Today, eCommerce has a huge place in customers’ lives, and to reach a wide audience, online efforts are an absolute must.
An eCommerce website provides numerous benefits for businesses and should be considered an essential part of any business plan.
IT can provide a competitive advantage for businesses, as it allows them to offer a wider range of products and services than a brick-and-mortar store. Plus, it helps businesses save on overhead costs, as they do not need to maintain a physical storefront.
So, you can say it is important. But, if you’re online, you also need to improve your visibility to be able to reach all these benefits. If you’re running an online store, then you know that eCommerce SEO strategies are key to your success. Without them, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential traffic and customers.
What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO is the practice of optimizing an online store to rank higher in search engine results pages and thereby drive more traffic and sales.
It’s a complex process that involves both on-page what you do on your website) and off-page ( everything else, e.g., link building) tactics and strategies.
When done correctly, eCommerce SEO can be a powerful tool to attract more visitors, boost conversion rates, and increase sales.
Even if you can get traffic from paid search, ensure that SEO costs much less. Moreover, ad blockers and ad blindness can reduce your paid search results. So, no matter what, you need to optimize for search.
However, because eCommerce SEO is such a vast topic, it can be difficult to know where to start.
This guide will teach you the 10 most effective eCommerce SEO strategies that you can implement right away to improve your website’s visibility and performance in search.
How to Develop an eCommerce SEO Strategy
Before we dive into the eCommerce SEO tactics and strategies that will help you improve your website’s visibility and performance, it’s important to understand how to develop an eCommerce SEO strategy.
Because yes, it seems like a serious challenge and takes time. However, you don’t have to worry about eCommerce SEO because plenty of strategies can help you rank higher on search engines. You just need one good idea and some hard work!
3. Benchmark Against Your Competitors
eCommerce SEO Best Practices
Find the Right Keywords
Keywords have always been the most important part of eCommerce SEO. So, you need to be careful about finding the right keywords.
Your eCommerce SEO strategy starts with finding the right keywords. You want to find ones that have a high search volume but aren’t too competitive.
To do this, you can use a keyword research tools such as:
Both of these tools will show you how many people are searching for a keyword and how competitive it is. The latter is especially important because you don’t want to focus your efforts on keywords that are too difficult to rank for.
You should choose keywords that are relevant to your products.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are phrases that are more specific and usually longer than traditional keywords. They tend to have less competition and may bring in more targeted traffic.
For example, if you sell women’s clothing, a long-tail keyword might be “plus size black dresses for special occasions.” This is more specific than just “black dresses,” so it may be easier to rank for and attract people who are further along in the buying cycle.
Conduct Competitor Research
Conducting a competitor analysis is the second step of eCommerce SEO. Checking what your competitors are doing and where they stand in organic search rankings will give you insights about the trends and allow you to make better decisions for your eCommerce store. There are a few things that you should focus on while conducting a competitor analysis:
- The number of backlinks they have
- The type of content they publish
- Their social media presence
- Their overall website design and user experience
There are various tools like Moz, SEMrush, etc. that will help you conduct a detailed competitor analysis.
Establish an Easy Site Architecture
An eCommerce website should have a well-organized and easy to understand site architecture. A good eCommerce site architecture will help search engine crawlers to easily index your website and also help visitors to easily navigate your website.
Some of the things that you need to keep in mind while creating a site architecture for an eCommerce website are:
- Use breadcrumb navigation on product pages
- Use keyword-rich URLs
- Include links to related products on product pages
- Add a search bar on every page
Focus on On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO has always been important for ranking on SERPs.
For a web page, On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page optimization refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
The on-page SEO of an eCommerce site is similar to that for traditional websites but there are some additional approaches you must keep in mind. For example, product pages need optimization because they rank higher than other parts or sites within the search engine results page (SERP) – this means more traffic and conversions.
Some of the most important On-page SEO techniques for eCommerce websites are:
- Optimizing the meta titles and descriptions
- Using the keyword-rich URLs
- Optimizing the product description
- Optimizing the visuals as well
- Adding Schema Markup
- Having a great linking strategy (both internal and external linking)
Optimize Product Pages
Optimize Your Images
Improve Site Speed
A slower site can cost you a lot of customer base. Life is fast, and people don’t have enough time and patience to wait for your site to load. If your page is slow, they’ll leave it before taking any action. And Google will for sure lower your ranking on SERPs.
So, what should you do?
First, identify your site speed issues. You can do that by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It will give you a report with actionable insights on how to improve your speed.
Here are some general tips:
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Optimize images
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Use browser caching
- Minimize code
Avoid Duplicate Pages and Content
One eCommerce SEO best practice is to avoid duplicate pages and content. It’s so normal that e-commerce sellers republish the same descriptions on every eCommerce platform because they don’t have the resources to produce special content.
You should try to avoid that. You can try to make some changes and publish later.
Also, duplicate page issues can happen if you have products that come in different colors or sizes, for example. You might be tempted to create a separate page for each product variation, but this can actually hurt your SEO because it creates duplicate content.
Instead of creating multiple pages for each product variation, use what’s called canonical tags. These tags tell search engines which page is the “main” page for a product, and they should be used on all similar pages.
Content Does Matter
This is especially true for product pages because they’re what people are looking for when they search for a product.
Your product descriptions should be clear, concise, and informative. They should also use the keywords you’re targeting. You also can share fresh content to attract organic traffic.
You can share:
- How-to content and FAQs
- Product launches
- Testimonials
- Webinars
- Videos
For more ideas, you can check what your competitors are doing.
When you have an idea for content, be sure you create high-quality ones. Be sure that you have a calendar to share them regularly. After all these steps, you also measure results regularly to ensure you get results.
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinking has always been considered the most genuine SEO practice for all websites. For eCommerce SEO, it is even more important. It can create huge traffic to your page.
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They’re important because they show search engines that your site is popular and trustworthy. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better.
To get backlinks, you can reach out to other website owners and ask if they’ll link to your site. You can also participate in forums and comment on blog posts to get your name and website out there. Just make sure you’re leaving helpful comments that contribute to the conversation.
Plus, while building backlinks, always remember that the third-party resource should be authentic and trustworthy. It should be relevant to your niche and you shouldn’t stuff your content with backlinks.