Website visibility on Google is crucial for eCommerce stores, as more than half of all purchases begin with a search. Unsurprisingly, having your website appear on the first page of Google's search results can directly affect your profits. However, with so much competition, it might sound like a daunting goal!

When it comes to being visible on Google, there's a lot to learn. We'll go over everything there is to know about eCommerce search engine optimization (SEO), including the difference search engine visibility can make for an eCommerce website and tactics you can use to make your website visible on Google.

What Does Online Visibility Mean to Ecommerce?

• Online visibility is a term that is used to describe how easily search engines can find your content.

Online visibility has taken on a new dimension following the growth of online commerce. In today's competitive eCommerce sector, having a strong online presence requires more than just a stellar website. You should extend your visibility across all areas of the digital landscape.

Visibility is not just about rankings in search engines but also about making people aware that you exist. Your content needs to be discoverable on other forms of media where your customers can find you. To gain visibility, create a social media posting schedule for regular postings on various social platforms. Making sure customers can discover you online through social media blogs, forums, and review sites makes you more visible, which leads to increased traffic and sales. 

How to Improve Ecommerce Visibility on Google?

1. Identify the right keywords to use

Every eCommerce site should have a list of keywords that can be used to grow the business organically over time. But there needs to be more clarity around which keywords to use. 

The eCommerce landscape is unique compared to other industries because the search behavior of shoppers revolves more around finding a product or service and making a purchase than trying to pick the perfect phrase to describe a particular need. Since people go online to shop, user intent is a primary factor in keyword research for eCommerce websites. 

When finding the right keywords for this niche, using the SEO keyword generator by SE Ranking can help you extract the most valuable phrases for you to target in your eCommerce SEO and PPC campaigns. In addition, you will get an analysis of the core keyword parameters, including the difficulty score and search volume of the given keywords, as well as the average price per click in a PPC Google Ads marketing campaign. 

You can expand the keyword list of your website by finding the following: 

• Related keywords. These phrases and terms have the same page rankings as the analyzed keyword.

• Similar keywords. They are similar in meaning to the given keyword.

• Low-search volume keywords. They are usually long-tail search queries with a specific intent that are searched for much less than other keywords.

2. Check product page crawlability and indexing

Crawlability and indexing are critical factors that determine your eCommerce store's search visibility. They let Google know what your store is about and what products you carry, so visitors can land on the pages that contain the items they're looking for. 

It is common for large eCommerce websites to have a lot of products on their site, which often leads to a complex navigation structure that can cause problems with web crawling and indexing by search engines. To find out if your important pages are indexed, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. The tool will allow you to see your site from the point of view of a Googlebot and root out any transgressions the bot may have experienced while crawling your site. It also gives you great insight into the general crawlability of your domain.

3. Improve your page load speed

Your website’s loading speed has a significant impact on visitor behavior. Many shoppers leave sites that take too long to load and go elsewhere. This is where page load speed optimization comes in: it contributes to the increased satisfaction of all users by significantly reducing page load time.

Moreover, as we all know, Google also places a greater value on faster-loading sites and even ranks these in the search results before sites with slower loading time, especially on mobile devices where slow speeds aren't tolerated. 

Although there are several solutions for decreasing page load times – it is important first to identify the pages that take longer to load. This information can be found in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Speed > Desktop Slowest and Mobile Slowest. Once you have determined which pages these are, you'll want to figure out what needs to be done to improve them.

When it comes to speeding up the site, most people start with image size. Image optimization is important because it speeds up page load times by reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred to the user's computer. 

Another major cause of slow websites is slow hosting. If you want your Wordpress website to be usable and user-friendly, it's essential that the hosting company you choose is fast and the Wordpress development services you hire is experienced and well-rounded with concepts.

Several other factors can slow down a site's loading time. Among them is code containing unnecessary plugins and Javascript that are not optimized for the webpage they are being used on. Customizable themes can even cause slower loading times if designers or developers with a lack of experience create them. 

4. Upload product data to Google Merchant Center

Whether you sell your own products on eCommerce websites like Amazon or Etsy, are running a full-service eCommerce business with thousands of items in your catalog, or are a retailer with a few physical locations and many goods sold throughout the web, you can share all of your product information with Google to improve advertising relevance in both Shopping ads and on various surfaces across Google Search.

Google Merchant Center, formerly known as Google Product Search, is a hub for all of your product data. You can submit product data to the center so it can be crawled and used in Google rich results, Google Product Search, and the Shopping ads network. With more relevant searches, you can bring more qualified traffic to your site and have a chance to increase sales.

5. Write quality eCommerce content to meet customer needs

When visitors come to your eCommerce website, they have certain goals in mind. Therefore, you should optimize your content for specific shopping journeys or stages of the buyer's journey. Ecommerce content covers any data needed at any stage of the shopper’s journey as they research and shop for products online, such as technical data to aid them in selecting the right product or consumer reports that discuss the quality or suitability of the goods. The two previous examples would be desirable pre-purchases. Information on return policies, shipping information, and size charts are data points that shoppers would want after they have completed their purchase, as they start to think about after-sales service and how to get the most out of the product they've just bought.

There are plenty of other things to focus on these days, for example:

• Brand story — When making a purchase, shoppers want to know who you are before they buy. A well-crafted brand story builds a foundation of trust. 

• Product Reviews — Retailers should include product reviews on their eCommerce sites because they give shoppers valuable information about how others rate the product and how it holds up over time.

• Catalog — Compile informative product descriptions that match the search queries used by shoppers when they search for your products. This makes the content attractive to search engines – with suitable metadata, headings, and relevant keywords – and also clear and easy to understand for visitors to your store.

6. Create backlinks to your eCommerce site

Here are a few link building tips: Backlinks are links from another website to your website. A backlink from another website is useful for eCommerce SEO and for boosting your site's authority, letting potential customers know that your site has been verified as notable by other websites and authorities on the web.

Just as a strong foundation under a house supports the entire structure, link building is a solid foundation on which search engines like Google build their index of authoritative web pages and findability algorithms rank domains. 

The most crucial aspect of any link-building strategy is to build quality backlinks to your business and help you reach your target audience. There are many link-building strategies out there, but one of the best ways to get quality links to your website is by creating a useful piece of content and then reaching out to relevant sites.

7. Publish product reviews

Product reviews have always been a go-to resource for shoppers who want to see what others (and experts) think about their prospective buys. Consumers are able to get a better sense of whether a product is truly worth its price or if it will be just like some other immediately trendy (but ultimately useless) purchase. Writing product reviews doesn't take a lot of time, but it does require some important qualities to write genuinely quality reviews about products.

The web is full of affiliate marketers who are interested in getting you to their site so they can sell you something. However, it’s better to focus on providing quality information people actually want when looking at a product. Start with a summary of the pros and cons, then go into detail about what you like or dislike and why. Then let readers know if there’s anything else they should consider when making a choice about what product to buy and where to buy it from. Reviews should be honest, objective, and detailed without sounding like a sales pitch. Google's recent update on product reviews is another attempt by the search engine to ensure customers receive the highest quality product reviews possible. 

8. Launch paid search ads campaign

Paid search ads are an easy way to increase your brand's exposure, spread your brand messaging, and expand your business reach. Paid search ads enable you to target your audience based on their search queries. By choosing a relevant keyword and setting a budget, your ads will show up at the top of the search engine results pages when people are looking for something that you sell.

Having a comprehensive action plan in place is vital for your paid search ad strategy to be successful. Whether you want to reach new customers, increase conversions, or get more overall traffic — the following three steps will guide you through the process of setting up your own campaign:

1. Create a campaign. In Google Ads, create a campaign with one or more ad groups and adverts. Include your target keywords, ad copy, and artwork.

2. Set your bids & budget. To make sure you have the best chance of reaching buyers and getting results, set your bids on each keyword for each match type and adjust your budget to get optimal spending levels. 

3. Evaluate performance & ROI, then expand into new markets. Once you've launched, start researching the available information so that you can evaluate performance — like changes in CPCs — and optimize your campaign as needed (by adding extra keywords, modifying bids, rotating adverts, or replacing pages).

Conclusion

Ecommerce sites of all sizes are competing for their piece of the pie, so getting found in the search results is crucial. Visibility in Google search is essential as more than half of all purchases begin with a search. Having your website show up on the first page directly impacts your profits. You need to ensure that customers can easily find you on search engines when they look for the products or services you offer. Several factors are at play here, including SEO (or Search Engine Optimization), paid marketing efforts such as PPC, and the organic strategies mentioned above in the article. A complete plan will give you the best chance of reaching your target audience and driving more sales on your website.

Author bio: Alina Tytarenko is Outreach Team Lead at SE Ranking and has worked in the SEO sphere for four years. She shares her experience in website optimization, link building, and SEO with readers.