Many search engine optimization specialists bring visitors to your blog or enterprise website. However, search engine optimization is likewise vital for eCommerce sites. If you're lagging at the back of Google's Search Engine Result Page (SERP), then you can additionally be lacking out on sales.

In this article, we will discuss Ecommerce SEO in-depth. We'll discover why search engine optimization is vital for eCommerce success. We'll then proportion 13 recommendations for enhancing your store's search engine optimization, which includes a way to create search-engine-friendly templates in your product pages and product categories. Let's get to work!

What is Ecommerce SEO?

SEO for eCommerce is the process of enhancing your e-commerce website visibility on search engine results pages (SERP) and driving more organic visitors to your Online Store. The Ecommerce SEO procedure typically involves on-page optimization, technical improvements, and fine-tuning your site structure according to your desired SEO Strategy.

Several acquisition channels exist for Ecommerce sites, but SEO is critical to long-term success. Luckily, many approaches help your store rise in search engines. By performing in-depth product-focused keyword research and learning from your competitors, you can execute your Ecommerce SEO strategy in the best possible way.

Why SEO is Important for your Ecommerce Website

Search Engine Optimization is essential for your Ecommerce Store to maximize your profits. Search engines like Google have become an integral part of an online store.

Google Analytics. Log in to the platform of your choice and check out your top traffic sources. Chances are, organic search from Google and other search engines will rank high. In fact, for many Online stores, Google is their primary source of traffic. 

An estimated 40-60 billion searches are performed on Google in the United States each month. Organic search means a vast potential of relevant audience and tons of additional revenue just waiting to be tapped for an Ecommerce store. Over 40% of most stores' revenue can be attributed to organic traffic, and relevant searches influence 39% of online purchases. 

Organic results are also more attractive to users than traditional paid advertising. According to research, 62.2% of Google searches on desktop devices result in organic clicks, while only 2.8% lead to paid clicks. These numbers are similar on mobile, where about 41% of mobile searches result in organic clicks. It is a significant increase over paid advertising, where only 2% of searches result in a paid click. You can expect 20x more traffic opportunities than desktop and mobile Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising offers by focusing on SEO. 

The importance of Ecommerce SEO is undeniable for the success of your online Ecommerce store. If you neglect Ecommerce SEO, you will limit your business growth and profits.

How Does Ecommerce SEO Strategy Work?

Search engines use a mix of crawlers (bots), indexes, and algorithms to see that content deserves the highest spot. To grant your store the most effective probability of ranking high, it's worth exploring the science behind how search engines work.

The method starts with "crawling." this is where search engines send a team of search engine bots that notice new and updated content. That may include a product you've just added to your store or a recent brand new review left by a happy customer. 

The discovered content is then kept in a database called an index. Once your content is in Google's database OR index, it's within the running to look for relevant results. Google will scour its index for appropriate content whenever somebody performs a search. If yours is deemed a decent match for the query, it's possible to be included in the search engine results.

Google arranges its content in a manner designed to resolve the search query as efficiently as possible. This process is understood as ranking. Your page's rankings will confirm wherever they seem in the results. The higher every page ranks, the closer it will appear to the desired number-one spot.

Wherever your store appears in search engine results will enormously impact how much more traffic it receives. Moving up only one spot in Google's search rankings can increase your Click Through Rates (CTRs) by over 53%. It could translate to a significant increase in visits, conversions, and ultimately additional revenue for your ecommerce site. 

What's more, the primary page of Google receives 95% percent of internet traffic, with subsequent pages receiving 5% or less of total organic traffic. Suppose you stood out and launched a successful Ecommerce SEO campaign and managed to attain that profitable number-one spot. In that case, your online store is ten times more likely to receive relevant organic traffic than a page in the tenth spot. That's an advantage well worth pursuing.

13 Key Steps to Initiate Your Ecommerce SEO

As we've seen, Ecommerce SEO is vital for driving traffic and generating sales. If your ecommerce website goes to thrive, it's essential that you just climb the search engine results and get the organic traffic your online store deserves. with that in mind,

let's check out 13 ways in which you'll be able to perform ecommerce SEO.

Step 1: Keyword Research

Conduct Keyword research wherever you determine search terms and phrases that visitors use when finding relevant content to your ecommerce store. It includes your services and products. Keyword research is vital for any productive SEO strategy. The phrases you identify can inform all of your succeeding optimization efforts throughout this step. 

There are two basic categories of keywords strategy: 

Informational: Visitors use search terms to get informative content on search engines, similar to how-tos and tutorials. If your ecommerce site features a blog, then these are the terms you'll be trying to target and rank to get maximum visitors to your site. 

Product/Transactional: These are terms used by visitors searching for an exact product on search engines. For an ecommerce website, these search terms can form the core of your keyword strategy. As we've seen, SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic and generating organic sales. If your Ecommerce website is going to thrive, you must get your Ecommerce website to the top of the search engine results and get the relevant organic traffic your store deserves.

Process of Finding the Relevant Keywords

To begin Ecommerce keyword research, you'll need to analyze the most popular search terms used by people searching for your products.

You'll be able to find keywords by using Google automated suggestions and 'people also ask' features. These provide helpful indications of the most popular keywords. You'll be able also to take a glance at your thriving competitors to see which techniques they're using for their SEO strategy and simulate them.

For ecommerce searches, Amazon is as famous as Google. You'll be able to learn by analyzing Amazon's keyword strategies. Jump onto Amazon and enter keywords that represent your products. Amazon will then create suggestions support every phrase:

These suggestions are an excellent starting point for your SEO strategy, as they're terms your customers are probably to be using. You'll also witness that these suggestions tend to be long-tail keywords, which may be less competitive.

Alternatively, you'll be able to explore Amazon's search suggestions using a standalone solution such as Keyword Tool Dominator and Google keyword planner.

Keyword Research Tools

For Ecommerce keyword research, Amazon could be an excellent place to start; however, it isn't the only place wherever you'll perform keyword research. There are tons of top-grade solutions out there that may help you out. Some advanced tools to get started with include Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Keyword Everywhere.

The SEMrush visibility management medium also provides keyword analysis solutions. You'll perform a quick analysis using Keyword Overview, whereas Keyword Magic is ideal for identifying long-tail keywords:

You'll then use Ads History to spot whether competitors previously used these keywords in paid searches. If a search term appeared in an ad, you'd read the number of traffic generated from that promotion. It can assist you in gauging the amount of interest in the keywords you're considering targeting for your Ecommerce SEO.

Finally, you can use Keyword difficulty to analyze how difficult it would be to surpass the pages currently presented for each keyword. When determining which keywords to target, you must focus on "untapped keywords" wherever possible. These are keywords with a decent search volume and low competition and can deliver more organic traffic and the best return On Investment (ROI).

Precisely what a decent search volume is can vary depending on your industry. However, be cautious of keywords that get a meager amount of searches. If nobody uses specific keywords, it doesn't matter how well that term converts.

Step 2: Analyzing Your Competitors

The Ecommerce world is very competitive. However, this can be a decent thing, as you'll learn from similar businesses. Competitor analysis involves analyzing your competitors' SEO strategies. You'll then identify the Keyword ideas working techniques and reverse-engineer them to use for your store.

There are many ways to perform competitor research; however, one of the most effective is keyword analysis, also called keyword gap analysis. It is where you use a tool similar to Moz's Keyword Explorer to spot the terms that your competitors are ranking highly for:

Then you'll analyze those high-performing keywords and identify any relevant to your business. You can specialize in keywords wherever your competitions outperform you by a significant margin for best results.

Another technique is to spot competitor content that has generated plenty of backlinks. Links from third-party websites can considerably improve your search engine rankings. You'll identify your competitor's most well-liked and frequently-linked content using a tool similar to Link Explorer.

Enter your competitor's domain, and open the total pages tab. This report will show all of the domain's linked URLs. Then you can put these top-performing URLs into a keyword analysis tool, such as Moz's Ranking Keywords, to examine which ones attracted the most external links. It can be helpful information for your Ecommerce SEO strategy.

Step 3: Optimizing Your Product Pages

Once you've performed your keyword research, you'll be able to begin to use this data to optimize your on-page SEO. It is where you improve your homepage and inner pages to help them rank higher in search engines similar to Google.

Product Description

The chances are high that your ecommerce website features an extensive range of category pages and product pages. The typical product page contains several elements; however, the description tends to be the foremost text-heavy element. It means it offers the most opportunities to optimize on-page SEO.

If you're using the popular WooCommerce platform for Ecommerce websites, then you can define two separate product descriptions:

Short product descriptions: Most WooCommerce themes show this description right away once the product title and alongside its images.

Long product descriptions: This typically seems below the short description.

Whereas these texts should offer relevant info to shoppers, they're also an excellent place to incorporate keywords. Wherever possible, try using your target keywords a minimum of once in each of your short and long descriptions (but confirm to include them organically).

Heading (H1 Tag):

When it comes to headings, it's essential to ensure that every product page options one primary keyword in the title, marked with an H1 tag. Search engine bots can use heading tags to spot your product page's most vital content. Putting multiple H1s on the same page will confuse these bots and negatively impact your Ecommerce SEO.

Images

Most product pages will feature a minimum of one image. For an additional SEO boost, it's vital to optimize the alt text and file names related to each image.

Alt text can provide Google with valuable info about an image's content. It will increase your probability of ranking product pictures in Google Image Search Engine. You can change your image alt text by editing the photo and using the alt Text box:

It's also a decent plan to use relevant keywords for your image file names. For example, rather than "product-inventory-1423.jpg", you could label an image "red-laptop-case.jpg."

Step 4: Optimizing your Ecommerce Site Snippets

A search snippet is a single search result in a set of search results representing your Ecommerce website in Google's search results. We tend to recommend using a dedicated SEO plugin to optimize the following:

Meta Title Tag

The meta title, also called the title tag, could be a key indicator to Google regarding the page's content. The proper title is informative and attention-grabbing, encouraging individuals to click on your link within the search results. The meta title doesn't essentially need to be constant because of the product or page title.

Meta Description

The description should be short, concise, and compelling. There's no need to include keywords here; however, the few sentences used for the meta descriptions should be relevant to the search. To encourage individuals to click on your search results, you will focus on incentives like low costs or free shipping.

URL Slug (Permalink)

It is a different way to feed search engines necessary contextual info about a page's contents. For Ecommerce websites, the auto-generated URL slugs will be complex, significantly when products are nested in multiple sub-categories. It's a decent plan to shorten your URLs to make them as concise as possible.

Structured Data (Schema Markup)

It's also a decent plan to explore the worlds of rich snippets. These snippets present richer search results on a Google results page. They will seem like reviews, star ratings, opening times, recipes, events, etc.

Rich snippets are schema markup – HTML code that website operations can add to the page's existing code. If you're already using Elementor, you'll use the star rating widget, which comes with pre-built rich snippets and Google structured markup capabilities. 

Rich snippets don't seem to be a right away SEO ranking factor. Regardless, they can help your ecommerce site stand out in Google's search results, which may boost your CTRs. If you're using WooCommerce, this widget can automatically add some structured information for products.

Step 5: Optimizing Your Product Categories and Tag Archives

Optimizing your Ecommerce product pages could be an excellent start. However, it's also an ideal plan to look at your category pages and tags closely. Making unique SEO descriptions for each category page and product page helps Google grasp each page's rank appropriately.

you'll be able to write a unique SEO title and meta descriptions for each Ecommerce category page or tag using a plugin similar to Yoast SEO. in the WordPress dashboard, navigate to either product > Categories or product > Tags:

You'll be able to open the tag or category pages for editing then. Next, scroll right down to the Yoast SEO box and create your descriptions. to form these as SEO-friendly as possible, we suggest including relevant search terms OR keywords, including long-tail variations.

Step 6: Consider Updating and Modifying Your Breadcrumbs

A breadcrumb or breadcrumb path is a line of text, usually placed at the top of a page. It indicates the user's location within your store:

Many different types of Ecommerce websites use breadcrumbs as a navigational aid. However, they're significantly helpful for ecommerce stores, wherever products are often nested inside a hierarchy of product categories and sub-categories.

As a Directional tool, breadcrumbs help improve the User experience (UX). When customers enjoy their time in your Ecommerce store, they're more likely to continue browsing. It will increase key SEO metrics, like session duration and range of pages visited. It may also directly translate into sales because the more product a customer views, the more likely they will purchase.

Breadcrumbs help Google perceive and crawl your Ecommerce store, which might improve your Ecommerce SEO efforts. Google will display breadcrumbs on its search page. It can help potential visitors understand the contents of your webpage before clicking on it.

WooCommerce has its breadcrumbs functionality. However, you can get control over your breadcrumbs by using PHP filters. You can also manually change WooCommerce's native breadcrumbs using an SEO plugin.

For example, Yoast SEO will customize the contents of each product's page auto-generated breadcrumbs. To do this, From your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Yoast SEO > Search appearance > Breadcrumbs:

Yoast SEO additionally adds JSON-LD structured data. It will increase the probabilities that Google can feature your breadcrumbs in its search engine.

Step 7: Update and Test Your robots.txt File

Your website's robots.txt file provides directions to the crawlers that are responsible for looking out the web and recording info regarding its content. You'll be able to use this file to specify that components of your website these crawlers can access and which parts they must ignore.

If your robots.txt file is organized incorrectly, then it can prevent Google from crawling and indexing specific product pages, or maybe your entire ecommerce store. Even simple formatting errors can contain a number of your pages from being indexed correctly, having a fatal impact on your SEO.

To make sure specific search engines that can genuinely see your products, you should ensure that your robots.txt file is designed correctly. You'll be able to take a look at this exploitation of Google's robots.txt Tester tool.

If this tool identifies a problem with your robots.txt file, you can edit it using a Yoast SEO plugin. From your WordPress dashboard, you can navigate to SEO > Tools and select File Editor:

Yoast SEO will show your robots.txt file, and you can edit it or upload an alternate file as needed.

Step 8: Switch to Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

Since you'll be handling payments through your ecommerce site, it's crucial to provide a secure connection using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). HTTPS is a protocol that encrypts the information sent between your internet server and the customer's browser.

Switch to HTTPS can help keep your customers safe. It can even improve your SEO, as Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal: "For now it's only a very light-weight signal….Though over time, we may decide to strengthen it, as a result of we'd like to suggest all website owners switch from HTTP to HTTPS, So everybody stay safe on the web."

When analyzing a million Google results, SEO specialist and founding father of Backlinko Brian Dean confirmed that change to HTTPS will positively impact your online store search engine rankings. 

Therefore, it's a decent plan to verify that your ecommerce store uses HTTPS. If it isn't, we'd highly suggest making the switch because it will almost certainly have a positive impact on your store's search rankings (and keep your customers' transactions safe).

Step 9: Test Your Online Store Performance

It's also a decent idea to explore the worlds of rich snippets. These snippets present richer search results on a Google results page. They can seem as reviews, recipes, pricing, star ratings, events, etc.

Rich snippets utilize schema markup – HTML code which site processes can boost the page's existing code. If you're already using Elementor, you'll use the star rating widget, which comes with pre-built rich snippets and Google structured markup capabilities.

Rich snippets are not a natural SEO ranking aspect. However, they can facilitate your ecommerce website to stand out in Google's results, which might boost your CTRs. If you're using WooCommerce, this widget can automatically add some structured information for products.

when it comes to testing your Ecommerce website performance, we'd suggest the following tools:

Google Page Speed Insights: This platform assesses how well your store performs on each desktop and mobile device. It'll then supply suggestions and best practices for increasing your website's page speed and overall performance.

GTmetrix: This platform provides precise, real-time performance tracking. The in-depth metrics contain a visual representation of how every single asset on your website loads, as well as your CSS, HTML, JavaScript, pictures, plugins, and third-party content. GTmetrix also provides suggestions for boosting your store's performance. 

It's a sensible idea to test your store daily. It helps you promptly identify and resolve any issues before degrading your SEO. It also suggests that you'll continuously refine your store's performance — and by extension, its rankings.

Step 10: Consider Using a Third Party SEO Plugin

As we've mentioned, Yoast SEO is an excellent choice for WooCommerce stores. Better, there is a dedicated Yoast WooCommerce SEO extension. This extension counts some valuable options designed explicitly for Ecommerce sites, together with rich ecommerce details for specific social media platforms. It will be helpful if your products acquire many shares on social websites.

The WooCommerce extension also cleanses up your XML sitemap. It removes irrelevant content, which is helpful since the WooCommerce platform will have a name for making duplicate content.

For example, all the parameters that your consumers use to filter your products can produce extra URLs that feature duplicate content. You don't need Google focusing its resources on indexing these pages once it can be concentrating on the content that you just genuinely want it to rank.

Another famous SEO plugin for Ecommerce sites is Rank Math. This SEO tool has built-in compatibility with Elementor, which is nice if you use Elementor WooCommerce Builder to design your store.

Step 11: Creating an SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is creating different styles of relevant content, including blog posts, videos, and infographics. This content can attract additional traffic to your store and ultimately drive conversions.

The key to a productive content strategy is to provide your readers with valuable information, mainly if it helps them resolve a relevant problem. It creates a way of trust that first-time buyers may need before sharing their credit card details with an online store.

By publishing helpful content daily, you'll be able to build a long-run connection with your customers. You can also boost a sense of brand loyalty that may transform one-time purchasers into loyal repeat customers.

For the most effective results, it's a decent idea to identify the challenges your customers are currently experiencing. You can then produce content that facilitates them to overcome those problems. It may help to interview your audience about the issues they're facing and the topics they're interested in. you can then produce a content calendar tailored to their actual needs.

Your previous analysis can also come in useful. Ideally, you must have high-value keyword data relevant to your ecommerce website. You'll be able to build some of your content around those terms.

You can also use your competitor analysis to influence your content marketing strategy. For example, if a competitor's post gained a vast number of backlinks, then you might create content that covers the same issue. You can then reach out to the third-party websites connected to the present content to see whether they're interested in featuring yours instead.

Ultimately, when it's time to publish your content, try to include a minimum of one relevant call To Action (CTA). It can be essential for converting traffic into paying customers.

Step 12: Acquire High Quality and Valuable Backlinks

Link building plays an essential role in Off-Page SEO. When an external website links to your online store, search engines count that as an endorsement of your store's content. Every external link will pass authority, relevancy, and trust to your site. You'll be able to measure the strength of your backlink profile by checking the Domain Authority and Page Authority in a tool similar to Ahrefs – remember that these are private metrics that Google doesn't use, so they should only be used as an alternative reference point to analyze your Ecommerce SEO performance.

The most helpful external links come from sources that Google trusts. It would possibly include established websites with an excessive following and an extended history of obeying Google's guidelines. The source should even be topically related to your website's content. For example, if your electronics store acquires a link from a blog discussing the simplest smart TVs of 2022, then this can be great for your Ecommerce SEO.

The most effective way to link building is to create valuable content. It might involve creating long and in-depth posts or concentrating on content forms that attract many external links. According to a study by BuzzSumo, 75 % of all online content gets zero links, while some sorts of content are greatly preferred. Popular backlinks include blog posts, quizzes, videos, infographics, social profiles, and how-to articles.

It may also help to execute a link gap analysis. It is where you identify links your competitors have acquired relevant to your online store. You can use Link Explorer's tool to examine domains and URLs that link to your competitors but not to you. It will give you a list of sites to focus on as a part of your external link-building strategy.

Step 13: Importance of Internal Linking

Search engine optimization specialists put a lot of emphasis on external links, but internal links also can boost your SEO. While backlinks are hyperlinks among different websites, an internal link is a hyperlink between other pages of the same website.

Although they're often neglected, internal backlinks can have a tremendous effect on SEO. Research shows that session duration and the number of pages visited per session are the essential ranking factors. Internal backlinks can improve each metric by helping visitors find related content.

Additionally, internal backlinks help define your site architecture – i.e., the connection between the pages on your website and where they fit within the website's overall layout. Internal pages of your Ecommerce site with lots of internal backlinks will be seen as more favorable. Likewise, pages with internal backlinks from high-value internal pages, including the homepage, are seen as focal to your website.

The significant factor about internal links is that you're in control. It means you can pick your very own anchor text. Ideally, the anchor text should contain keywords you need the web page to rank.

Anchor text links can also be branded or unbranded; it includes your store's name and helps enhance visibility.

After including your internal links, it's an excellent idea to monitor the health of those URLs. A study of over 450 million net pages discovered that 80 percent of the websites had broken links. It will negatively affect the consumer experience and harm your SEO efforts.

You can use a Sitelink health checking tool, such as Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to recognize unhealthy link behavior, including broken links. After locating broken links, you can either update them, set up a redirect, or remove it entirely.

Optimizing Organic Traffic Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) involves increasing the proportion of visitors who convert to your website. For ecommerce websites, this generally consists in transforming visitors into paying customers.

As with a physical storefront, You will get many people through the door. However, if most of those visitors are content to browse without ever making a purchase, your business will struggle to turn a profit. By focusing on Conversion Rate optimization, on the other hand, you can get a lot of customers from the same amount of traffic.

A productive CRO strategy involves making the purchasing method frictionless. It's a sensible idea to use tracking tools to map buyers' journeys through your Ecommerce website. You can then concentrate on refining that path. It usually involves providing a precise sales funnel, from when the visitor arrives on your website right through to when they complete the checkout process.

To provide a far better purchasing experience for your site visitors, you can also offer multiple payment gateways. It lets buyers select how they want to pay. Wherever possible, it's also a decent idea to grant customers the option to check out without making an account on your online store.

To provide a seamless customer experience, it may help conduct customer surveys and experiment with the various call to action (CTA's). Every website is unique, so it's always a decent idea to put your theories to the test rather than guess what your customers will respond positively.

Analyzing Your Ecommerce SEO Strategy's Success

SEO optimization isn't a one-time task. Search engines like Google are notorious for changing their algorithms over time. If you want to keep up your search position, then be ready to observe your website's performance and refine your SEO consequently.

You may also add content to your website to boost your Ecommerce SEO. It may include new products or blog posts that you generate as a part of your content marketing strategy. It may help Google perceive and rank this new content, and it's a wise move to perform SEO optimization on every piece of fresh content you publish.

You can additionally monitor your SEO using tools similar to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. In particular, we'd suggest paying careful attention to traffic numbers and time spent in your store. You can use these metrics to spot and improve problems. For example, an increased volume of traffic but a low percentage of repeat visitors could indicate that your online store is struggling to hold customer interest in the long run.

Boost Your Sales Through Ecommerce SEO Strategy

If your product pages and category pages aren't ranking highly on Google's results page, then you may be missing out on conversions. By following our SEO Tips, you can achieve the first page rankings and even score that preferred number-one spot.

By conducting comprehensive keyword research and learning from your competitors, you can create your SEO strategy off to a robust start. You can then initiate on-page optimization of your product pages to help them rise in search engines, using techniques like snippets and breadcrumbs. Finally, you can increase critical metrics with an effective content strategy, including session duration and the number of product pages visited.

Let us know If you have any questions about using our Ecommerce SEO tips to drive more organic traffic to your ecommerce store? Contact us now !!