Intro

Investing in the right ecommerce SEO strategies is crucial to your online store’s success. Using the right SEO strategies is vital if you want to boost your site visitors while growing your business simultaneously.

Search engine optimization can often be intimidating if you’re starting out. Getting your site on the top spot of Google amongst thousands, if not millions, of other ecommerce brands can be daunting.

In an attempt to get the top spot, you might encounter duplicate content issues, broken links, poor user experience, etc. Therefore, a generic ‘how to do SEO’ guide won’t cut it. It would help if you had SEO strategies that are SEO-specific.

In this post, we’ll walk you through the ins and outs of ecommerce SEO and tied and tested strategies to help you rank your online store.

But first, let’s walk you through the basics:

What is Ecommerce SEO?

In a nutshell, ecommerce SEO is optimizing your ecommerce store to rank on search engines.

It’s a kind of marketing that uses on-page, off-site, technical, and content optimization strategies to enhance your site’s appearance on search results.

SEO is Crucial for Ecommerce Organic Growth

One of the best ways to drive organic traffic in your ecommerce store is SEO. Because most people utilize Google and other search engines to look for products, you want to rank your site at the top of your target customers, and this is where SEO makes a significant impact.

In fact, according to studies, search engines could drive up to 10x more traffic to ecommerce sites than social media will. SEO allows you to generate traffic, almost on autopilot, for months and even years.

Ecommerce SEO Strategies

Here are the effective strategies that you can use to optimize your store, rank better on Google, and drive more sales to your site:

1. Run an SEO audit

Talking about competitors, you need to know how you rank against your competitors. You can’t just work on your SEO and boost your e-commerce conversions if you don’t know where to start.

You can develop a list of competitors relevant in terms of SEO. Usually, some are different from the ones that you can think of. If there are giant brands in your industry, you might also have to put them in your SEO audit. Check out the best SEO audit tools here this 2023.

Although they’re not directly your competitors, in this day and age of online shopping, they still are very much a threat when it comes to stealing your customers’ attention on Google results pages.

When you have a list of your competitors and segments, think of keywords that customers in each segment could consider. Make sure you look up these keywords on search engines and mark your position and competitors for every keyword.

Then, calculate the average position of each of your competitors and yourself. Compare the results to know how well you’re doing while searching for opportunities where you can copy the keywords from your competitors in unique ways. You can use Ranktracker’s handy SERP checker, an analysis tool that helps you find the weak spots of your competitors.

2. Conduct effective keyword research

At the heart of every successful SEO strategy is keyword research. You can do keyword research to identify search terms that your target audience uses and look for similar businesses and products.

In the same way, you also need to use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder, and Surfer Keyword Extension to find research keywords relevant to your business.

You also need to consider these three factors:

• Search volume: How many searches are done for this particular keyword monthly? This may vary depending on the location and language.
• Keyword difficulty: How difficult a keyword will rank in search, based on the domains that are already ranking for this particular keyword.
• Relevance: How is this keyword applicable to your business, and what is the user searching for? This can be subjective.

3. Optimize product pages

Aside from a carefully written copy that customers will see in the description, you must also focus on the on-page SEO elements.

Here are the three key elements of an on-page SEO:

• Page titles: This is the top blue line that often shows up on every search result on Google. This line has an intuitive name for prospective customers while placing a keyword or two if you can. Your title should be at least 70 characters long.
• Meta descriptions: This is the text found underneath the page title in Google search results. For product pages, think of this as a preview of what they’ll see when they click. Make sure that you add keywords naturally. Your meta description should be up to 32 characters long.
• Images: What you name your images before you upload them also makes a difference. That’s because search engines “crawl” this information meaning they constantly look at it and use the data for ranking, archiving, and delivering the results on image search pages. Ensure you use keywords as much as possible in naming your images. Also, use descriptive colors and styles.

4. Create internal links

The longer you keep site visitors browsing your content online, the higher your chances of snagging a sale. Adding relevant links to other landing pages on your site will help prospective customers browse and find information or products on your site.

Also, ensure that your anchor text, or the place you’re placing your links, includes your target keyword verbatim. You can use internal linking to drive customers to your site’s relevant product pages, educational content, and category pages.

As long as you’re familiar with your audience’s decision-making process, creating content to help them throughout different stages of their buying journey is easier. Don’t go too crazy with internal links as well. Ideally, have one or two links placed for every hundred words.

5. Prioritize speed

Another factor that will help you rank well on search engines is speed. You should deliver the content to users quickly without any delays or errors. That way, users and search engines could easily access your offerings.

In a world of instant gratification, the last thing anyone wants is to wait a couple of seconds for a page to load, no matter how good your products are!

6. Optimize your website for mobile

As of 2022, 66% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Thus, it’s a sin if your site isn’t mobile-responsive. As an ecommerce store, you must take care of traffic from these mobile devices.

You also need to tailor your site based on your audience’s screens. That way, you’ll have lesser bounce rates, more traffic, and, eventually, better business.

7. Make your website secure

(Image source: petsmart.com)

With the rise of third-party apps that are privy to sensitive data, greater emphasis should be placed on consumer security. You’ll notice that on search engines, sites have HTTP or HTTPS before their domain names.

The main difference is that HTTPS has an added layer of encryption, making it more secure. On the other hand, HTTP connections on public WiFi networks often need to be more secure. Thus, anyone can intercept communications.

You need to buy an SSL certificate to upgrade your HTTP site to HTPPS. This small data file will protect the transfer of sensitive data between web servers and web browsers.

HTPPs are also one of the ranking factors of Google. Google will usually rank higher sites that have HTPPS. There are a lot of entities that issue SSL certificates, but only a couple issue global ones. So, make sure that you research ahead of time. The most trusted are GoDaddy and GlobalSign.

8. Build high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most genuine SEO practices a website can do. With ecommerce SEO, your platform should be recommended by trusted resources so that it can generate more traffic to your site.

In building backlinks, your third-party resource needs to be authentic. Generally, avoid spammy or irrelevant links.

You can also build backlinks in your ecommerce site via social media platforms, Q&A platforms, directory submission, and much more.

9. Redirect broken pages. When doing technical SEO, make sure that you create redirects for broken pages.

Usually, these are pages with issues with content, poor URL structure, or missing products. For broken pages, a “404” in the page title or elsewhere in the page, or load a message that says “page not found.”

While most site owners take down these pages, this could eventually lead to crawl-related errors that will take a while to fix.

Over to You

So there you have it. You need to know these are some of the best ecommerce SEO strategies. Pay attention to each one rather than just choosing where you spend your time, energy, and resources.

Once you get these things right, you’ll gain organic leads regularly. You also need to know that SEO is a long-term strategy, and you don’t give up after just weeks of trying. Good luck!