17 SEO Best Practices To Grow Your E-Commerce Sales 2018

The SEO strategy in e-commerce is a vast field and requires great attention for online businesses. 
1. Research & Planning 
Using proper keywords with research and planning can help in generating high traffic to a website. The keywords must be high ranking and in demand. Place these keywords in your website’s content like in page titles, headers, image alternate text, etc. Long tail keywords are easy to match to the phrases that the user is searching for. Nowadays it's also smart to plan for , which is a relatively new consideration for SEO's.
2. Keep Up With The Competition 
Be aware of the strategies your business rivals are using, for example, the keywords that they are using or the kind of website interface they provide. This will help you to know your position in the market and maybe you learn something new or generate a new idea of your own. Websites like SEMrush are great for on the competition. 
3. Speed Up That Website 
Generally, users expect the pages to load within microseconds and if your page fails to do so one might lose a customer here. So, optimize the page speed and make it the best it can be. Remove excessive ads, install helpful plugins, and compress media to help keep your website lightning fast. 
4. Rapid Responsivenes 
For a layman, if the website is not easy to use, they probably won’t visit it again. So, it is important for a web page to be responsive and easy to use. The desktop version of the website isn't ideal on a mobile device and vice versa. It should be responsive to the size of the screen that it appears on and certainly be mobile responsive. If your website isn't then you'll lose out with Google and customer sales. 
5. Create Distinctive Headings For Products 
The headings of the products must be distinctive and unique according to the page that you own. This will create a better link with the search engine and create more traffic on the webpage. Make sure it is accurate, reasonable in length, descriptive, and accompanied by high quality (but reasonable compressed) images.
6. Master Mobile 
This goes back to #4. It's important to know that more than 50% of the e-commerce traffic is generated from mobile phones these days, so it is very important for a website to and be as much responsive on phone as on a PC.this will create a better impression of the website and hence the more the traffic on the website the more the sales of the products. 
7. Include Snippets 
Snippets are a few words that appear below the website’s name in the search engine’s results. How many times have you avoided opening a website because you didn't like its description? Make sure this doesn’t happen on your website. Include rich snippets on your website to attract customers rather than boring them away. A Michigan company namely Detroit internet marketing can help you with best snippets that are more likely to be seen and contain search words that will match your snippets.
8. Connect Your Website With Social Media 
This earth is now a global village. Communication is very important and there are few better ways to communicate that than on social media platforms. Sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, , Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook can play key roles in advertising your company or web page. Connect the website with your social media accounts and keep them updated regularly. 
9. Keep In Touch With Customers 
Keeping in touch with the customers is very important. It helps to build a better website and to remove any flaws that are causing difficulty to the user because, in the end, . Keeping a record of their reviews is extremely important and allowing other users to read those comments also plays a vital role in the increasing or decreasing of sales. If the provided products are of excellent quality and the customer is happy then his complimentary reviews will attract other customers but keep in mind the opposite can also happen. 
10. Provide Contact Information 
The website must contain the name, address and contact of the company so that it is easy for the customers to keep in touch with their orders or any other queries they might have. Poor contact information might take away the attention of the customer, and it can also put you on Google's radar in a bad way. If you take a look at Moz Open Site Explorer, you'll get a point towards their spam flag predictor if your website doesn't include contact information.
11. Configure An SSL Certificate 
SSL certificate is a for E-commerce or other websites. SSL certified websites are more secure to use and can reduce your liability for stolen customer data. Now Google Chrome also notifies users if the page that they're on is not secure and it could cause customers to lose faith in your business if you don't have HTTPS.
12. Website Architecture 
The architecture of a website is very important. Note each and everything in detail. Check the navigation of the web page, how deep the links are, how aesthetically appealing it is, and how easy to use it is. Apart from one’s own website, get an idea of the competitor’s web pages too. This will give you a better idea of your website and how you can make it better. 
13. Make Your Website Stand Out 
It is very important for your website to stand out from the other billions of pages out there. Generate innovative ideas for the website, including ideas never seen before. Create fresh and helpful content at least weekly such as , videos, and white papers. Only then you will be able to attract more and more customers. 
14. Eliminate Site Errors 
Removing errors from your website must the top priority. Use Screaming Frog to remove any errors from your website. It will spider the website’s links, CSS, images, and apps as an SEO. It will also provide a summary of all errors. The most common errors in websites are usually missing links, duplicate pages, missing headings, and redirects. So, remove all these errors before you make this website available for customers. 
15. If You Build It (Links) They Will Come
You must pay attention to earning trustworthy inbound links. Try to provide guest blog posts for websites with high domain authority and include a dofollow link to your website within them. White hat but it will pay off big with more organic traffic. If your site is going Black hat and linking to low-quality websites, you could actually be penalized by Google and end up losing search engine page rank and earning less organic traffic. Slow and steady is better than fast and reckless. Internal links to your other related content can benefit you as well.
16. Create Permalink Structure 
Google uses permalink structure to know what the site is about and what kind of data it produces. Therefore self-explanatory permalinks are mandatory for all web pages. Keep your URL's SEO-friendly by making them accurate, reasonable in length, keyword-rich, and easy to read for both people and search engines. Avoid excessive keyword stuffing thought as Google will see right through that. 
17. SEO Audit 
This tool helps you know the status of your ecommerce website in the overall Google search world. It tells what needs to be done to keep moving forward. Auditor, Screaming Frog, SEO Optimizer, SEMrush, & Moz Open Site Explorer (among several other programs) can help you find your position in the market. 
The optimization of search engines is done for countless reasons, but in E-commerce the end goal is always to increase sales. When search engine optimization is done the right way, it ensures more traffic which means repeated visitors and conversions into paying customers. But don't get complacent and never rest on your laurels. There are always competing websites looking to grab the upper hand in search results and Google (among other large search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and ) are always changing their algorithms.