Your Go-To Guide To SEO for E-commerce in 2016

Of all the website types you’ll find on the internet, e-commerce sites easily benefit the most from SEO, as not only can this marketing technique help to direct consumer transactions; implement SEO on your most popular pages and it can help to drive more traffic to your site and boost your profits.

Yet like all things, SEO is only as good as the techniques you employ. Fail to move with the market and utilise new technologies, insights and practices, and eventually your site will drop.

To ensure you stay on top and ahead of the competition, below we have created a list of top SEO trends for 2016 that will help to strengthen your e-commerce website and ensure you keep achieving strong revenues:

1. Think outside of the box
   SEO technology (3rd party apps, widgets and tools used to optimise sites and improve rankings) is evolving just as fast as the search engines that inspired them, and with them have come ‘out of the box’ solutions that have grown in popularity as well.

   These unique template solutions are ideal for onsite optimisation as they can be implemented in a few easy steps. An example of this is WordPress plugin Yoast SEO, which has been designed to handle a large amount of SEO automatically.

   Admittedly these solutions cannot perform every onsite function – so you’ll still need to handle your own title tags, navigation etc. – however they are incredibly beneficial for e-commerce websites and should not be overlooked.

2. Long-form content
   In the past short-form content has been common place on e-commerce sites and have barely consisted of a title, a brief description, photos and customer reviews. However, thanks to shifts in user demands and search engines, long-form content has become more crucial across all industries.

   With long-form content you can supply users with more detail; use more long-tail/ conversational phrases and provide more market differentiation which will help you to better handle your competition.

   Good places to utilise this technique is on your company blog. Here you can describe your products and offer company insights, whilst carefully injecting researched keywords.

3. Share
   Social media is becoming increasingly popular, not just because it allows you to advertise your business for free, but because companies are beginning to see a positive ROI from their social media endeavours.

   In fact, many believe in the next 5 years social media will play an even more important role within marketing and SEO.

   Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat… all of these cutting edge platforms are a fantastic way to boost site visibility and achieve more inbounds links and social signals. Simply encourage sharing during the shopping and checkout process, and you can get users to share your products; write and share reviews, and keep them engaged with all social aspects of your site, whilst at the same time increasing your visibility on search engines.

4. Increase video content usage
   According to the experts, video content is starting to outperform all other kinds of content, partly because as a generation we are becoming increasingly reliant on mobiles. If there is WIFI available, people automatically use their phones to jump on the web, and this is great news for video sharing as video content shows up as rich media in search results and has a greater virility.

   We suggest adding video content to your product pages and company blog, as the popularity surrounding this medium is only set to grow.

5. Mobile optimise your website
   Like we’ve already mentioned, we are a generation stuck to our phones, so ensuring that your website is optimised for all platforms i.e. mobiles is essential. It is vital that your site has the functionality to work on mobiles but more importantly is filled with the best possible content.

   The best way to achieve full mobile optimisation on your e-commerce site is to include app optimisation, as these mobile apps will help you to become more visible to consumers.

6. Voice searches and digital assistants
   Both of these methods are growing in popularity and use, so if you’re not already using them we suggest integrating them into your website.

   Admittedly voice searches presented more problems than help when they were first developed (due to inaccurately recognising voices); however thanks to advancements by major tech companies – who have created Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Now – more and more people are relying on digital assistants for help.

   Simply incorporate voice searches onto your website and make sure they can handle both colloquial and long-tail phrases, and you can provide consumers with rich answers.

7. Local results
   Local SEO has become more prominent over the years, with technological advancements allowing them to work more efficiently. So whilst most e-commerce companies only look to make themselves visible nationally, we feel local SEO should not be overlooked.

   In fact, by adopting local SEO you can differentiate yourselves from the competition and target smaller, more relevant audiences.

As you can see, each of these 7 trends has the power to boost your e-commerce campaigns and keep you visible within this heavily competitive market.

So, if you want to finish 2016 on a high, we suggest keeping these SEO techniques in mind and allowing them to influence the direction of your marketing ideas. Used correctly, SEO can immediately help to strengthen your e-commerce revenues.