There’re many things to do when you’re running your online store, and most of them involve trying to either increase your traffic or your conversion rate. Traffic can be increased by simply buying paid search traffic from Adwords, Bing, or Facebook, but if you are looking to get organic traffic, then you are much more limited. In fact, you will need to spend money and time to achieve results which might take months to take effect.

Here’re a few ways you can optimize your SEO campaigns in order to squeeze the maximum amount of juice from your time and money.

Schema Snippets

Perhaps the most important part of this article is the schema snippets. This is what sets you apart from your competitors. There are many schema snippets you can implement on your ecommerce website, but the most useful one for ecommerce websites is the product schema.

Within the product schema, there are many properties you can choose.

The most popular property is the AggregateRating that shows up in search engines as star icons, which brings focus to your organic result and away from your competitors (unless they also have schema snippets).

In addition to AggregateRating, you can also use properties such as brand, manufacturer, logo, and itemCondition. Although you can choose to implement as many properties as you want, search engines do not guarantee that they will display them in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

My recommendation is that as long as the property is relevant for the type of product you are selling, then go for it. Better to have it on there than to leave it off.

Product Page Title Tag

The next thing we will go over is the product page title tags. These are the html <title> tags. Although many people overlook them, they are actually quite important.

Title tags are the primary description which tells search engines what your website is about. Even though you do not need to have your desired keyword in the title tag to be able to rank for that keyword, you would still be wise to add it there because it will be much easier to rank.

Title tags also determine what shows up in SERPs when the results are displayed. So as you can imagine, it is pretty important to have something relevant to your keyword in your title tag.

Product Meta Descriptions

The next piece of the puzzle is the meta descriptions. Despite the fact that they’re not really used as ranking indicators, they are still valuable in increasing your CTR (Click Through Rate) from SERPs.

You are essentially selling your page on SERPs, so you have to give as much detail as possible, while also keeping it concise and accurate. You only have about 155 characters that will show up, everything after that will pretty much be useless.

Product Meta Keywords

The next most important SEO optimization is the meta keywords … just kidding. Skip to next section.

Product Descriptions

Product descriptions should not be confused with product meta descriptions. Product descriptions are simply descriptions on the actual page which describe your product. These are usually not shown on SERPs, but they are heavily utilized by ranking algorithms to determine what the page is about and where it should fit in the rankings.

Although this may make you want to add a 3,000 character description, you do not want to go overboard. That could potentially penalize your website due to excessive SEO and keyword optimization.

XML Sitemap

And finally, we have the XML sitemaps. They are much more important in ecommerce websites because they tend to have hundreds if not thousands of different products and search engines sometimes have trouble crawling all the pages.

An XML sitemap tells search engines about EVERY page on your website that you want them to crawl and how often the content on those pages changes. You are essentially giving them a blueprint of your website and they get to know more about your website.

There’re many ways to generate an XML sitemap, but if you’re using WordPress, Joomla, or Magento platforms, you can simply install one of many XML sitemap plugins and it will generate them for you in a matter of seconds.

Last Thoughts

As you can see, there are quite a few different things you can do on your website to help increase the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns. Every little change matters, so it’s important you experiment on your own website and decide what works and what does not.