Ecommerce SEO — that’s what this lesson covers. Why and how to do SEO for ecommerce, how to define ecommerce SEO strategies that let us grow online sales, which are the best ecommerce SEO tools, and plenty more…
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to search engine rankings, for ecommerce as well as blogs and company sites. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want to know the best SEO practices for an ecommerce site, or how to optimize category and product pages for search, or perhaps because your B2B or B2C ecommerce SEO strategy isn’t getting you to the business goals you set.
We’re here to help — let’s not waste any more time!
Want to become an SEO guru?
Thinking about starting a career in SEO?
Got a site you want to optimize for search yourself?
Get in touch and ask about our SEO courses!
I want more info
Why do SEO for ecommerce?
SEO for an ecommerce site is a critical success factor. High rankings mean high volumes of web traffic and therefore a better chance of selling. The difference between the best ecommerce site and any old store lies in the former’s ability to attract large amounts of qualified traffic.
Appearing on a search engine results page (SERP) isn’t enough on its own, though — visitors may still not click. The site therefore has to be optimized both for ranking and for another important metric: organic click-through rate (CTR).
CTR is the percentage of users who click the site’s link relative to the impressions it received, calculated as clicks / impressions = CTR. Google has never admitted that this metric matters for search rankings — Bing has (read the article) — but its importance has been shown by numerous studies.
A study by Moz (read the article) in 2014 found that CTR falls away sharply past the top three positions in the SERP, and is practically nil for a business on page two. As the chart shows, the top five SERP results alone take 67.60% of all clicks, while positions six to ten take just 3.73%. From those numbers it’s easy to see how, without a proper SEO strategy, an ecommerce site loses significant sales opportunities.
Image from moz.com
When should you do ecommerce SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is fundamental to an ecommerce site pursuing some or all of these goals:
- growth in visibility and web traffic;
- building, improving or increasing brand awareness and online reputation;
- more prospects and therefore more potential sales;
- better customer retention;
- holding onto the results achieved over time.
Want an SEO analysis of your site?
Want to know how many keywords you rank for on Google?
Want to know your website’s organic traffic?
Want to know who your competitors are and how they’re performing?
Want to know the number of backlinks pointing to your site?
No problem, we’ll tell you. FREE!
How do you do ecommerce SEO?
Search Engine Optimization for an ecommerce site takes more time and more care than for a “normal” site, because of the peculiarities of the sales channel. As with any marketing work, an SEO specialist can’t skip these steps:
- analyse the target market
- define measurable goals and an effective ecommerce SEO strategy
- assign resources and responsibilities
- implement all the planned SEO work
Ecommerce SEO strategies
As with the SEO audit we covered in an earlier lesson, let’s now look at the strategies and techniques for optimizing the elements that help your ecommerce site rank.
Those elements span several areas (user experience & web design, on-page SEO and link building, technical SEO, content marketing).
Keyword research
In an ecommerce SEO campaign too, keyword research remains a first-order job. It will shape technical elements (SEO title, meta tags and so on) and non-technical ones across your site, homepage, product and category pages included. Although an ecommerce site has room for keywords suggesting informational intent, remember that most of the ones used are about searching for products.
So how do you find the right keywords for an ecommerce site’s product and category pages?
There are various free tools for the job, such as Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest, and freemium ones such as Ahrefs and SEMrush. The internal search engines of Amazon and Facebook prove very useful too, as do forums and Wikipedia. Wikipedia in particular sometimes carries valuable keywords (and their variants) for category pages in its table of contents.
Let’s look more closely at the three tools we recommend for keyword research: Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest.
Google Keyword Planner
A tool inside Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), which you’ll find here.
- once registered, log into your account
- click “Tools” at the top right
- choose “Keyword Planner” under “Planning”
Image from Google.it
- click “find new keywords” and enter the keyword you’re interested in
- run the search
For the keyword “men’s watches”, covering a specific category, we get this result:
Image from Google.it
The tool is particularly useful for estimating keyword search volumes and competition levels, and for checking transactional search intent.
Ubersuggest
Once the tool is open (go to the official site), enter the target keyword and the country in the relevant fields and run the search.
Image from Ubersuggest
The newer version brings plenty of useful additions and gives you valuable information: search volume, keyword difficulty, competition, number of results and CPC.
A recent feature lets you enter a competitor’s URL and get better ideas for your own keyword. The “Top SEO pages” report then shows which competitor pages rank for popular organic keywords and perform well on social media.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
The tool in the Ahrefs suite (go to site) for researching keywords to rank for. Ahrefs is paid, but it can be used free for seven days. To start, click “Keywords Explorer” in the top bar, select the country, enter the target keyword and run the search.
Image from ahrefs.com
The report shows some important metrics at the top: search volume, return rate, number of clicks, clicks-per-search ratio, parent topic, volume and traffic potential. Under “Keyword ideas” in the sidebar you can find new ones using the filters “having same terms”, “also rank for” and “search suggestions”.
Image from ahrefs.com
Amazon Suggest
The equivalent of Google Suggest. Although Amazon is an ecommerce site’s biggest competitor, the Amazon database is useful for finding new ideas for product and category pages. Once on the Amazon site, enter your target keyword in the search field and look at the suggested terms.
The same works with the Facebook database and with Wikipedia. For keywords to use on category pages, hover over “shop by category” and you’ll see the list along with its sub-categories.
Image from marketingland.com
How to choose and validate keywords
When choosing and validating keywords, focus mainly on keywords and long-tail keywords relevant to your brand or to your products and services — ideally ones with high search volume and low competition.
On search volume, also weigh seasonality, monthly fluctuations and market segment. A keyword with low volume but a better fit for your business beats one with higher volume that’s more generic.
Competitor research
Useful pointers and ideas also come from competitor analysis. If you find yourself competing for a keyword against a site with higher Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) than yours, you’d do better to change keyword or use a long-tail one. Keyword difficulty can be checked in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, and DA by installing the MozBar in your browser (here it is).
Ecommerce site architecture & UX
Having an internal structure that gives the user the best possible user experience (UX) matters for any site, and all the more for an ecommerce site. Beyond UX, an imperfect internal structure can hurt rankings and conversions.
So focus more on the usability the visitor gets than on aesthetics — though aesthetics shouldn’t be neglected entirely.
Among the best practices is keeping the structure simple, with room for pages covering:
- the best-selling products in a category
- highly rated products
- related products
- recently viewed products
Another good practice is using breadcrumbs to make navigation easier.
For SEO purposes it’s worth keeping pages no more than three clicks from the homepage, since that’s what links from other sites (backlinks) point to. Sitting too deep, the authority (link juice) earned by a backlink would be diluted too far before reaching product and category pages.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO covers the whole set of elements inside the ecommerce site, or its pages, that an SEO specialist can optimize. The main ones:
1 – Keywords
The site’s product and category pages have to be optimized for specific keywords. Those (along with their variants, synonyms and LSI terms) also belong in other elements:
- meta tags (title tag and subheadings H1, H2, H3…H6): beyond the keyword, these should carry “modifiers” that make them better at attracting clicks. Among the highest-CTR terms: “buy”, “deal”, “cheap”, “lowest price”, “X% off”.
- the meta tag (meta description): although not a direct ranking factor, it matters for raising CTR and for voice search. To that end, keep it the right length (160 characters max) and include the keyword along with “magnet words” such as “huge selection”, “free shipping”, “everything in stock” and the like.
- Content: remember to distribute keywords, synonyms and LSI keywords (related terms) across the whole length of the text. An easy way to find LSI keywords is to enter the search term in GKP and look at the suggestions. Another is to enter the target keyword on Amazon and see which terms appear repeatedly on the category page.
Other elements to include the keyword in:
- Image file names
- Image ALT tags
- Rich snippets
- URLs
- Customer reviews
- Social signals
2 – Thin content
Many ecommerce sites have hundreds of category pages, plenty of them holding few products and little content.
Various studies show that longer content, over 1,000 words, tends to rank better in Google. Where you can, follow that practice at least for the product descriptions on your main product and category pages.
Use tools such as Ahrefs, Screaming Frog or SEMrush to find this content and remove or update it. Google prefers content that gets updated periodically.
3 – Friendly URLs
Write SEO-friendly URLs: short, containing the main keyword, descriptive and immediately clear to users and search engines alike.
For category pages, include one or two terms describing the category or sub-category. For product pages use the focus keyword alone, preferring hyphens (-) to underscores (_).
4 – Site speed
Ecommerce site speed is an important ranking factor affecting UX and conversions. Studies show that a slow site is one of the main causes of cart abandonment.
Measure your site’s speed with tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights (go to site), GTmetrix (go to site) or Pingdom (go to site).
To make it faster, work on:
- compressing images
- removing or minifying CSS and JavaScript files
- reducing the number of redirects
- cutting server response time by upgrading your hosting plan
- investing in a CDN
5 – Internal links
A link with exact anchor text from one target page on your ecommerce site to another top page on the same site helps improve its ranking.
On an ecommerce site internal links get created almost automatically, and precisely for that reason they need watching. A heavy mass of internal links could look suspicious to RankBrain and leave the site open to Google Penguin penalties.
Good practice is to add internal links only where it’s natural for them to be.
6 – Rich snippets
A type of structured data, or schema markup, you can add to your site’s product pages to help users and search engines understand your content better.
To make marking up your page’s elements easier, Google offers a structured data markup helper (find it here).
To use it, once the tool is open:
- choose the category (product, event, article, local business and so on). Let’s assume you’ve chosen product, as an ecommerce site would;
- then choose a product page carrying reviews and ratings;
- paste the product page URL into the input box and click “start tagging”;
- highlight the section of the page you want to label (reviews and ratings, say);
- if the product was reviewed by a single person, select “review”, then highlight the reviewer’s name, the review date and any other details;
- if several customers reviewed the product, highlight the number or stars of the rating and click “aggregate rating”;
- enter as much information as possible, including the number of reviews, and click the “count” tag;
- choose “create HTML” from the menu and copy and paste that HTML into the page, or add the new schema markup to your existing code;
- when you’re done, test the page with Google’s structured data testing tool.
If you need more examples, look at the markup helper page linked above, or consult HubSpot’s guide to creating and using rich snippets (find it here).
Technical SEO
This covers finding and fixing technical problems in the ecommerce site’s HTML that can hurt rankings. Errors in the code are usually caused by:
- duplicate or missing meta tags (titles, meta descriptions, H1s and so on);
- duplicate content and rel canonical;
- broken links;
- images with no ALT tag;
- pages blocked by errors in the directives (“Disallow” and “noindex”) in robots.txt;
- 302 redirects that should be 301 redirects;
- …
These are easily found with Ahrefs or with Screaming Frog, which is free for the first 500 URLs (for more, or to see how to fix the various errors it turns up, read our article on SEO strategy).
A responsive, mobile-friendly site
Mobile optimization belongs to this technical SEO section too, and it matters more and more for ecommerce sites.
The latest Digital report from We Are Social found that “two Italians in three shop or pay online, and 42% have done so from a mobile device”. Add to that other statistics showing how essential a responsive, user-friendly site is for an ecommerce business:
- more than 70% of web traffic happens on mobile devices (CIODive, 2018);
- 51% of customers say they use mobile devices to discover new brands and products (BrightEdge, 2017);
- 89% of people recommend a brand after a positive mobile experience (Google, 2017).
To check whether your site is responsive and mobile friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test (here). To improve site speed (by 15–85%, according to Google), remove unnecessary JavaScript and use Google’s AMP.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a defined audience — and ultimately to drive customer action (Content Marketing Institute).
But how does an ecommerce site or blog use content to get first on Google and grow web traffic?
Good keyword research helps, pointed in the right direction with tools such as Answer The Public (here) or forums such as Quora (here) and Reddit (here), along with the communities on the various social networks. That’s where you find the questions, words and phrases customers and prospects use to raise and describe problems, discuss particular topics or share buying experiences.
That lets you create content that meets users’ search intent squarely, and to remove or head off the reasons they don’t buy your products.
The content itself (product and category pages, blog posts, landing pages, video, product titles and descriptions) has to be written using persuasive and SEO copywriting techniques, and has to:
- be relevant enough to attract links from authoritative sites;
- be current, original and capable of sparking interest, interaction and sharing;
- be informative and valuable to a specific target audience;
- respect the principles of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) set out by Google — see the SEO starter guide (here) and the webmaster guidelines (here).
Link building (off-page SEO)
Earning quality links, part of off-page SEO, is a crucial factor for an ecommerce site too. The best link building — or rather link earning — strategy remains acquiring backlinks, editorial ones ideally, from sites with high Domain Authority. To that end, don’t forget to include infographics, statistics and case studies in your content.
In exchange for a link to one of your product pages or other content, you can offer something of value — “link magnets” such as ebooks. Other techniques involve offering to collaborate on quality pages (guest blogging) or case studies.
Add to those techniques such as broken link building, which means finding broken pages or links on a competitor’s site and contacting the site’s owner to offer a link to quality content on your own ecommerce site instead (for more, read our article on link building).
Local business
If, alongside the ecommerce site, your store has one or more physical locations, make sure each shop’s name, address and phone number — NAP — appear correctly on the site.
You could also list your site in the main directories, as long as they’re relevant to your sector.
Local SEO is a real opportunity for an ecommerce business to grow visibility and rankings (for more, read our article on local SEO).
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered ecommerce SEO. You now have what you need to optimize the main elements of your ecommerce site yourself — but that isn’t enough on its own.
SEO is a process in constant motion, and updates arrive almost daily. Getting an ecommerce site, or one of its product or category pages, to the top of Google is no easy thing.
Follow a sound SEO strategy, though, and the odds improve.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence and semantic SEO are just some of the recent arrivals affecting ecommerce SEO, and we’ll keep covering where they lead in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
If you need help with an SEO audit, or with SEO in general, or if you want to sharpen your own SEO knowledge — get in touch!
Want to improve your online shop’s rankings through an ecommerce SEO strategy? Want to optimize your site, get found by your customers on Google and beat the competition? Get in touch! We’ll work out the best SEO strategy for your site.
Want to sharpen your SEO knowledge? Get in touch! We’ll find the right SEO course for you.
Want to ask us something or just talk to us? Get in touch! That’s what we’re here for.