Home › Blog › New 2014 SEO Standards For Ecommerce
If your shop doesn’t have a decent Google ranking, it doesn’t really stand a chance of making a profit (simple). Just when everyone thinks they’ve mastered the latest SEO techniques for their e-commerce sites, Google will throw a spanner in the works and switch-up the algorithm. That’s why, with the new alterations for 2014, it’s a good time to revise your SEO efforts and improve the techniques you’re currently using.
So, keep reading! We have broken down the latest, most important “SEO things” (very technical) for you to consider. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg and our SEO analysts would start screaming if we were to suggest this is all it takes, but if you at least covering these 5 things you are well on your way!
- MOBILE OPTIMISATION
Having a website that is optimised for mobile devices is no longer an “extra feature” – it’s an absolute must as more and more users are opting to use their mobiles (or more accurately tablets) to shop online. If your website is not working properly and is not fast and simple to navigate, they will quickly find one that is (probably with help from Google). You don’t want to lose customers do you? Well without a mobile optimised site that is exactly what you are doing, you are effectively ignoring a huge chunk of your audience. If you have a larger budget to invest, you could even consider launching a mobile app.
- LOADING TIME
One of the factors that Google is looking at to determine whether the website is user-friendly or not, is the time it takes to load your homepage, especially on mobile devices (due to people having limited data allowance). The time your site loads shouldn’t be higher than 3 seconds. The ideal time is 1.5 seconds. You can even run a quick test on your website using a free Google tool – PageSpeed Insights to make sure your SEO standards for 2014 are up to scratch!
- UNIQUE AND VALUABLE CONTENT
Google has been rewarding pages with unique and valuable content since the 2011 Panda update. This year, there was another update which was intended to help small and medium companies with great content rank higher on Google search.
Apart from having a great blog (hint hint), you should be writing unique product descriptions to increase your Google ranking. Using the same descriptions on all product pages or even copying the description from someone else will significantly decrease your Google rank.
If your shop has too many products to write a truly unique description for each, you should consider introducing reviews and comments – these will diversify the product pages and provide good SEO content.
- GOOGLE PLUS
Linking a Google Plus profile to your online shop is also very good practice in “Google’s eyes”. Posting updates will increase the visibility of your links in search.
Another important thing to take care of is ensuring you have a profile that has been properly completed. You should include:
- Name and logo
- Details on the Founder
- Information about the shop
- Main office address and the year the shop was founded
- Summary of recent google plus posts
- RICH SNIPPETS
Having a rich snippet will not directly increase your Google ranking however it has been proved that it helps to increase the number of clicks from that link.
Rich snippets allow you to display information about your product that might be valuable for your potential customers.
Adding rating stars to your snippets can be done by allowing reviews and comments on your website. You can also work on improving your snippets using the Google Webmaster tool.
- PRODUCT COMPARISONS
Adding an option to compare 2 or 3 products from your shop will increase the usability of your site and is also known to have a positive impact on conversions. There is a reason price comparison sites are so popular you know!
- VIDEOS
Adding short interesting (being the keyword) videos about your products is a great way to get your products out there (‘there’ being social media channels and where people are). It will also aid your SEO efforts as Google owns YouTube so it definitely does favour content coming from this platform (although we can’t 100% prove this).
- SOCIAL MEDIA
There is no proof that having social media profiles influences your Google ranking. However, allowing people to find you on social channels will drive more traffic to the website and will help to make the name of your shop more memorable. So instead of looking for generic search terms, your potential customers will look for the name of your shop and when searching for your brand name you should appear at if not very close to the top of the results page…
With the recent Google update, online stores with clean SEO practices, good usability and valuable content are being rewarded more than they were in the past. And on the other end of the scale, sites with poor performance, dodgy links and bad optimisation are getting punished more than before.
So there you have it, the new SEO standards for 2014! If you want additional information or are looking for a defined strategy to drive up your rankings. Please get in touch here.