The goal for your e-commerce site is to reach a wide audience. With more than 7 billion people using the Internet today, any number of people could be viewing your online store right now. Unfortunately, you’ve got plenty of competition vying for consumer attention, and you’re finding it a challenge to get more people to visit your website. What’s more, not all leads automatically turn into customers. And no customer conversion means zero profit.

So how do you entice more traffic to your e-commerce site and go from inviting leads to converting customers?

You need to land a spot on the first page of search engines, from Google to Yahoo.

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Search Engine Visibility Means More Traffic

The quality of your website has power over your bottom line, whether you run an exclusively online store or have a brick-and-mortar outlet. Consumers are getting information and doing transactions on their mobile devices and desktop computers. If your e-commerce site isn’t ranking in any search engine, particularly Google, business isn’t likely to pick up.

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Consider the following:

• Search Engine Journal reveals that 50% of users who do local search on their mobile devices visit a local store on the same day
• 93% of online and mobile traffic organic search traffic, globally, comes from Google
• 75% of users never go past the first page of search results
  

Taking advantage of proven SEO strategies to boost your e-commerce site’s rankings can drastically improve your ROI ensuring that your business in on the right track. Achieving a high SERP ranking, however, entails meticulous attention to certain details about your website, from its design to its architecture.

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This is why businesses turn to digital marketing experts; professional web marketers have the experience, the time, and resources to come up with a custom plan that fits your e-commerce site’s goals, allowing your site to rise to the top.

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While you look for the right professional marketer, there are five steps you can apply on your own to begin boosting your e-commerce site’s traffic:

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1. Establish Domain Authority

The principles behind losing and establishing domain authority are simple. If your website is purely composed of product and category pages, it loses authority as a quality backlink. Think about it. How can other websites use your own as an authority site if your website only provides product specs, prices, and categories?

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Sometimes, e-commerce sites have a free pass because they focus on selling a product or service.  This is a huge misfire because 72% of marketers believe that relevant, high-quality content is the most effective SEO tactic.

So you’ll want to enrich your e-commerce site with quality content that other sites can use as a backlink. A good way to do this is through blogs that engage your customers and add value to their lives. Your blog posts not only need to be relevant to your products but also updated as new posts can boost your traffic by 100%.

This approach can help your site’s domain authority to grow in addition to ranking your product and category pages higher. Look at it from this perspective: backlinks are references to your website. Other people are quoting you for the content you provide, so ensuring that you have quality content and a content marketing strategy can cement your domain authority.

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2. Optimize Your Product Page

Your product page is the gateway to convert leads into paying customers. After all, the page shows people what you sell. Product page optimization can make conversions easier, but how do you do that?

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Use specific keywords in strategic locations: page title, product descriptions, meta title and description, and even image file names.

• Adding relevant words to your main target keyword can optimize it for specific searches, and allow you to get an edge on the competition. Specific keywords also help your product page to appear for long-tail searches.
  

For example, if your target keyword is “used cars,” you can make it specific by including words that people usually use when searching for this type of product, like cheap and mint condition, or you can add a brand, like Ford and Subaru.

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Add magnet words as well

• Optimizing your product page title tags for clickthrough rate (CTR) will generate even more traffic, which obviously means more potential customers. Using magnet words can instantly boost your CTR, so use them often.

Popular magnet words include “Guarantee,” “Free Shipping,” “Sale,” and the like. A common characteristic among magnet words is that they promise something to your customer, so use them only if you the business can do it.

Provide longer, high-quality content for select pages

• Content once again finds its way into this discussion. Studies show that webpages with longer content rank better on the SERPs because Google ranks comprehensive pages higher. But writing 1,000-2,000 words of content for every page is obviously difficult. A workaround for this is discovering which of your sites get the most traffic, or figuring out which site you want to rank the highest, and then providing long content only for those pages.

Effective keyword insertion

• Inserting your keyword strategically helps Google to determine what your page is about. Effective keyword insertion is all about using the same keyword in a logical manner across your content to optimize it further.

Optimize your URL structure

• To cut a long story short, short URLs often rank better than longer URLs. This does not mean that you should shorten all your URLs, but you should set up your URL structure in a way that your new product pages have short URLs.

3. Improve Your Website Design

Arranging the pages on your e-commerce website in a way that makes it more accessible to visitors is important for SEO strategy.

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Here are a few ways to ensure that your webpages are accessible:

• Focus on creating a flat architecture-based website. This ensures that your product pages are one to three clicks away from your home page.
• Check your site’s usability as well. This involves limiting the number of steps in the checkout process, providing easily accessible information, and giving your visitor an easy way to contact you for inquiries.
• Links should be readable
• Ensure that your website has no bugs. This helps your site to load quickly, which improves visitor retention.

Moreover, creating a mobile version of your e-commerce site attracts even more visitors to it. In fact, 20% of Internet users in 2015 used only their mobile devices. So it only makes sense that your e-commerce site is mobile-friendly.

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4. Show Customer Testimonials on your Site

Did you know that 80-90% of shoppers consult online customer reviews first before buying a product? In addition, your e-commerce conversion rate can increase anywhere from 14%-76% if you show customer reviews on your website. So make sure that you either have a link on your homepage that redirects to a customer review page, or have your customer testimonials available on the homepage.

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Furthermore, reviews help you lower the cost of your lead generation strategy as well as minimize the time it takes for your leads to convert.

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5. Install Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are HTML coded bits that “tell” search engines what the searcher should know about your website even before they click the link.

For example, if you’re selling artisanal ice cream, search engines either provide an image that goes along with the link or it displays the keyword in bold text (artisanal ice cream).

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You can install rich snippets with little or no technical guidance. Just head to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. You simply:

• Choose a category for your product, then enter the URL of that product you want to tag
• Highlight the part you want to tag and assign a value to it once the tool pulls up a visual representation of the page
• Export the HTML source code with the new markup
• Test it here to make sure it works

Which brings us to the final task: testing. You want to make sure that the strategies you have in place are working, and you can only know the definitive answer by testing your on-page SEO and site usability. Remember that optimizing your e-commerce site is a continuous process, so be sure to do the following:

• Use analytics resources to see which keywords convert the most leads
• Utilize PPC in conjunction with SEO, so you gain authority on organic and paid searches
• Optimize your meta data to increase CTR
• A/B test page your content to increase conversions from site visits

E-commerce is big business. Opportunities abound online with more consumers searching, engaging, and buying on the web. While such opportunities also mean stiff competition, you can manage to edge out other online stores with the right SEO plan. And hiring professional web marketers to ensure effective strategies are in place can help you rise to the top.