E-commerce SEO Guide for Beginners

When it comes to e-commerce, few things are as important as SEO. Search engine optimisation is the process of optimizing websites so they rank high in search results. This is especially true for e-commerce sites since visibility on search engines is often the primary way potential customers find your site.

Ecommerce SEO may seem like an intimidating topic. Read on to get introduced to the world of e-commerce SEO and understand everything you need to know about this field in order to succeed with your own e-commerce website.

What is e-commerce SEO?

SEO is a defining component of e-commerce. In today’s world, a large portion of sales come from people who are searching for products online rather than from people who are actively shopping at physical stores. Ecommerce SEO is the process of creating content and optimizing your site so that it ranks as high as possible in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant searches. Better rankings on important keywords are the primary way customers find and shop on e-commerce sites, so it’s essential that you have a strong e-commerce SEO strategy in place.

Step by Step E-commerce SEO Guide

1) Keyword Research

Before you start running an SEO campaign, you need to find the right target keywords for your business.

The right strategy is to use and target different keywords for your website’s home page, product pages, and blog. The keyword research process for all pages is not completely the same.

Detailed and effective keyword research is essential when it comes to optimising various pages of your website. In order to rank and drive traffic from Google, you’ll likely need to target keywords that have a lot of monthly searches while having less competition.

Here are 6 tips for e-commerce keyword research:

1. User intent is something you need to keep in mind. Choose keywords that are closely related to your business and products. Keyword-product (or service) fit is important.
2. Choose keywords that have high monthly searches. In some industries, even 80-90 searches per month can be great. On the other hand, 5k monthly searches can be considered low in some others. After spending some time on keyword research for keywords that are relevant to the sector, you will gain insight.
3. For getting keyword ideas, you can use tools and sources like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Google Autocomplete, Amazon Suggestions, Wikipedia, relevant blogs, and forums.
4. Check which keywords your competitors already ranking and getting traffic for. These keywords tend to be very lucrative if you are not already getting traffic from them. You can use a tool like SEMrush for competitor analysis.
5. Check competition levels for your prospective keywords. Avoid selecting keywords that are way too competitive or very common. You can use SEMrush and other keyword tools for checking this metric for each keyword.
6. Choose relevant long-tail keywords with a decent amount of search volume for your business blog.

Always keep in mind that the main goal is to find keywords that are relevant to your business and have higher search volume and less competition.

2) High-Quality Content

Now that you know which keywords to target, it’s time to actually create the content that will help you rank high in SERPs. There are a few simple things you can do in order to create the best possible e-commerce SEO content:

1. Choose Your Topics Carefully
2. Make Your Content Well-written and Informative
3. Make Your Content Compelling to Click
4. Make Your Content Unique

You can use the target keywords in the following:

1. Page URLs.
2. The page title and description tags.
3. Meta description. (Not for SEO but a good description can increase CTR)
4. H1 tags.
5. H2 tags if relevant.
6. Image alt-texts.

At the same time avoid keyword stuffing. Never fill your website pages or blog content with too many keywords. Keywords should be used properly and naturally in the sentences. Add internal links to other relevant pages on your website with relevant anchor text. This will help search engines to understand the topic of those pages better.

Also, avoid keyword cannibalisation. This means targeting the same keyword with multiple pages on your website.

Optimising an e-commerce website may require you to work on thousands of pages. Start by optimising the most important pages first!

Consider Starting a Blog!

Creating, maintaining, and optimising a business blog is the best thing you can do to market your online store to its target audience. The important thing is to identify and write around the keywords that are valuable to your business.

1. Do not target keywords that you already targeted on your website. Instead, focus on long-tailed and popular queries about your products or services.
2. Your blog content must be of high quality and provide value to the readers.
3. Feel free to add internal links to your blog posts with relevant product pages on your website, but don’t overdo it!
4. Prioritise long-tail keywords with less competition, high search volume, and higher buyer intent.

3) Off-Page Optimisation

When it comes to off-page optimisation for e-commerce SEO, your focus should be on creating new high-quality links instead of trying to get a large number of low-quality links.

High-quality links are links that originate from a high authority domain or page. Ten high-quality incoming connections are better and more profitable than hundreds of low-quality connections. However, creating high-quality links can be a difficult task.

First, try to get links from where your competitors get links.

Adding great content and relevant infographics, images, and e-books that other site owners would like to use, may gain you high authority links.

You can try to reach relevant blogs in your niche and learn about guest blogging opportunities. For example, if your website sells digital devices, you may contact tech blogs with high domain authority to write guest blogs.

In addition to link building, you should also focus on getting rid of bad, low-quality links coming to your website which negatively affect your rankings. Google disallow tool is used for this purpose.

4) Technical SEO

The technical part of e-commerce SEO is about identifying and fixing crawling and indexing issues on your website. Ensure that Robots.txt and Sitemap set up correctly. Check all HTTP response codes and redirects are working well. In order to identify errors on your website, you can use tools such as Screaming Frog.

Besides errors, another important thing to consider is the speed of your site. If your website speed is slow, you may miss a significant number of visitors. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed ​​Insights or Pingdom to check the speed of your website and find suggestions.

Google began to use mobile-first indexing in 2018. Positions on the search engine results pages started to be determined with mobile pages with this change. Therefore, it is even more important to have an optimised and mobile-friendly website for better rankings. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Bottom Line

Embracing good SEO practices will get you more conversions from your e-commerce website. If you want to be successful with your e-commerce site, you need to implement a strong e-commerce SEO strategy. To do that, you’ll need to carefully consider which keywords you want to target and create the best possible content for those keywords. You can do this by choosing your topics carefully, and making sure your content is well-written and informative.