Google is constantly changing the rules for site ranking as it pursuits the perfection in terms of finding relevant answers. Therefore, SEO trends are also constantly changing, and it is a must for any eCommerce business owner, who wants to stay ahead of the competition, to keep up with these trends.
At first, let’s have a close look at last year SEO trends because some of them are going to be important this year, too.
SEO trends in 2016
- Long-form high-quality content. The importance of quality content is growing each year (even each day) as Google doesn’t put an end to the improvement of its algorithms. That is why our first SEO tip from 2016: concentrate on the idea of your eCommerce business and cultivate quality content on the blog. Furthermore, searchers often use long-tail and colloquial phrases to get more relevant content, consequently, grow your content to a long-form one expanding short descriptions of items and encouraging customers to leave comments on their purchases. However, do not overstuff the content with keywords! Remember about quality.
- Social networks. A great number of eCommerce merchants state that social networks bring them a positive return on investment. That is why the next SEO tip from 2016: encourage customers to leave links to your products or services on their social pages.
- Mobile optimization. As far back as May 2015, Google stated that the number of mobile searches exceeded the number of desktop ones on its search engine. And guess what! The number of mobile users continues to grow with every passing day! Not long ago, Google started its experiment with shifting to mobile-first index, that means that soon Google will make its decision on how to rank a site taking into consideration primarily the mobile content instead of the desktop one. As you can guess, the next SEO tip from 2016 is to pay attention to the mobile optimization of your eCommerce site in order to improve the experience of mobile users.
- Video content. Video content is getting popular thanks to its potential for virality (sharing) and the capability to be presented as rich media in search result pages. If you still don’t use video content on your site, you no longer keep pace with SEO trends. One more SEO tip from 2016 is to add video content to product pages and the company blog.
- Local results. Local SEO has been improved during past years and the odds are that the importance of local results is going to grow. Our last SEO tip from 2016: think about the local strategy and combine it with the national or international one.
From our point of view, these five trends were of the uttermost importance in 2016 and will continue to influence SEO in 2017. However, 2017 itself will bring several novelties in SEO, and we are going to describe them below.
SEO trends in 2017
- Focus on the company concept. Our first SEO tip for 2017: study your customers and topics that bring them to your Magento store and cultivate the content according to the results of your investigation. As search engines become smarter and better understand the user’s intent, you also have to focus on user’s desires and company concept rather than on keywords.
- Structured data. You have definitely noticed that Google often gives an answer to your question, (“rich answer”) along with relevant websites directly on SERPs (search engine result pages). According to statistics, rich answers are shown twice as often as it was in the beginning of 2014. Isn’t it a great opportunity to be highlighted on SERPs in such a way? Our second SEO tip for 2017: implement structured data markup (or schema markup) that helps search engines to understand the content and display it in rich answers.
- Voice search. Voice search option is growing in its popularity because it works fast and doesn’t require your hands. As the speech recognition error rate has been lowered from 25% to 8% during a couple of years, the number of searchers who prefer to use the voice search or digital assistants is growing, and if you want to keep up with the newest trends, use our SEO tip for 2017: offer more long-tail and colloquial phrases, which are usually used for voice searches.
When creating product pages, keep in mind keywords that might be used by users. If you don’t know how to research them, just use as much detail in the title as possible, without making the title too long, and make sure to have a visible button for Add to Cart or Buy or whatever. Structure the website properly, using clear categories for everything and making the URLs descriptive. Don’t just use numbers for the URLs, write words describing the items
All the presented SEO trends tell us that search engines focus their attention on satisfying their users and enhancing their users’ experience, especially on mobile devices. That means that if you want to keep up with SEO trends, you should not only take care of all new Google updates and make sure that everything on your site is correctly set but also constantly improve the content in order to make it useful for visitors.
Now, we will use high-ranked eCommerce sites in order find out what factors make an eCommerce site rank higher than others in Google.
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Ranking Factors for eCommerce Sites
Searchmetrics conducted research in order to find out what eCommerce sites are ranked high by Google. According to Searchmetrics, highly ranked eCommerce sites have the following features:
- a handful of advertisements on the average
- a structured content with lots of lists and bullets
- a larger file size of pages in comparison with the average file size
- lots of interactive elements
- much more internal links
- almost all highly ranked eCommerce sites have the top-level domain .com
- URLs of top 10 eCommerce sites include 25% more words than average.
To sum up, 2017 will be a challenging year for SEO marketers as customers are getting more interested in the content and search engines constantly improve their algorithms in order to make their users’ experience better. We’ve presented here several SEO ideas that will help your eCommerce site rank well. Good luck!
>>> READ MORE: SEO Audit Checklist for 2017