Optimising your eCommerce SEO audit can be challenging. And is one of the most difficult tasks when it comes to SEO. Especially if you’re dealing with large multilingual online stores. Smaller retailers can also face these challenges, even if they are operating and selling their products in a single country.

It can be difficult enough to cover the basics of an eCommerce SEO audit, but how do you edge the competition with SEO?

hen the essentials are covered? The answer to that falls within your competition’s downfall. You have to take advantage of the places they fail the most and push ahead in these areas. Here are 5 areas where you may be able to jump ahead of your competition when trying to improve eCommerce SEO.

1. Know how to deal with, ‘out of stock’ pages

Two temporarily out of stock signs

Out of stock products can be one of the biggest headaches for eCommerce websites. Especially if they are still generating traffic and the products are in high demand. There are a few options, you can index the landing page and miss out on the visitors that it’s generating. Or you can keep the page live, but this could result in everyone who lands on the page becoming annoyed as it looks like your taking no action.

Hopefully, if you choose the second choice and do it in a way that will not annoy visitors. It could result in them looking for a substitution for that product and still resulting in a sale.

If an item does go out of stock, it is important to make sure that this is clearly labelled on the product listing. So users can this as soon as they land on the page. Even though the product is out of stock, you could offer them highly relevant alternative products to the product that they have clicked through to see. For example, you could show them the same product but in different colours. Similar products from the same brand, or similar products in the same category.

You could also offer to email the customer when the product is back in stock. This also allows you to access their email for marketing purposes, and even send over a voucher for a future purchase to encourage them to buy still. Looking for more help? Check out this guide.

2. Ruthlessness when it comes to eCommerce UX

One of the biggest factors which result in eCommerce websites failing is user experience. This might explain why most online retailers generally have below-average conversion rates.

Google has started to press user experiences more when it comes to ranking websites on their search engine and will continue to do so. Especially with their new algorithm update coming in 2021. This means now is the time to get relentless on your quest to improve the user’s experience on your eCommerce website.

The Google website displayed on an iPad.

3. Be strict with E-A-T and YMYL

YMYL stands for ‘your money or your life’. These are pages that Google considers to have the potential to impact the future happiness, wealth, and wellbeing of users. News websites, finance, shopping, health and safety websites, and government law sites, can all fall under what Google considers to be YMYL pages.

E-A-T is also an acronym created by Google that stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These factors are featured heavily in Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines. Assessed by a team of human evaluators, who score the websites based on these factors.

E-A-T and YMYL are priorities to factor into your website. Especially for eCommerce sites, as they are considered high-risk websites to Google’s search quality rankers. Due to the fact, your website will have options to buy and asks customers to part way with money, you will need to work harder to satisfy Google’s requirements.

4. Invest in product descriptions for eCommerce SEO

Product descriptions can be one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce websites face. The challenge only increases with the more products you add to your website. Product descriptions can take a large chunk of time to create as they need to be unique content. This means a lot of brands don’t bother creating them.

The fact that a lot of brands don’t bother making product descriptions is a major reason why you should. This will give you an edge over your competitors and will also allow you to feed customers valuable information about your product. Instead of creating one unique description for every single item, it may be worth creating a single page and include dynamic variations. This will reduce your workload and help you avoid uploading duplicate content.

A person holding a credit card whilst shopping online on their laptop preparing to make a purchase.

It is also important not to use the descriptions given by the retailer. You should invest in a copywriter who will create unique descriptions that will convince customers to buy your products.

5. Take advantage of content marketing apps

A lot of eCommerce websites tend to think that content marketing is not for them. Or even that they don’t know how to effectively engage with an audience. Being an online retailer creates the perfect opportunity for you to offer advice to your target audience that will help them make decisions about purchases.

There is a huge gap in the content marketing world. That is yet to be filled by perfectly positioned eCommerce brands. As an eCommerce brand, you can provide a range of content from videos, photos, reviews, blogs and how-to guides, aimed towards your target audience. Which will give a customer a wealth of opportunity to engage with your brand before making a purchase.

The key thing to remember is to hold off from promoting their own products and genuinely help consumers find the right product for them. This will help you build a genuine relationship with customers and your target audience, which will influence them to buy your products when the time is right.

A white office with a Mac in the centre displaying the Google Analytics interface.

Castle can help improve your eCommerce SEO audit

Here at Castle, we are experts in search engine optimisation and have helped several clients with eCommerce stores improve their eCommerce SEO audit and increase their sales substantially. In fact, we have made £23 million for our clients in just three years by implementing effective marketing strategies. Our SEO team works hard to ensure your eCommerce SEO audit and site is performing as they should and is fully optimised to get you ranking highly on search engines. If you need help optimising your eCommerce store for search, contact us on 0330 107 5344 or info@castle.co.uk.