eCommerce Website SEO Checklist – The ultimate guide

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) plays a major role in promoting an eCommerce business. With proper utilization of SEO practices, you can get immense visibility on your website. You will appear at better positions in the search results. So having an SEO checklist helps you don’t miss out on any crucial steps.
We have listed a few points for you to take care of while planning your SEOs.

1. Check if your website is mobile friendly
Your customers must be comfortable while working on your website and mobile application. Check if your mobile app and website are functioning without any flaws on the mobile phones If they do not then rectify them immediately.
Only when your website works well on mobile devices you’ll find more people visiting your website.

2. Speed of your website
The speed of the website largely determines the number of customers you are going to have. If a person is going to log into your website there are more chances of them staying, if your website is at the optimum speed. If the website is even one second slower in loading, you may lose about one-third of your customers.

3. Have https and SSL certification
To have a secure website have your website on https. Most of the top-ranking websites are https. Get your SSL certification to ensure the reliability of your website. With SSL your website will be ranked as preferential website and be trusted by many customers.

4. Display your reviews
Display your reviews on all the platforms available like Google, Facebook and other platforms. Having good ratings and reviews can aid you in boosting up your sales. So encourage and ask for the reviews from your customers for the products they purchased.

5. Have FAQ pages
While purchasing a product the customer is bound to have many doubts and questions. Sometimes all these will be similar for most of the customers. Have FAQ pages for your products to minimize the queries of the customers to as little as possible. This will drastically improve the number of products bought on your website.

6. Have search functionality and Html site map
Have search functionality for the customers to quickly search for the information or product they are looking for. This saves the time of the customer and the customer will want to visit your site often.
During the eCommerce website development, create a HTML or .xml based sitemap for the customers & search engines to easily navigate through your website. e-commerce websites are huge and having a site map saves the time of the customer and helps them navigate through your website without any confusion.

7. Check for unwanted pages
Check if your website contains any unused or unwanted pages and remove them immediately. However careful you are, there is a chance that your website contains many unused pages and unwanted pages. These occupy a lot of space, thus slowing down your website speed.
Having an empty page also can reduce the speed of your website. Check for them and remove them as soon as possible to maintain the speed of your website.

8. Have a compressing tool for your website
Reducing the size of your files increases the loading speed. Have a compressing tool like GZip to compress your files so that they will occupy less space while loading, thus enabling your website to load quickly.

9. Minimize third-party solutions
If your website contains large amounts of third party resources or solutions, there would be a lot of pop-ups and ads displayed on every page of your website. This will occupy extra space and your page loading speed will be affected. This will also irritate the customers, so try not to use any third-party resources.

10. Resize and load your images slowly
Your images are going to occupy, the majority of the page size. This will definitely slow down your website speed. To avoid this reduce the size of your images so that they will not occupy large amounts of space.
Loading the images is going to take quite some time. To keep your user occupied until the image is loading display it in the middle of the page. Until the image loads, the customer will go through your information.

11. Delete the outdated images
An e-commerce website contains many images and many become outdated from time to time. Keep track of these images and delete them as soon as possible to avoid slowing down your website.

12. Use Alt-tags and file names for your images
Using Alt-tags and file names is a form of SEO practice. Alt-tags are the descriptions of the images. They describe the aspects of the products. With these descriptions, Google will understand the product and your page will appear on the search.
Use the suitable file names for all the images. Your file name plays an important role in aiding you to appear on the search. The file names are also the descriptions of the products.

13. Google index, Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools
Avoid Google index pages as they are not useful to you and your customers. They block Google from reaching your website and you may lose your visibility.
Use Google Search Console and Bing webmaster to obtain valuable information and act according to them.

14. Check for product variations
It may not seem like a big problem for you if the images and the products vary by one or two shades. But to a customer it certainly is. Check if all the images on your website match the products in colour, size and descriptions. Have the images for the same product in different colours. Though it may occupy more space it gives the customers an accurate picture of how the products look.

15. Redirect your product pages
Automatically redirect the product pages that are discontinued. When a product is discontinued or not available redirect the page to a different URL containing the same product.

16. Product videos
Make short videos on the products and upload them on the product pages. The videos better describe the functionalities of the products.