The Comprehensive Guide to Ecommerce SEO

ecommerce seo

Ecommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Contents hide
6 What are areas of SEO important to consider with E-commerce websites?
15 43 Ecommerce SEO Tips from Online Store Owners
15.1 Ecommerce SEO is essential if you are expecting sales revenue for the Web.
16 1. Use Google Page Speed Insight to test your site and improve your site speed.
19 4. Schema mark-up and structured data must be implemented consistently.
24 9. Do not buy backlinks for your Ecommerce SEO
30 15. Audit everything every six months with your Ecommerce SEO
33 18. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript to increase site loading times.
42 27. Write unique product content with Ecommerce SEO
44 29. Segmentation is important.
45 30. Buyer’s Guides/Whitepapers are good for Ecommerce SEO (and useful for making customers trust you)
48 33. Target paid and organic search results simultaneously
50 35. If you’re using a premade theme, make sure it’s Ecommerce SEO friendly

Ecommerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience.

Ecommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

The article includes 43 Ecommerce SEO Tips from Online Store Owners.

Ecommerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience.

This article will cover the basics of Ecommerce SEO – what it is and how you go about doing it. If you’re in charge of an online store and want your products to rank in Google and other search engine results pages (SERPs), then this article is for you!

This blog post will discuss what Ecommerce SEO is and how it can help your business. We’ll also talk about the different areas of Ecommerce SEO that you should focus on to make your online store more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). Finally, we will give you a list of tools that will optimize your site easier for you!

What is an ecommerce business?

What is an ecommerce business?

An ecommerce business is one where goods and services are sold online. They are typically businesses that sell via the internet without a physical store.

Pros:

  • Customers can order from anywhere in the world at any time.
  • The prices of goods and services remain competitive because there is no overhead cost, such as rent or utility costs, for an ecommerce company.
  • Reputation is more accessible via online reviews. If you offer excellent customer service, your review score will increase on websites like Yelp and Google Reviews.

Cons:

  • As a new business, you’re competing with more established companies. It isn’t easy to compete with big brands that have been around for decades unless you have a unique product that appeals to customers.
  • With the rise of social media, you have to spend time marketing your business on multiple channels instead of just focusing on one or two advertisements that are guaranteed to bring in customers.

Ecommerce websites?

Some examples of great Ecommerce websites are Nordstrom, eBay, and Sephora.

Nordstrom is one of the most well-known American department stores that sell clothes, shoes, jewelry, and accessories for men and women.

eBay is an online marketplace where buyers and sellers can trade goods or services.

An ecommerce business is one where goods and services are sold online. They are typically businesses that sell via the internet without a physical store.

What are Ecommerce SEO and e-commerce websites?

Many factors can affect how your ecommerce store is seen by potential customers in the SERPs, but the most important factor is SEO. Ecommerce SEO is usually concerned with ensuring that your site ranks high for keywords and phrases that potential buyers would search on.

The first thing to do when it comes to ecommerce SEO is to figure out what you want people to search for when they come to your site. If you want people to come to your site and purchase a new laptop, then “laptop” would be a keyword or phrase that you would want on your site.

It’s also important to keep in mind what Google wants searchers to find when they look up these terms – so research what kinds of results come up for these keywords and phrases. You may find that people are looking for reviews, product comparisons, or even just images.

The next thing to consider is how you’re going to structure your site so it can accommodate all the various kinds of information searchers might be looking for when they search on a given keyword or phrase.

Ecommerce Platforms

The three most popular ecommerce platforms are WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento. Each platform has different styles, features, and price points that make them more or less appealing to different businesses.

WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress. You can download WooCommerce from the WordPress Plugin Directory or purchase it directly from the developers. WooCommerce also offers a free starter theme called Storefront, giving you a headstart on building your site.

Shopify is the largest ecommerce platform in the world. Shopify is a hosted platform, so everything you need to run your store is stored on their servers, and they handle any security or site updates.

Magento is one of the most popular open-source ecommerce platforms in existence. Magento offers both free and paid web hosting options.

You can also purchase a fully hosted version of Magento from their site, but that costs more than the other two platforms we’ve already discussed.

The next thing to consider is which platform will be easiest for your business to use and manage once it’s up and running?

Shopify offers some great features like one-click product importing and more that make it easy to get started. Still, if you’re already using WordPress, then WooCommerce might be a better choice because all of your content can easily transfer over.

The final thing we want to mention about ecommerce platforms is that Shopify requires SSL (Secure Socket Layer) on every page of their site while WooCommerce does not. SSL encrypts the information that you send and receive from your site, making it harder for hackers to intercept private data like credit card numbers which are why we think this should be a major consideration when choosing an ecommerce platform for any business.

What are areas of SEO important to consider with E-commerce websites?

Ecommerce SEO is a process where you can optimize your store to appear on the search engine results pages, among other things.

A few key areas of Ecommerce SEO to consider are making sure your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, and navigational structure are optimized for search and user experience.

Ecommerce keyword research

Ecommerce keyword research

It’s important to think about the keywords that potential customers use to search for your products and conduct Ecommerce keyword research accordingly. This means investigating the keywords driving traffic to other sites like yours, plus understanding which phrases people use when searching for what you offer.

To find these keywords, it’s usually a good idea to start by looking at your site analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) – this might reveal some insight into what people are searching for when they arrive on your pages. You can also use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to see which phrases are relatively popular.

Meta tags and descriptions

It’s also a good idea to make sure your Ecommerce product pages have meta titles, images, and descriptions that advise people of the products they’re viewing – this will give you a better chance at attracting visitors who might be interested in what you’re selling.

Internal linking

When it comes to Ecommerce SEO, internal linking is especially important when optimizing your product pages – this will help users find more of the products they want on your site without having to look elsewhere for what you offer. You can use tools like Yoast’s Website Analysis plugin or RankMath.

The Different Areas of Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO has many different areas to it. There are off-page elements like metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure that all need to be for your site to rank highly in the SERPs.

On-page content like headings, product descriptions, and body copy also play a major role in gaining visibility for your site.

Off-Page Elements:

There are two kinds of off-page elements that will affect your Ecommerce SEO – external links and backlinks.

External Links: You want people to find you when they search on keywords related to your ecommerce store, so you’ll want to spend time building up various kinds of external links to your site. There are lots of ways to do this, including:

  • Getting your store listed on directories and other search engines. Make sure that any ecommerce SEO directory you get into is for stores similar to yours, so you’re more likely to get relevant visitors – it’s also important not just to be present but contribute helpful information to build up trust. This means writing informative reviews, filling out your profile page with as much data about your store as possible (including things like opening hours), and sharing other people’s content through social media.
  • Building backlinks to your site – these are the links that point from one website to another. These can come in many forms: guest blogging on related websites, writing articles or press releases that link back to your site, creating videos with links in the description text, etc.
  • Partnering up with other ecommerce stores – these can be partnerships of various kinds (selling each others’ products on each others’ sites) or just having a mutual relationship where you help promote each other’s businesses. This technique is also known as co-marketing.

Internal Link Structure:

The internal link structure of your site is important because Google wants to see that other pages on your website are related and relevant, so having many links pointing from one page to another will help you rank higher in the SERPs.

You should also avoid overly deep structures or too many links in your navigational structure – Google is looking for sites that are easy to navigate and won’t want to rank anything too complex.

Product & Content Descriptions:

Product descriptions should be engaging but informative, focusing on what makes each product unique or different from the competition without being overly salesy.

You’ll probably have several product pages with similar kinds of descriptions, so it’s important to vary the language you use to avoid being repetitive. This can also help with your internal link structure – linking between product pages is a great way to show Google that these are related pages on your site.

As for content marketing – blogging about topics related to ecommerce and SEO (and eventually including links to your site) is a great way to build traffic and gain visibility.

Navigational Structure:

The navigational structure of your website should be easy for users to use, so you’ll want it organized by category rather than having too many links within each page (again, Google doesn’t like overly complex websites).

You also need to ensure that there’s a clear path from the homepage to every other page on your site – this is often done in ecommerce stores by having links at the bottom of each page directing visitors back towards their main categories or search bar.

Why You Should Invest in Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages.

Ecommerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience.

There are many ways to do this, including Getting your store listed on directories and other search engines.

Make sure that any ecommerce SEO directory you get your site listed on has a high page ranking, uses human editors rather than automated submissions, and requires your store to have a certain level of trust or authority.

Tools to make Ecommerce SEO easier

Firstly, you need to start with keywords. You may want to use a tool like Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Wordtracker that will help you identify the most relevant keywords for your website.

Next, you can work on optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, and navigation structure with the goal of both improving search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. Examples of tools to use include Google Webmaster Tools, Schema Creator for Structured Data, Mozilla Online Marketing Toolkit, and Moz’s.

Finally, be sure to do some keyword research before creating site content or creating new products. This will not only improve SEO but will also save you time in the long run.

How to Optimize Your Store for Search Engines

Two things can be done on your site to help it rank higher in SERPs – internal SEO and off-page SEO. There is much overlap between the two, with off-page SEO affecting internal SEO and vice versa.

Internal SEO is mainly about optimizing the content of your website for search engines. You want to optimize your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, and navigational structure.

Off-Page SEO can be broken down into two categories: external links and backlinks.

When listing your ecommerce store on a directory, make sure that it is ranked highly, uses human editors, and requires a certain level of trust or authority.

How to Promote Your Online Store and Increase Sales

The first step in the process is to make sure that you are getting found! Use keywords like “Ecommerce” or “SEO” (don’t overdo it), and make sure to include them within your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure. 

Also, keep things updated, including your headlines. The more often you update these areas, the more likely new customers will find you.

After you’ve updated your page content with current Ecommerce SEO strategies, then it’s time to look at how people are finding your products today. 

Most people search for items on Google, Amazon, eBay, and other sites before making a purchase decision, so look at how others are linking to your pages and make sure you are linking to them as well.

Including relevant keywords throughout your product pages will result in higher rankings, more traffic from Google, and the ability for customers to find their way back to your site. Remember, people want information!

They don’t care about special offers or sales until they’ve decided that a store will meet their needs.

Tools to make Ecommerce SEO easier

Referring back to off-page SEO, there are many tools that you can use to identify relevant keywords for your website and help optimize your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, and navigation structure to improve search engine optimization (SEO) and user.

SEO Tool RankMath

RankMath is a straightforward, easy-to-use rank monitor for WordPress blogs. If you’re looking for a way to monitor your blog’s performance over time, this software is the perfect fit. 

The dashboard keeps track of where your site ranks for your chosen terms or phrases in five different “metrics.” It also lets you input up to five different “keywords” at any one time, which is tracked on their line graph to give you an idea of how they correlate with the other keywords.

The RankMath dashboard monitors your site’s performance over time by tracking your site rank for your chosen terms or phrases in 5 metrics:

  • Page Rank (inverse)
  • Alexa Rank (inverse) 
  • Google PageRank (original) 
  • Domain Authority 
  • Page Authority

SEO tool Semrush

Semrush is a program designed for web rankings with an emphasis on SEO. This site crawls the internet, including social media, to identify and rank keywords.

It can track competitors and show you how they are ranking.

What does an ecommerce SEO agency do?

An ecommerce SEO agency will provide tools and strategies to optimize web presence for online sellers. Some of their services include keyword research, competitor analysis, content marketing, and user experience testing.

These agencies can be used by startups or large established players in the industry.

An ecommerce SEO agency prepares a comprehensive plan to ensure you get found.

They’ll do everything from choosing your keywords and writing your Headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure to web pages that are both optimized for search engines so they’ll rank highly and user-friendly. Hence, people want to browse through them.

And more! An ecommerce SEO agency will periodically audit its work with analytics programs like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or RankMath, which will help businesses see how well they executed their plans on an ongoing basis, find areas of improvement for the future SEO Campaigns.

To compete in today’s digital world, you need a stellar website that ranks high on the SERPs.

This article is intended to give you an overview of all the steps required for e-commerce SEO and how they can help your store rank higher. If you don’t have time or knowledge about this topic, we recommend hiring a professional – it will be worth every penny!

We hope this guide has been helpful and informative; let us know if there’s anything else we can do to make your life easier as an Ecommerce Entrepreneur.

43 Ecommerce SEO Tips from Online Store Owners

Ecommerce SEO is essential if you are expecting sales revenue for the Web.

SEO and Ecommerce both need to trend in the right direction. SEO must help drive more traffic for your target customer while sales revenue moves in the same direction, up.

When you run an ecommerce store, there are so many moving parts you have to keep track of. There’s the constant shuffling of inventory and order fulfillment. Customer support tickets to answer. Social media posts and other content. 

With all those variables to account for, there are plenty of on-site SEO variables that can fly under the radar.

I interviewed dozens of ecommerce store owners and ecommerce SEO specialists and asked them what their number one optimization tip for ecommerce is. 

How would you like to see results like this?

website traffic increase through seo

Time and resources are important so you may need to look for an ecommerce SEO company that may help you.

This is what they’re doing to rank. How does your website stack up? 

1. Use Google Page Speed Insight to test your site and improve your site speed. 

Website speed performance has an impact on SEO as well as lower ad spend and conversion rates. Page Speed is free to use and is an excellent first tool to use for a performance audit. 

Darjan Hren, Conversion Rate and SEO Specialist at hren.io

2. If you sell custom items, make sure the corresponding webpage is as specific as can be, and uses target keywords

A large part of my sales come from custom orders. By nature, custom pieces will always be hard to describe; how do you write a standard product description for a non-standard item, and make sure that the webpage ranks?

Besides using strategic keyword phrases (like “custom embroidery pattern”), be as specific as you can. There are going to be certain features that always stay the same, so do what you can to make custom descriptions as straightforward.

Bonus tip: Don’t forget to make the URL for product pages match the page’s name. 

Caitlin Rethwish, Founder of Etcetera Embroidery.  

3. Don’t clutter your menu.

Only include the main categories you want to rank. That said, users should easily be able to get to any product within three clicks.

In our example, we have fitness equipment > cardio machines >exercise bikes > folding exercise bikes as a category structure. If we only included fitness equipment in the menu, it would take five clicks to get to a folding exercise bike page.

Even including Cardio Machines is not enough (four clicks), so we include Exercise Bikes on the menu so people can still easily find products they are searching for.

Robin Young, CEO of Fitness Savvy

4. Schema mark-up and structured data must be implemented consistently.

This is especially important for collection (category) pages. Google’s guidelines state that if one item on such a page is marked up, they must all be marked up. Failing to do this is a violation of their guidelines and will prevent your category pages from ranking – something you need to avoid, as category pages typically have the highest volume of searches per month.

5. Make sure pop-ups don’t obscure content.

If you have pop-ups on your site that obscure the main content, it will trigger an algorithmic penalty that will drag your entire site down in the rankings. 

Robin Young, CEO of Fitness Savvy

6. Keep product pages comprehensive.

Keeping the product pages comprehensive allows users to have a better experience in the store and increases trust (which can also help with engagement metrics). I usually advise clients to have plenty of high-quality images, product demonstration videos (if possible), as well as showing product reviews on the page.

Itamar Blauer, SEO Consultant

7. Take internal linking seriously with Ecommerce SEO.

Most people completely overlook the importance of a healthy internal linking structure for maximizing SEO performance. This is particularly true for ecommerce stores, where typically the only internal linking you’ll find is when product pages include ‘related products’ sections.

The issue with this type of internal linking is that it isn’t contextual, it doesn’t typically include descriptive anchor text, and it’s not usually from the pages on your site with the most external links. Instead of relying on automated internal linking like this, roll your sleeves up and add some links manually – within product descriptions, from your homepage into your more in-depth pages and blog posts. This will have a much better impact on your SEO. 

Sam Williamson, Co-founder of CBDiablo

8. Use an external feedback system like Trustpilot. 

It would help if you had reviews of your products to build trust and rank higher on Google. The only reviews that matter is off-site reviews on platforms like Facebook and Trustpilot, mostly because anyone can fake their reviews on their website.

Trustpilot is excellent in that regard because, with its plugin, you will be sending an automated email to your customers after they made a purchase, reminding them to review the product on their platform. This is very important because less than 3% of customers leave reviews (usually the angry ones… people love hating, but they hate loving). You will also get a cool review widget that you can use on your homepage. 

Dan Serbanescu, CEO, Leather Depot

That is rule number 1. Search engines hate low-quality backlinks, like shady websites where you pay $5 for 200 backlinks. It would be best if you focused on getting backlinks from reputable sources, and a tool like Ahrefs authority checker can help you find out who is trustworthy. Just enter to check out sites that you are unsure of.

Dan Serbanescu, CEO

10. Stop going for the well-known keywords.

 For example, if you are selling protein powder, it will be extremely hard (pretty much impossible) to rank on page 1 for the keyword “protein powder.” Instead, try to optimize your product descriptions and your blog posts for side keywords, like “athlete protein powder,” “best taste protein powder,” “strawberry protein powder,” etc. Therefore, you should only go after the prevalent keywords for your homepage and maybe 2 – 3 products. The other essential pages should aim to rank for lesser-known keywords, not as competitive (maybe up to 5000 monthly searches). 

Dan Serbanescu, CEO, Leather Depot

11. Design a logical site structure. 

The number one SEO tip I have for Shopify business owners is to design a logical site structure that focuses on useful and intuitive customer experience.

That means that you need to make sure you design a laser-focused product category flow right from the start (e.g., food -> sweets -> lollipops), which will make it easy for your users, but also Google, to navigate and understand your site. A significant side effect: Google often uses these categories and includes them as site links in the search results, giving your conversion rates a significant boost, as it creates confidence by users that it is a relevant search result for their query

Martin Heubel, Founder and CEO of Consulterce

12. Right size your images with Ecommerce SEO

 This is the easiest way to speed up your store’s page. Most ecommerce stores have huge image files. Use a compressor. Product images on Shopify should be 2048×2048. There is no need to go any bigger.

Sean Collins, Director of Marketing Strategy & Business Intelligence at Barrel

13. Get rid of the accordions on your PDP.

This is from an SEO perspective, so you’ll also want to consider the UX implications of it. However, long a hunch, data now supports the belief that you lose some keyword value from stuff that lives in accordions. That is excellent long-tail keyword stuff and high intent stuff. Break it out and increase its value to you. 

Sean Collins, Director of Marketing Strategy & Business Intelligence at Barrel

14. Use headers to make content easier to read. 

Google actively encourages a more direct reader experience. Design your page with a unique look and strong personality. People love to see something well-made, looks original, and has its character. Use H2 and H3 titles along the article to make the reader’s experience more intuitive and easier to read. 

Giorgio Passalacqua, CEO at SoundsWow 

15. Audit everything every six months with your Ecommerce SEO

 We optimize our website in a six-month cycle. The starting point is a technical audit where we see if everything is stable (404 pages, indexed/non-indexed URLs, loading speed, etc.). SEO audit is also a starting point to see if there are any gaps in our on-page elements (the list is long but includes checking optimized titles, images, and meta descriptions).

We follow the SEO audit recommendations and implement improvements. At the same time, we work on our blog content and link building. All of these three practices are a cycle that keeps our website running smoothly.

Stephen Lever, Managing Director of Parka London 

16. Think about subcategories for your product pages. 

Whenever I work on a new eCommerce site, the first thing I do is make sure their product navigation makes sense. Are their category and subcategory pages too broad or specific? For example, if they sell women’s clothing, how is the category of bottoms subdivided – are jeans a part of pants or their subcategory? There are enough modifiers for Jeans that they should have their subcategory page.

Samantha Hulkower, Director of Marketing at KSW Solutions

17. Put yourself in the shoes of comparison shoppers. 

Comparison shoppers make up a large portion of the overall search, especially at the funnel’s middle to late stages. So writing product comparison blogs that link internally to product category pages will help you rank better.

Stephan Boehringer, Business Development Strategist at Get The Clicks

18. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript to increase site loading times. 

If you use a CSS preprocessor, minifying your styles should be as simple as setting the output to `compressed` or an equivalent setting. JavaScript is a bit different. You’ll want to uglify your source code when it is in the process of removing excess spaces.

You could use some tools online or set up a build system with Gulp, Grunt, or Webpack to minify your JavaScript. Similarly, HTML can be compressed with a project build tool or PHP directly with `ob_start().` This can potentially cause an issue if you have any inline JavaScript, so be sure to watch out for that. 

Kelsey Nagle, Marketing Coordinator at Brolik

19. Don’t lose the forest for the trees.

 It’s a work in progress, but I try to focus on my landing page more from a conversion perspective than a strictly SEO one. Specifically, if somebody watches my intro video, they’re 3x as likely to convert as those who do not.

Does watching a video increase visit time, which signals to Google that my landing page is worth ranking higher than a competitor’s? Probably. But that’s not the point–the point is that people like the video, and it’s important not to get so sucked into SEO that you forget about the actual content you make.

Mark Aselstine, Founder of Uncorked Ventures

20. Asking visitors to leave a conversion page is asking for a higher bounce rate. 

Like everybody, I’ve got a list of keywords; it would be a lot easier for me to break my landing pages into a wine club page and a gift basket page. But, asking people to get off the home page immediately and find somewhere else to go, just adds a step and hurts conversions.

So everything stays on the home page, which coincidentally is how all my better-known competitors are ranked. Then I have the issue of needing for my wine club and gift basket business to sell that stuff. Thus, my short manifesto at the bottom. Part of it is trying to get some keywords onto the page to give me a fighting chance, and the other part is, of course, trying to sound like myself and convert people.

Mark Aselstine, Founder of Uncorked Ventures

21. Implement FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). 

FAQs are great for adding relevant copy to category and product pages. As well as being helpful for users, FAQs will naturally increase the topical relevance of the page in question and offer the opportunity to implement target keywords naturally. Paid tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush allow you to view question-based queries around a topic with ease, while free tools, such as Answer The Public and Also Asked, are great for identifying a range of questions around a topic. Don’t forget to track common questions you may receive via channels such as phone, email, and live chat! 

Ben Dracup, SEO Manager at Minty Digital

22. Focus on chatty and conversational keywords. 

Based on recent research, 50% of searches will be voice searches by the end of 2020. A forecast by Juniper Research shows that voice commerce will reach more than $80 billion by 2023. When voice searching, people prefer complete questions or sentences. With the help of artificial intelligence, an online search is becoming more conversational and user-friendly. As the audience starts using programs like Siri, Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, Google Assistant, etc., search engines might get to the optimized sites with casual and chatty keywords. In addition to that, you should take into account that voice searches usually use the W-questions – “Who,” “What,” “Where,” “When.” That’s why it’s imperative to use a conversational tone throughout the content.

Alexandra Zelenko, Senior Marketer at DDI Development

23. Your business contact page matters too for Ecommerce SEO

Use structured mark-up (schema) to ensure your business information (name, address, phone number), is correctly formatted for Google and other engines to index properly. Treat it with the same seriousness as product descriptions. This is especially vital for emerging trends like voice search, not just local SEO

Kent Lewis, President, and Founder, Anvil Media

24. Using Semrush, use Google search to filter results for questions. 

To get started, take your highest level product keyword (something like leather jackets or skateboards) and plug it into both SEMRush and Google. These two tools will give us all of the blog content we need. In SEMRush, navigate to SEO Toolkit > Keyword Magic Tool. Here, you will paste your high-level keyword, click search, and filter the results for questions.*

You can then download all of the questions that SEMRush returns regarding leather jackets, and use the relevant ones in your blog calendar. Blogs from high authority sites that explicitly answer high volume questions have a great chance of earning the featured snippet. Since these blogs are directly answering questions about your product, you’ll have plenty of opportunities for internal links with relevant anchor text.

Adam Gingery, Digital Strategy at Majux

25. Invest in a full-time copywriter. It’s worth it. 

We see conversion rates increase when we can provide in-depth descriptions for each of our products. Enough so that we hired a full-time copywriter onto our staff. Descriptive words are essential. A big challenge is being short and concise while also providing value in our brand voice. We also have to avoid duplicate content red flags from Google when we have the same product shared across our sites.

Brian Lim, Founder, and CEO of iHeartRaves

26. Don’t forget about mobile and Ecommerce SEO: Speed

Another critical factor for increasing conversions is mobile site speed. To ensure our mobile site loads quickly, we compress our images. This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality. We also took steps to minify all our liquid code and prioritized script load order while trimming down the total number of scripts being called. Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing image assets on others helped reduce site load time. We also started to use AMP on our blog pages, which reduced page speed load time by under 1 second. As a result, we’ve seen a 20% lift in traffic to our blog.

Brian Lim, Founder, and CEO of iHeartRaves

27. Write unique product content with Ecommerce SEO

Invest in Better Product Content. Writing highly optimized, unique product content instead of using the manufacturer’s supplied content is definitely worth the time. For some reason, many ecommerce sites simply recycle the same verbiage from the manufacturer. How will that help distinguish your product when you’re plagiarising the description from the company that made it? This is a pretty straightforward SEO tip for any ecommerce reseller. 

Seth Hanes, Sr. Digital Marketing Manager at Gooten

28. Use 360-degree product images. 

Static product images do not fully represent the product you sell to the online consumer, such as the front side, backside, and side angle views. 360-degree gives online customers an in-store experience by elevating product display. Online customers can easily rotate products in all directions equally and zoom in to see the product’s necessary and essential details, such as design, quality, and features. Not only do customers get a real sense of the product’s quality, but they will also spend more time on your site, which positively impacts your rank. 

Simonas Steponaitis, Marketing Manager at Hosting Wiki

29. Segmentation is important. 

For example, a pet store shouldn’t just talk about their subscription boxes, dog and cat food, toys, etc. Go beyond that and start talking about training your dog or grooming tips. Segment them based on customer profiles, i.e., first-time owners vs. experienced ones. Cat owners vs. dog owners. You can also segment branded vs. unbranded keywords (e.g., Herman Miller ergonomic office chair vs. ergonomic office chair), low-volume (500 or fewer searches per month) high-volume keywords, and many more. 

Ariel Lim, Digital Marketing Consultant

30. Buyer’s Guides/Whitepapers are good for Ecommerce SEO (and useful for making customers trust you) 

Create buyer’s guides and comparison pieces, so you help your audience with their purchase decisions. By creating content around which criteria to choose when buying home office equipment, or comparing Amazon Basics versus a brand you’re carrying, you add value to the shopping experience and create long-lasting goodwill.

I often use the analogy of a consumer and a bank. You are the consumer, while your customer is the bank. Every time you make it easy for your customer to do business with you or help them achieve their goals, you create goodwill. These are small deposits to the bank. Then, when you ask for the sale (e.g., promos and other campaigns), you take away from this goodwill you’ve built up.

If you have no investments or deposits, will you be able to withdraw from the bank?

Jon Lim, Founder of The Marketing Introvert

31. Word count minimums on for Ecommerce SEO product pages

I see way too many ecommerce stores with great images but minimal content on their product pages. Since the content on these pages informs Google of how to rank them in search, it’s vital to include as many relevant keywords as possible. Don’t keyword stuff, but as a general rule, I shoot for 500 words minimum on product pages while keeping the tone as natural as possible. 

Calloway Cook, President of Illuminate Labs

32. Create faceted landing pages

For me, the most crucial aspect of Ecommerce SEO is site structure and faceted navigation – both the user and Google need to locate your key category pages and understand how they relate to each other. Some of our clients have 15-20,000 products on their site, so getting the most out of your crawl budget is critical.

Ensuring you have landing pages for key facets such as color, size, price, and brand depending on what you sell is important as they can bring users to key mid-level category pages. However, this should be controlled so that pages that contain a maximum of two facets can only be indexed. Otherwise, you will run into difficulty with giving Googlebot too many pages to crawl. Striking a balance between these two should be a crucial part of your Ecommerce SEO strategy.

Conor Coyle, SEO Team Lead at Loudmouth Media

33. Target paid and organic search results simultaneously 

Seeing your brand name appear twice, both on organic and on paid results creates more brand awareness and intensifies your business’s trustworthiness. Research shows that if two brands have the same products, people will be more likely to choose the one they are familiar with. When a brand is shown in organic results alone, it only gets 60% of clicks, whereas a brand that appeared in organic and paid search results, attracts 92% of total clicks. This means that clicks increase for organic and paid listings when they are both featured and do not detract from each other. If you have the budget to do it, investing in paid search alongside your highest-ranking keywords is a way to monopolize the results that matter most to your business altogether. 

Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder and CEO at Mavens & Moguls

34. Quantity does not mean quality for Ecommerce SEO

The domain authority of other websites certainly plays a massive role in the domain authority of your website. We can have over 100 backlinks that may be of low quality, but this is less effective than one website with a very high domain authority score. When we focus on white hat SEO, we try to target links that have more quality behind them, even if it means putting in more work to get that higher DA link.

Rizwan Girach, Founder at Chessgammon 

35. If you’re using a premade theme, make sure it’s Ecommerce SEO friendly

I see a lot of beautiful, professionally-designed themes on Shopify, BigCommerce, and other platforms. Unfortunately, many people get duped into using a theme that claims SEO-friendly when it isn’t. I’ve seen source code for drag and drop Shopify websites where most HTML in the first 800 lines are scripted, with the H1 for the page not even appearing until line 822. That will make it harder for search engine crawlers to find the content they’re looking for. So if you’re deciding on a theme to install on your ecommerce store, check to make sure the scripts are clean and as minimal as possible. 

David James, Founder of Business Growth Digital Marketing

36. Tell buyers what it will mean to own your product

Many business owners make the mistake of purely selling the features and benefits, hoping that their potential clients will be interested and want to buy. Instead, I recommend writing content about what it will mean when someone owns your products. What will it do for them, and how will that make them feel?

By focusing on this aspect, you’ll align with their reasons for wanting to buy in the first place. People buy with emotion, and then justify it with logic. Write content that aligns with them emotionally, and ensure it’s written with keywords that people are looking for. We use Ubersuggest to find out what keywords people are looking for, and then write both emotional and logical content centered around these keywords.

Khabeer Rockley, Founder of The 5% Institute

37. Don’t forget the page description

These meta descriptions are just as important as the product descriptions themselves! Add in a description of what your page is about, making sure to not only include the keyword you want to rank for but also include other keywords/phrases that are similar to the one you are ranking for. A great example of this is trying to rank for the term un-tied bow ties, also called self-tie bow ties. In this instance, you’ll want to include both of these terms in your page description.

Rob Remak, Co-Founder of Art of the Gentleman

38. Utilize user-generated content and Ecommerce SEO

Leave room for user-generated content, like reviews. That’s going to add additional content, additional organic links, and further optimization to your product pages.

Domantas Gudeliauskas, Marketing Manager at Zyro

39. Eliminate duplicate content within your website

Many different pages end up having the same type of content, just due to how websites are naturally designed. Those pages are the product pages followed by categories, tags, and search parameter pages. Creating a canonical spreadsheet map that identifies all of these URLs and picking the best page to rank according to the user’s experience is of the most critical importance. 

Here’s an example using the shoe company Finishline and a few URLs from their website:

If we Google mens black shoes, this is the Finishline URL that shows up on page 1: finishline.com/mens-black-shoes

This URL is exactly what we’re searching for, mens-black-shoes.

From the Finishline homepage, using the menu go to Mens > Shoes then scroll down and click the filter tag black, this is the URL: www.finishline.com/store/men/shoes//N-1737dkj?mnid=men_shoes#/store/men/shoes//N-1737dkjZ1qpcher?mnid=men_shoes

Notice /store/mens/shoes/ part of the URL, these are category pages within the store. Usually, you would see /store/mens/shoes/black with black denoting the tag filter, but enterprise ecommerce stores are more complicated.

Lastly, if we go to the Finishline homepage and use the search function and type mens black shoes, this is the URL: www.finishline.com/store/_/N-/Ntt-mens%20black%20shoes?isrfk=true

Mens%20black%20shoes?isrfk=true – this is a search query string within their store for mens black shoes.

All 3 of these URLs have the same products, but depending on how the user got there, the URL is wildly different.

Notice the result that populated in the search engines is the simplest URL that has the exact keywords in the URL, mens-black-shoes, and it doesn’t have all the extra parameters in the URL string. This is properly optimized, and to avoid duplicate content, the other pages should be canonical back to this ranking URL mens-black-shoes for proper SEO benefits.

Alex Furfaro, SEO Consultant

40. Look at what your competitors are doing for Ecommerce SEO

Search for your keywords and look for your competitors that rank higher than your website. Take a sneak peek on their pages and how they utilize their keywords. However, do not go for the same words as them, instead, be creative and outperform theirs.

Shari Smith, Founder of Sheri-Sells.com

41. Keep title tags under 60 characters 

Ecommerce store owners should take the time to optimize their website’s title tags. Title tags should be less than 60 characters because that is the number of characters that Google displays in its search engine result pages (SERPs). There’s a better chance that Google will display the full page title if it’s less than 60 characters.

If above 60 characters, Google will either truncate the page title or pick a title of its own. In other words, keeping your title tag under 60 characters gives you the most control over how your website shows up in Google’s search results. Useful title tags help drive high click-through rates, which boost your organic search traffic and keyword rankings.

Bruce Horgan, CEO of Software Pundit

42. Product reviews help avoid duplicate content problems

Another reason why adding on-page reviews are helpful for SEO is that many ecommerce product pages suffer from duplicate content issues. The addition of customer reviews can help

to add unique content to each page and minimize the amount of duplicate content.

Michael Anderson, Marketing & SEO Specialist at GeoJango

43. “No-Index” pages that aren’t getting any traffic

E-commerce websites have tons of similar pages, as there are many products with slight variations. To avoid getting penalized for duplicate content, make a list of all the pages that are not gaining any traffic and no-index them so that Google doesn’t crawl those pages. It’ll give a significant lift to the pages on your website that do get traffic. 

Ian Kelly, VP of Operations at NuLeaf Naturals


Conclusion on Ecommerce SEO

There’s always room for improvement, no matter how well your ecommerce website is optimized. Think about what you’ve read here and decided which aspects of your site can do with a little TLC, then get to work and start optimizing! 

Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.

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General FAQs

What is Ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO makes your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When people search for products that you sell, you want to rank as highly as possible to get more traffic. You can get traffic from paid search, but SEO costs much less.


What is Ecommerce?

Electronic commerce or ecommerce (sometimes written as eCommerce) is a business model that lets firms and individuals buy and sell things over the internet. Ecommerce operates in all four of the following major market segments: Business to business, Business to consumer, and direct to consumer.


What is SEO (Search engine optimization)?

The process of optimizing a website and all the content on that website – so it will appear in prominent positions in the organic results of search results. There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO.


What is duplicate content on a website?

One of the best-known duplicate content checkers is probably CopyScape.com. This tool works pretty quickly: insert a link in the box on the homepage, and CopyScape will return several results, presented a bit like Google’s search result pages. We use grammerly.com.

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