What Is Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing new or existing online stores for search engines to achieve increased organic search traffic.
The process itself is divided into six major parts: when combined, an ecommerce site will have the best odds of ranking higher in search engine result pages (SERP).
The six parts being:
- Keyword research
- On-Page SEO
- Technical SEO & Website Optimization
- Link Building
- Content Marketing
- Web Analytics
In this guide, you will learn more about these six parts and learn how to use ecommerce SEO to rank your online store higher to gain its many benefits.
How You Will Benefit From This Guide?
This guide is specifically for ecommerce SEO, while not having an online store yourself, you might still learn something new about search engine optimization reading between the lines.
The main goal will be to rank an online store in Google and other search engines with SEO.
This guide is also universal for ecommerce, and the tips and strategies you will learn, you can apply to most online store platforms.
However, each platform will have a set of strengths and weaknesses when it comes to SEO.
Platforms like:
- Shopify (+Shopify plus) learn more about Shopify
- WooCommerce & WordPress
- Magento
- Bigcommerce
- Wix
- Ecwid
- Squarespace
- Big Cartel
- Self-developed online store
If you’re utilizing Amazon for cross-selling products, check out our Amazon SEO guide.
When it comes to the best ecommerce SEO practices, it mostly depends on your business.
We may feature ideas and strategies that might be hard for you to implement the way we showcase it. Still, through understanding the underlying mechanics, you can utilize them anyway today or in the future.
The best ecommerce SEO strategies are born through independent testing, and through validating results with gained data, you will discover the absolute best way to increase organic traffic to your online store.
Learn from our case study: The impact of a niche online store ranking first in its primary keywords.
The Goals And Benefits Of Ecommerce SEO
- Increased visibility and online brand recognition
- Increase revenue and profitability
- Be found at the right time by new and old audiences
- Save money on advertising
- Sustainability by not relying on one traffic channel
- New opportunities and ideas to diversify your product catalog
- Expand your content marketing strategy
- Improves ecommerce site
- Better competitiveness
- High ROI
Ecommerce Keyword Research
The goal of keyword research in ecommerce SEO is to find relative keywords that match your products and their categories and finding opportunities in which you can realistically achieve a rank.
In ecommerce SEO, keyword research should focus on transactional keywords.
The chances of gaining high tier keywords such as “women’s shoes” will be hard for anyone, even for the greatest players out there. So it’s all about finding the best keyword opportunities for your online store.
Whether you have an online store ready, the keyword research should be the first step for optimization.
The more you understand the keywords of your industry, the easier it’s for you to reach the right audiences from search engines.
The right keywords dictate the way we optimize everything in our online stores.
Depending on the number of products you have, conducting a proper keyword analysis will be time-consuming.
We’ll need a strategy to start optimizing page by page. Start by searching your best-performing pages.
Only through optimizing every individual page, we can achieve the most value out of our future ecommerce SEO methods.
A key is to develop a process on how you will do this every time you publish a new product in the store.
Find The Best Product Pages From Your Ecommerce Store
You can use any tool you have access to, one of the free SEO tools from here, or you can just use the combination of Search Console and Google Analytics to find the best product pages you have.
We recommend finding the best performing product pages by the revenue it creates. But you need to have Google Analytics Goals set up before you can measure by value.
Or you can use your sales data to determine the best performing products and then finding which pages these would be.
Most ecommerce platforms have given you full access to the best performing products.
Alternatively, you can start by going through the pages that generate the most traffic, organic, or otherwise.
No matter the goal you’ve decided upon, the following steps will be the same as the goal is to increase traffic to your store as of now.
Finding The Keywords For Optimization
Now we will need to find every top product page a primary keyword, and additional keywords that support them (such as long-tail keywords, three or more words)
Generally, keywords for category pages will be shorter and have more traffic potential, but individual product pages should utilize more long-tail keywords.
More often than not, your category and product pages are already ranking with the primary keyword, and just need a bit of adjustment to maximize its traffic potential.
When searching for keywords, let’s say in Google Ads Keyword Planner, enter the primary keyword, and location.
While you research your primary keyword for the product page, remember to look for potential long-tail keywords.
After using the Keyword Planner or keyword tool of choice, you can also use Amazon to check the top results for those keywords. Amazon is a great way to expand your keyword plan.
When you’re creating your keyword plan for your ecommerce site, take care that you’re not intentionally at this stage using the same keywords.
It’s easier to avoid keyword cannibalization errors early on, by preventing the use of the same keywords in your plan.
If the keywords you chose seem relevant and an excellent opportunity for you, it’s time to see what currently ranks for that keyword in the first place.
Finding What Ranks Already For The Chosen Keyword
You can either just do a Google search for the primary keyword (preferably with VPN + Incognito), so your past searches won’t affect the search results.
Or you can use Ubersuggest freely to check the top 10 results. The key here is to keep an eye out for what are the types of pages currently ranking for each keyword.
As user intentions drive rankings more than anything, if you don’t see online store results within the top 10, this might entail that people searching with that keyword aren’t interested in commercial activity and ranking with a product or category page will be almost impossible.
If this is the case, you will need to readjust your primary keyword, until there are other online store pages in the top 10.
Remember to check the search results of the long-tail keywords as well!
If you’re selling branded products, these searches will probably give results in which top rank will be for the brand itself. Remember to check what results come after them, because you don’t always have to be first to make a sale.
A tip for redoing the search is to check if there’s any validity adding words such as “buy” or “free shipping,” or any word that implies commercial activity in your industry. Not all search terms are equal in different businesses.
To save time, think about it yourself, does a keyword have transactional potential if you think about it in a natural setting. Would your friend expect to find something to buy if they would use a search term X?
Check Your Competitors Keywords
The more you know about your competition, so increases the chances of beating them at SEO.
While great to understand how your competition ranks in search results, you can also find great keyword ideas to your store.
You might discover a new combination of words that you can’t see by searching for keywords yourself.
Most keyword tools will let you see in which keywords your competitors’ ecommerce site ranks.
For example, you can use the Ubersuggest tool to discover more about how your competitors rank.
Finding the Right Keyword for Your Home Page
Until now, we’d been looking at keywords for category and product pages, which will bring the bulk of your traffic depending on the nature of your ecommerce site.
But optimizing the keyword for your home page is crucial as well.
Niche online stores can primarily benefit most from optimizing their home page keywords as their business and brand revolve tightly around a couple of topics.
If we look at how Amazon optimizes their home page, we can see it’s pretty vague as their offering is one of the world’s largest.
But here lies the opportunity for niche stores to express their brand to fit a broader yet single keyword.
As most traffic from Google will end up in a category or product pages, your home page keyword should express your brand and what keyword would fit the most to your offerings.
And eventually, as brand recognition rises and your position in the field strengthens, you will have more chances to acquire traffic to your home page with these keywords.
But researching keywords for your home page shouldn’t be any different as when looking for other pages, and the same tips apply.
Optimizing Product Category Pages
Depending on your online store, you might have tens or even hundreds of different category pages, and optimizing them is crucial to gain the maximum effect of ecommerce SEO.
Many category pages for broader keywords, mainly serve as the leading destination for users searching for a wider range of products.
You need to name your categories very clearly to make them visible for the searchers. Don’t leave it vague: “T-Shirts” rather more specifically go for “T-Shirts for Men.”
Keep your categories simple and relevant. It’s easy to create categories with many products that may seem similar. Still, in most cases, you’re better off just creating individual categories for products that are actually in the same category.
A tip for managing this is to realize if you use two keywords in some product categories, it might entail you that a separate category would probably be better.
But don’t leave your category pages empty. A category page with only one or two products will not do you any favors.
Category Titles And Meta Descriptions
To increase your clickthrough rates (CTR) from Google Search and others, you need to pay attention to your titles and meta descriptions. They are the first things new visitors will see from your brand, and that essential for you to optimize.
Most online stores rely on the classic combination of Category (Keyword) – Brand Name.
Which works if the category is appropriately keyword optimized and targets the right audience.
Utilizing the full real estate that Google provides you in the titles and descriptions is your chance to add uniqueness to your default categories.
A useful and unique meta description serves its title and should include your sales pitch that makes you unique against others in the search results.
The more clicks, the higher CTR you will achieve and better rankings over your competitors you will get.
More ideas to craft a unique and optimized meta description:
- Use your previously chosen primary keywords and use long-tail keywords when relevant
- Use call to actions such as [sale, free, buy, click, learn]
- If you offer free shipping or free returns, mention it.
Titles and meta descriptions can’t stay static as they are essential when people click on your pages from Google. From time to time, optimize these metas to improve your CTR, especially if you see a declining CTR.
Category Page Content
While creating an SEO heavy wall of text in a product category page might seem like a good idea, it usually isn’t.
You need to have the keywords present, but the way you include them is more important for your online store’s overall experience.
Help your customers decide what they want by guiding them through the options within the category and provide crucial information that might help them with everyday issues related to the products.
For category descriptions, write a descriptive and unique content that your audience would enjoy and to Google to get a grasp of what your page is all about.
For category page content:
- Include the primary keyword
- Add naturally long-tail keywords
- Make sure you create unique content for each page (it’s easy to start repeating oneself as you have to write tens or even hundreds of these pages)
- Keep it short. You want to make the products the stars of the page in the end.
For category page titles (H1), use the title of the category, which should be optimized already. Take a second look, if you feel you could improve it.
Gain Traffic From Promotional Keywords
Sometimes you might find out that people will search for your keywords + [promotion], [sales], etc. In these cases, you want to create category pages that automatically list products on sale and match the category itself.
By creating these types of category pages, you won’t have to create promotional pages from scratch when eventually, you run a promotion, and they would’ve already gained traction through the search engine.
Product Page Optimization
We have written earlier about product page SEO in more in detail, so if you want to learn more about product page SEO in detail, click here.
But to summarize the importance of optimizing your product pages in your ecommerce SEO, we’ll list the key features that you need for their optimization.
A product page is where you make the conversion and make that visitor into a customer, so you need to always think about the experience you’re creating for your customers.
How to build a better experience then?
As discussed earlier in the category page optimization, how unique content will make you stand out, the same applies here.
The only difference is that depending on your layout and ecommerce design. You can have fully fleshed out product pages that leave nothing unanswered to the customer searching for a specific product.
If the visitors find everything they need to make a purchase, they won’t bounce from your product page to another product page or in the worst-case leave to your competitor’s store.
It’s best to keep the customer on the product page as long as it is needed to make a decision.
For example, here are some tips for doing just that:
- Use unique content only (Don’t copy your old product descriptions and even worse copy text from manufacturers)
- Answer the common questions about the product that a customer would ask often. The more data you get better questions and answers you can have on the product pages.
- Avoid automation or, at the very least, carefully monitor the progress of automation not to leave lingering mistakes compound.
- Showcase product reviews and ratings (we’ll go more in-depth on how to show the product ratings in Google Search itself later in the article)
Also, add your product variations into one product page. It’s confusing to try to find product variations if all of them have their pages. Just understand that, in some cases, variations might be a different product entirely.
How To deal With Out-Of-Stock Products In Ecommerce SEO
If you have a product page out-of-stock, you will have a couple of ways of dealing with it.
Firstly, you need to decide if this product is coming back to your store, meaning it’s only a temporary state of being out of stock.
If yes, then you need to leave the page up until more stock is available.
If you create a new page every time a product runs out, you will never achieve a high ranking for that page since it hasn’t had the time to rank.
The key is how to manage the out-of-stock, while you source more products.
You can use product recommendations (automated, preferably the larger your store is), or link to similar offerings, which would give your visitor something to go instead of bouncing away from your site.
Also, more ideas to manage this:
- Use internal links with a strong call to actions to keep users engaged
- Offer a waitlist
- Engage with a chat
The bigger questions are what to do if the out-of-stock is permanent:
You need to redirect users from those old product pages to those pages that would match the product the most.
And you will gain in the short term increased traffic to other products in the store, and when eventually the old products get delisted from search engines, the newer product page would have gained traffic to boost their rankings.
Alternatively, you can set a default redirection that would redirect deleted product pages into their main category page, saving time.
Product Video and Image Optimization
Image search is a powerful tool to increase organic results in your online store. Many starting online stores can achieve an initial organic traffic boost by optimizing their images and videos properly.
Learn more about Google Images.
With the combination of structured data (we’ll discuss this later in the article) images in ecommerce SEO is vital to achieving more with what you have now on hand.
So what do you need to do to optimize images and videos in your store?
Add relevant keywords to your image’s alt tag. The process itself can be automated, and a simple rule of thumb could be that you add the product’s name, model, and even color.
Use the uniquely written descriptions to give context to the images. In most cases, this will come naturally to you when writing descriptions, but keep it in mind.
You need to give context to images. Especially vital, if you have additional product images within your product descriptions.
Always give an image reason to exist where you put it. This act will increase Google’s chances of showing a part of your description in the image search itself.
Remember, you can use great and beautiful product images in your social media marketing strategy, especially using Pinterest, and Instagram to share your pictures potentially can bring you additional traffic.
If you have videos about your products, you need to optimize them as well. Whether you display the videos directly on your store or embed it from somewhere, you also need to give it context and reason to be on your page.
If you have quality videos, with excellent potential, share them on YouTube, and optimize them with youtube SEO (learn more) accordingly.
Use Schema Markup in Ecommerce SEO
With the use of Schema markups in ecommerce SEO, you can have your product pages pop (with rich data snippets) in the search results.
It adds crucial information for buyers searching products like reviews, ratings, price, and stock levels. When a potential buyer sees these details from your products with a glance, they are more likely to click on your product than your competitor if they don’t have schema markup added.
Check all the possible markup available for products. There are many to choose from, but selecting the essential ones will show all the necessary information for a potential buyer.
Best product schema marks are:
- Name
- Image
- Description
- AggregateRating
- Offers > Price
- Offers > priceCurrency
You can use Structured Data Markup Helper from Google to more easily markup schemas from your page. It will help you generate HTML code which you can insert into the code of your page.
You can test with Rich Results Tests to see if your markups work correctly.
Always look at what your products are about, and if you see a markup that would be beneficial to add to your product page, go ahead, as not all products are equal.
Schema markups are for individual products, and if you want to use the markups for category pages. You would have to mark up each product individually from a category.
As category pages won’t likely have rich data snippets appearing next to them in the search results, you will have to decide whether it’s worth the time spent.
Nevertheless, it does have a benefit as Google would understand your category pages better.
Create A Product Feed For Google Shopping
As including schema markups adds the additional information to your product pages, you can use these in your Product Feed for Free Google Shopping listings.
Free Google Shopping listing is now only available in the U.S, and you need to create a Google Merchant Center Account.
If you’re outside of the U.S, you can still use Google Shopping Ads, to create automated ads to diversify your search engine marketing.
Learn the benefits of Google Shopping Ads for an ecommerce site.
Ecommerce URL Structure
Keep your URL structure as clean and simple as possible. Avoid long URLs and titles. For example, adding your full feature set in a URL will make it unnecessarily long.
Best practice for URL structure would be:
- yourstore.com/category
- yourstore.com/category/product
- yourstore.com/category/subcategory
- yourstore.com/category/subcategory/product
Anything more than four steps in your URL is going to be too complicated and lengthy by default. And might leave your pages too deep to be properly indexed by Google.
The more natural your store is to navigate, the easier it will be easier for Google to index. Think user-friendliness first, SEO second as these goes hand-in-hand.
Many platforms have their default URL structures to start with, and some won’t have any opportunity to change that.
If you can’t control your URL structure within the chosen platform, test with a product’s worst-case scenario, and see what you can do to change that. For example, using fewer categories or shorter product URLs could be of help.
An URL should induce your primary keyword (should be in the title already!), avoid additional URL parameters, and use hyphens to separate words.
Keep note; if you decide to rename URLs later on, you need to redirect them to the new ones accordingly. If you can, avoid changing your URLs after setting up as long as you’ve done them correctly in the first place.
Optimize Online Store Loading Speed
Optimizing your website speeds is a critical factor for ranking in search engines. Not only does it affect the way you rank, but a slow website is also a bad experience for the customer you’re trying to convert.
A visitor who can’t access your online store quickly enough will leave before it loads to them.
As engaged users who won’t bounce off your site, send positive signals to Google, telling it that your website is worth their time, you can achieve higher rankings than your competitors by being faster than them.
A faster site has a positive impact by increasing your sales through and through your store.
For example, imagine this, a user adds a product to its cart and has to wait for the checkout even to load; you will most likely lose a customer in this critical stage.
And no matter how hard you try to retarget them again with ads, a bad experience, and the first impression is hardly ever forgotten.
From time to time look at how your online store’s loading speeds develop using tools such as:
A great way to monitor your loading speeds is through Google Analytics, as it records loading times on the background with PageSpeed.
Check Mobile Usability and Optimize For Mobile Use
As Google has started to predominantly index websites to its search engine through mobile sites, it’s more crucial than ever to have a mobile version of your online store that is the best it can be.
The majority of Google Searches are via mobile and ecommerce site owners, who have a subpar mobile experience and will lose rankings over time.
Take every step to ensure that your online store has a mobile-first experience that will rank higher in search results.
Many online stores still lack a proper mobile version, which depending on your industry and competition, might give you an advantage when implementing SEO across your store.
As the PageSpeed tool also gives you a mobile score of the site, optimizing it will lead to better results.
Luckily many ecommerce platforms have a proper mobile-first experience by default. You just need to make sure, what is your situation, and make changes accordingly.
Duplicate Content In Ecommerce SEO
Duplicate content is a constant problem in ecommerce SEO, especially the larger your product selection, and their variations get.
A typical generator of duplicate content in online stores is its search functions.
A simple search on your store can, in many cases, produce unnecessarily many links to the same content.
For example, as users can search for colors and size variations with the search, you have almost unlimited pages, which search engines could consider duplicate content.
To overcome this, you can create URL-parameters for your store’s most common search variables, so that search engines can index them accurately. But avoid creating these parameters for everything.
Or you can create a “noindex, follow” meta robot tags to these dynamic content pages, and Google will not index them.
For example, you can spot apparent duplicate content when two versions of the same pages exist, but they only vary in its URL.
Deleting the other page and redirecting the older URL to the new one can remove this type of duplicate content.
But there’s a couple of things you can do if you need these pages to exist in parallel:
Using a canonical tag, you will guide Google not to index a specific page, but in some cases, Google might not follow through and index it anyway, in which case, you need another solution.
After the pages are non-indexed, you can block these pages entirely through robot.txt with “disallow.”
User Safety and Data Policies
Compared to many other types of websites, an online store, by default, has to collect a lot of identifiable user information about its users to make sales happen.
Due to this fact, improving user safety, and the use of detailed data policies not only improve user trust in your store, which will lower hesitation when buying from you, but will also affect your rank in Google.
For the very least, be sure your website encrypts all user data with having HTTPS enabled on your site.
Not having a secure connection to your ecommerce store will be an awkward moment for at some point, if Google decides to show “The connection to this website is not secure” before entering your site.
A non-secure connection will lower your store’s trust, and visitors will most likely bounce away immediately.
Also, security is a confirmed ranking signal for Google.
The same goes for having the appropriate policies pages to tell your visitors everything they need to know about your business and how you’re handling everything from data to returns.
Ecommerce Internal Linking
Navigation in your online store is a crucial step not only for SEO but the experience of a visitor and customer. Optimizing your internal linking to be the best it can be for your users will increase the time spent on the site and lower the barrier for purchasing.
Certain products and categories may be hidden within your store if there are many steps to access these pages.
Optimizing internal linking in an online store’s goal is to make every product category and product page discoverable by the search engines more easily.
It’s all about creating a natural flow, from a visitor landing in a product X, can have natural experience of finding what they are interested in, by just engaging with the first page.
So what to do?
Do an audit on your internal links. And see how many steps you need to reach some of your most hidden pages. If a user requires more than five steps to find a page, there’s an issue.
You will need to lower the number of steps.
Link to other products and product categories in your product pages. You can do this by creating a dynamic, recommended product section on each page.
An excellent example of recommended products in product pages is to link to upsells.
Link other categories from category pages. Utilizing a breadcrumb is crucial, but you need to increase internal linking between different categories as well.
Use the uniquely created content to your advantage. You can add relevant internal links in descriptions to enhance the natural flow of pages.
Within blog posts, add links to relevant products and categories naturally. If you have only a couple of products, manually adding products to blogs might be better, but it’s best to link to categories at a certain scale.
Ecommerce Backlinks and Partnerships
Backlinks are one of the cornerstones in SEO, and in ecommerce SEO, it’s not an exception.
Gaining backlinks from other websites back to your product, category, and home pages isn’t always a simple process and may take time to accomplish. But the time spent in gaining backlinks is worth it for any ecommerce site owner.
Your goal here is to get another website to link to your store, and there are multiple ways of achieving this goal.
If you’re starting with backlinks, one way to get miles ahead is to figure out who links to your competitors.
Two things to keep in mind:
First, discover who links to whom
Second, Why they are linking to them
For example, you can use Ubersuggest to freely or Ahrefs (paid) to discover your competitors’ backlinks. Take note of these pages, and find the reason for the link.
Is the website linking to a similar product, linking to an article made by the competitor, or perhaps its a partnership between the two parties?
No matter the reason, you can use this information to conduct your strategy to connect with these linking websites and offer something similar but new to gain a link to yourself.
Gaining a link is not a zero-sum game, and the linking website might give you a link without taking your competitors to link away in most cases.
Of course, an exception for this if you find that the linking website links to dead content on your competitors’ site, you can offer links that are valid and fresh instead.
Here’s a list of examples of different backlink strategies for ecommerce:
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can offer great benefits to every party involved, and it’s a great way to achieve high-quality backlinks back to your site.
Guest blogging can be one of the most time-consuming strategies to rank your online store, but the long-lasting effects cancel the time spent on it.
To achieve results with guest blogging, you will need a solid strategy to follow. Learn more about how to create a guest blogging strategy in nine steps.
Influencers
Similarly to guest blogging, influencers from your industry might operate websites that could be great backlink opportunities.
Compared to a typical guest post, influencers can further push a message than just a blog post on a website, for example, through their social media profiles.
By researching the right types of influencers for your online store, you can connect with them and offer something unique and worth their time to give you a backlink.
The relationships you form in influencer marketing will usually require payment unless you find a way to help an influencer in an impactful way.
Organic Backlinks From High-Quality Content
This strategy is the most cost-effective for sure, as it depends on the nature of your content marketing strategy. Do you create the content yourself on an ecommerce site, or do you outsource it?
As long as you create excellent and helpful content, you can achieve backlinks organically with time.
But the negative of this strategy is that you can’t control the process of gaining those links. But if you don’t have time to search for linking opportunities actively, the method could work for you as creating quality content should be one of your marketing strategies anyway.
Partnerships (Business and otherwise)
Building partnerships with manufacturers, resellers, retailers, and customers is also a valid strategy you can implement for gaining backlinks.
Especially beneficial, if you’re already in partnerships with others, you can try to get the partnered websites to link back to you.
Whenever you form new partnerships for your business, always try to keep the strategy in mind, and look for ways on how you could achieve a backlink from your partnership.
Content Marketing in Ecommerce SEO
Content marketing is essential when you want to grow your online store with ecommerce SEO.
Only through providing additional content via different forms on your online store and outside of it, you can achieve more organic traffic to the store.
Start A Blog For Online Store
Creating a blog for an online store has plenty of benefits, but let’s start with the obvious: increased organic for hard to reach keywords.
Since you can’t truly optimize a product to every kind of keyword out there, you’re losing on potential traffic by not creating additional blog content that supports your product offering.
Even if you’re not starting a full-pledged blog in the online store, you can use these ideas as well to create specific content pages for users to enjoy within your store.
For example, think about all of the following opportunities:
- How to [your product keyword]
- Trends [your product keywords]
- Campaign pages (Such as Black Friday or Holidays, don’t delete these types of pages even if it’s not in the season, only refer traffic to other campaigns with internal links within these pages. )
- News about your industry
- Customer testimonials
- Solve customer pain-points [with your product]
- Answer industry-related questions
- Detailed product recommendations for different customer segments
- Sensational products that offer a great clickbait link back to your store (great for online ads)
- Much more.
You can search with your primary keyword and see in the “people also ask” – section great blog ideas around your primary keyword.
A blog is a powerful tool in your content distribution strategy for your online store. The content you create within a blog allows you to use it in a variety of ways to keep promoting your store and its offerings.
Use the content you create in your paid online advertising, like in social media marketing platforms.
A well-done blog post can go a long way in ecommerce SEO and a strategy to consider to boost organic traffic.
Build Dedicated Landing pages
The benefit of dedicated landing pages for increasing engagement and sales throughout your store is massive.
There two ways you might want to think about this.
You can either use your product pages as landing pages or dedicated landing pages that send traffic product pages.
Both have their pros and cons:
The pros of product page as a landing page:
- No need for extra landing pages
- Every product page is built conversions in mind
- Pages are ready for online advertising
- High engagement rate from visitors
- Ecommerce SEO value is higher
The cons of the product page as a landing page:
- Amount of work to create engaging content for each product page
- Adding technical product information smoothly to the page might be an issue
- Not suitable for large online stores
- Can’t do specific offer-based landing pages
- Content customization for different audiences
The pros of using a landing page to send traffic to product pages:
- Content customization based on audiences
- Offer-based pages
- Using other conversion metrics, not just sales.
- Can sell anything from your store
- Faster to implement
- Suitable for both small and large ecommerce stores
The cons of using landing pages to send traffic to product pages:
- Timed landing pages won’t add to your SEO
- Mostly useful in online advertising and not for organic traffic
- Every campaign needs its unique landing page for maximizing results
No matter how you decide to implement landing pages for your online store, your benefit is increased overall sales or other conversions.
It makes using them an essential part of your ecommerce digital marketing strategy.
Avoid Content Automation
As online stores can get very large and hard to manage in general, the need for automation might seem necessary. The problem relies on the fact that automation usually can’t optimize properly.
It might categorize wrongly certain products or write descriptions that lead to an uninspired text, which will lower conversion rates across your stores.
When building brands online, you need to keep in control of the content that your site relies on for its sales channels.
Automation might also seem like a great way to scale your online store, only to weaken your SEO progress in the long run.
Best performing online stores create content for which they find the perfect content mix that produces the most sales through data.
Automation does have its benefits, such as keyword implementation at scale, but that won’t be enough when competing at a higher level.
For example, if you see a lot of automation used in your industry, you can stand out by creating unique content for your listings.
But automation is still crucial for online store productivity; just don’t use it for content creation and other critical ecommerce SEO tactics.
Web Analytics in Ecommerce SEO
As web analytics is crucial in every online strategy and ecommerce SEO, there will be no exception.
Every strategy develops over time, and through using web data to measure your results actively, you can achieve more every day.
You need to track the success of implemented SEO methods and find which methods bring the most results in your specific case. As it’s not realistic to implement everything at once, so you need to find where to spend the most time.
First, you should analyze data from Search Console, Google Analytics, and Facebook Pixel to see the effects of SEO in the online store. If you have access to other tools, use them, but remember to set the right goals on what you want to achieve.
The other benefits of web analytics to your online is the ability to track conversions from SEO and many others.
Ecommerce Local SEO
If you’re a local retailer that happens to sell also online, you need to optimize your local SEO to maximize your local visibility for these retail stores.
The simplest way to start with local SEO is to create a Google My Business (GMB) page for your online store. And if you’ve multiple retail locations, remember that every retail store needs its unique GMB listing.
Even if you don’t have a retail location, a GMB listing for your business is still beneficial in many ways, for example, collecting and displaying reviews.
Learn all the benefits of Google My Business.
Each store needs a dedicated page in your online store, which includes the main keyword of your business and its location.
This way, your online store will be found on Google, when people might search the products you sell in a location your store exists.
It’s up to you if you want to promote the online store versus the retail location in these cases.
Every store page needs to have all the necessary information that a visitor needs to come to the store to purchase something.
At least include the following:
- Address and a map
- Store phone number and email
- Opening hours
- All other additional information that a visitor may need to shop at the location.
- Also, add enticing offers on these pages if the retail locations have their unique offers.
Increase Brand Awareness With Online Ads
To have all the benefits of SEO in your online store, you need to increase brand awareness.
Search engines like when direct traffic increases in your ecommerce site because of its positive signal to show relevancy.
As a starting online store, increasing your brand awareness and social media traffic is one of your only ways to gain enough traffic to sustain the business.
When using online ads of any kind, it’s crucial to have your Ecommerce SEO in a solid-state so that you can benefit from the compounding effects of increased brand values.
Depending on your online store’s nature and audience, you will have many online ad platforms to choose from such as
- Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms
- SEM (Google, Bing)
- Influencers
The critical point to understand is, even if you produce a winning and profitable ad campaign, never forget the implementation of ecommerce SEO in your store.
The more traffic channels you have for your online store, the better chances you will have to weather any storms that may come your way.
Improve Everything Every Day As Ecommerce SEO Can Take A While
Ecommerce SEO is not the best way to instantly bring traffic and turn them into customers with speed.
SEO is a lengthy process and takes a lot of planning and patience, which you need to consider first. And the process can be tedious at times, as compared to blogs or business websites, an online store can have thousands of pages that require optimization.
The key to finding success with SEO in your online store is to produce and follow a strict plan in which you develop your store with SEO strategies a little every day.
Start with the most accessible strategies you can implement right away, and slowly integrate more difficult ones into your workflow.
Then use data to measure where you can see which strategies bring the most impact on your store.
By now, we hope you have a better understanding of how to rank an online store higher in search engines.
Now it’s time to implement these methods and start truly competing with your competitors and eventually gain more organic traffic than them.