Statistics:  

• 81% of shoppers research products online before purchasing.
• Two-thirds of Americans aged 50-plus buy from e-retailers.
• 89% would prefer an online store with advanced mobile capabilities.
• Those who shop via mobile spend 66% more than those who shop only in-store.
• According to PWC, 67% of shoppers admit influence of social media review on their online shopping behaviour.

Thus it can be said that e-commerce websites are able to attract good number of customers. However, an online store never appears in the organic search results unless it adopts a powerful SEO strategy. A balanced SEO strategy needs to address a great number of technical, structural and content aspects.

A few SEO strategies for e-commerce websites:

Implement Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster code on the website to measure performance from time to time.

Check every detail of your site with the help of these tools and adjust your internet marketing strategies accordingly.

Select and focus on the right set of keywords. It will help you to improve the organic search performance. In fact, you also need to choose different keyword variations having high search volume in order to achieve high rankings as well as traffic.

According to an online study, online store owners neglect Meta titles and descriptions, which eventually harm their websites. Therefore, optimise Meta titles and descriptions on a regular basis.

Tips:

• Use Google’s Keyword Planner, Analytics, and Google Search Console to find relevant keywords and fine tune your site.
• Ensure that every page on your online store has a unique Meta title and description.
• Add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Search engines reward sites that are mobile friendly, so make and optimise your site for mobile.
• SEO strategies drive more traffic to your store, supplement content marketing, and outperform other form of marketing.

It is a well- known fact that an e-commerce site has thousands of pages, and many of which may not be important for users as well as search engines. Therefore, use robots.txt to restrict those pages from being crawled.

However, you should not use the robots.txt to block private content (use server-side authentication instead), or handle canonicalisation.

This will not only improve the speed, performance and usability of your website, but also make it user and search engine friendly.

Facts:

• Google uses software known as “web crawlers” to discover publicly available web pages.
• The crawl process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners.
• With the robots.txt file, site owners can choose not to be crawled by Googlebot, or they can provide more specific instructions on how to process pages on their sites.

It is important to have Breadcrumb navigation on a website. It is useful for audiences and search engines as well. It helps the search engine better understand the site structure.  According to Wikipedia, Breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces.

So, devise your SEO strategy according to your business objectives and address these SEO issues to make your e-commerce site perform better.