Online Store - SEO Tips for High Visibility

Your products are top-notch, but how about the visibility of your online store? Technical and content optimization for search engines also plays a crucial role. How can the shopping experience of your visitors be improved with targeted measures in the area of online store SEO? From efficiently fixing 404 errors to the significance of seasonal events and designing category and product pages – we provide important SEO tips for various aspects that affect your online store ranking.

404 Errors: Better Shopping Experience Through Online Store SEO

Are there internal links in your store that might lead potential visitors to an empty or non-existent page? If so, you should act quickly. Fixing 404 errors is one of the most important measures for successful search engine optimization for online stores. Nothing is more frustrating than when page visitors click on a promoted product in the search results and receive an error message. This inevitably leads to frustration, and likely these visitors will leave the page early and return to the search results, increasing the bounce rate. This can be interpreted as a negative signal. The time spent on a page is considered one of many indicators of satisfaction with a search result. To ensure this doesn't happen to you and to offer your visitors the best shopping experience, you should keep the number of unreachable pages as low as possible.

Identifying Faulty Links

Manually check if your key products are still accessible. Using the Search Console, under Settings -> Crawl Stats -> By Response -> Not Found (404), you can list all the faulty pages that currently exist or existed at an earlier time. You should especially pay attention to the date during the evaluation. You will also find information on where these pages are linked from. However, external links that potentially link to an incorrect or no longer existing URL are also displayed. Especially during active online campaigns, it is annoying if visitors are directed to a target URL that no longer exists.

Figure 1: Excerpt from the Google Search Console - Not Found Pages

Creating a 404 Error Page

If users do end up on a 404 page, there is a way to keep them on the website. You should create an optimized 404 error page. This is displayed when the actually requested page is not available. It is essential for any store that wants to conduct excellent OnPage SEO. Users should be given a clear and user-friendly experience here. They should be informed that the desired page cannot be found to avoid confusion. A well-designed 404 error page gives you the opportunity to redirect to other relevant content in your store or to offer alternative options, such as popular products. A user-friendly 404 page helps improve user satisfaction and helps you reduce the bounce rate. Ultimately, this leads to an improvement in your online store SEO ranking. A best practice example can be seen in the following illustration:

Online Store Events - Relevance for SEO

Seasonal events and holidays are particularly important for online stores. They offer a great deal of sales potential that should not be overlooked. Start planning and preparing early to achieve the best results. Essential events of the year include Christmas, Black Friday, Easter, and school openings. Depending on the industry, buyer behavior varies. Therefore, you should analyze your target audience and focus on the most important events that have the greatest potential for your online store. To benefit from these, search engine optimization for online stores should be implemented at least three months in advance. Optimize your content for relevant products to be placed in search results for important keywords in time.

Seasonal Landing Pages

By creating seasonal landing pages, the traffic on your website can be significantly increased. We recommend the following approach:

First, a keyword analysis is important to rank for relevant search queries. The content on the page should be optimized based on the keywords. Additionally, a clear goal and a call-to-action element are essential. The landing page should ideally be prominently linked on the homepage after creation. After the respective event, your seasonal landing pages remain indexed, as they might be well positioned for high-traffic search terms. This way, you can benefit from them again the following year, provided the pages were still accessible to search engine crawlers. External links such as shares and likes can also point to the page, positively affecting the ranking.

Even when creating seasonal URLs, you can ensure a future ranking advantage: you should not use a year in the URL. This way, you only need to create the landing pages once and can reuse them the next year. After, for example, the Christmas season is over, you don’t need to link the landing pages as prominently. You can link from a suitable themed page so search engine crawlers can still find the page and you don’t lose all rankings.

Mobile Online Store: SEO Adjustments

For many people, smartphones are already being constantly used for online shopping. Google, as the leading search engine, has adapted its indexing method accordingly. Since October 2023, the transition to Mobile First is complete. Websites are now only crawled with the mobile Googlebot. To remain competitive, an online store with an optimized mobile view is therefore essential. You can also keep the number of bounces and purchase cancellations low by doing this. To significantly increase user-friendliness, you should consider the following three SEO tips:

We recommend a responsive web design. Here, the content automatically adjusts to the screen size and is scaled and arranged accordingly. This ensures good readability and user-friendliness. Besides design, two technical criteria are essential for successful search engine optimization that should be met by online stores. To minimize purchase cancellations, common mobile payment systems should definitely be offered. These include, for example, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Nothing is more frustrating than interested visitors who abandon the purchase process because the desired payment method is missing. You should also absolutely avoid pop-up windows. Especially on mobile versions of online stores, these lead to longer loading times, failed Core Web Vitals, and therefore worse rankings in search engine results.

Successful Search Engine Optimization for Online Stores: Interaction of Crawlability and User-Friendliness

The most important prerequisite for good on-page SEO is that all relevant content of the domain can be fully crawled and indexed by the Googlebot for both the desktop and mobile website. Therefore, check your robots.txt again for possible instructions that may exclude certain directories or product pages from crawling by search engines. In addition, both search engine bots and the users of your website should be able to navigate it smoothly and intuitively. Crawler help from the sitemap, which should also be optimized for efficient crawling, is required. You can learn what a perfect sitemap looks like in our blog post. The link structure should be designed to be as natural and user-friendly as possible for the users.

A particularly important aspect is the theme-relevant linking, often referred to as siloing (see Figure 3). According to this principle, visitors to an online store who are on the product detail page of a soccer shoe should not be shown a link to products from the "T-shirts" or "Pants" categories. These are most likely not relevant in this situation. Instead, it makes sense to provide a link to a soccer shoe from a different brand, as the users are obviously interested in this type of product. The internal linking should therefore be limited to the respective category where the users are located and only refer to the home pages of other categories.

Figure 3: Overview of Optimal Linking Between Subdirectories of a URL

OnPage SEO for Your Store: Category and Product Pages

There are important SEO tips to consider for the content optimization of your pages. For an online store, it's best if the category and product pages land as high as possible in the search results for important keywords.

Many make the mistake of having category pages be just a list of products. To guarantee successful search engine optimization for online stores, individual content must also be written for these pages. We recommend 400-500 words, with a shorter section (around 50 words) above the products and the longer text below. The quality of the content plays a major role. Google evaluates the content according to the E-E-A-T criteria. The abbreviation stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Therefore, make sure that the texts on category pages also offer an important added value for the visitors.

You can also optimize individual product pages. On the one hand, this makes a ranking directly for the product name more likely, and on the other hand, it avoids the risk of thin content. Google refers to URLs with low quality as thin content, which leads to penalties in the search results rankings. The same applies to duplicate content. For similar products, it is therefore particularly important that the content is unique. For this reason, you should never use the manufacturer's descriptions. If other online stores also save time on their content creation, duplicate content quickly develops. The better alternative is to focus the product texts on specific keywords for which your page should ideally rank. Readability and usability should not be impaired. To create a clear product page, it is important to use bullet points and headings for good structuring. A well-structured page is very important for on-page SEO. The primary keyword should be embedded in the H1 heading.

Conclusion of SEO Tips for Online Stores

For online stores, SEO is crucial if you want to achieve a long-term high number of organic visitors. In the world of e-commerce, the visibility of your online store is just as important as the quality of your products.

Our SEO tips range from efficiently fixing 404 errors to designing seasonal landing pages. To ensure your online store consistently generates high traffic, we also recommend mobile adjustments as well as ensuring crawlability and user-friendliness. Implement these SEO tips to achieve long-term success selling online.

We are happy to support you with optimization. During an SEO analysis, our experts will identify the potential in your online store. Together, we can define measures and implement them for you to achieve maximum success.

Contact us now without obligation for an offer or if you have further questions.