When you have an online store, you know that it’s extremely important to drive people to your website. However, you might find yourself struggling to rank in searches, or to get the desired amount of traffic.

Search engine optimization has several purposes for most websites, but it’s arguably more important for ecommerce than for any other industry. This is because ecommerce customers typically are ready to buy, when they’re making a search, as opposed to simply doing research or browsing for fun. Your potential customers are ready to hand over their hard-earned cash—but without SEO, they may never even know your store exists. SEO for ecommerce makes sure your store is visible so you can maximize your profits.

SEO is the online equivalent of placing a huge sign in front of a brick-and-mortar storefront that says “we sell pet supplies!” Without optimizing your website for these key phrases, your chance at showing up in searches for keywords with high buying intent is slim to none. And because you probably sell a lot of products, you have a lot of products to optimize your site for—and a lot of keyword variations to target.

Additionally, without SEO, your competitors are highly likely to beat you out in search. Even if you create an amazing website with a beautiful design that naturally attracts hundreds of links, a competitor with solid SEO and a good idea of which keywords to target will outrank you almost every time, in every search. It’s not enough to have part of the package. With competition as high as it is online, you need the complete SEO package.

[size=18pt]What Ecommerce SEO Audit Services Include[/size]
Keyword Identification
Before making any changes to your website, first do research to identify the words and phrases you need to include in your content. These are often called keywords or keyphrases. By researching online using free and paid tools, asking your customers how they describe your products, or working with you to find the keywords you already know are successful, you’ll find out how you should be describing your store or products to rank highly in searches.

Keywords most often pertain to your products or their central theme. For example, if your ecommerce store sells kid toys, you would expect to show up in a search for “kid toys.” So when you develop content for your website, this phrase should be included. This is a critical ecommerce SEO service to establishing an effective strategy for your business.

Keyword Implementation
The next step in the process is to implement the keywords we’ve found to be most relevant to your website. These keywords will likely be implemented in a number of places, including in your store’s homepage, page titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions, and so on. This step is essential to Ecommerce SEO, ensuring you show up in search results when potential customers need your services. You can do your own copywriting to implement these recommended keywords, or outsource it.

Optimizing Your Product Pages
Every page on your website should be optimized for search engines. When it comes to ecommerce stores, it’s hard to find anything more important to optimize than product pages. Product pages are extremely important because they are most likely to rank for very specific search phrases, also known as “long-tail keywords.” If someone searches for “kid gun toy,” you’re probably not going to have this long-tail keyword on your homepage… but it will appear on the product page for this item.

To ensure that your product pages are best optimized for high rankings, you’ll make sure that each page has a title, as well as a paragraph or two of keyword-rich copy that describes the item. It may also be a good idea to include the model number (if there is one) so you show up in searches for that, too.

Your product pages should also include images of the items you are selling. Although images themselves have little impact on SEO, including alt text that describes each image is another way that you can get keywords on a page.

Over to you
What are some of the best Ecommerce SEO practices that is working for you? If you have any question, post it below for expert review.