50++ Ecommerce SEO Tips (That Actually Work)

Search engine optimization is low-hanging fruit for ecommerce websites. Many online stores pay little to no attention to search engines despite the fact that SEO has a high ROI for ecommerce marketing campaigns.

Many people rely on social media or paid ads to market their products, which can be great for companies but requires a lot of effort and money. Ad spending by companies is costing them billions of dollars every year and this amount is only increasing.

Taking the above into account, we can see that SEO may initially require more effort, but it could eventually lead to less work in the long run.

It is important to understand SEO best practices if you want your ecommerce business to be successful.

Site structure

The structure of your website is important for both your website’s success and your SEO strategy. If the text lacked structure, the user would be easily confused or discouraged and would leave immediately. And Google doesn’t like that.

To improve your site’s structure: – Use headings and subheadings – Write clear and concise content – Use bullet points or numbering when appropriate – Use easy to read fonts To give customers a better experience: – Use images and videos – Use easy to navigate menus – Use clear and concise text – Use customer testimonials

Your e-commerce store needs to be on HTTPS. It helps protect customer information, it’s trusted by Google, and it even improves your SEO.
Speed is critical for e-commerce SEO. As page load times increase, your bounce rate increases dramatically.
Don’t neglect mobile: By the end of 2017, mobile will account for 50%of digital e-commerce revenue. Optimize your site for mobile ASAP.
Start building high-quality backlinks before your peak season to boost rankings and traffic.
Write more compelling meta-descriptions to increase CTRs on organic search. This won’t directly impact your rankings, but increasing your CTR can.
Add ALT tags to all of your images. Not only does this improve SEO by allowing bots to scan the alt text, but it also helps blind and visually-impaired people understand your images.
Start using e-commerce breadcrumbs to improve internal linking and site structure.
If you have an expired or discontinued product, 301-redirect the URL to a newer product page. All SEO value will transfer to the new page.
Treat category-based pages (like Men or Women) as individual homepages with their own keywords and content.
Structure your URLs in a user-friendly and Google-friendly way.
Always offer category-level navigation on your e-commerce store.
Compress your images if you want faster load times and better SEO. Page speed is a big factor in rankings.
Don’t neglect your marketplace SEO. One store was able to generate 320% more sales in 10 minutes of optimization on Amazon.
Optimize your title tag to be 60-70 characters and always include the keyword to grab user attention.
Always include social integrations on your product pages for people to share your products and generate more organic traffic.
Turn your 404 error pages into a sales-driving machine.
Boost your conversion rates by nearly 50% by simply adding live chat to your site.
Always build and submit a sitemap and Robots.txt file to Google for scanning and more indexed pages.
Be sure to reduce your bounce rate by increasing speed and internal linking. This helps you rank higher.
Use internal links to suggest related products or products that other users bought to drive more relevant sales and better your site structure.
Use keywords in anchor text instead of “click here” to rank pages for specific terms.
Optimize for the user experience. SEO is all about optimizing for real people now — not search engines. Make your content easily accessible and understandable.
Update your calls to action frequently. Optimize them for specific holidays, promotions, and sales.
Create an “About Us” page to increase content on-site and give Google more context about which industries you’re in and what products you sell.
Your homepage should already initiate the selling process. Start by suggesting products that are popular to get people interested fast. This will help reduce the likelihood of a bounce.
Activate an SSL certificate. Google gives higher authority to sites that have better security and have updated to SSL.
Collect leads on product pages when your product is out of stock. Instead of leaving the page blank, most likely causing a bounce, ask the user to give their email in exchange for stocking notifications.
Use terms like “buy online” to give the user an idea of how they can get your product before they even click. Tons of e-commerce stores do this to increase their organic CTR.
Use a canonical tag to organize your content and prioritize specific web pages over duplicate pages. Every web page has duplicate content. This is one of the fastest ways to fix it.

Promotion and brand awareness

If you want to make more money from your e-commerce store, you need to promote it more and make people aware of your brand. And you’re missing out on some powerful SEO juice.

Social proof is a powerful way to increase conversions. 85% of consumerstrust social proof as much as personal recommendations.
Don’t neglect paid search. It can be a great driver of brand awareness that leads to an organic purchase (last-touch bias).
Use Schema markup to get aggregate, star-based reviews next to your products in organic search.
38% of e-commerce product searchesstart on Amazon. Make sure your product is listed and linked back to your site.
According to Google, links and content are the biggest factors for organic rankings. Produce content and share it often to build links.
Contact popular bloggers in your product niche and ask them to review your products. This will get you links faston roundup-style posts.
Allow buyers to leave reviews to help increase content on your product pages.
Always have consistent branding. This can help increase your organic CTR, which improves SEO rankings.
Start implementing a guest blogging strategy to drive more traffic and links back to your site. This can also help you increase brand awareness.
Take advantage of rich snippets to give better product descriptions and increase your click-through rate on organic results.
Bid on branded PPC terms to dominate the organic results for your company. This ensures that all organic searches for your store result in a click to your site.
Write unbiased review content for your blog surrounding products that you sell. For example, do you sell shoes? Write a specific post reviewing multiple shoe products to generate traffic without blatantly promoting your products.
Start an affiliate program to get bloggers writing about and promoting your products on your site. This will not only generate more sales, but it will also increase your site backlinks, giving you more authority and better rankings.
Use a broken link-building strategy to acquire more links fast. Google roundup posts like “Top 10 makeup products” and click all the links for each product. If there are broken links, contact the site and ask them to replace them with your products.
Sponsor a local eventor conference to get a link on a high-authority site and get better recognition for your brand. Do this by searching for local events and contacting them to sponsor.
If your business is also local, be sure to list it on Moz Local to drive tons of traffic to both your e-commerce shop and your local store.

On-Page SEO Strategy

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website to make sure your keywords are in the right places. By doing this, you can improve your website’s ranking in search engines and get more traffic. Google uses structured data markup to better understand the content of your page. By adding structured data markup to your HTML, you can help Google better understand your page and improve your site’s search results.

Having strong on-page SEO is important not only for appearing in regular search results, but also in other Search Engine Results Page features.

The factors that involve ranking for SERP including the following:

Ecommerce keyword research.

Identifying and targeting the right keywords is the first step to a successful ecommerce SEO campaign.

If you get this part wrong, one of two things will happen:

You’ll target keywords too difficult to rank for and won’t make it to page one.
You’ll rank for keywords that don’t garner traffic or cause customers to buy.

Ecommerce keyword research is important in order to target keywords that are easy to rank for, have good search volume, and have high conversion rates.

However, there is more to choosing keywords than simply looking at how difficult it is to rank or how many people search for them. You also need to consider how relevant the keyword is to your business, how likely people are to convert after searching for it, and a number of other factors. The following four options can help you to perform ecommerce keyword research, find keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume and uncover buyer intent:

Determine if you are choosing the right keywords.

If you want to have keyword data for the phrases you picked, you’ll need to use a tool like Ahrefs. To know which keywords to use, you need to determine keyword difficulty, search volume and buyer intent.

You can use Google Keyword Planner to find out how many people are searching for a particular keyword, as well as how much advertisers are willing to pay for that keyword. This can help you determine whether people are interested in buying what you’re selling. It does not provide keyword difficulty or spread.

If you want to improve your SEO efforts and target a wider range of keywords, you should create a keyword matrix.

A keyword matrix is a way of sorting through relevant keywords and organizing them in a spreadsheet so that you can determine the best keywords to use on each page quickly. It’s based on KD, search volume and search intent.

Use Amazon for keyword research.

Amazon is a good place to find keywords that indicate that the person searching is intending to buy something. This is because people usually search on Amazon when they want to purchase an item.

To identify keywords using Amazon, begin by entering a seed keyword. In response, Amazon will spit out autofill suggestions. These are ideas for potential keywords that can be added to a Google spreadsheet for later use.

If you have hundreds or thousands of products, it could take a long time. That’s where the Amazon Keyword Tool comes in.

This tool allows you to see Amazon’s autofill suggestions for any keyword you type in. For each search you conduct, select all of the keywords and add them to your list. Then, use the “Download Selected Keywords” button to download the list as a CSV file.

Find keywords through competitor research.

If you want to improve your ranking in search results, you can look at your competitor’s websites to get ideas for keywords. First, type your keyword into Google, choose a competitor and look at their category and product pages for ideas on potential keywords.

You should not use the same keyword as your competitor just because they outrank you. Domain authority is another important factor to consider.

In addition to considering your website’s layout, it is also important to think about breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are a type of advanced navigation that helps Google scan and index your site. You can check if you’ve installed breadcrumbs on your site by looking it up on Google. If you see “yoursite.com -> category -> subcategory” in the website navigation, then breadcrumbs have been set up.

Use Ahrefs to help you find keyword opportunities.

Ahrefs is an all-around, fantastic SEO tool. This tool can be used for a number of different tasks such as keyword research, competitive research, and building backlinks.

The system allows you to see how you rank compared to your competitors and where you can make improvements.

Ecommerce product pages.

Product and category pages are the most important pages to rank. If a potential customer searches for your company on Google, they will see all the products you offer in that category.

To properly optimize these pages, you need to put your target keyword in the following places:

In the URL.

One way you can improve your site’s search ranking is by including your primary keyword in the URL. A more relevant and optimized URL is an edge that allows a website to draw in more traffic than its competitors. This is especially useful for websites that are competing in more competitive niches.

You can also optimize them for whichever keyword will give you the best ranking on your category pages.

In the title tag (H).

Your H1 tag should contain your target keyword close to the beginning. This supports the main ideas of the page and can help you get a higher organic ranking for the title tag.

In body copy.

Body copy is where things get a little trickier. Category pages on most websites lack an introduction, which hurts their ranking on Google.

A good intro should be at least 300 words, and your keyword should be included 2-3 times.

In image alt text.

Since Google can’t interpret images, they use alt text to determine what the image is and what it contains.

Image alt text is another opportunity to use your keyword on the page, which increases your chances of appearing in Google image results.

In the metadata.

Although there is no evidence that directly connecting your keyword to your metadata will impact your ranking, it could improve your click-through rate. Having a higher CTR has been linked with better rankings.

This is because when you include your main keyword in the meta description and description tags, Google bolds it in the search results:

Do the same thing for your category pages as you did for your product pages.