wayfair has a broad range of products, but they intuitively break them down into the main categories.

If you click on any of these, you will see their sub-categories.

2. Look for use cases in product searches

Once you have the basics of navigation (the foundation), you can start exploring the different uses that users might have and how they search for them.

Are people searching for prices? Maybe there are categories that can be used for pricing?

You can list all beds within this price range by going to “Beds below $1,000”, for example.

Maybe people are drawn to style?

Let’s suppose you sell adjustable beds. This product is searched for on average 47,000 times per month in the U.S.

Maybe people search for brands?

If Craftmatic is your product, you might consider creating a category page for Craftmatic adjustable bed. There are an estimated 1,900 monthly searches.

Another way to view this is: For instance, let’s say you have only one category page for Furniture.

This case is where you’re targeting a keyword that has a high monthly search volume (588,000 per month).

it can also be a very competitive keyword, which is less likely to land you a top-ranking spot.

Even if you reached the next level and created one page for “Beds”, with 112,000 searches, you would still be trying to rank for something very difficult.

But if you continue to dig down, you will find relevant opportunities.

You should consider “targeted keywords” that have low search volumes but high competition.

People searching for “Craftmatic adjustable bed” are likely to have an idea of what they are looking for.

This is the best part: By incorporating this feature into your site structure, content plans, and user experience, you reward website visitors with a better user-experience (matching content to searcher’s intent).

You will also see an improvement in your organic rankings almost automatically.

One product can now be represented in multiple categories/areas on your website (Furniture/Beds/Beds under Price Point/Style/Brand).

It is much more effective to merchandize your products than listing them all on one page.

Once you have all this information, you can now think about cross-promotion (through internal link) within the website.

These subcategory and category pages can be used for paid searches, such as Google Ads or Shopping Ads. The Quality Score of the landing page determines the relevance, which in turn affects the cost per click.

3. Merchandise your products

Brick-and-mortar merchandise usually refers to the endcaps, which are small hanging displays of pot holders that hang next to the signage and cookware display.

Merchandising is a great way to promote products in ecommerce.

You might include the following information on your product page:

• You may also be interested in other products of the same manufacturer.
• Others products were also purchased.
• Commonly purchased products together
• Similar products by other brands

It might be a good idea to highlight “Top Brands” on your homepage so that visitors can easily associate your site with trusted brands.

It is easy to optimize your website for many keywords that include “brand + product names”. These pages can be linked to by your manufacturing/vendor partner.

Many manufacturers have sections on their sites devoted to distributors, partners or where to buy call-outs.

Maybe the buyer of a bed might also be interested in a pad for their mattress. These could you possibly sell?

Let’s make sure we have cross-sell opportunities and that the product is intuitive for them.

Wayfair once again shows that this can increase the user experience.

You can increase the number of searchers who will find your product if you better merchandise it.

It’s a win/win situation! It’s a win-win situation. Users find the information they need, and you gain relevant visitors who are more likely than not to convert.

This will increase your keyword breadth which is good for SEO because you’ll have many other opportunities to maintain organic traffic. You never know when you might lose the top 3 ranking for “Beds.”

Wayfair has 1.7million non-brand keywords in Google’s top ten results according to Semrush.

This includes:

• #2 for “Furniture”, and #1 for “Beds.”
• 253 keywords variations of “Adjustable bed” rank in the top 10.
• Rank #8 in “Craftmatic adjustable bed”

4. Take advantage of seasonal and shopping discounts

The way that the product is promoted is also part of merchandising.

Brick-and-mortar retail would include the shelving, shelving signage and aisle signage. Floor signage, packaging, price labels, promotional pricing labels, and packaging are all examples.

You can also shop for seasonal deals through ecommerce.

Walmart uses the yellow tag sales as a sub-brand.

They promoted their Black Friday “Deals for Days” promotion leading up to Thanksgiving. It was featured in the main navigation and included in a promo banner.

Further down, there was another section that highlighted more Black Friday deals.

Each of these sections must be coordinated and planned. You will also need a flexible CMS that can support these temporary sections and pull in the correct products with the correct pricing.

To capture these types of search queries, you will also need a section called Deals/Discounts.

Many keywords indicate that price-sensitive shoppers may not have to spend the full retail price. These keywords include:

• Discount.
• Sales.
• Deals.
• Clearance.
• Closeouts.
• Markdowns.
• Used.
• Coupons.

Sometimes, seasonal variations are also possible.

• Black Friday deals.
• End-of-year sales.
• After-Christmas sales.
• Presidents’ Day sales.

These events are annual events and consolidate link signals. I recommend that you set them up with an alwaysgreen URL. This will help reduce internal linking errors.

Improved site organization and product marketing will increase sales.

These are just some of the things you should consider when creating an ecommerce website and figuring out how best to promote or merchandise specific products.

Your relationships with vendors, seasonal promotions, as well as other factors, will influence many of your decisions.

A team of SEO experts with ecommerce expertise can help you navigate these items. This will maximize your organic exposure, based on the information customers need and what they are looking for.

Your efforts can make a difference in:

• Numerous long-tail keywords rankings
• Improved user experience.
• Conversion rates that are higher

You can also earn links by linking to a specific product or seasonal promotion.

Keep in mind that the higher your rank on Google, the more likely someone looking for similar content will find you website.

Happy merchandising!

The post SEO & UX 4 Simple Tips to Increase Traffic and Sales was first published on Search Engine land.