It is no longer a secret that the ecommerce business in the Arab world is growing significantly on a yearly basis. Recently, Payfort generated a detailed ecommerce report, stating that the number of online buyers in the region increased by 14% between 2014 and 2015. This growing opportunity is encouraging retailers to join the trend of selling their products online. As a web agency with an experience that made us to create a cost-effective ecommerce solution, we advise every retailer in the region to consider selling online.

Merchants are aware of this trend, so sooner or later the competition will grow further more. Therefore, shop owners would want to gain an advantage over the competition. In order to build a successful online store , an investment in marketing should be done, and more specifically, in search engine optimization (SEO). (Learn more about what is SEO).

But what are the best SEO practices for ecommerce websites to succeed in selling online?

Designing a website focusing on user experience

Every once in a while, Google introduces a new algorithm update that makes website owners and SEO experts flip out. The ultimate purpose of these changes is to oblige web design and development companies to build websites that focus on user experience. You are probably asking yourself about the meaning of this. Well, briefly, it’s about developing an appealing, easy to use, engaging user interface that is adapted to different screens (desktop, mobile, tablet). In the digital industry, we call this responsive web design. Once an ecommerce website meets all these criteria, it would be easier for visitors to browse it, thus its chances to appear on search engines first results page increases.

Investing in keywords research

Keywords define the content of the website. They are what users search for on Google in order to find a product. Therefore, optimizing the website by inserting keywords in the content helps its ranking. But how to know what people are typing in the search bar? There are several tools that will help you find out, and the most used one is Google Keyword Planner. Spend some time researching and selecting a batch of highly searched keywords to include on your website.

Finding relevant backlinks

One of the most important SEO practices is having links on other websites that redirect to yours. This shows search engines how popular the website is which gives a boost in the ranking. There are several ways to have backlinks to your ecommerce site: enticing product reviews, giving interviews, finding broken links, and blogging.

Generating content constantly

If you have been curious about SEO before, then you have definitely heard of the expression "content is king". This statement got familiar when Google started giving an important part to high-quality content. Following this, creating interesting content became indispensable for any website, as it has a big weight on search engines ranking. The best way to do so is by blogging which allows you to gain backlinks, educate your target market, and gather social media engagement.

Using social media

Almost everybody is on social media. According to the same Payfort report, between 85% and 90% of internet users in the region are present on the different social networks, especially Facebook. Even though Google+ is still far from competing with Facebook, being active on this platform can benefit your Google ranking. Until today, there are still many debates as if social activities are directly related to SEO or not. But one thing is sure, as long as your website is being popular on the different social networks, it must have, at least, an indirect impact on your ranking. To boost the social interactions, include social media sharing buttons on the products pages and blog articles of your website.

Adding rich snippets

Rich snippets are additional information published in the search results like the rating of a product, the reviews...etc. The rich snippets give more details about the ecommerce website which help internet users better understand what to expect. How do they affect SEO? Whether rich snippets affect SEO or not is still a debatable subject. However, they definitely do affect clicks to your website which implies to more visitors, showing that it is relevant to the search made on the Google. And that’s how it can help the ranking.

Applying these 6 SEO practices for your ecommerce website gets you closer to the top search results, thus to success. However, these are definitely not the only practices to do. To stand out of the competition, a continuous effort must be done. But don’t worry, all YOU need to do is delegate the work to an SEO company that will take care of these points and more.