Maximizing Conversions: SEO Tips for eCommerce CRO

Two main tasks in eCommerce are ensuring excellent visibility for your website and increasing the number of purchases on it.

SEO aims to improve search engine rankings and, thus, attract traffic to your website. Meanwhile, conversion rate optimization (CRO) will help convert visitors into customers.

You can combine both strategies to make pursuits even more effective. Various SEO techniques can help increase eCommerce conversions, so keep reading to learn about them.

The Basics of SEO & CRO

The eCommerce conversion rate shows the percentage of people who end up buying something. The formula to measure it is simple. For example, 1000 people visit your site per day, and 5 of them make a purchase. The eCommerce conversion rate calculation will be as follows:

5/1000*100% = 0.5%

How do you know whether your site has a good eCommerce conversion rate? According to a LittleData survey, the average conversion rate for eCommerce businesses is 1.3%. Anything below that means you have room for improvement. The top performers have a conversion rate of 3.3%, and getting there can take time and effort.

SEO consists of techniques for attracting organic traffic to your page. They include optimizing a website to meet Google standards, researching keywords, optimizing your pages for those keywords, etc.

Your website’s goal is to appear at the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) for keywords that describe your products.

SEO Tips for Better Ecommerce Conversion Rate

SEO techniques are great for directing high-quality traffic to your pages. They can also help to improve the eCommerce conversion rate. Here are the SEO aspects that you should focus on for CRO.

Create Product Pages That Meet User Intent

The first thing you can do to enhance conversion rate with SEO is to create product pages that contain the right keywords and meet user intent.

User intent is why a user decides to google something and what they expect to find. There are four major user intent categories that you’ll have to work with:

• Informational. The user wants to find information about something related to your product. Example: how to pair belts with shoes.
• Navigational. The user wants to find your company website or page. Example: yourcompany.com, brown shoes.
• Commercial. The user wants to find details about your company or products before purchasing. Example: best shoe manufacturers.
• Transactional. The user is searching with a purchase intent. Example: buy brown men’s shoes.

The first step is to look at your keyword list and sort the keywords into one of these four categories. As eCommerce sites typically have hundreds of pages, it’s best to focus on transactional and commercial keywords first — these will help you improve the conversion rate.

It’s safe to assume that a keyword like “buy men’s brown shoes” is of transactional intent. But user intent goes deeper than that.

You also want to understand what information users want to see on the page. For this purpose, run a Google search for the keyword that you’re trying to optimize for and see what the search engine returns.

After the text ads, you’ll typically see local pack results for such a request.

Source: Google

Alt: Local results in an eCommerce search.

Then, it will likely show you images and shoppable ads.

Source: Google

Alt: Image and ads in eCommerce search.

If you see any of these features, it’s a good idea to try to get your company on these, either by doing local SEO or creating a Google Merchant Center account, because these results will always be higher up in search than organic results.

But that’s more of a long-term project. For now, go down to the organic results.

Source: Google

Alt: Organic results in an eCommerce search.

Click through the top ten organic search results and take a look at what content these websites show. Here’s what a typical page looks like.

Source: Macy’s

Alt: Layout of a category page of an eCommerce website.

The other pages from the SERP look very similar. A few trends are obvious here:

• A list of products with a large picture.
• A short description and review rating for each product.
• Sales and discounts are announced on the product listings.
• Easy access to applying filters.

Based on that, you can conclude that when searching for “brown men’s shoes,” users expect to see a list of options to filter through them. They don’t expect to see descriptions or only a single product.

If your page does make it to the top of the SERP and doesn’t show users what they want to see, they might go back. This negatively influences not only the eCommerce conversion rate but also SEO.

So do this analysis for all pages that are likely to convert, like product and category pages, and ensure you meet user expectations.

On a side note, don’t only focus on shorter keywords with high search volumes. Long keywords are typically used to find a particular product. Even though thousands of people may not be searching for them, the conversion rate might be higher.

Here’s an example of such a keyword. The first result is a single product that matches what the user might be looking for.

Source: Google

Alt: Results of a long-tail keyword search.

Apart from intent, don’t forget to optimize a page for the keyword as well. You want the primary keyword to appear not only in the body of the text but also in the SEO tags:

• Title tag.
• Meta description tag.
• Alt tags for images.
• URL.

Doing this ensures that users will find your pages and that the eCommerce conversion rate will grow because the people who find your pages will be more interested in the products you offer.

Work on Technical SEO

Optimizing page content for user intent is probably the most significant part of CRO, and SEO can help with this. You can also optimize technical SEO.

Users don’t like when they follow a link and find a 404 page or when the site takes half a minute to open, especially on mobile platforms. 53% of mobile users will leave the page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

If you optimize website speed and deal with other problems, more people stay on the site and convert.

Start by identifying the issues. To do this, you can use SE Ranking’s audit. This tool can analyze your site and find all sorts of issues, like 404 errors, duplicate content, Core Web Vitals that are below average, and code pieces that are slowing down the site.

Run this audit once a week and look up suggestions for improvements.

You’ll typically have to do some of these things to speed up your site.

• Make image file sizes smaller.
• Minify JavaScript and CSS.
• Prioritize loading HTML content before JavaScript or large files.
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests.

You also should consider users on all platforms. Make sure that your site loads differently on mobile platforms and prioritizes mobile responsiveness. This will help retain users who view your eCommerce store from mobile, which might be over half of all visitors.

Finally, there’s one thing you can do to increase the clicks on your site in the organic search results. With Schema markup, you can show significantly more information in SERP.

For example, this page shows an image of the product and some navigational links.

Source: Google

You can also show things like the price of an item, its availability, and your opening hours.

Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add Schema to your pages, or ask AI tools to generate the code for you.

Provide Clear & Understandable Navigation

Users might leave without purchasing if they can’t find the product they want. This is why you also have to work on making your navigation seamless across all platforms.

The main navigation bar has to be at the top of the page, feature popular categories, and have subcategories if necessary.

Source: Alexanderscolumbus.com

Other best practices include the following:

• Have the main navigation menu on every page.
• Use the most popular categories as menu items.
• Don’t put popular products too deep down on the list.
• Use breadcrumbs navigation.
• Give plenty of options to filter lists of products on category pages.
• Give users suggestions for products.
• On mobile, avoid using subcategories in the menu.
• Make sure menu items are far apart on mobile so users won’t misclick on them.
• Substitute hover animations for click animations on mobile.

If you’ve chosen a good platform for your eCommerce site, some of these best practices might already be implemented by default.

That said, you do have to think a lot about the navigation system. Deciding what categories to put first on the menu list or whether to have a separate menu item for discounts depends on the type of business you run.

You’ll need to figure that out by planning and simply by trial and error. For a more data-based approach, you can use heatmap software.

Pros & Cons of Using SEO for Ecommerce Websites

Now, let’s look at a list of pros and cons so you can figure out whether SEO is right for your eCommerce business.

SEO eCommerce Pros

• Better Brand Awareness. When your site ranks consistently high in the SERP for relevant keywords, it will boost brand awareness. Even if users aren’t clicking on your site in the search results, they will see it and learn about your brand.
• More Organic Traffic. Organic traffic from Google is free since you don’t have to pay for ads. It can also be attained more easily than organic social media traffic. Thus, optimizing your website for search engines grows your potential customer base.
• Higher Customer Engagement. Websites should have a clear structure so that they’re easy to navigate and easy to place an order. This is why directing more traffic to your website means more engagement and sales.
• Lower Customer Acquisition Cost. Using SEO as your primary source of eCommerce leads can mean lower CAC. With social media or paid ads, you have to pay the high cost of running advertising campaigns or video production. With SEO, most of the expenses are related to employee compensation.

SEO eCommerce Cons

• Time-consuming Process. SEO doesn’t provide leads as fast as running paid ads does. Optimizing the SEO conversion rate takes a lot of work, and you might not see any positive changes for some time after you optimize it.
• Search Engines Algorithm Changes. Google is constantly refining its approach to search. In 2023, the company rolled out ten updates. This means things that worked before may stop working, and your site could drop from high SERP positions. However, if you follow safe best practices, you should be okay.
• Competition in High Volume Keywords. Keywords that have high search volumes, like “buy shoes,” have thousands of sites competing for them. This means you have to work hard to keep up.
• No Guarantees. The worst part about SEO is that it’s not as straightforward as running ads. There’s no guarantee you’ll get first place in the SERP for a specific keyword, no matter how hard you try, because the competition is tough. This is why you have to target hundreds of keywords.

Summary

Do you think SEO is right for your eCommerce company? If it is, follow the best practices to gain a better SERP position, more traffic, and more sales.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to use the SEO conversion optimization tips from this article to improve the eCommerce conversion rate and traffic numbers.