Mastering E-commerce SEO: A Step-by-Step Guide to More Sales

Operating an e-commerce store involves much more than listing products and expecting customers to appear. To attract visitors and transform them into buyers, it’s essential to master e-commerce SEO. 

When executed right, it can enhance your store’s position on search results pages (SERPs), boost your visibility, and drive additional organic traffic to your website, leading to improved conversions and sales.

This blog post will guide you through essential strategies for e-commerce SEO and prominent reasons why SEO is crucial in the e-commerce sector. 

Let’s get things rolling!

Understanding SEO for E-commerce

A well-structured and optimized e-commerce website paired with high-quality content will perform better in search engines like Google, boosting your store’s visibility and attracting traffic. In other words, SEO for e-commerce focuses on refining your site, simplifying lead generation, and increasing conversions.

However, unlike SEO tailored for content-driven websites, improving your online store involves more than just incorporating keywords, creating blog posts, and getting backlinks. It requires a deeper understanding of how search engines rank e-commerce sites and the major factors they prioritize.

To stay ahead and succeed, it is important to have a strong knowledge of e-commerce SEO, a clear concept of Google’s guidelines, and the ability to analyze buyer intent. All these factors can help you better strategize for what your potential customers are searching for.

Why is E-commerce SEO Important?

You may wonder why SEO is vital for e-commerce sites. The primary reason is the rapid expansion of e-commerce globally, reaching $8 trillion by 2027.

According to a survey, 82% of marketers believe e-commerce SEO has a positive influence on their marketing performance and objectives, while 50% say SEO has significantly benefited them.

SEO is important because it offers lasting benefits and is cost-effective compared to paid search advertising, which yields quick results but can be costly to sustain over time.

Furthermore, SEO provides additional visibility in search results, which is extremely valuable since searchers typically don’t venture beyond the first page of Google; nearly 75% of searchers remain on page one, with the top result capturing 27.6% of Google traffic.

The key takeaway: If you’re not achieving high rankings on search engines, you are likely missing out on traffic, leads, and conversions.

14 Best SEO Strategies for E-commerce Success

To level up your e-commerce store, consider these essential e-commerce SEO strategies:

1. Perform a Comprehensive SEO Audit

Performing an SEO audit of your e-commerce site helps you identify the major pitfalls and reasons why you’re not achieving the desired SEO objectives (more organic traffic, better conversion rates, and more).

A survey indicates that 79% of online shoppers encounter website problems that can prevent them from returning to make a purchase. Considering these facts, it is important to work on the efficiency and health of your e-commerce website.

Here are some factors to keep in mind during your SEO audit:

• Do all pages feature relevant and optimized meta tags?
• Are all your pages and content tailored to your target keywords?
• Do all your URLs function correctly and comply with search engine standards?
• Do all your images include appropriate ALT tags, which is essential for most e-commerce websites?
• Are you correctly utilizing links within your content? 

2. Thorough Keywords Research and Selection

One crucial activity every e-commerce entrepreneur should engage in is detailed keyword research (identifying the terms that consumers use when searching online for products/services) for their store.

Performing keyword research allows you to discover trends and key phrases that users look for on search engines. This guarantees that you’re creating suitable content to boost your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Your objective should be twofold.

Firstly, aim to discover the most pertinent and popular keywords within your niche. Secondly, understand the user or search intent (the underlying reason a person is searching) associated with each keyword.

There are numerous tools available for this purpose, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Answer the Public, Semrush, etc.

3. Utilize Long-Tail Keywords for Better Targeting

Did you know that over half of all searches feature at least four words? Keep this in mind when performing keyword research.

Integrate long-tail keywords into your site and use them in your product descriptions, FAQs, and other related sections. To discover different synonyms and long-tail keyword variations consider using Ahref’s Site Explorer tools or Google’s Autocomplete feature.

Typically, long-tail keywords don’t attract high search volumes, which means they will face less competition from other brands employing similar keywords in their e-commerce SEO tactics.

4. Optimize Product Pages with Relevant Keywords

The majority of e-commerce website pages focus on products. Consequently, optimizing individual product pages is vital for your overall SEO plan.

If your product pages aren’t SEO-friendly, how will potential customers find your products?

Ideally, you should concentrate on keywords that accurately depict your products. Next, seek out related terms that shoppers often use when searching for comparable products online. Once you’ve selected a primary keyword for each product, the following step is to incorporate them on specific pages. 

For instance, if you’re selling shoes, you’ll need a separate page for heels, flats, peep toes, wedges, and sneakers. Each product page should be optimized for an appropriate keyword. You shouldn’t include “peep toes,” for instance, on a product page dedicated to sneakers.

5. Incorporate Engaging and Interactive Content

Regular updates to your website content are essential for achieving a good ranking on search engines. Post high-quality, interactive content that caters to the specific needs of your target audience. Provide them with unique insights regarding your products or services and explain how your offerings surpass those of your competitors.

Updating your e-commerce site with fresh content can be a challenging task. However, by adding more interactive content, you can ensure that your site remains active. 

6. Implement a Strong Internal Linking Strategy

Internal links contribute significantly to your website. They enable you to establish your site’s architecture, distribute link equity, and guide users to important pages on your e-commerce site.

Additionally, you can reduce your site’s bounce rate by increasing internal linking. This helps you rank higher and ensures users spend more time browsing your store.

It’s beneficial to develop a solid internal linking framework. This structure allows you to direct “link juice” to your main content and helps search engine bots recognize which sections of your site hold greater significance.

7. Enhance Product Images for SEO

Optimizing images is vital for ensuring your site loads swiftly. If users experience delays due to oversized images, they may abandon your site and turn to a competitor. This could negatively affect your business revenue.

Here are a couple of tips for optimizing your images:

• Include captions with alt tags — descriptions for specific images found online.
• Ensure your images are as small as possible while maintaining quality.
• Incorporate keywords (or long-tail keywords) into file names.

These image optimization strategies can also increase the likelihood of your product images being displayed in search results [Image Search].

8. Implement Schema Markup on Product Pages 

Schema markups are HTML elements that give search bots extra insights about the content found on web pages. Implementing these markups can enhance your SEO efforts for e-commerce. 

When schema markup is applied, it can generate rich snippets, which allow search engines to display more details about specific queries at the top of the search results. 

These snippets help users find what they need more quickly and easily by presenting various kinds of information. 

The types of e-commerce schema include: 

Product schema: This assists in the discovery of new products and services during web searches by offering rich product details such as images, prices, and availability. It also enables product advertisements to be displayed on search results pages. 

Review schema: This facilitates online reviews. The author and title filters help users locate specific individuals who have submitted reviews on your website or blog post, as well as assist searchers in finding product reviews. 

Product availability schema: This schema outlines available products. It can be a single page or integrated within an online store and typically details the product name, description, price, images, and variations. 

Price schema: Price schema is a method for indicating product prices or a range of prices. 

FAQ schema: FAQ schema is a type of markup that incorporates a series of questions and answers. 

[Also Read: Schema Markup for Small Businesses: A Practical Guide to Structured Data] 

9. Showcase Customer Reviews for Trust and Authority

The significance of online reviews cannot be overstated. Just ask consumers! 

A survey revealed that 90 percent of shoppers consider reviews when before making a purchase. 

Why is that? It’s probably because reviews offer critical information that aids customers in their choices. Furthermore, they help establish trust with potential buyers, and a favorable review might be enough to close a sale. 

An effective method to promote customer reviews is by sending an email following their purchase. For instance, you can send an automated message to show gratitude for the purchase and request feedback. 

After a customer posts a review, you could send a follow-up email expressing thanks and featuring special offers or discounts to foster further engagement.

10. Secure Your Site with HTTPS

HTTPS is a secure protocol used for transferring information between websites and their visitors. It protects against the theft of sensitive data that users often share with online retailers, such as names, addresses, and credit card information. 

Since 2014, it has also been a nominal ranking factor for Google. You can identify if your store utilizes HTTPS by looking for a “padlock” icon in the address bar. 

Most popular e-commerce platforms operate on HTTPS, so it generally shouldn’t be an issue for most users. However, if it is, ensure it gets resolved.

[Also Read: HTTPS & Security for SEO: A Must-Have for Small Businesses]

11. Streamline Your Website’s Structure

Major search engines, such as Google, employ automated bots called web crawlers to catalog information found on websites. However, if your site has a complicated design, these bots may not index the content accurately, preventing your site from appearing in top search results.

Generally, there are two primary reasons why e-commerce websites are structured in a specific manner:

• It assists Google and other search engines in discovering your pages — Google can “navigate” through internal links from one page to another.
• Getting your site layout right from the beginning helps you avert the trouble of needing to redesign your site’s structure down the line.

Concerning internal links, it’s advisable to keep it straightforward initially. For instance, your homepage should connect to your category pages, which in turn should link to suitable subcategory pages, and finally, those should link to the relevant products.

12. Improve Website Loading Speed

Page loading time indicates how long it takes an internet user to access a webpage. It is a significant ranking element, and various studies indicate that consumers are unwilling to wait for a site to load. A recent analysis found that 53% of users will leave a page that takes longer than two to three seconds to load. Since your customers won’t wait for sluggish sites, speed must be an integral part of your SEO approach for your e-commerce site.

If you’re uncertain about your current loading speeds, you can evaluate them using GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

What should you do if your site is slow? First, determine the cause. It could be due to:

• Your site has too much content for the server to manage.
• Excessive scripts that hinder loading speeds.
• Images that require too long to load.
• An issue with your web hosting provider.

Achieving a perfect score of 100 % on PageSpeed Insights is quite rare, however, these below-mentioned tips can help you optimize your site speed: 

• Reducing the number of images on the pages.
• Compressing your files.
• Optimizing your images.
• Minimizing the use of social media widgets.
• Avoiding clutter and maintaining ample white space.
• Limiting redirects and HTTP requests.
• Improving your server response time.
• Switching web hosts or upgrading your hosting plan to better suit your needs.

13. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness

According to statistics approximately 60% of all online searches are conducted on mobile devices. Therefore, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, Google will not favor it in mobile search outcomes.

As such, optimizing your online store is crucial for converting as many visitors as possible into customers, no matter what device they are using.

To evaluate your site, you can utilize Google’s mobile-friendly test to reassess your site from a user perspective.

14. Build High-Quality Backlinks

A widespread misunderstanding is that having numerous links to a site improves its ranking. However, this is usually not the case.

It’s crucial to understand that the quality of links is more significant than their quantity. Effective link building is essential in SEO, as it influences your site’s credibility and traffic.

Moreover, the websites you link to and receive links from should have a solid reputation and good traffic. For instance, if you link to a low-quality spammy website or one that Google has blacklisted, you could face penalties for those backlinks, resulting in decreased rankings on search results pages.

Bottom Line for E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO can enhance your website’s visibility, draw in new customers to your store, and foster a loyal client base.

While it might seem overwhelming, focusing on the main SEO best practices and optimizing essential parts of your website, doesn’t have to be too complex.

The key point to remember is that SEO for e-commerce sites is not an instant process. Instead, it is a continuous strategy that requires ongoing updates to achieve the best and long-term results.

[Also Read: Shopify SEO Optimization: 12 Essential Tips You Need to Know]