E-Commerce website optimization is a necessity if you are a retailer and want to reach the widest audience possible. That’s why this E-Commerce SEO guide is a must for all the retailers out there to beat the competition and rank higher to get increased traffic to your site and as a result more customers.
On the internet, there are tons of tutorials and how-to articles that offer broad SEO guidance, but this one will particularly target the needs of E-Commerce business owners. So, let's get started.
First and foremost, we're sure you're wondering what SEO for an E-Commerce site is and where do you begin. Well, we have all the information you need to develop a successful E-Commerce SEO strategy and prevent frequent pitfalls.
What is E-Commerce SEO?
E-Commerce SEO is the practice of enhancing your online store's presence in search engine results pages. When customers search for your products, you want to be at the top of the results to get more visitors. In other words, SEO for an E-Commerce website focuses on optimising your site to increase leads and conversions.
SEO for E-Commerce, however, differs from SEO for content-focused websites, it entails more than just adding keywords, generating blog articles, and gaining links. You should be familiar with how search engines function.
E-commerce SEO often involves optimising your headlines, metadata, product descriptions, navigational structure and internal link structure for search and user experience. Every product you offer needs to have a page designed specifically to draw visitors from search engines.
You also don't want to overlook static, non-product-oriented pages on your site, such as the home page, about us, blog articles, contact us page etc.
Why does SEO for E-Commerce matter?
So, imagine you want to buy a coffee machine. What would be the first thing you would do? That’s obvious, right? You would perform Google Search to look for options, tips, comparisons and other information to help you make informed decisions. If a store which sells that doesn’t show up on SERPs then they have lost a real potential customer like you because you can’t find them online.
Therefore, if your website does not appear in the SERPs, you will miss out on qualified and interested e-commerce clients. Your products may have a presence on the internet, but are they findable?
So, to offer you a better understanding of why E-Commerce SEO is important, here are four reasons:
Brand Awareness: If someone is unfamiliar with your brand, doing SEO on E-commerce sites is a terrific approach to assist them in discovering your brand. You appear in more search results, allowing more people to find your brand.
Easily Findable: People actively seek out products that your e-commerce store provides. By investing in e-commerce SEO, you can assist enhance product visibility and brand familiarity.
Improved Customer Experience: Investing in search engine e-commerce allows you to give a better user experience to your target demographic. You must optimise your site in order to rank higher in search results, which will allow you to give a better experience for your audience. Positive brand association and improved sales result from a positive user experience.
Increased Sales: When leads see your products through search, they take the time to look them over and see whether they are a good fit. By ranking high in relevant search results, you acquire prospects who are more likely to convert into sales for your company.
How to Decide an E-Commerce SEO Strategy: Step by Step
Prioritise the Pages
Begin with the pages that get the most traction on your site. Furthermore, if you want people to focus on a certain or signature product, optimise for it first.
Build a Work Process
SEO necessitates several specialised characteristics. This area includes selecting keywords, adding metadata, accurately naming your photos, adding image alternative qualities and incorporating relevant keywords.
Observe the Competition
Your e-commerce SEO strategy should be built to out-win the competition. Examine the websites of your major competitors and their SEO efforts. Determine how you can improve yours.
Follow through with CRO
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) should be followed in E-commerce SEO in order to get maximum conversions.
E-Commerce SEO Checklist
With millions of online retail sites already in operation, SEO for E-Commerce is a challenging industry and it's not always simple to make your site stand out.
Building your SEO rankings may seem like a tremendous challenge, but by following simple best practices, you can get off to a good start. This eventually improves your chances of being seen and attracting more natural leads and clients.
We will discuss some of the best advice for e-commerce businesses that are underperforming in the SEO department. You need an e-commerce SEO plan if you want customers to be able to find your products more quickly, and your strategy will be more effective the more items you cross off your list.
Strategies that you need to keep in mind for your e-commerce website-
Yes, keywords are still important. Although you don't want to overuse these keywords in your product titles and descriptions, they must be in the material.
Let’s simplify the definition of a keyword for you if you are unclear. Keywords are the terms that your e-commerce customers use to find relevant products when they use a search engine. For instance, someone looking for lipstick may type "red tone lipstick online."
There are a few things to consider before you select your Primary Keywords for your Products.
Analyse Volume & Difficulty
You can tell how much interest a specific keyword sparks in users by looking at the search volume. There will be more active searches for that keyword if the search volume is high, which denotes greater popularity.
Keyword Difficulty on the other hand determines how difficult it is for a particular keyword to rank. It gives you an idea of how much effort and time it will take for you to rank on the SERPs. The higher the Keyword Difficulty, the more effort and time it will take to rank and vice versa.
Search Intent
Imagine a website which is an E-Commerce shop ranking for the keyword “Almonds”. Now, if you look up the word “Almonds” on google you will mostly see informational content. Sites like Wikipedia and other informational blogs would show up. Now even if that website is ranking in the Top 10, users would not click on that. Why you ask? That is because the user is not looking to buy anything. So, eventually, when Google sees that the E-Commerce site is not getting clicks, Google won’t rank it for that keyword anymore.
Hence, Keyword intent or Search Intent is the intention behind a search query. There are three categories of Search Intent:
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Informational Intent - In SEO, informational keyword intent is used to indicate the type of information sought by the searcher.
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Commercial/Buying Intent -When consumers are looking for information to assist them to make a purchase, they have commercial keyword intent. This means people want to find and get what they need as soon as possible. Commercial keyword users are more likely to have purchase intent and are less likely to search for information about the product or service rather than simply investigating where to obtain it.
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Mixed Intent – That’s a mix of both Informational and Commercial Intent.
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Competitor’s Research
If you have no idea where, to begin with on-site optimization for your e-commerce site, your competitors are your greatest chance. Bigger competitors, in particular, have most likely already done their homework for optimising their websites and many of their secrets can be found on their websites. You should look at the keywords on their home pages and top product pages in particular.
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Optimise Product Pages
As product pages are the lifeblood of your business, you should devote a significant amount of time and effort in improving them. Many e-commerce store owners merely write a few lines describing each product. But to have SEO for e-commerce Product Pages is a must.
Having more information on your product pages is essential for Google to find you. Here are the precise tasks you want to complete-
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Optimise Product Name - The name of your product is crucial. It's also commonly used in the SEO title and URL of your product page. This is why you should think about adding a popular search term or keyword phrase to your products.
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Optimise Images - Images are an essential component of any product page. Not only are images important for your customers, but they are also important for search engine optimization. Begin with the filename to appropriately optimise your photographs for search. Don't include photographs with the filename IMG0010.jpg on your product pages. Use the product name and main keyword instead. Additionally, you should compress your image to reduce page load time and create a better user experience.
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Include Reviews - Reviews are another great approach to improve customer confidence in your product, so show them if you have a good one.
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Include FAQs - In a FAQ area, respond to customer questions. Roller Skate Nation raised their conversions by 69% after adding a FAQ to their purchase page, according to Optimizely.
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Enhance Site Structure
When designing a website structure, keep your clients in mind. Take a moment to look through your site's structure and see how easy it is to find pages. If you haven't previously, include a search bar function so your customers can easily find the products they are looking for. You should also have a clear navigation structure, from your homepage to product categories to the products offered within those categories.
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Creating Useful Content
Content allows you to rank higher in search results and brings more relevant traffic to your website. Content topics must be decided before you can begin creating the material. Stick to issues that are relevant to your industry and will help you bring relevant visitors to your page. Then you can look for appropriate keywords to incorporate into your text.
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Interlinking
Internal linking inside product category pages can help move consumers and searchers from one page to another on your website. It makes the navigation pretty smooth for the users.
By including internal connections on your pages, you create an ecosystem within your website that keeps visitors on your pages and increases the possibility of engagement or conversions.
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Page Speed
A website page's loading time is the wait time for an internet user to open a web page. It may be calculated by summing the time it takes to download all non-hidden components.
Page speed is a ranking element, and customers are not willing to wait for a site to load.
You can try to reduce load time by:
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Reducing the number of photos on the page
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File compression.
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Reducing the number of social networking widgets you use.
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Enhancing your images
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Eliminating clutter and making liberal use of white space
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Restricting redirections and HTTP requests improving your server's response time
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Redirects
Redirects are a method of sending visitors and search engines to a different URL from the one they requested.
Redirects will have an impact on your SEO, but whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on a variety of circumstances. Unique URLs are frequently used by search engines to identify them. When Google examines the page and then redirects it, it will try to determine the relevancy of the new page to the original page's keyword.
Make sure there is a link between the old URL and the redirected one, or you may lose SEO rankings.
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Responsive Designs
It is vital to the effectiveness of your SEO in E-Commerce strategy to ensure that your website is not only mobile-friendly but also mobile-responsive.
These days, a lot of people's purchasing is done on their phones. One of the SEO tips for e-commerce website optimization is using a responsive design as it will improve not only user experience but also search results. Google's mobile-first index takes into account mobile friendliness when determining rankings.
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Secure your Site - HTTPs
Site security is critical for e-commerce sites, and there is a strong push in e-commerce search engine optimization for consumers' private information to be kept secure.
As an e-commerce store, you must encrypt the information you receive from your clients. When they enter their credit card and address information, your audience wants to feel safe. You must secure your site in order for customers to continue buying on your website.
You can do so by requesting a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate.
An SSL certificate encrypts data on your website so that malicious users cannot read it. It also adds HTTPS (rather than insecure HTTP) before the domain name of your website. Secure sites will outrank unsecured sites, therefore securing your website is critical for improving your e-commerce SEO strategy.
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Canonicals
Canonical URLs or tags assist your website by indicating to Google which version of a URL you wish to see in search results.
Keywords can appear in many URLs within similar subjects or pages. Your SEO results may suffer if the master page is not tagged, as Google will penalise you for using repetitive search phrases.
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Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that contains information about your website's pages, videos and other resources. The sitemap essentially tells Google which pages on your site are significant, helping them to explore your site more efficiently.
Sitemaps are an underappreciated yet critical component of your SEO strategy. You can direct potential readers and viewers to certain sites by directing search engines where to look. This raises their ranks and allows you to control site traffic.
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Schema Markup
Schema markups are HTML tags that offer additional details about the content of online pages. Using these markups can help your e-commerce SEO efforts.
Schema markup results in the creation of rich snippets. These permit search engines to present more details about specific items in search results.
By presenting numerous types of information, they also help customers find what they're looking for simply and quickly.
There are numerous varieties of rich snippets, including:
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Product markup snippets.
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FAQs snippets.
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Review snippets.
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Backlinks
Link building is an SEO ranking component. Quality links indicate to Google that your site is credible. Backlinks also have an impact on how your website ranks for specific keywords.
Backlink building as a part of SEO for e-commerce websites does not have to be complex. Guest posting on blogs relating to your niche is a simple, white-hat method of link-building. Simply send an email to the proprietors of the blogs you're interested in with three or more potential guest post ideas.
E-Commerce SEO Best Practices
Now that you know the strategies that you have to follow for your own E-Commerce SEO, we have a surprise in store for you. Of course, since you have read so far, we will give some of the E-Commerce SEO Best Practices that you can leverage to make your website rank higher.
Avoid Cluttered URLs
A URL is an address that a website visitor uses to access a page on your e-commerce business. A lot of information can fit into a tiny space in a URL. They can contain the names of categories, products, file kinds, or even actions (such as "_blank" to open a new link in a new window).
According to SEO standards, URLs should be as clear as feasible and contain keywords relevant to what shows on the final page. Also, it is easier to share products on social media and other websites when your e-commerce site has a straightforward URL structure, and it can boost e-commerce SEO by providing more relevant data to search engines.
URLs should be as legible and understandable as possible for the greatest outcomes.
Here's an example of something NOT to do: https://www.example.com/article-about-what-is-a-space/
This URL structure would be far superior: https://www.example.com/what-is-space
From an E-Commerce perspective, you should avoid URLs that look like this –
http://www.websiteurl.com/cat?=328/product?=237828/main.html
Instead, you should always have URLs that are like this –
http://www.websiteurl.com/teas/rose-green-tea
Use Alt Texts in Images
Alt text is a line of text that can be utilised in a variety of ways. It can be displayed in place of an image (for example, if the link is broken), or it may be displayed when the user's cursor hovers over the picture in some browsers.
Alt text is another technique to incorporate vital keywords into your website. A search engine has no means of knowing what your photos are or why they are on a given page when it crawls a website.
This also adds context to the page; for example, a page with a rose green tea image on it is likely to contain content about rose green tea.
Use Important Keywords
The use of important keywords is the essence of SEO for E-Commerce strategy. Include important keywords in your product name, description, URL, metadata, content, alt texts, and so on but make sure you avoid keyword stuffing as it is pretty annoying for the user and they might end up exiting your page thus increasing the bounce rate which would affect your rankings.
Create Eye Catchy Meta Data
In search results, meta descriptions appear beneath your title tags. They provide a brief summary of 160 characters of what customers will find on your website.
Meta descriptions are crucial in giving shoppers information about your page and convincing them to click on your link. Attractive meta descriptions will drive visitors to your online store.
Remember to add your targeted keywords in the description. It will assist both Google and searchers in determining whether or not your page is relevant to the search results.
Avoid Duplicate Content
If you are a retailer rather than a producer and sell products manufactured by other companies online, you most likely obtained product descriptions directly from the manufacturer. While it is ideal to include as much information about your products as possible, you should do everything possible to avoid repeating any product descriptions or product copy that has been provided to you.
Duplicate content dispersed across a few pages is unlikely to harm anyone. However, as search engine algorithms evolve, more and more websites are being penalised for content duplication. To prevent harming your rankings, strive to write new, distinctive descriptions for each item you sell.
Best E-Commerce SEO Tools you can use
If you want your SEO strategy for e-commerce to thrive, you must use the proper tools. The following are some of the most useful e-commerce SEO tools for learning how to optimise your on-page and off-page SEO for increased rankings in SERPs.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is used to monitor website performance and gather visitor data. It can assist you in determining the top sources of user traffic, determining the success of your marketing activities and campaigns, tracking goal completions (such as purchases and adding products to carts), discovering patterns and trends in user engagement and obtaining other visitor information such as demographics. Google Analytics is frequently used by small and medium-sized retail websites to acquire and analyse various customer behaviour analytics, which may be utilised to boost marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and better retain customers.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free platform that allows anyone with a website to analyse and optimise their organic presence. This includes viewing your referring domains, mobile performance, rich snippets and the most popular queries and pages. Information regarding search appearance, search traffic, technical status updates, crawl statistics and further instructional resources are among the other features.
Google Keyword Planner
Google's Keyword Planner is intended to assist you in researching keywords for use in Search Network campaigns. It's a useful free tool that lets you find keywords linked to your business and monitor how many monthly searches they get. You can utilise this information to intelligently choose the keywords for which you wish to rank. Check that your intent matches your goal.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is excellent for detecting site issues such as broken links, missing meta descriptions, and duplicate content. When you detect those issues, make redirects or add missing material to avoid being penalised by search engines. The free version includes many useful functions, but if you have more than 500 URL extensions, you might consider upgrading to the premium.
Ahrefs
Optimize and track your e-commerce SEO strategy using Ahrefs. It's excellent for locating backlinks to your site as well as those of your competitors. If someone has connected to your competitor's site, you might be able to get a connection to your own site by emailing that person and building a relationship. Offer to link to his or her site, then recommend one of your high-quality posts that his or her audience might be interested in.
Moz
MOZ is an excellent tool for tracking and locating keywords, identifying link-building opportunities, and analysing competitors' page data. There are free and paid versions, allowing you to choose how much power you require to leverage your e-commerce SEO campaign.
SEMrush
This tool provides a detailed analysis of the value and search volume of a keyword (national and global). It also displays the intent, number of results, potential SERP elements, and level of competition, as well as related keyword inquiries and variations.
Conclusion
Many e-commerce operators want to get right to increasing conversions. That is the correct mindset, but you are one step ahead.
Before you can turn visitors into clients, you must first draw them to your website. Starting with e-commerce SEO positions you for success.
Take a look at our e-commerce SEO checklist:
- Performing the Right Keyword Research
- Competitor Research
- Optimise Product Pages
- Enhance Site Architecture
- Creating Useful Content
- Interlinking
- Page Speed
- Redirects
- Responsive Designs
- Secure your site - HTTPs
- Canonicals
- Sitemaps
- Schema Markup
- Backlinks
There are numerous methods for obtaining visitors, ranging from social media to sponsored advertisements and email. However, search traffic is the only one that is consistent, free, self-sustaining and relatively straightforward to obtain.
Learning the ins and outs of this e-commerce SEO guide can revolutionise your business if you want your site to acquire considerable traffic and the right visitors. A basic SEO strategy for e-commerce can result in massively increased revenues. We hope these E-commerce SEO tips help you in your search engine e-commerce rankings.
FAQs
How is E-Commerce SEO different?
SEO for e-commerce is more than just adding keywords, producing blog posts and gaining links, as opposed to SEO for content-focused websites.
When it comes to e-commerce SEO, there are several areas to focus on, such as
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Expanding the range of product information and materials
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Images on your webpage
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Your home page
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SEO for e-commerce product pages and descriptions.
How costly is SEO for E-Commerce?
SEO for E-Commerce is not really that costly if you compare it with Paid ads and campaigns. However, coming up with a definitive number is going to be difficult as it would depend on a lot of factors such as the size of your site, the number of products, your niche etc.
How to optimize E-Commerce SEO for the Homepage?
You should optimise your homepage thoroughly. The following are the main items you should add and optimise.
Homepage Title Tag - Include your company name as well as the major keyword term you are targeting. This title tag should be no more than 70 characters long.
Homepage Meta Description - The meta description for your homepage is a 160-character description of your company that will appear beneath the title tag in search results. Write it in a way that makes people want to go to your website.
Homepage Content - Try not to overwhelm visitors with too much material. Try including your unique selling proposition and the most important products on the homepage. Cluttered home pages can mislead both visitors and search engines.
How do ratings and reviews affect SEO for E-Commerce sites?
When customers review products, they deliberately or unknowingly mention the brand name multiple times, as well as the purpose of the product, which happens to be a related keyword for the brand. These reviews often have terms that are keywords, such as the product's name, brand, usage, and benefits of utilising it. This improves your brand's online visibility and raises SERP rankings.
Is SEO really important for Ecommerce?
SEO is a must-have for e-commerce websites. Your products must rank higher than your competitors and be displayed correctly so that potential buyers may identify the products they require in the SERPs and choose your site to click on.
