A poorly referenced online store is like a physical store located in a low-traffic street: this greatly reduces the chances of attracting visitors and therefore generating sales. Still, the basic rules for ensuring a minimum of visibility in the search engine results pages are relatively simple. In view of the sites that still do not seem to know, it seemed good to remind them … Again! Here is a series of 10 tips for successful referencing an e-commerce site.

How to improve the visibility of an online store in the SERPs?

First of all, let's not forget that this article You will probably not make the difference to outclbad your competitors. As explained in the introduction, its goal is to revisit SEO best practices to prepare the ground for further optimization later.

1 – Define a relevant keyword strategy [19659005] You have most certainly read this advice in most of the articles you have already consulted on the subject. And there is a good reason for this: keywords are and remain the basis of SEO.

Therefore, you need to know which ones visitors and future customers of your site are most likely to reach. on this one. To do this, start with your products first and then use online tools, such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, to identify opportunities for organic traffic to capture. To make sure you do not miss any, take a look at the positions occupied by your competitors, why not with SEMrush.

If your shop is already in production, do not hesitate to badyze the requests that generate traffic on it via Google's Webmaster Tools taking care to cross the data with your pages that convert the most.

2 – Build a suitable tree

Once you have your strategic keyword list set, you can go to step next: the construction of the tree. Assume that the products corresponding to the most competitive expressions must be placed as close as possible to the homepage. They will thus benefit to the best of its popularity, the homepage being generally the most popular page of a site. By clbadifying them by degree of competition, you should get a first view of the title and hierarchy of your categories and subcategories.

Be careful, however, not to focus on the SEO dimension alone! Your tree should also and above all respect a logic merchandising so as to optimize the shopping journey of your visitors. Regardless of the page through which they enter your shop, they must be able to easily find and find the products they are looking for.

3 – Apply specific indexing rules

All pages of this site a website do not need to be indexed in Google. For a merchant site, it is necessary to ensure that the indexing of the generated pages is blocked by the combination of too many filters.

Take the example of a woman looking for a red dress, made of cotton, size 38 and the mark Comptoir des cotonniers . The probability that she will enter the query "red cotton dress size 38 counter of cotton" directly in Google is very low, or even zero. Therefore, it is better to tell the engine not to index the corresponding page. By doing so, you will improve your percentage of pages in the primary index of Google, that is to say, where are listed the pages he deems of interest.

4 – Bet on markup intelligent semantics

Semantic markup refers to the specific coding to be used to properly structure the textual and visual content of a site. In other words, particular code tags must be used, wisely, to insert elements such as titles, paragraphs or images and their attributes. On a product sheet, the tags

and

are ideally used to structure the product description, its category and its presentation respectively.

5 – Propose high value-added content

The lack of content is a recurring problem in e-commerce. Many shops are content to offer only on their product sheets while the pages that require the highest level of optimization are, except in special cases, those of possible categories and subcategories.

To give more weight on these pages, we must first enrich them with a brief introductory paragraph, ideally 150 to 200 words to not disrupt the user experience. The most strategic of them can be meshed from one or more buying guides. These guides, in addition to providing useful information to readers, represent an excellent opportunity to offset the editorial deficit encountered by many commercial sites.

6 – Create and animate a company blog

We could have been able to to devote an entire article to this sixth point, so much is there to develop it. We will be content for the moment to highlight all the benefits of the corporate blog. In an e-commerce context, it will be primarily a source of content complementary to those previously discussed. Similarly in terms of internal networking.

Moreover, a blog can allow a company to maintain a close relationship with its customers via the sharing of information and photos revealing it from within: backstage support technical if it is managed internally, overview of stocks, presentation of order pickers … Not to mention good deals such as promo codes and quizzes that can be used to relay.

7 – To develop its popularity (Netlinking)

If you, or your provider, do your job well, this blog could boost your popularity. As soon as his articles are shared and quoted from other sites, you will gain quality links in backlinks in the most natural way possible.

8 – Make his site compatible with mobiles

Mobile compatibility now influencing the ranking of sites for searches on smartphones, adopt a responsive design is imperative. As recently as last week, we unveiled an infographic summarizing the issues arising from this compatibility. In addition, providing an optimized browsing experience on smartphone and tablet will increase your chances of converting to mobile.

Mobile traffic should eventually take precedence over the traffic generated on desktop . So it goes with the durability of your activity!

9 – Manage the products out of stock

A priori, the sheet of a product which is no longer in stock is not supposed to be still displayed because it will not lead to a direct sale. If an upcoming replenishment is planned, it is better to leave it online, especially if it is very well referenced. It will then be necessary to offer Internet users to subscribe to a newsletter that will inform them as soon as the product is available again. In the opposite case, we will redirect his file to that of a similar product or to the nearest category. Whichever option you choose, it will prevent you from encountering errors of exploration.

Because a picture is sometimes better than words, here is a very nice diagram made by the web agency AxeNet:

10 – Communicating on social networks

As part of a multichannel strategy, we know that Google Plus is interesting for local SEO. Via Google My Business, it allows you to promote the phone number, opening hours and other information of a physical point of sale within the pages of search results. For its part, Twitter should soon represent an badet for organic positioning as Google plans to index the Tweets. Case to follow.

From a total point of view, it will be recalled that the social networks, beyond their purely social vocation, are a plus for the SEO insofar as the signals which they send to Google contribute to speed up the indexing of new URLs. In other words, you would be wrong not to be present …