It's extremely difficult to sell products over the internet, physical or digital, if people can't actually find your website.

You can hire the best web designer in the world to create a stunning website and offer a completely unique product at an affordable price, but if your target customers can't find you within the first two or three pages of Google, you won't see the phenomenal returns you anticipated.

That's where SEO for eCommerce steps in. Apply sound white-hat SEO tactics, and your targeted keywords will naturally rank higher. This leads to more unique visitors and an increase in sales.

Here are three actionable SEO tips for eCommerce stores.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Anyone who has ever researched a sliver of SEO knows the dangers associated with duplicate content. It's well documented how much search engines dislike text that is copy and pasted or spun.

Duplicate content is a bigger problem with eCommerce stores. This is due to the fact that most eCommerce sites offer products that are similar or virtually the same with a few differences. This results in product descriptions having very similar words, phrases and sentences, which can possibly be a red flag for Google.

With this said, it's vital to the health of any eCommerce store that each page and description is checked for duplicate content. Before posting content, such as product descriptions, make sure it's as original as it can be.

Optimize Images

Images are an integral piece to profitable eCommerce stores. People want to see what they're buying, and with so much competition, uploading dreary and dry images won't cut it.

But just uploading detailed high-quality images isn't enough, either. You also need to encourage search engine bots to find and analyze your images so they know exactly what the photos are about.

By forgetting to properly optimize your eCommerce photos, you're leaving plenty of SEO value on the table and not achieving your highest search engine ranking for a particular keyword.

The solution is simple: Add relevant keywords and phrases to the images ALT tags in addition to a unique description of the photo.

Allow Ratings and Reviews

Give your eCommerce store a competitive edge by allowing buyers to post their thoughts and experiences of a product. Not all eCommerce sites allow customers to post reviews and ratings. This is definitely not a good practice seeing as a consumer’s favorite products are those that already have legitimate reviews from others.

Enabling reviews isn't just good for customers on your website, but it's also excellent for standing out in the search engine results. Every eCommerce store should employ a Schema markup for each webpage.

Schema might sound complex, but it's really not. Any knowledgeable web developer can implement Schema code onto a website. Schema allows the search engines to have a more thorough understanding of a website.

But Schema's real SEO power lies in the snippets of rich text snippets that appear in a products page description on the search engines results. The text snippets can display things like thumbnails, star ratings and even a real customer review. These Schema snippets are far more likely to receive clicks from consumers compared to the generic listings.

There are an endless number of ways you can optimize your eCommerce website for a better search engine ranking. The three eCommerce SEO tips above are simple, actionable tactics that can be applied right away.

Not sure your eCommerce is correctly optimized for the search engines? Need a little guidance in the right direction? No problem, feel free to contact us today for more information.