Best SEO For Ecommerce Websites

Looking for the best SEO for Ecommerce websites?

How about 6 of the best SEO strategy tips for Ecommerce sites from Google themselves?

Have I got your interest now? Good. Let’s get started.

Google has revealed six insider SEO techniques to optimise your ecommerce website in search results that combine structured and Merchant Centre data to maximise your website’s visibility in their search results.

Google Developer Advocate, Alan Kent, details each tip in a recent YouTube video. Kent stresses the importance of GMC (Google Merchant Centre), which allows Ecommerce site owners to send product information via structured feeds.

The feeds from Merchant Centre can be read by computers. This means that the extracted data is more reliable than Googlebot crawling your site.

So when you’re thinking about the best SEO for Ecommerce websites, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon structured data on your product pages in favour of Merchant Centre as it remains important because Google may cross-check data from the structured data on your site with the feed from Merchant Centre.

Google’s SEO clearly recommends maximising both of these tools for the best results.

1 – Get Your Products Indexed

The first tip from Google for the SEO for Ecommerce websites is that Googlebot may miss pages while crawling sites if they aren’t linked to other web pages e.g. Ecommerce sites may have product pages that are only accessed by on-site searches.

Google can use a Google Merchant Centre feed or XML Sitemap to crawl your product pages and discover your products. Googlebot can share the URLs of product pages which can be used as a base for crawling other pages.

2 – Verify how accurate the product prices search results are

When you’re considering the best SEO for Ecommerce websites, you need to know that Google may incorrectly extract pricing data from product pages. In this case, it might list the original price and not the sale price.

It’s best to include structured data to product pages. Also, create Google Merchant Centre feeds of product info as it allows Google to find the right price information from product web pages.

3 – Minimise price & availability delay

Google crawls pages on a website according to its own time schedule. Googlebot might not notice any changes to your site until the next time it crawls your site.

This can mean that search results may not show the latest changes to your site e.g. item out of stock etc.

It is best to avoid inconsistencies between availability and pricing data on your website and Google’s understanding about your website due to time lags.

Google suggests using product feeds from Merchant Centre in order to keep pages updated more consistently. This is another great insider tip from Google to help you have the best SEO for Ecommerce websites.

4 – Make sure your products are set up for RPR (Rich Product Results)

Product structured data is required to be eligible for rich product results.

When looking for the SEO for Ecommerce websites, Google recommends that you provide structured data on your product pages and Merchant Centre product feeds to get a rich product presentation format.

This will allow Google to understand how to extract product information to show rich results, but even then they still may or may not display rich results, even if you have the right structured data.

5 – Make your product inventory data local

If people enter queries like ‘near me’ on Google, ensure they can find your products on your site.

Register your bricks-and-mortar store in Google Business Profile and create a local inventory feed for Merchant Centre.

Google’s local inventory feed contains product identifiers as well as store codes. This allows Google to locate your inventory physically.

Google suggests that you use a tool named Pointy as an additional step. Pointy is a tool that connects  your point-of-sale system and automagically informs Google about inventory in your physical shop and keeps search results current.

6 – Register for Google Shopping Tab

It is possible that your items may be found in Google search results, but not in the Shopping tab.

Search for your products in the Shopping tab to see if if they’re there as product information and just using structured data are guaranteed to mean they will be included in the Shopping tab.

You can apply for the Shopping tab by providing product data feeds through Merchant Centre and signing up for Google Surfaces.

Watch the video below for more help and tips from Google.

I hope you liked Best SEO for Ecommerce websites. You can find more great SEO Tips like this by checking out our last Blog post Best Internal Linking Strategy.