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Many aspects of the online retail industry are evolving for 2022. From AI automation to voice search optimizations, new trends keep changing the playing field. Now, it’s no secret that any successful eCommerce store should stay updated with all SEO best practices. We have seen it happen with many of our clients and others in the industry, as lead conversion and mobile revenue are directly tied to your store’s Google rankings. To help you get an in-depth overview of how to rank your store on Google in the future, we have put together a 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist.
**What is SEO for eCommerce? **
Before diving into some of the eCommerce SEO trends for 2022, it’s best to get clear about what SEO means. This acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization and is relevant for all websites that appear on Google, whether that is an online store or a personal blog. ECommerce SEO is the strategy of making your store increasingly visible to search engines and in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Considering that 43.0% of all the eCommerce traffic comes from Google rankings and organic results, learning how to rank your store on Google is a priority.
A strong SEO for eCommerce strategy can help hundreds of new leads discover your site through organic Google traffic. If you optimize your product and landing pages correctly, these will rank higher on Google search results and come up as one of the main options when people search for that product or your brand. Organic traffic from search engines drives 53% of all site traffic, according to a new Brightedge Research study. This means your store would be missing on some significant lead conversion if you do not implement SEO best practices for eCommerce In 2022.
The 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist covering all the SEO trends for 2022:
**1. Prioritize a healthy technical eCommerce store architecture. **Your eCommerce store is the most important part of your online retail business. It’s the hub your customers will use to perform all transactions, learn about your brand, and monitor their orders. Besides the obvious customer development and different functionalities your site should have, boasting a proper foundation for SEO success is equally important. The store should have no broken links, have a responsive design, be mobile optimized, include structured content, and feature an SSL certificate. These factors will help the rest of your 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist become effective enough to help your store rank on Google. If the foundation fails, even the top SEO best practices might not be enough to improve your Google rankings.
Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip:Prioritize a clear site structure and check for any extra code that could be slowing down your mobile rankings. If the technical architecture of your store isn’t optimized, no eCommerce SEO checklist will be as effective as it could be.
**2. Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console. **Signing up for Google Search Console is the way to let Google know it should index your site. This is a free tool that keeps you updated regarding any indexing issues, your page views, website visitors, and top keywords. Google Analytics is a similar platform but offers more insight into how visitors interact with your site. Both of them are extremely useful and you should download them to maximize your SEO efforts.
Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip:If you ever need to schedule a priority crawl for any of your store’s pages, just paste the URL into Search Console and select “request indexing”.
**3. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. **Sitemaps help Google understand how to navigate your site and find all pages of your eCommerce store faster. It tells search engines exactly where to find your content and crawl it to index it and make it show on Google rankings. This is especially important since search engines can’t index your content without crawling it first. Many eCommerce platforms like Shopify generate the sitemap automatically, but you can always ask your development team to do it instead.
**Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip: **If you used WordPress to build your eCommerce store, download the Yoast SEO plug-in. It creates as many sitemaps as you need for free and all you have to do is copy/paste the link onto Search Console.
**4. Conduct regular keyword research. **Keyword research is extremely important if you want your store to rank for each product page and other relevant and related searches. Those keywords are then going to be included in your site - whether in product descriptions, FAQ pages, or the detailing of your services - to help Google recognize and rank its content. You should start by listing out general keywords, such as ‘jacket’ or ‘planner’, and looking for long-tail ones, like ‘a digital planner for creatives’ or ‘winter jackets for kids’.
Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip:Use Google Keyword Planner to scout for the best keywords for free.
**5. Start link building to your eCommerce store. **A site with 100 backlinks will be favored by the search engines over a site with 10 backlinks and similar SEO optimizations. In fact, backlinks are one of the top two criteria considered in Google’s page ranking algorithm, according to recent statistics by Search Engine Land. These are links from other websites to your site, which help to build the authority of your store and rank your content faster. You should also perform internal linking by adding links to related products or your About page on different sections of your site.
**Resolve Digital insider’s Tip: **Try collaborating with other online retailers, approach blogging influencers, or try guest podcasting to build backlinks to your eCommerce store.
**6. Optimize all metadata corresponding to any page on your site. **Metadata is also picked up by search engines on regular crawls and indexed to Google, affecting your rankings. First, you should start with the meta title. This is the first line of text displayed on the SERP when your site shows up on Google results. It should contain at least one keyword and be no longer than 60/70 characters. The meta description will show up right below the title, but it can be longer. This text snippet should describe the page and be up to 155-160 characters. Be sure to incorporate your main keywords into it and a call to action (CTA) to encourage people to click on the link to your store. When it comes to the image metadata, you should include alternative text to all pictures on your site. This allows Google to understand the images better and show the alt text to those who can’t see what’s in it. It’s important to make your store accessible to everyone!
**Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip: **Don’t force keywords into an image alternative text. If it fits the picture, go for it. But don’t keyword stuff for the sake of it or it could hurt your efforts to rank your store on Google.
**7. Add schema markup to your product/service pages. **This is one of the biggest SEO trends for 2022, as schema markup helps to improve your rankings and click-through rate (CTR). This is a code added to any page on your website that tells search engines the exact content of that page to provide more in-depth search results. That way potential customers can see every detail of a product or service, offering better information than with regular search results. You can add a product description schema or an FAQ schema as well, depending on your store’s specific needs.
Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip:If you have a WordPress store, try the Structured Content plug-in to create solid schema markup for free. And if you work with Solidus or Shopify, try the plug-in Schema Builder & Tester For Structured Data.
**8. Make sure your eCommerce store is optimized for mobile rankings. **Mcommerce is here to stay, as 52.2% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices according to Statista. We have discussed this with multiple clients and urged them to prepare for the rise of mobile eCommerce sales. From now on, eCommerce stores shouldn’t take more than 3 seconds to load. If they take longer, their SEO rankings might be hijacked since mobile optimization is now a priority for search engines. If you need any help checking this point off your 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist, here are the three main reasons your site still doesn’t work on mobile.
Resolve Digital Insider’s Tip:Eliminate all unnecessary code from the mobile version of your site, compress all images, and make sure all clickable elements are spread apart to meet Google’s basic mobile requirements.
Do you need any help with the technical side of the 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist? Let us handle it!At Resolve Digital, we have helped several clients improve the technical architecture of their eCommerce store to leverage their eCommerce SEO strategy. Different aspects of your site can affect how search engines rank your store on Google. From broken links to extended lading times, every eCommerce store needs to have a solid technical ground to be able to effectively implement the 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist.
We know that performing technical enhancements to your company’s eCommerce store is no easy task. Because of this, we offer both front and back-end development and design services to any eCommerce store owners to achieve their desired Google rankings and lead conversions. Our team of talented software engineers specializes in Magento, Spree, Shopify, Solidus, and custom Ruby on Rails eCommerce applications. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you complete the 2022 eCommerce SEO checklist!