The start of 2024 opens up a huge opportunity for businesses to capitalize on ecommerce.
Starting from the considerable growth of the Philippine ecommerce market during the Covid-19, it shows no signs of slowing down.
From a $17-billion industry in 2021, experts expected it to grow by 17% to $24 billion in 2025. It can also see a sustained rise of up to $60 billion in 2030, according to Statista data.
With these encouraging numbers, 2024 is the best time to seize this thriving market.
The Need to Invest in eCommerce SEO
However, entering the eCommerce landscape can be a tall order. Without the right knowledge and strategies, your competitors can easily beat your company to a pulp.
One way to avoid this tragedy is by optimizing your eCommerce site for Google.
For this task, you need SEO pros to make your site accessible to humans and search engines. They use the right tools, tweaks, and tricks to maximize your web presence.
But why should your website optimization be your top priority? The reason is, it’s the primary touchpoint of online buyers.
A survey revealed nearly half (44%) of online buyers begin their online shopping journey through Google.
What’s more, more than one-fourth (37.5%) of all eCommerce sites traffic comes from search engines. Meanwhile around one-fourth (23.6%) of e-store orders are attributed to organic traffic.
E-commerce SEO Best Practices to Focus in 2024
Looking at these numbers, you see the importance of optimizing your e-commerce website. To succeed in this task, SEO specialists should focus on what to optimize, which usually rely on the latest Google algorithm updates.
[We focus on meeting Google’s requirements because it holds the dominant position in search, with a market share of around 95% on mobile and 85% on desktop,]
In 2024, here are some of the optimizations your website needs.
Leverage AI Tools for Better and Optimized Content
AI enables marketers to produce quality results fast. SEOs can also leverage this technology by supercharging their capabilities.
Search engines are increasingly powered by AI and machine learning, making them capable of understanding user intent and delivering highly relevant results. This means you need to go beyond basic keywords and delve into long-tail queries and conversational language to truly connect with your target audience.
At LeapOut, we understand the need for quick compliance to our client’s ecommerce requirements with quality results. To do this we use and advocate the use of AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Gemini, Claude AI, and Grammarly to help us in:
- Performing keyword research using our tech partner Semrush to discover and focus on targeting industry-specific keywords with commercial and transactional intent. This task enables us to zero in on what the target audiences of our clients seek for. It will also direct us in producing or suggesting the appropriate content in relation to the searcher’s intent.
- Crafting compelling meta titles, meta descriptions, slugs that include the primary keywords
- Create topic clusters and supply them with content to make visitors stay longer in the site
- Get topic suggestions you can write for based on highly sought and marketable keywords.
When used properly, AI reduces the amount of time it takes while generating the best results for improving search rankings and brand online visibility.
Invest in Mobile SEO for Ecommerce
Mobile now trumps desktop as the go-to device for browsing and shopping. Studies suggest that about two-thirds of ecommerce purchases take place on mobile devices. This means mobile phone optimization is a must to make your site visible to a massive chunk of potential customers.
Sadly, LeapOut’s SEO team found out that many of our clients’ websites are still not optimized for mobile. When audited, their site still failed to pass the acceptable mobile responsiveness, loading speed, and ease of navigation set by Google. Fixing these issues can lead to a huge improvement in mobile users’ engagement to your site.
Give More Emphasis on User Experience
Gone are the days of chasing better rankings only through keywords. Today’s algorithms give emphasis on user experience (UX) signals. This means you need to find ways to encourage visitors to access and stay in your site.
Some of the common practices our on-page optimization for ecommerce to increase dwell time and engagement are:
- Producing relevant and helpful easy-to-read texts across your site. These product descriptions should be able to:
- resonate with your audience,
- answer their questions, and
- keep them accessing other pages and digital assets within your website.
- Image optimization by including clear, sharp, and high-resolution images with the smallest possible file size
- Embedding relevant and engaging video content.
- Reducing the time it takes for your website to load. Make sure that your pages pass the Pagespeed Insights, which measures the Core Web Vitals. These set of metrics give developers an idea of how fast the specific parts of a page loads on the screen.
Craft Helpful Content with Your Experts
Days after Google rolled out its Helpful Content update in September 2023, brands, bloggers, and other content creators immediately felt its impact. Many of them saw their rankings and traffic dip because their web content failed to pass the “people-first” shift in Google’s requirements.
This algorithm update rewards websites that focus on crafting useful and valuable content for people and not for search engine bots. This means overuse of keywords (keyword stuffing) and producing content for the sake of jacking up your ranking no longer works. To do this, Google added the author’s expertise or experience to the topic it is writing or E to its E-A-T guideline.
Weaving Seamless Customer Journeys with Omnichannel SEO
Nowadays, brands need to interconnect their marketing channels. Today’s customers expect a cohesive experience that allows for seamless interaction between physical stores, websites, social media, and more. They also seek to access your company on their smart home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Nest.
To make this possible, you need to beef up your omnichannel SEO strategy to optimize your online presence across all touchpoints. A unified customer experience will improve your online visibility to increase user engagement and sales. This practice will also allow you to measure your marketing results effectively using Google Analytics 4 and other data analysis tools.
Some strategies to ensure an enhance your omnichannel presence include:
- Ensure content consistency across all platforms
- Improve voice search optimization
- Use structured data and schema markup for ecommerce
- Link to your social media accounts
- Enhance email marketing campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences
- Integrate your offline and physical presence like physical stores and events.
Boost Ecommerce Presence within an Area Through Local SEO
Many ecommerce businesses focus only on national or international reach while placing minimal effort on creating a solid foothold within a local front. Local SEO can be a powerful tool to unlock hidden potential and attract customers right in your backyard, especially if you have a physical store.
With local SEO for ecommerce, your virtual store can target local shoppers, boost organic visibility through Google Maps and Google Business Profile listing. This practice can also build trust and credibility by showcasing your physical presence, positive reviews, and community involvement, increasing trust and attracting local customers.
LeapOut boost local organic presence of our clients through:
- Enlisting our clients’ websites in Google Business Profile and optimizing them
- Performing local keyword research
- Building local citations
- Creating content specific to a particular area
- Managing online reviews on Google, Yelp, and other platforms
- Forging local partnerships
- Running targeted local PPC campaigns
Amplify Your Reach through Social Media SEO
Your social media accounts are a powerful tool for driving organic reach and attracting new customers. Optimizing your social media profiles and content to enhance visibility within the platforms themselves through social media SEO (SMSEO) helps draw traffic to your ecommerce site.
With an effective SMSEO strategy, you can boost your visibility within social media algorithms and even in search engine results, resulting in increased website traffic You can also target your engagement for specific topics or keywords with relevant content, build brand awareness, and establish a community with a stronger relationships with customers and potential customers
Our SEO work hand-in-hand with our Social Media team to carry out these SMSEO strategies:
- Identifying relevant keywords and hashtags our clients’ target audience use through keyword research
- Optimizing our clients’ social profile by crafting compelling bios, descriptions, and usernames
- Producing engaging social media content
- Using platform-specific relevant and popular hashtags
- Adding alt text and captions for images and videos
- Leverage platform features like shoppable posts and stories to facilitate seamless product discovery and purchase within the platform.
- Partner with influencers and industry experts through influencer marketing.
Equip Your Site Best Online Store Optimization in 2024 with LeapOut
Technologies develop at a very rapid pace. To keep up with the changing ecommerce trends and dominate your online competition, you need effective SEO strategies. By seeking digital marketing experts like those in LeapOut, Contact us now to bring your online business to the next level starting from this year onwards.
Tony Chua is an adept Web Content Specialist and HubSpot-certified professional, with an Economics degree from the University of Santo Tomas and over ten years in content creation. Specializing in SEO articles, blog posts, and social media content, Tony has a diverse background encompassing news writing, press releases, and editorial work.
His multifaceted expertise also covers desktop publishing, graphic design, web development, and video editing. At LeapOut Digital, Tony applies his versatile skills to enhance digital narratives and engage a global audience through compelling content.
