The start of 2024 opens up a huge opportunity for businesses to capitalize on ecommerce. Starting from the considerable growth of the Philippine ecommerce market during the Covid-19, it shows no signs of slowing down. From a $17-billion industry in 2021, experts expected it to grow by 17% to $24 billion in 2025. It can also see a sustained rise of up to $60 billion in 2030, according to Statista data. With these encouraging numbers, 2024 is the best time to seize this thriving market. The Need to Invest in eCommerce SEO However, entering the eCommerce landscape can be a tall order. Without the right knowledge and strategies, your competitors can easily beat your company to a pulp. One way to avoid this tragedy is by optimizing your eCommerce site for Google. For this task, you need SEO pros to make your site accessible to humans and search engines. They use the right tools, tweaks, and tricks to maximize your web presence. But why should your website optimization be your top priority? The reason is, it’s the primary touchpoint of online buyers. A survey revealed nearly half (44%) of online buyers begin their online shopping journey through Google. What’s more, more than one-fourth (37.5%) of all eCommerce sites traffic comes from search engines. Meanwhile around one-fourth (23.6%) of e-store orders are attributed to organic traffic. E-commerce SEO Best Practices to Focus in 2024 Looking at these numbers, you see the importance of optimizing your e-commerce website. To succeed in this task, SEO specialists should focus on what to optimize, which usually rely on the latest Google algorithm updates.  [We focus on meeting Google’s requirements because it holds the dominant position in search, with a market share of around 95% on mobile and 85% on desktop,] In 2024, here are some of the optimizations your website needs. Leverage AI Tools for Better and Optimized Content AI enables marketers to produce quality results fast. SEOs can also leverage this technology by supercharging their capabilities. Search engines are increasingly powered by AI and machine learning, making them capable of understanding user intent and delivering highly relevant results. This means you need to go beyond basic keywords and delve into long-tail queries and conversational language to truly connect with your target audience. At LeapOut, we understand the need for quick compliance to our client’s ecommerce requirements with quality results. To do this we use and advocate the use of AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Gemini, Claude AI, and Grammarly to help us in: Performing keyword research using our tech partner Semrush to discover and focus on targeting industry-specific keywords with commercial and transactional intent. This task enables us to zero in on what the target audiences of our clients seek for. It will also direct us in producing or suggesting the appropriate content in relation to the searcher’s intent. Crafting compelling meta titles, meta descriptions, slugs that include the primary keywords  Create topic clusters and supply them with content to make visitors stay longer in the site Get topic suggestions you can write for based on highly sought and marketable keywords.  When used properly, AI reduces the amount of time it takes while generating the best results for improving search rankings and brand online visibility. Invest in Mobile SEO for Ecommerce Mobile now trumps desktop as the go-to device for browsing and shopping. Studies suggest that about two-thirds of ecommerce purchases take place on mobile devices. This means mobile phone optimization is a must to make your site visible to a massive chunk of potential customers. Sadly, LeapOut’s SEO team found out that many of our clients’ websites are still not optimized for mobile.  When audited, their site still failed to pass the acceptable mobile responsiveness, loading speed, and ease of navigation set by Google. Fixing these issues can lead to a huge improvement in mobile users’ engagement to your site.  Give More Emphasis on User Experience Gone are the days of chasing better rankings only through keywords. Today’s algorithms give emphasis on user experience (UX) signals. This means you need to find ways to encourage visitors to access and stay in your site. Some of the common practices our on-page optimization for ecommerce to increase dwell time and engagement are: Producing relevant and helpful easy-to-read texts across your site. These product descriptions should be able to: resonate with your audience,  answer their questions, and  keep them accessing other pages and digital assets within your website. Image optimization by including clear, sharp, and high-resolution images with the smallest possible file size Embedding relevant and engaging video content. Reducing the time it takes for your website to load. Make sure that your pages pass the Pagespeed Insights, which measures the Core Web Vitals. These set of metrics give developers an idea of how fast the specific parts of a page loads on the screen. Craft Helpful Content with Your Experts Days after Google rolled out its Helpful Content update in September 2023, brands, bloggers, and other content creators immediately felt its impact. Many of them saw their rankings and traffic dip because their web content failed to pass the “people-first” shift in Google’s requirements.  This algorithm update rewards websites that focus on crafting useful and valuable content for people and not for search engine bots. This means overuse of keywords (keyword stuffing) and producing content for the sake of jacking up your ranking no longer works. To do this, Google added the author’s expertise or experience to the topic it is writing or E to its E-A-T guideline.  Weaving Seamless Customer Journeys with Omnichannel SEO Nowadays, brands need to interconnect their marketing channels. Today’s customers expect a cohesive experience that allows for seamless interaction between physical stores, websites, social media, and more. They also seek to access your company on their smart home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Nest. To make this possible, you need to beef up your omnichannel SEO strategy to optimize your online presence across all touchpoints. A unified customer