The presence of numerous website builders and CMS platform options makes setting up a store online a lot easier than it was before. Therefore, we see a lot of new spicks and span new e-commerce stores with a wide array of products but no customers. Many business owners are often too quick to blame their website template and core code for the lack of traffic. Nonetheless, how responsible can your code infrastructure be if several other stores are using the same code type or the same template?

Did you know? A majority of websites that cater to customers in one way or another run on PHP. Now, you may want to put forth the point that you are using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla to run your store. That is indeed true. Most website owners now develop their e-commerce sites using these CMS platforms and even use WYSIWYG builders for diverse power functions. However, on the back of every impressive template design, plug-in and extension is a set of PHP codes. They have extensive compatibility towards external plug-ins that can boost SEO. Therefore, you have little to no reason to blame a standard template design you have used to create your website.

Even for websites created from scratch using PHP codes, there are several options to enhance visibility. When we say visibility, we are of course referring toSEO Los Angeles. Yes, your website core code can affect your visibility, but using standard premium PHP template designs often eliminates this risk. Besides, almost all templates, whether standard or custom built, have room for enough optimization.

There are several ways you can boost traffic and conversion rates of your e-commerce site –

On-site factors

Out of the 200 ranking factors that affect the visibility of your products and content drastically, a huge number are on-site. These are your images, texts and tags that the search engines crawl to check the content quality, product type and website potentials. Now, you can obviously take Google's preferences into account and modify your on-page content for better rankings.

1. Meta descriptions and title tags: meta descriptions are what people see on the SRL right under your page URL and title. So, construct a meaningful yet interesting description of your content and do not forget to give it an attractive title too.
2. SEO title: setting a new SEO title distinct from your page title is very easy with PHP based website designs. Especially WordPress has Yoast as the leading plug-in, and it allows users to designate titles that are easy, relevant and without stop words.
3. Content quality and plagiarism: Google does not like respun content. You need to spend time and research to develop your unique content for better website performance and visibility. Content is one of the leading on-site SEO factors.
4. Keyword strategies: blindly working on fancy content is not good enough. You need content that attracts specific user groups. This is only possible if you use trending search trends and LSI keywords to power your current keyword strategy.
5. URL structure: as per the SEO experts, your page URLs should be legible to bots as well as human users. They should contain bits of your SEO title and page title, and they should completely bypass the strange concoction of seemingly meaningless numbers that appear in default URLs of all PHP sites.
6. Mobile friendliness: over 70% of an e-commerce site's traffic now comes from smartphones. People are always on their phones whether they are waiting for their bus, waiting for the signal to turn green or sitting in anUber. You need to capitalize on this trend and create a responsive website that caters to all populations. It is super easy to make a PHP-based website responsive and retina friendly for all users.
7. Page loading speed: unless your page loading speed is under 3 seconds, you are not doing well enough. Larger corporations end up losing upwards of a billion dollars’ worth of business when the loading time increases by one second! Most PHP templates are lightweight, and that makes it much easier to manage your website loading speed.
8. Links on the page: do you have enough internal links to keep people on your site? Do your posts have enough external links to provide your visitors with a complete experience? The type of link and their destination directly affects the performance of your site.

Off-site factors

The off-site factors demand more importance than on-site at times. In case of product heavy and content light e-commerce websites, the kind of references from outbound links, reviews on business directories, product reviews on other sites and link authority contribute extensively to the rankings. The following five factors influence the visibility, organic traffic, sales and ROI of any website related to business, irrespective of their CMS.

1. Types of links and their ratio: off-site SEO strategies depend greatly on backlink building. Get rid of link farm ideas and black hat SEO strategies. You need solid natural links and manually built links to boost your site ranking.
2. Guest blogging: this is a great way to increase your web presence. You can create more links to your website from the reputable guest blogs. Google is still not very verbal about their preference for extensive guest blogging, so you need to stay in tune with their latest announcements.
3. Social media marketing and Influencer marketing: this is an integral part of any SEO building strategy. Your website presence depends directly on your social media presence as well. Post on your business profile, user reviews, and social mentions work as inbound links as well. Social media marketing, of course, brings in the mention of influencer marketing, where you find a reliable and relatable social media celeb to endorse your brand/products publicly. This boosts the relatable factor and trust for your brand.
4. Local off-site SEO: local off-site is a new trait of SEO that focuses on the hyper-local search result optimization. You can target highly specific crowds of users from very specific geographic locations. For example – if you are an indie brand working out of Seattle, you can use the trending search results from the particular area along with a combination of local specific keywords to target the specific crowds of users.

Both on-site and off-site components of SEO are vital. You cannot ignore one and hope to see success. Thankfully, e-commerce sites and templates with a PHP backbone make it easier for developers and admins to add SEO-friendly features to the sites to boost visibility.