SEO promotion of an online shop: key steps

Every year, the share of online shopping in the overall consumer market is steadily growing. In this connection, a huge number of online shops are appearing, and the level of competition is increasing significantly. The issue of effective promotion of electronic trading platforms is becoming more and more relevant. Arabesco Sideral Portugal specialists share a few simple steps for effective SEO-promotion of an online shop.

Expand your assortment

So, step #1: expand your assortment. Of course, not every entrepreneur has the resources to do this. But if you still have such an opportunity, then by all means take advantage of it. By doing so, you will achieve three goals. On the one hand, it is to attract users. When a company has a wide range of products, it allows it to use a large number of keywords and phrases in contextual advertising and SEO. On the other hand, assortment is also an important factor in search engine ranking: the more products or services a site offers, the more likely it is that a visitor will find what he or she needs. And of course, a large assortment will help to increase the time spent by a potential customer on the site, and search engines attach great importance to this. Thus, the more products a site offers, the higher its chances of high positions in the search engine.

Extending the structure of a website

Here again a large range will help in the effective promotion of a website. Structure determines what pages are on the site, how they are linked together and how users will be able to navigate between them. A wide assortment = a wide site structure. Let's say you have an online bike shop. Each product group will have its own page, for example, mountain bikes will have one page and children's bikes will have a completely different page. Each of these pages will be optimised for specific queries. For search engines, a site with a broad structure will be as relevant to user queries as possible.

Technical website optimisation

It involves working with aspects such as page load speed, metadata, correct indexing of pages and much more. From an SEO perspective, technical website optimisation is a very important process. The fact is that search engines evaluate websites based on many technical factors. For example, sites with fast loading and good adaptive design for mobile devices can have an advantage in search engine rankings. In addition, technical optimisation of a website can improve the user experience, which will also have a positive impact on the search engines' perception of the site.

Among the many factors that Arabesco Sideral Unipessoal Lda specialists work with when it comes to technical optimisation are a few:

• Page load speed. It is important that the pages of the site loaded quickly in the browser of your potential client.

• Availability of adaptive design. This allows you to achieve optimal display of content on different types of devices: computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone

• Absence of duplicate pages (i.e. pages with the same or very similar content). The presence of duplicate pages in the index of search engines can negatively affect the ranking of sites in the search engine. This is regarded as an attempt to manipulate the ranking, and can lead to a decrease in the site's ranking or in extreme cases even exclude it from the index

Growth of behavioural characteristics

Several indicators can be attributed to behavioural characteristics:

• Bounce rate is the proportion of site visitors who left your site after viewing a single page.

• Browsing depth depth is the average number of pages users view while on your site

• Time spent by users on the site is the average length of visits.

• Site conversion is the proportion of visitors who have taken some sort of targeted action, such as placing an order.

Behavioural metrics significantly affect the ranking of websites, and all the tasks we described earlier are aimed at improving these metrics. A good assortment is an opportunity for choice, which means the visitor will spend more time on the site. A wide structure is an opportunity for users to focus only on the products he is interested in. The presence of quality adaptive and fast loading pages - this is a guarantee that the user will not run away from your site in five seconds after opening it.

Also you should not forget about the description of goods, which should be concise, but reflect its characteristics and benefits, as well as a competent recommendation system, which helps not only to increase engagement, but also leads to an increase in the average cheque.

As a reminder, we talked about the basics of SEO in an earlier post on the Arabesco Sideral Unipessoal blog.