Anyone who is interested in e commerce pharmacy website design will know the importance of using search engine optimisation techniques (SEO) as part of their digital marketing strategy.
Good SEO will help your website rank highly in internet searches, meaning that it is more visible, and this converts to higher visitor traffic, and ultimately higher sales. Of course, your website still needs to be well designed and user friendly to retain customers, but SEO tools will help to draw them to the site in the first place.
There are some basic SEO tools that all websites should have, such as meta tags, links, headers, alt text, and so on, which are integrated in every page and optimised with keywords. However, these measures alone will make little difference. These are some of the most current factors Google uses(which is the source of over 80% of all online searches).
Fast loading speed
Google now ranks site by loading speed, so if your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, this may be why it is showing disappointing rankings and user traffic. If your site is slow, check that it is not overloaded with lots of large high-res images. For an e-commerce site, compressed images on most pages are fine.
Make sure that the coding is streamlined, with the minimum of https queries. If your site is on a platform such as WordPress, make sure that it is running on the latest versions of the software available, and is not weighed down by lots of obsolete pages and clunky plug ins.
Fully responsive design
Responsive design is non-negotiable if you want your website to stay relevant. Google now ranks sites with priority for those which are optimised for mobiles, rather than desktop devices. The site should adjust flexibly and automatically to which ever device it is displayed on for optimum browsing experience.
Responsive ads
Paying for Google ads is a common way to improve SEO rankings, but Google have recently begun to transition adwords to Responsive Search Ads, or RSAs. This allows you to create more precisely targeted ads which are tailored to the customer’s previous search activity, location, and the device they are searching on.
Accessible sites
Pharmacy websites should be designed with user accessibility as a priority. For example, they may have customers who are visually impaired, and require audio descriptions to be enabled across the entire site. High colour contrasts should be used throughout the site to make it easier to view and navigate.
All images should have an alt-text, which is a brief written description of the image content, to help the visually impaired. Alt-text should be included as best practice in all websites, as they are useful if the images fail to load, and can also help with SEO.
The good news is, Google now takes accessibility standards into account when setting its algorithms for site ranking, so if your site is built to the latest requirements, this will work to your advantage.