Driving traffic is a primary concern for every eCommerce business. However, how can you attract visitors to your online store without incurring significant costs on advertising and marketing? The answer lies in leveraging eCommerce SEO strategies.

Harnessing eCommerce SEO strategies involves optimizing your website to align with search engine standards, which includes updating your website content to match search queries from prospective customers.

Store owners’ profits, brand awareness, and site visitors improve with the implementation of SEO. However, alterations in search engine algorithms pose unforeseen challenges, rendering search optimization a dynamic endeavor.

What is eCommerce SEO?

SEO eCommerce pertains to specific alterations carried out in an online shop to improve its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing using organic methods. This makes it easier for shoppers to find your website, enhancing your SEO visibility and boosting site traffic without the need for paid advertising.

Tasks used to improve ecommerce SEO include:

Conducting comprehensive keyword research
Optimizing category and product pages for keywords
Enhancing website structure and navigation
Writing and publishing quality website content
Securing backlinks from other websites

Why Is SEO Important for Ecommerce Websites?

SEO is crucial for ecommerce websites because it greatly aids in driving additional traffic and boosting sales. If your online store appears towards the top of the electronic listings, you are likely to attract attention from a greater number of people. In turn, this can help you gain more customers.

Optimizing ecommerce SEO improves your business’s online visibility and trustworthiness. It enables you to:

Access your target audience without any expenditure on advertisement
Establish authority since people trust organic results much more than paid ones
Maintain a market advantage over other unoptimized online stores

Let’s now take a look at the best ecommerce SEO practices, which will help increase traffic to your online store.

Creating a successful e-commerce SEO campaign

If you’re not on the top of the search results page and want to improve your ranking on Google, here are five steps to get you started.

1. Ecommerce keyword research

Any SEO strategy starts with a minimum of defined terms and is developed by first selecting the most valuable keywords relevant to your business. This can be addressed through eCommerce keyword research, which can be conducted in a number of ways.

How can I rank my Shopify store for ecommerce SEO keywords? Strive for a blend of commercial and informational keywords. You start by figuring out which keywords people are using, then move to the next stage.

Bloggers and guides target more keywords that provide answers, explanations, and guides. To capture at least a bit of the traffic coming to their stores, Shopify stores and related ecommerce sites have blogs. They also target buying intent keywords like “raincoats for dogs.” Best SEO practices suggest that starting with, Shopify store SEO keywords is best.

Informational keywords are just one category of SEO keywords. As the name implies, these keywords provide information and answers, describe things, and give step-by-step suggestions. These keywords are at the heart of content-heavy sites and blogs. On-page SEO has to ensure that these keywords are present on the page.

2. Work with On-Page SEO

Everyone likes working with the things they love, and that is exactly what makes on-page optimization such an enjoyable task. Structuring the copy of your web page or your title tags, like meta descriptions and headers, into a format that is more likely to rank is the goal of optimization.

For example, compilers of content on topics of interest usually come up with a list of ten or more keywords they set out to promote in one go. Depending on the depth of work involved with keywords, this would require a few hundred keywords to achieve results and this would prove valuable.

Before optimizing a given web page, you will want to have a primary keyword and several supporting keywords along with LSI terms and other qualifiers that relate to the keywords. Including these terms helps improve search results. An attention-grabbing title, meta descriptions, and URL can influence a user’s decision to click on a result.

3. Technical SEO

Unlike the other methods, technical SEO does not improve content for the user directly. No shopper will notice the work you have done, but you can be sure that your website has crawl optimization, ideal site speed, and mobile optimization. This work allows for:

Improved engagement, as your website is fast and easy to get
Increased organic traffic due to ease of access for crawlers

Some ways to improve your technical SEO for eCommerce include the following:

Building correct internal links with menu structures.
Submitting the sitemap to the Google Search Console.
Image optimization for quick loading times.

4. Link building

One of the oldest components of the Google algorithm is PageRank. It’s an algorithm looking for understanding the quality of a web page by how many links arrive on the page from different web pages.

Linking to a page increases its quality score based on the number and caliber of links connecting to it. New websites with few external links and backlinks tend to have a low authority score on search engines. This can be improved over time; however, faster backlinks from other authoritative sites will elevate your ranking in the eyes of Google faster.

Government and respected sites like .com, .gov, and .edu are the most beneficial as they raise authority with their backlinks. Links from well-known websites in your industry are also incredibly beneficial.

It is best to implement a partnership strategy when it comes to building backlinks. Identify what content can be developed that will serve as a value-adding piece for other websites. Usually, if you develop something useful to others, that content gets cited.

Guest posts

Having guest authors can help sow backlinks into their writings as long as the content aligns with the needs and interests of the audience. Use Ahrefs to run an ecommerce keyword research analysis to find backlinks that accept guest posts within your niche.

Press Mentions

You can also create backlinks to your ecommerce store using press mentions. Creating a press list or hiring a PR is costly, so as a simple growth hack anyone can do, building this kind of list can be easy.

Once you sign up for Help A Reporter Out or Help a B2B Writer, you will receive a daily reporter request digest sent directly to your email. If a lead suits your brand, reach out to the email address and pitch the story. If you are able to secure an interview, do remember to request that they give you a backlink to your website.

5. Blogging

This is a type of content marketing strategy that includes creating a blog for your website. To properly execute this, make sure to use on-page and technical SEO strategies in order to improve your site’s visibility on the web. Doing this will help you gain the trust of search engines, hence ranking your site for keywords relevant to the interests and needs of your audience.

In a blog’s SEO long-term content strategy, every single post published has the power to:

Strengthen your reputation as a credible source
Boost authority metrics of your site
Enhance further discovery through organic searches

Let’s say you are starting a new business that sells running gear. You want to make sure your prospective customers know how to use your products, help them solve their running and fitness issues, and use your products more effectively. If you wish to be discovered on search engines like Google, then blogging is the way to achieve that.

Blogging is one of the most vital marketing tools and having a good blog post does help your store gain an ample amount of original content. As your content is being discovered by a larger number of people, it helps your standing as a sociable and credible source of information. Which, in other words, will help you rank higher.

Ecommerce businesses are faced with the challenge when it comes to blogging. They struggle the most because blogging requires time, resources, and effort. Sprinkling random blog posts every month won’t optimize your site’s traffic.

Nonetheless, numerous e-commerce companies make use of blogs as a marketing channel. For instance, Au Lit Fine Linens, a retailer, sells everything, including luxury sheets, pillows, bath linens, and more. The brand has a blog, Between the Sheets, which aims to provide helpful articles on how readers can improve sleep quality.

6. Ecommerce SEO & Development

When building an ecommerce store, scalability is one of the primary focus areas. This is to say that if your site is starting out with a mere few dozen products but plans to have hundreds or thousands on the same eCommerce platform, you need to ensure that your website is able to adapt and scale with you as you grow. Structural decisions have major eCommerce SEO consequences.

Factors such as your selected eCommerce platform, the way you design your website’s database and ERP, your choice of hosting solution, and others have an important impact on the degree of scalability you can achieve. If you do not have the skills, time, and resources to make these critical decisions on your own, you should definitely hire an eCommerce consulting firm before you progress too far into the process.

One primary goal of any eCommerce site needs to be to make navigating from the homepage to checkout as seamless as possible. The average website user should be able to travel from the homepage to their preferred products within two to three clicks.

With that said, they should plan the user flow and reduce the number of clicks required to reach the user’s desired products. Users should be able to efficiently sort, filter, and browse all product listing categories and pages. Streamlined browsing and filtering required on category pages does not end there; the entire checkout process also needs to be refined after a product is added to the shopping cart.

Just like physical stores facilitate retail shopping, every eCommerce store should facilitate purchasing at every level.

Harnessing The Power of Ecommerce SEO Tools

Avada SEO & Image Optimizer

With Avada Image Optimizer and SEO, e-commerce stores can leverage all the SEO tools offered by Avada to rank higher than their competitors. Compressing images, optimizing site speed, schema markup, and other features of Avada SEO keep your site picking up traffic. Customer support is available 24/7.

SEOAnt

SEOAnt is a free tool that allows you to run various SEO checkup reports, fix broken links, and optimize images. You can also take advantage of their AI feature for generating meta and alt text.

Google Analytics

You are going to use Google Analytics if you own a website, and with good reason. This free SEO tool offers tracking and reporting services when it comes to website traffic, giving you insight on how to better your customers, store SEO, and marketing ROI. Shopify store owners can connect Google Analytics with Shopify Analytics to pick and track specific eCommerce data.

Ahrefs

As an eCommerce marketing professional, you have probably already used Ahrefs and seen it in action in this post, and there is a reason why it is so well-known. It’s one of the most powerful sounds, shown by the number of domains and keywords under its name, the one that helps professionals create SEO campaigns, pushing thecompany to the top of Google.

When researching different SEO tools, many of you will stumble upon other companies that offer SEO software like Moz and Semrush, which are direct competitors of Ahrefs.

Utilize Ahrefs to evaluate a website’s backlink profile, keyword positions, and general SEO capabilities. It can also help you perform keyword research for Google, Amazon, and YouTube.

Semrush Position Tracking

The position tracking tool provides insight into whether or not your ecommerce SEO strategies are resulting in ranking increases. You can quickly see how your rankings have changed over time. And what keywords have seen a rise or fall in visibility?

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a no-cost resource that allows you to monitor organic traffic, detect and resolve site problems, and check your site’s indexation status. This is very beneficial for spotting technical issues.

Best Practices for eCommerce SEO

1. Focus on product- and service-related SEO keywords

To optimize your product details for both customers and search engines requires researching ecommerce keywords that describe your products and industry topics. Do ensure that your measurements, colors, prices, and sizes, along with other relevant descriptors, are clearly and readily available to users at a glance.

If your website gets traffic from various areas, consider if you need to put measurements in standard, metric, or both forms. Verify that product images are accurate, as referenced, to the color and size of physical items. Some retailers do not show the prices of their products openly until a user adds the product to their cart.

This may be due to special sales or simply because the retailer is trying to circumvent a manufacturer’s minimum advertised pricing policy. While hiding prices may not affect SEO directly, it does affect the product page. If a shopper cannot see the pricing details on the product page, chances are they will leave within seconds.

This has been proven to increase bounce rate, which we discuss in the next section. Always strive to be as current as possible with the product details. If the manufacturer has made new info accessible to you, do your utmost to incorporate it. Not only is it helpful for shoppers, but it increases keyword density on your page, which inevitably improves your ranking.

2. Develop with the customer’s eye

Your website and product pages should enhance the shopping experience, not take away from it. If a shopper has difficulty gauging the usability of your website or is forced to use an unreliable search function, they are most likely going to get very annoyed and leave regardless of the awesome value you offer on goods or services.

An effective design can also have positive changes on SEO. If a search engine scans your site and finds that there is a disproportionate number of visitors to your page compared to the time spent on it, which indicates they are accessing the page only to leave immediately, your rankings are likely to drop. A well-designed website will reduce the bounce rate and keep visitors on more pages, even if they are not able to find what they are looking for right away.

The menus and navigation options of your eCommerce website should be intuitive so that visitors easily know what they will see when they click a link. You should limit the use of images as well because higher load times can make impatient shoppers click the back button. Load time is also a ranking factor. So keeping pages loading as fast as possible is always beneficial.

If you are designing a new website and don’t know where to begin, spend some time browsing through your favorite websites and take notes. What do you like about their layout? What do you not like? This way, you will understand what your customers want to see when they visit your online store.

3. Adding alt texts to images

When it comes to adding images to websites through a CMS or HTML, many users are familiar with the concept of alt text. In this instance, alt text refers to alternate text, which has several applications. Almost all browsers can display a line of text instead of an image when the picture is broken. Some browsers can also display the text when they hover the pointer over the image.

When it comes to adding alt texts, it is yet another way to optimize your website for important search keywords. Websites are usually crawled by a search engine and there is no way the engine is able to see what images are or why they are located on a specific page. The alternate text, however, is able to inform search engines that the picture depicts a lawnmower. It also provides further context relevant to the page, where an image of a lawnmower hints towards its contextual content.

Avoid situations where alt text may not be active, such as showcasing a product image with Flash. Even with notable keywords on a product or category page, alt text adds context, which helps search engines understand the images on the website and may enable them to be featured in image searches linked to those keywords.

For individuals who are blind or deal with difficulty seeing a webpage, alt text is very crucial. As part of Section 508 of the United States Rehabilitation Act, all websites need to be accessible to people with disabilities. If your website is primarily visual with no alt text, a visually impaired individual’s browser will have nothing to read for them. Some websites have run into problems in the past because they do not follow this best practice. Implement alt text for every image on the website, no matter how small or intricate, to avoid experiencing such issues.

4. Capturing Customer Reviews

Customer reviews can encourage people to buy from your product pages. Actually, studies show that around 90% of shoppers are likely to purchase a product if they see reviews for it, regardless of whether those reviews are positive or not. For this reason, you should offer your customers the chance to leave feedback, as it is good for business!

Furthermore, that also helps SEO, which is why many ecommerce merchants offer review management as part of their ecommerce SEO services. Customers are very likely to automatically include important keywords in their review. Even though using the same phrases that already appear on your page is not helpful, they may provide alternatives or phrases that could improve your ranking (or send good signals to search engines).

5. Do not have identical content

If you’re a retailer selling goods from different companies, you probably receive product descriptions straight from the brand’s website if they’re the ones selling the item. It is advisable to include as much content as possible; however, when you receive external content, try your best to ensure that you do not replicate their product descriptions or product copy.

Having repeated content sprinkled across a few webpages won’t be too harmful. However, because of frequent updates to search engines, a growing number of websites are facing penalties for copy-pasting product descriptions. To avoid getting punished for your ranking, the objective should be to write new, distinct descriptions for each item you stock. While this may be challenging and tedious—especially if your inventory is massive—doing so could give you an edge in the market.

Readers appreciate product descriptions that are clear, well-structured, captivating, and informative. Any attempt to add humor, no matter how small, is another way to capture the audience’s attention, so feel free to stretch your creativity. Make sure to include essential keywords or phrases that correspond with the item’s target audience. Aim to capture all of this information in 3 to 5 sentences.

And don’t copy blog entries and other original content from the manufacturers. Aside from why this approach is wrong when it comes to plagiarism, it is likely that the company will negatively view it. Many distributors and manufacturers have content marketing plans created just like yours! If there’s something on a manufacturer’s website that catches your interest, email them and clear your intentions first.

Ecommerce SEO mistakes to avoid

Here are several common issues that can significantly impact ecommerce websites and their rankings.

The absence of breadcrumbs: Customers (and Google) find breadcrumbs helpful on e-commerce sites.
Neglecting to include schema markup: Schema enhancement helps with Google rich snippets.
The inclusion of low-value pages: Including e-commerce filters or search pages that offer no substantial value.
Overusing target keywords: Overuse of keywords on your website.
Restricting important pages of your website: Occasionally, noindex tags or “disallow” commands in robots.txt are unintentionally added, preventing pages from being indexed in Google.
Having a slow site: Your site may not appeal to customers if it takes too long to load, and not having optimization for speed could negatively affect conversions; this is especially true for mobile visitors.

Conclusion

In the world of online retail, eCommerce SEO has become one of the most sought-after strategies to achieve sustainable growth. Unlike paid advertising, which stops yielding results as soon as a budget runs out, SEO continues to drive high-value traffic that is more likely to become repeat customers.

As a store owner, one can unlock better placements on the SERPs, which results in improved traffic by optimizing for relevant keywords, enhancing the site structure, improving scrolling speeds, mobile responsiveness, and overall site UX.

From boosting visibility to delivering value to your audience and crafting captivating product descriptions, eCommerce SEO improves brand authority and customer trust by enhancing the overall shopping experience, which in turn boosts conversions.

Investing in eCommerce SEO is a cost-effective solution to sustain your business in the future and stay ahead of competitors. If you’re ready to transform your eCommerce success story, optimize your store, and embrace the power of organic growth.

komal T.