Category: Logistics

Since the past few decades, there has been a significant battle recorded for the Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies in regard to acquiring the market share and space on the retail shelves. For having the advantage of costing terms, companies are now heavily relying on CPG logistics operations and as per the course of such circumstances price pints are a key factor in this battle of market acquisition and different ways to reduce logistics cost. 

As a fortunate course of events, incremental improvements are being recorded these days in the existing distribution processes. The employable ways of managing logistics strategies and managing shipping strategies have been debunked and contribute to the current processes in regards to retail capture and targeting customers. To do, logistics cost management is an essential concept to understand here. The perfect balance of newly formulated strategies that are optimal, and offer the potential boost for gaining profits and cost savings have been now discovered effectively. 

These strategies are targeted especially for mid-tier suppliers who are struggling against the big brands. Before we go further on understanding multiple ways to reduce logistics costs in consumer goods distribution, let’s get the concept of consumer goods distribution and logistics costs involved in the same, clarified. 

What are logistics costs in consumer goods distribution?

Consumer distribution happens at various levels or tiers. There are multiple channels through such kind of distribution takes place. When it comes to bringing the two concepts of consumer goods and distribution and logistics, there is a significant course of activities that can be linked together. Any form of distribution will primarily have logistics as its basic activity.

Same for consumer goods distribution as well, logistics plays a very vital part. For small players in the market, logistics costs overlapping the costs of distribution or manufacturing have become a very big challenge. Logistics being a crucial procedural activity for distribution cannot be negated at the same time. Thus, finding ways to curb logistics costs have become very essential for small and middle distribution enterprises. 

6 Ways to reduce logistics cost

Here are a few of the most important ways or strategies on ways to reduce logistics cost:

Unite with Shippers on Loads for Logistics Costs Reduction

While missing out on large freight volumes, small enterprises can leverage using higher costs that are less in an amount in regards to truckload (LTL) shipments. Being one of the primary ways to ways to reduce freight costs, consumer products goods’ companies can be competently in the playing field of the market by having load consolidation with other CPG firms. 

In some cases, there have been instances of doing the same with competitors thereby targeting the same targeted customers. The smart shift from LTL (less than truckload) to lower costs, and full truckload initiates to move, it does not just contribute in reducing freight rate but also bears responsibility for your share of the lower-cost move. Considered to be a great strategy, many enterprises have deployed this and carry on handling consumer goods clients with an ideal position retained in the market. 

Data Integration from Sales and Fulfilment Systems

Specifying available inventory against the list of current orders leads to chaotic situations and troubles that are hard to manage. The problematic aspect of this situation is that even technological advancement, in terms of having an automated programmed algorithm, is also not existent to process the subjective decision. Leading to more errors, this decision-making process calls for personal bias since customer service executives and sales representatives may direct available inventory to their current set of in-house customers. To overcome this challenging situation, integration of data in regards to the sales and inventory is a great strategy. 

However, this can have some limited repercussions on small-sized companies since they are allocated with limited systems resources. Since this strategy has been one of the best ways how to optimize transportation costs, many companies have already leveraged in integrating data from multiple systems from experience and resources thereby expediting decisions that are to be made. 

Another vital thing to note under this context is that companies can combine valuable knowledge about their retail customers and can have decisions made based on customer priority. Doing this, the potential threats of disappointing key customers based on the “first-in, first-out” model can be simply avoided. 

Cross-Docking

Standing out effectively as a productive way of reducing logistics costs for small and mid-sized CPG companies, the cross-docking method can help in moving the just-in-time inventory model. Since it’s a proven strategy, multiple CPG companies have been using this and continue to do so to fetch some productive results. The cross-docking method requires three essential factors to be ticked; 

1. Visibility must be given to inbound freight and factory production
2. Advanced systems to combine orders with inbound freight
3. Coordinate with carriers in an effective manner

Companies having the accessibility to insights and analytics can quickly deploy cross-dock strategy, thereby effectively knowing about the steps that can be taken to reduce cost in the transportation of inventory.

Product Packaging in Distribution Centre

As an obvious fact, retailers will never agree for the selling of products in its configured form before leaving the factory. Although, in respect to certain markets, factory finished products are required in various quantities in a pack, or with altered configuration altogether. Many of the currently exiting customer production goods companies ships their products directly from their respective distribution centers to firms handling the outside packaging, this is primarily done to get back the product to the same distribution center. 

However, doing this leads to an escalation of freight costs and can hamper the company to miss out on visibility to the product at its packaging stage. Eliminating these errors can be done by executing secondary packaging services and other related product configurations at the operating distribution center. As per an estimation is done on how much savings can be acquired from doing this, a revelation of 10%-15% savings was found out based on data showing reductions in inventory, freight costs and damage.

Reduction in Chargebacks

Big sized CPG companies have in-house departments who would look after the chargebacks and also monitoring them at the same time. However small and mid-sized enterprises lack the potential resources to cast their focus on chargeback reduction and compromises on accepting them at the cost of running the business. For such enterprises tying with big sized CPG companies can be a significant move in gaining chargeback reductions. 

Companies that are shipping out to multiple CPG manufacturers have knowledge about their retailers’ requirements and can monitor outbound shipments for assuring compliance. Such inputs can also contribute to gaining the data to validate the charge and support penalty challenges.

Virtual Logistics Capability 

With globalization in its full form, consumer product brands have partnered with multi-billion dollar companies who can provide them with the advantages of having use of supply chain synergies. This has led to stiff competition for small and mid-sized CPG companies. 

However, making agreements with the correct and credible logistics partner for consumer goods distribution can make a significant shift in your business dynamics. They can leverage you in playing safely in the market with facilities of a big company logistics without the overhead burdens. 

Conclusion

Thus, now that you have a broad idea on how to reduce logistics costs in consumer goods distribution, make sure to take the full advantage to help the business run fruitfully in the global market. In case you wish to know how to calculate logistics costs in India, you may refer to the supporting blog from here. Get all the details regarding logistics costs and how the calculations are redone today. 

As time progresses, the definition of logistics in the industrial world and the global market keeps evolving continuously. The growth rate of logistics in India has shown tremendous improvement in the last decade, starting from scratch and reaching a level where the Indian logistics industry is competing with the top dogs of the most affluent countries. Since there is potential for unlimited improvement, the Indian logistics reports will always highlight areas where improvement could be implemented for better performance in the next year. The key areas for logistics growth in 2020 are as follows.

Logistics Sector In India Overview And Challenges

There is no doubt that the Indian logistics industry is the backbone of our economy. Our world logistics index rankings have come a long way since the beginning of its slow ascent to success. In 2014, the Indian logistics industry ranked 54^th globally in the Logistics Performance Index. Moving to 2018, the ranking jumped to 35^th and showed a massive improvement in the logistics system. Today, the growth rate of the logistics industry in India is interlinked to every industry and has amalgamated itself with technology, recently emerging service providers and infrastructure. The Indian logistics industry in 2019 is officially the most promising industry along with the quickest growth seen.

 Currently, the value of the Indian logistics Industry in 2019 is said to be around $160 Billion and the world anticipates this to grow to at least $250 Billion in the year 2020. This growth can be attributed to the increasing number of e-commerce retailers and their stellar services to the citizens of the country. So, why is logistics growth important? People already rely on e-commerce for their needs and till the year 2020, there will be a huge online-shopping market for the logistics industry to tap into. The entrance of several MNCs into the FMCG sector of the country also creates new avenues of opportunity for the Indian logistics industry to grow. These new and upcoming sectors’ progress has a direct impact on the growth of the Indian logistics industry’s inventory management and effective warehousing solutions for the retail industry.

Several companies from various industries are heavily relying on the Indian logistics industry to help them in serving the customized demands of the customer base. This will help the logistics industry to reach a CAGR of over 7% by the end of the year 2022.

While it is doing substantially well, there are areas that definitely call for a review and improvement. The ideas to improve the logistics industry in India currently revolve around reducing the costs of logistics for customers while providing top-notch services with the given budget is one of the constant challenges the Indian logistics industry faces. Increasing affordability encourages corporates to heavily invest in logistics services through tie-ups or outsourcing help. A lack of proper storage and stockpiling training has also been experienced in the logistics industry. By such companies establishing training and development centers, the industry can create trained professionals meant for the logistics industry rather than employing semi-skilled or skilled labor.

Trained personnel to monitor automatic stockpiling, proper storage and cargo safety will increase the profits since the losses will marginally be cut down. Creating an inventory stock portfolio, stock removal and maintenance system, the Indian logistics industry in 2019 can gain efficiency in cost-cutting for more retained earnings.

Since the warehousing system plays an important role in the manufacturing industry in aspects like global procurement and new models of sales and distribution. Improving the current technology by investing in recent research and development using indigenous and domestic technology will boost the economy by pushing other industries like tech to perform better as well. Making constant changes and upgrades in the operations system of the logistics companies will bring the benefit to the customers since this creates an environment of healthy competition while bringing the best services forward.

In 2020, we expect to see substantial changes and development in these key growth factors for growth of logistics in India.

Infrastructure Development

The Indian Government keeps reaffirming its aim to improve the logistics industry in India by making attempts to modernize the functionality starting with infrastructure development. The administration has introduced key infrastructural development projects to increase access to the untapped rural markets in the country. These projects will focus on bringing more efficiency to the supply chain and improve connectivity issues faced due to the geographical vastness of the country and the different terrains present. We’d think that infrastructural development pilot projects may bring about all the change necessary but there are also other factors. Logistics education, training, and an understanding of the framework are very important for the overall progress of the logistics industry just as hardcore infrastructural development is.

Boost In Policies And Regulations

Revolutionary policies and reforms rolled out by the Indian government such as the Goods and Services Tax (GST), granting of the infra status, and relaxing the FDI policies will play a major role in 2020 with the boost of the Indian logistics industry received. GST changed the face of the way Indian logistics worked. Since then, the logistics industry shifted towards creating logistics with multi-modals and large formats, Industrial centers that can act as goods distribution and aggregation hubs were also encouraged to expand due to the introduction of GST.

The point of advantage GST gave to logistics companies was saving on their organization and capital. Where they had to run several warehouses all over the country that attributed to a huge overall expense in the storage department, they can now use a few but huge capacity warehouses that save them the costs of maintaining multiple warehouses and transportation. This system improved the model of freight and cargo movement that the logistics companies used for transportation from manufacturing units to the warehouses, wholesale market, retail market and the points of sale. The growth of the e-commerce industry and the FMCG industry’s expansive policies.

This will help logistics companies increase the amount of load they carry in single trips, the way they move goods from small manufacturing units in order to save on transportation costs while keeping a great service quality for customer satisfaction.

The Advantage Of Adopting The Latest Technology

The advent of technology in the logistics industry has spelled loads of progress in the operations and various systems. Technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things are meant to move the foundations of traditional and old-school logistics operations in the country.

Though it may take some time, it shows promising results to make better improvements in productivity than any other means while streamlining the operations systems of the Indian logistics sector. When such modern technology can replace a system that is prone to error, we expect great things to happen.

The backbone of the economy will turn stronger and in return strengthen the other sectors of the industries. Even though many might debate that adopting these technological advancements is expensive, it is in the best interest of the logistics industry to integrate their organization with them before the gap between their current and the future technology becomes vast.

That will backfire their attempts to cost-cut and increase their expenditures at least three-fold. Integrating such technology calls for initial investments like installation, test runs and training the personnel to run these programs, but once completely set up, the companies will experience a new world of streamlined processes that the older technology could never compete with. In 2020, technology will make space for logistics industries to make space to handle bigger clients because of powerful management tools.

The Future Perspective

Looking at the big picture, on the global level, Indian logistics as an industry has come a long way and is expected to keep a significant upturn in performance on the world’s platform. Companies and International Corporations joining hands with the various logistics companies of India will create a mutually beneficial relationship by reducing their logistics costs, increasing transportation abilities for the customers while bringing much-needed income to make the logistics industry the biggest industry of the country.

In the future, we can expect specialized operations for logistics and delivery to be in high demand from clients of all walks. Be it technological spare parts, automobile equipment or food delivery, everyone will soon bank on the efficiency of a streamlined logistics industry to fulfill all the transportation, storage and delivery needs of all industries. The advancement of e-commerce will soon reach a new high, resulting in more opportunities for the logistics industry to make a mark on express deliveries and round the clock services apart from the company’s in-house logistics system.

Conclusion

While the Indian logistics industry was once considered to be a service provider, now it is classified as an end to end solutions provider for multiple sectors of the industrial realm. In 2020, the worth of the logistics industry will expand to roughly $250 Billion due to the key areas bringing a substantial improvement to operations and overall management. Apart from improving global rankings, it is safe to say that anticipating the Indian logistics industry to become the dominant industry in the country.

Visibility is an important aspect of logistics’ surroundings. It provides the status of supply chain processes. A well-known consultant from Columbus namely Nancy Marino believes that supply chain visibility is not enough and it should consider having full transparency. 

It is a fact that customers are not always satisfied with just visibility. They want to know the absolute status of their orders. Customers always tend to know the status of their orders at every instance in a supply chain process. This particular tendency requires more than just supply chain visibility.

Supply chain visibility is table stakes today. It wasn’t too long ago that visibility was a “nice to have”. Now it is “a must-have”. It is important to know what is going on inside the supply chain at all times. At times, there are potential disruptions in the supply chain; there are market opportunities, and things keep on changing with time. 

Therefore, it is very important to have visibility on both the upstream and down streams. This gives you the feeling of comfort to see all those processes taking place and you have full control over everything. This helps you to respond to potential disruptions or opportunities that might arise when a shipment is in transit. 

What is supply chain visibility? How does it work?

The supply chain is all about getting the right product in the right place and at the right time along with suited quality and cost. Supply chain management is the management of the complete flow of goods and their particular services. This gives full information on the movement of raw materials, and their respective work in progress inventory. This is a very basic definition. 

However, if you see clearly, the supply chain is a fascinating topic because it is present all around us. It is everywhere whether it is building, or restaurant, or any product, supply chain works wholesome for everything.

Every company regardless of how small or big they are, visibility is important. If you are an importer or exporter or even have a multi-national shop, you still have all the same fundamental components involved in your supply chain. You got a lot of things that can happen and go wrong when a shipment is in transit. The smaller companies are a lot easier to communicate internally. They have fewer people involved in the supply chain in servicing your customers. 

Bigger companies have more stakeholders and more finance groups. They also have many buyers and several logistics people are involved. Overall, it is a big crowd. Therefore, internal communication becomes difficult. This is the reason why a good visibility tool is required to not only manage shipments and supply chains effectively but also it gives all those stakeholders insides the visibility of your company. This latter part is important too as it makes the internal flow of communication much easier to manage. 

The major aspects of supply chain visibility

When visibility is concerned, there are certain things you need to focus on:

Functionality

In functionality, there are two dimensions. One is the real-time web-based environment where you can see what is going on with your supply chain and manage all of the moving parts inside your supply chain. The second part is reporting where you can pull data out of a system so that you can see what is going on inside your supply chain. This allows you to measure suppliers, manage vendors, and manage on-time delivery. Therefore, real-time functionality and reporting are the two critical components that you should be focusing on. Thus, if you are thinking about which visibility tools you should use, this is the real deal.

Ease of use

Somebody can provide you with the best system with all the components available, but if it is too hard to implement or if it is not user-friendly then you know you are not going to use it. Then you lose the real value that a good visibility tool represents.

Make it cost-effective

One other value of having good visibility to the solution is the ability that it can create for a company to help drive efficiencies internally and manage costs taking place inside companies. This helps the company to manage all those moving parts.

Therefore, a good visibility tool with good automation is certainly going to give an organization a much better opportunity to be lean.

Lack of supply chain visibility and the need for transparency

There is no doubt that supply chain visibility is one of the major aspects of the supply chain process. However, with time and advancement consumers expect more. Moreover, the supply chain processes of many companies are conserved and they fail to serve the customers right. 

In addition to this, the supply chain provides access and knowledge to just shipments and deliveries but transparency on the other provides a lot more. Moreover, the available visibility tools are not good enough or efficient enough to satisfy the customers and at the same time decreases the company’s credibility. 

Consumers want to know where the product originated and what their actual reviews are. This not only maintains the company’s credibility to stay crystal clear with its consumers but also increases its brand value at the same time. So if a company goes from providing only shipment visibility to total transparency, they will find that consumer engagement on their product has increased considerably.  

Why transparency is at high stakes?

Supply chain visibility only provides you with information about the product’s position in the supply chain. The information is shared among suppliers, shippers, customers and lastly business partners. It also deals with three particular supply chain flows is Information, material, and capital. 

The universal concept of supply chain visibility is that everyone has become familiar with over the years. It includes activities in sourcing, storing, planning, and lastly delivering products. However, when we consider the supply chain globally, then the visibility involved expands.

Transparency is way beyond visibility. Transparency does not simply give the information about the orders or shipments. It takes you a deeper insight into the supply chain processes and all the critical analysis of all the ongoing activities. The effectiveness of every process and system cannot be measured separately. This requires exact metrics that can reflect the total performance of the corporate sector.

The supply chain management of every company is so dispersed that it creates risk and the transition of transparency form visibility becomes critical. The only way is to gather accurate data from the demand and supply sides and analyze the supply chain using the corporate KPIs. 

This can then be used for planning, operative forecasting, and risk management. Indeed, supply chain transparency is not an easy thing to achieve, but once achieved it gives you that secure foundation that provides continuous improvement and efficient management. 

Why it is so important to have transparency?

When consumers become completely aware of the origin of the product, they become more and more interested in it. If the companies are not able to give the full disclosure of their supply chain processes, the consumers can fill in their place. For instance, Google Guide is a very famous platform that is well known for giving out pieces of information on anything that is asked. 

An individual can easily get or share information on social and health impacts on any product. It is impossible to create positive product images without having an open supply chain platform. Allowing customers to have full access and knowledge on the product details increases a company’s credibility and creates strong brand value. 

 Supply chain transparency provides the following:

• It helps to achieve the optimal level of the inventory.
• Restore the healthy bond between inbound supply and outbound demand.
• Makes sure that the vendors are selling only approved components,
• Analyze the products of the company and its environmental footprint.
• It helps to identify invalid supply chain elements and ensures operational improvements.

Conclusion

Companies opting for transparency in the supply chain process are most likely facing problems while accumulating data. Problems like what exact data they need to collect, how can they be verified, and how the data should be stored and analyzed. It is been years that companies have been struggling to get data access to external suppliers and managing dispersed data. 

Supply chain visibility is not enough to get the customer’s full attention. As the customers are paying for the products in full amount, it is justified that they get every information they require. Therefore, only supply chain visibility is not enough. Complete transparency is necessary. 

Only knowing things is not good enough anymore, people demand to foresee much deeper. This not only prevents problems but also helps to avoid any unforeseen difficulties, which is why people tend to rely on many predictive platforms. The biggest example is google maps, google guide, and ok google. Therefore, only supply chain visibility is not enough; complete transparency of it is necessary.

The best ways of marketing your eCommerce in the online world are endless. However, you might be tricked into using some of the backdated techniques that won’t fetch you any good results. Considered to be one of the primary digital marketing strategies, e-commerce SEO strategy comes as your best fitting choice to market and promote your eCommerce. 

Thus, this further becomes quite essential to implement current SEO tactics for your eCommerce brand. 

Here are a few of the most vital SEO tactics that are hand-picked to skyrocket your eCommerce business without risking your hard-earned money:

Getting your Website Architecture on Point!

The very first thing to ensure is to see whether your eCommerce store is present on HTTPS. This aids you in protecting your customer’s valuable information and at the same time is proves its credibility on Google. To make it even better, being an HTTPS link also enhances your SEO functionalities. 

When it comes to understanding user experience, one of the most important things is the speed or the loading time of the website. If your eCommerce website takes a lot of time to load, it will repel your customers thereby increasing bounce rates massively. You can check your site loading speed from Google Page Insight.

With smartphones becoming an integral part of modern customers, making your eCommerce completely mobile-friendly and optimized is inevitable. You can check your site mobile friendliness from mobiletest.me

As mentioned above, SEO tactics are very important to boost your eCommerce brand. Backlinking is something that you just cannot afford to ignore. Building high quality and high domain authority links during the sale season is something that can actually bring you results worth every time and money invested. 

Meta descriptions are used to augment CTRs on organic search. So, alone meta descriptions cannot rank your eCommerce website on Google but enhancing the click-through rates definitely can. 

As an eCommerce brand, it is obvious that your website must have a lot of images, especially the maximum of them to be high-resolution images. Each of these images must have an alt tag that permits the bots to scan the alt text, and improves your SEO ranks.

Another very interesting and effective way of optimizing your eCommerce website architecture is the addition of breadcrumbs. Defining breadcrumbs would suggest them to be a secondary navigation scheme that enables user’s location in a site or web app. Showing breadcrumbs within the search index has proven to enhance visibility on Google. 

Sometimes, the errors on an eCommerce website can get really disturbing for the buyers. This happens when you have a discontinued or an expired product. To avoid this, 301-redirecting the URL to a newer product page can be leveraged and will transfer the existing SEO values to the respective new page as well.

Structuring the URLs in a manner that is user-friendly is very important. While doing so, keep in mind that it must be Google friendly as well.

As an obvious element of eCommerce, images speak for your business and have to be of very high quality. This can lead to making your website slow and loading time also increases. To help this situation never arise, compressing your website’s images has to be a mandated action.

Make sure your title tag is optimized and is no more than 60-70 characters each. While executing this, keep the keyword in the beginning to grab the attention of your targeted users’ search terms. 

Talking about user experience, one of the latest trends is to implementing live chat on your website. A live chat not just compliments your inclination of response towards your customers but also helps them to get their searches sorted with your assistance. It has also been proven, that with the implementation of live chat, the conversion rates have soared to a maximum of 50%.

As an SEO fundamental, do not miss to engineer and submit a robust sitemap and Robots.txt file to Google. The purpose of indexing properly Google gets quite sorted with this step.

One of the major challenges of any website is the issue of bounce rates irrespective of being an eCommerce or a simple brand presence website. For eCommerce, this even becomes much more relevant due to the sales factor being integrally embedded. With the proper mechanism of having internal linking done on your website, you can have loading time increased thereby making your ranking higher and better. This can also further aid in suggesting related products and services that have been purchased by other users in order to drive sales effectively. 

Using keywords as a replacement for anchor texts is a smarter way to rank your page for a few of the specific terminologies. 

With a few of the most notable SEO tactics explained above in regards to your website’s structure, there are more to know about further. With SEO being a broad and vast topic, it is important to know about the tactics in respect to it its core branches. When we talk about SEO, we speak, the primary two divisions that are set forth are on-page and off-page. Both on-page and off-page SEO plays an extremely vital role to help your eCommerce get maximum visibility and better ranking on any web page, primarily Google.

On-Page SEO Tactics for eCommerce Website

Let us first take proceed with few of the most effective e-commerce SEO strategies for on-page that will enhance your eCommerce brand on Google.

Keyword Listing

The foremost and most important action of SEO tactics for your eCommerce would be the extensive formulation of the keyword list. Keywords are defined as common search terms which the users or customers input in a web search page to get their desired results in respect to that. Keywords are vital elements and stand out as base components for any SEO activities.

The formulation of the keywords list will take through research involving the knowledge of a few of the most common terms used by customers with respect to your eCommerce industry. For example, if the common term is ‘best Indian spices’, you can take this keyword and use it as ’best Indian spices online sale’. Get relevant terms with regards to the products and services you offer on your eCommerce website. 

With the use of any paid or free SEO tool, you can check the demand and search frequency of these keywords. Make sure to have at least 40 – 150 keywords listed for each product or services. Once your keyword list is ready for implementation, evaluate the variations of those being long keywords and add to each main page including the product and category pages.

Un-traditionalizing SEO search terms

Customers these days are very smart and with frequent use of the web they can predict your moves quite well. In terms of using SEO search terms or rather keywords while formulating product descriptions, consider having a very conversational tone. Phrases like, ‘I want to buy, ‘I want to do, ‘Where can I buy…’ can be very smartly used. 

Landing Pages 

The use of landing pages is like a ritualistic action when it comes to ticking the SEO checklist. Speaking of eCommerce, landing pages becomes very crucial. ECommerce giants will invest heavily in building highly responsive and robust landing pages and use for its multiple promotional activities. This not only fetches you higher rankings on various search engines but also gives productive results during peak sales time. You can also leverage landing for specific promotions as well.  

The best part about creating and having landing pages is that it does not have an expiry limit. It will exist and remain for eternity even after the promotional activity is over and continue to gain your essential important link juice from being an old and authoritative link. This phenomenon is often regarded as Trust Flow (TF), and Page Authority (PA). 

Product Descriptions

Ensuring optimized content for each product page is a very vital step to keep things on the right track while executing SEO tactics for your eCommerce website. To do this in the right way, there are a few sets of instructions that need to be followed principally. Each product description is written must be within the word limit range of 300-800 only.  If the product is listed under the high-selling category, the description can stretch till 1000 as well.  

Important specifications or features must be separated in multiple columns and must be placed in accordance with a significant place within the product page. Ensuring internal links between category and product pages must be also checked simultaneously and addition of at least 3-5 links within the product description must be on executed.

Off-page SEO Tactics for eCommerce Websites

Link Building 

To accelerate off-page SEO tactics of your eCommerce website, initiate the basic level link building activities for the offers you are providing currently. This can include blog comments, citations, web 2.0 links, posting on a question and answer forums and mandatorily social bookmarking.  

Such submission sites might not give you the desired link juice you are looking out for, but at the same, these mandated to gain high rankings for your eCommerce website. When you assess your website’s search rankings, it will give you noticeable impacts for sure.  

One of the critical points to keep in mind here is that Google algorithms are subjected to frequent fluctuations and can affect the authority of your website. In order to sustain good rankings, here are points that you can follow:

Try linking the third-party websites with your main landing pages and can consider embedding codes to get your products linked by bloggers who will be writing about your brand.

Try to formulate separate blogs each of which will be subjected to reviewing your website’s products. This will lead to the creation of a Private Blog Network (PBN).

Paid Partnerships

Affiliate marketing is one of the coolest trends in digital marketing. Paid partnerships with noted affiliates in the market can fetch you a real boost for your eCommerce business. The affiliates will work you in terms of very minimal charges or commission and help to get your products or services sold. Leveraging affiliate marketing during peak sales window will not burden you with thoughts of revenue or sales returns. Affiliates can do their job pretty well with an encouraging percentage of ROI for your brand.  

Blogger Collaborations

One of the primary components of off-page SEO is e-commerce content marketing. Be it article submissions, or guest blogging the venture of content marketing serves very productively for eCommerce brands. To do this in an accelerated way, you can consider reaching out to bloggers who are writing niche content for the industry you deal with. 

Collaborations with the bloggers will help your products and services included in their blogs that are read by countless people on the web. The most prospective part about outreaching to blogger sand leveraging from content marketing is that you can ask for backlinks. At times, few bloggers won’t be agreeing to mention your brand but will be fine with giving out backlinks to your website.

Now that you have quite a bit of transparency on how to manage on-page and off-page tactics for your eCommerce website, you need to stretch further to know the technical aspects of SEO. As the term SEO is not a definite concept and belongs to a cluster of technicalities, you must cover all the aspects in order to leave no stones unturned for skyrocketing your eCommerce website. 

Simply putting the keywords and follo9wing the do’s and don’ts of SEO won’t fetch you your desired results. All factors once determined to be on their right track, will get you results that will exceed your expectation bars. After all, you would be looking forward to giving your users the best experience on the eCommerce website. And, that’s what Google eventually cares about too!

Technical SEO Tactics for eCommerce Websites

Execution of SEO Audit

One of the primary actions of doing technical SEO is a thorough audit. To do an SEO audit, you can use the Google Analytics and Google Search Console primarily. This will help you to get a complete overview of the current standing and quality of your eCommerce website. 

Further, this will also help you to leverage in creating a task list that outlines the focus areas of on-page and off-page SEO. From result determination to locating the error spots, you get it all done swiftly with extensive insights from executing an SEO audit.

In order to do a spotless SEO Audit, there are few mandatory steps to follow. Consider the below mentioned critically:

Website Crawl

The primary action of executing technical SEO is putting your eCommerce website on a crawl. Crawling your website will reveal insights that show if any broken links are present on your website, locate missing alt text or metadata and encircle out duplicate or thin content. While doing SEO for your eCommerce website you must have knowledge of the things mentioned above to be unhealthy for your website. 

Ensuring single browsable version of your eCommerce Website 

To make it certain that your website has a single browsable version (which is legally accepted by Google) is one of your primary objectives for executing technical SEO. Multiple ways can be used to link or browse through your site. However, only one domain must be browsable and the rest can be 301 redirected to the canonical version. It is advisable to select the HTTPS version since it is an encrypted and secured version.

Also, this will be essential for enhancing user experience along with Google’s ranking algorithm. Since it’s an eCommerce that has direct bridging with payment gateways, making your website encrypted and secured is very vital. Your users will automatically have confidence in buying from your website along with having faith in your brand credibility. 

Evaluating Website’s Home Page’s SEO

Going back to verifying your home page’s technicalities is a vital step while doing technical SEO. For this, the first thing to evaluate is to see whether the home page includes well-formulated and clickable titles. Next, you must ensure the meta descriptions to be customized and optimized for maximising click-through rates. While doing this, keep a check on H1 tag and sub-headers (H2, H3, etc.).

Crawl Report Analysis

By the time, your crawl report is almost finished; you must take a trip back to ensuring all the things have been properly implemented. Be it, Client Errors (4xx)” (aka broken links), missing or duplicate content, duplicate URLs, missing alt text and missing or duplicate meta descriptions.

Verification of Unique Content 

Placing duplicate content on Google is considered to be serious misconduct for your ECommerce website. This can also have the legal repercussion of facing a penalty ever since Google’s Panda algorithm update. Check the uniqueness of your content from any paid SEO Tool and analyse the same. Once you are done with the analysis, you will a complete list of URLs containing duplicate content along with a risk factor percentage. Clicking on the URLs will take you to the sites where the duplicate content exits and you can also charge the concerned person for the same

Self-Conducted Google Search

This is a very important step to consider. On priority search the Google web page with your brand name. If you are not a brand new business, your name should pop up first on the search results page. In case, it does not, it might be considered there are few things that haven’t gone the right way. In other cases, if your name is not on the first few result links, consider doing the below-mentioned steps:

• Crafting a few strong, branded links
• Listing some citations on business directories
• Listing on Google My Business is mandatory
• Social media coverage of your website must be present and active

The next step of self-conducting a Google search of your brand is to initiate a search by typing “site” before your domain name. For example, “site:besteCommercebrand.com”. this will give instant results on how many pages of your eCommerce website are indexed so far.

One vital point to note here is that the URLs count must be fewer than shown in your crawl report. If the number is exceeded this might be a sign for junk pages being categorized. Such as blog category pages, product or site searches or tag pages.

Ideally, these pages should be noindexe and will have no content present on them.

Search Traffic Analysis

With the site being updated and crawl reports run properly, one of the essential action element is to have a comprehensive look at the Google Analytics report from day one. Thus will give you clarity on what potential your existing eCommerce website is having on the web and what is the traction happening.  

After the Google analytics being critically analysed with in-depth information being pit under scrutiny, the next step is to run the website on Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). To do this, step one would be going to Crawl -> Crawl Errors to locate any errors that Google indexing robots might be having while crawling your website. 

Analysing Backlink Profile

The backlink profile is all about the links that are being currently pointed to your website. Doing this is vital to make sure that no spammy links are coming to your website for which your site can get penalized. While conducting an in-depth analysis for your backlink profile, you must pay attention to three crucial elements of, anchor text (the text that is linked to your site), sleazy links and broken backlinks.

Improving Site Speed

Additionally with crawl speed, comes another very important action of site speed. It is something that has a direct relation with a site’s competence to rank and have a robust UX. As per a study on eCommerce websites, site speed has been accountable for 60-70% of annual purchases. This clearly demarcates that if your eCommerce website is way too slow or buffers more than 1-2 mins on each page, the cut down rate of your purchases grows massively. 

To help your website gain adequate speed and to know what errors causing to increase the load time, consider going to Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool and insert in your URL. This will give you an average score, based on smartphone and desktop devices and would also suggest countable steps in order to enhance your site’s speed. As a general note, compressing high-resolution images can help to speed up your website’s loading time alone. 

The Bottom Line

Thus, with such a comprehensive and thorough detailed explanation of the latest eCommerce SEO tactics to follow 2019, it is expected to not leave any room for doubts. All the above-mentioned pointers in regards to site structure, on-page and off-page SEO and technical SEO are in alignment with Google’s latest algorithm and thus are subjected to bring you productive results if followed properly. So why wait anymore, get on with the SEO tactics and let the revenue scores of your eCommerce soar high!