The following is a collection of tips from the Fujisan Marketing SEO experts. They cover a range of SEO challenges and common e-commerce site problems along with our solutions and advice on how to create the best organic results. So, without further ado:

Prioritize Mobile

Or, at least, don’t neglect mobile.

The fact is, while many companies devote more energy to and typically approach their site from the perspective of a desktop user, 57% of traffic comes from mobile or tablet users. If you’re primarily focusing on your site’s utility and presentation on a computer screen and giving little thought to how it appears on someone’s smartphone, you’re unintentionally sabotaging your own efforts. This is particularly true since, under Google’s mobile-first indexing, your mobile site acts as the starting point for Google’s indexing process and thus carries a higher influence in your ranking.

When it comes to boosting your mobile viability, first thing’s first: Optimize your website for mobile and consider everything from the perspective of a mobile user. This goes for both your website experience as well as your content marketing approach.

Example of Mobile Friendly Site

Content marketing is the layout of information in articles, blog posts, product description pages, and so on. While arranging this information is typically more straightforward when optimizing your desktop site, there’s other mobile-specific questions to ask yourself when optimizing for mobile. These are some factors that need to be addressed:

• Are your blog posts easy to digest from a mobile phone?
• Are they engaging and do they answer the question readers might have?
• Do they have to scroll forever to reach the bottom of the page?
• Are your images condensing to a mobile screen properly?
• Is a contact form buried so low on the page that a user won’t even notice it?

While these are pillars of a good mobile content marketing approach, they are naturally not comprehensive. And, similar to mobile-based content marketing, it’s imperative to make sure that the purchasing process on your site is well-tuned to mobile — for example, ensuring the process is simple and intuitive, plus that your purchasing forms are mobile responsive.

Research Keyword Usage and Structure Your Site Accordingly

Successful content marketing is founded on successful keyword research and making sure your site is structured to reflect this research. The basic objective with keyword research is ensuring that the content and meta tags within your site are optimized for search engines; it’s important to know specific words and phrases people use to search for your products or services. In application, this directs a greater volume of people your way. For example, if you’re a grocer and know that there are 10,000 searches per month for “supermarkets near me” but 50,000 searches per month for “grocery stores near me” you’d optimize your content for the term “grocery store” since its volume is greater.

Once you have the knowledge of which terms are most valuable to your site, it can inform both your content and the meta tags with which you choose to mark it.

Luckily for this research, it’s simple to break down into more concrete, digestible steps. The first part is to focus on the display of your products and services. Here, your steps can be broken down into:

1. Identify all keywords associated with your products and/or services.
2. Create product and service pages with on-page content and meta tags informed by your findings from step one.

Also, if the open-endedness of step one feels somewhat daunting, a helpful nugget we should mention is that AdWords’ Keyword Planner is your friend. This is a tool offered by Google to help you identify the keywords that should be most effective for your site.

Along with your product and services pages (and as mentioned previously), this applies to your on-site content marketing as well. The steps here are similar to the aforementioned approach, but applied a bit differently:

1. Identify all keywords and searches that are related to your business, products, and services — especially focus on question searches that are relevant to your business.
2. Create written content addressing the searches and questions you’ve identified.

Whichever direction you take with this content, the important thing is that it actually provides value to the people reading it. Low-standard, vapid material is relatively useless (not to mention low-key a giveaway that you don’t think highly of others’ time, intelligence, or ability to discern). Also, while the nature of this means you’re writing about things specific to your field — and so there’s a certain amount of standard vernacular that is likely not universally understood — it’s valuable to present this information so that a layman could understand it; if you do want to a piece to go in-depth to the extent where what you’re discussing requires more extensive background knowledge, vocabulary, etc., make sure to include links to layman-friendly pieces that provide said background knowledge.

If you want something simple to start with for your site’s content, we recommend an FAQ page. (And make sure your answers to the FAQs are actually extensive enough to be useful — it doesn’t have to be War and Peace, but a five word answer doesn’t bring much value to the table.)

Utilize Schema Markup

Schema Markup (also known as Structured Data) is a collaboration between the leading search engines to help sites provide them with more comprehensive information. The more information web pages provide to search engines, the more search engines can understand the web pages content and the better results search engines can provide to users. Schema markup currently isn’t a direct ranking factor, but Google has suggested that likely won’t be the case forever.

Yet, even without it being a direct factor for now, it has a huge impact on click through rates because, by adding Schema markup to your HTML, you’re enhancing the snippet that appears under your result on search engine results pages (SERPs). The result of this enhancement is called a “rich snippet,” and it provides greater visibility to your search result. These rich snippets provide extra information that’s valuable to both a search user going through results, and the search engine ranking them. And by taking up more real estate on the SERPS, it makes your making your listing more prominent and eye-catching to users.

Example of Schema Markup

There are many different types of rich snippets. To name a few:

• Search functionality directly from the SERP
• Linked breadcrumbs
• Pricing information
• Recipe information
• Reviews of your product or service
• Drop down boxes of frequently asked questions

This Schema markup is a block of code that labels information about the web page, and it can be applied in SEO Yoast if your website is built on WordPress.  Or the Schema can be applied through LD+JSON, which is Google’s preferred format for implementing the code. You can find more technical details about LD+JSON here.

Implement SEO-Friendly Faceted Navigation

This is a tricky and common problem faced by many online retailers. Faceted navigation, also called “filtered navigation,” is a web solution for filtering through a large selection of products. While faceted navigation is quite useful for making the user experience less cluttered (and subsequently removing barriers that would otherwise make users less likely to make a purchase), its SEO implications are negative — and larger than one would think.

In most cases, stock plug-ins and default templates with filtered navigation work by appending URL parameters to the root URL. Using a theoretical T-shirt company as an example, we can see the problem this creates:

Let’s say their root URL is www.store.com/t-shirts. If you, the user, want to filter the selections to only see, for example, blue shirts, you’d be able to filter via color and select “blue.” The URL would then become www.store.com/t-shirts?filter=blue. This means two things: First, they’re causing duplicate content and wasting site crawler budget since search engine crawlers will crawl every possible variation of filters and URL parameters. This is referring to the fact that www.store.com/t-shirts?filter=blue and www.store.com/t-shirts are labeled duplicate content. Secondly, because they don’t have an actual page for “blue T-shirts,” they’re missing out on the possibility of ranking for that term even though they have a large selection of blue T-shirts.

The issue here is that the root URL hasn’t changed and, since “blue T-shirts” is a keyword they want to rank for on search engines, it needs its own page and URL like www.store.com/blue-t-shirts.

So that’s the problem, but you can implement faceted navigation in a way that doesn’t work against SEO. For more information on implementing the solution, check out Moz’s article here.

Don’t Forget Internal Links

When utilized properly, internal linking can be a great asset for your site. The mechanisms facilitated by internal links are threefold:

1. Guiding users through the customer journey:

This is more applicable to some companies’ sites than others, but good internal linking is like a good salesman: They can talk about the company and what makes them special, after which they can familiarize you with the product’s benefits, and after that they can bring up the warranty and support the user will be receiving post-purchase.

In action, this would look like the site’s “About” page linking to the “Product” pages, which link the “Warranty” or “Customer Promise” pages, which link to the blog. Obviously, there’s numerous variations of this, but this is a good starting point.

1. Easier navigation:

While good central navigation within a site is crucial, what’s particularly impactful alongside that is having context-based internal linking. Then, not only does a user have more entry points to any given page, but those pages are better framed, and users are better prepared to make a purchase or whichever other action is relevant.

For example, a blog post on a hockey gear site explaining different ice skate fits and then linking the user to ice skates means the site will see more users on the linked ice skate pages, plus a user who arrived on an ice skate page via this post’s internal linking is more educated and more prepared to pull the trigger. Also, a part of this mechanism is an increased ease of navigation giving more visibility to your entire website and keeping people on your site longer, thus increasing your SEO rank.

1. Directing traffic from popular pages to low-traffic pages

This is a big one. Does your site have one page that gets lots more hits than the rest and ranks really high in Google searches? First, examine why it’s ranking well, then link from that page out to other, lower-traffic pages. For example, if you have a popular blog post about how to choose a snowboard, you can provide links throughout the article to related, lower-traffic blog posts like “What to look for in snowboard bindings,” or “Best mountains in the PNW.” You’re now both providing value and keeping users on your site, earning more page views per session, and improving your SEO ranking — so long as the content is good and not low-value drivel.

These are a few of our most important tips for increasing the performance of your e-commerce site. And we suppose we’d be remiss to not follow our own advice on that whole internal linking thing, so if you’d like to read some more pieces on improving your SEO performance, might we recommend the benefits of SEO audits? Are we being too obvious by internally linking right after talking about the importance of internal linking? Probably, right? Well, regardless, check it out if you want, and we hope you’ve found this helpful.