Achieving high search rankings means that more people will be served your website when searching for answers to their queries via search engines like Google.

There are numerous ways to ensure that your website ranks as highly as possible, helping you to increase organic traffic to your website.

What are search rankings?

A web page’s search ranking refers to where it appears on the search engine results page (SERP) for certain queries. The higher your pages rank, the more likely people are to see them and click through, increasing your organic traffic.

You can increase the click-through rate further by ensuring that each page has a strong page title and engaging meta description, as these appear on the SERP.

1. Focus on user experience

It may be tempting to build web pages for search engines, but creating web content with your user in mind is far better for SEO. Search engines, such as Google, are very good at working out how helpful and relevant a page is to a user, so focusing on user experience is the best way to rise up the search rankings. Ensure your pages are optimised for various devices, including mobile, and stay on top of any technical issues that may harm user experience e.g. broken links.

To create a page that’s useful for visitors to your website, write information in a concise way that makes it easy to read. Ensure that the page title is relevant to the page and segment copy under different headings so that readers can clearly see what to expect from each section of text. Include images that complement the copy to make the page visually appealing, and add internal links to related products, services, or articles on your website.

2. Implement on-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to any optimisations that you make to your web pages to increase their rankings. This includes everything from writing enhanced copy and providing image alt text to creating strong titles and meta descriptions. Keep on-page SEO in mind when building new web pages and enhance your current pages ready for search engines to crawl them again. Avoid duplicate content throughout your site as this will harm your SEO efforts.

It’s important to reinforce that creating a great user experience should be your number one priority when implementing on-page SEO. Any changes you make should make your pages easier to read and understand, well-structured, and engaging. Use headings, including a concise H1 and relevant H2s, imagery, and links to build pages that meet search intent and provide all the information someone who clicks through will be expecting to see.

3. Keyword research

Keywords are the building blocks of any great eCommerce website as they tell you what your target audience is searching for. Keyword research enables you to find relevant keywords, their monthly search volumes, and how competitive they are. Your research will uncover single keywords, phrases (long-tail keywords), and questions which you can group into categories. These will help you form your content pillars and strategy.

Although formatting your copy around keywords is great, avoid partaking in ‘keyword stuffing’. Using so many keywords that the page doesn’t read naturally will be flagged as negative by search engines. Remember, content should be written for the user, so include your keywords but don’t let them have an impact on the quality of your copy. You should also consider whether your keywords are informational, commercial, or transactional, as this will help you decide which pages to use them on.

4. High-quality content

High-quality content that answers people’s questions will be ranked favourable by search engines. Their purpose is to direct individuals to the most relevant information for their query, so it makes sense that web pages should be tailored towards answering specific questions. If content doesn’t make sense, isn’t well structured, contains no images, and doesn’t appear to provide answers to frequently asked questions, search engines won’t direct people towards these pages.

Spend time and resources on high-quality content that’s been thoroughly researched, structured correctly, and reads well, as this will boost organic traffic, sales, and revenue. Creating low-quality content takes time too, but you won’t get any benefit so it’s worth putting in the extra effort to produce something that will have a positive impact on your website and sales.

5. Backlink strategy

Building a backlink strategy involves gaining links from other websites which will lead people through to yours. The websites you approach should be relevant, authoritative, and of high quality, or the backlink could do more harm than good. It can be easy to find websites with a low page authority to link to you, which can make this a tempting strategy, but one link from a high-quality site that you’ve worked hard to place will have a far greater positive impact on your SEO efforts.

Look for websites that already mention your brand but don’t provide a link, websites of companies that you work with or have partnered with in the past, relevant blog sites, and any other places where you feel that potential customers might visit. Backlink strategies look different across various industries, so put time into researching what would be best for your specific company.

We hope we’ve helped you understand how to increase your eCommerce web page ranking. We’d love to help you with your SEO to ensure that your web pages are ranking as highly as possible.

For information about how we can support you and your SEO strategy, contact us today.

To discover more about the different ways in which efficient SEO can positively impact your website traffic, sales, and engagement, look at our News page.