Ecommerce SEO 101
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As an online retailer, getting more targeted traffic to your website is a top priority—and that begins with outranking your competitors on Google. Ecommerce SEO is the process of generating more organic traffic to your online store by improving your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Just how important is SEO for ecommerce websites? In an analysis of the leading online retailers in the United States, SEMrush found that 37.5% of traffic to ecommerce sites comes from search engines—the second largest source (by a wide margin) after direct traffic.
What does this mean for your ecommerce business? If you have been neglecting your SEO marketing strategy, you could be missing out on more than a third of your customer traffic.
In this ecommerce SEO 101 guide, we will discuss some of the basic strategies ecommerce retailers can begin implementing today to drive more traffic to their online stores, including:
Keep reading to learn how to leverage these SEO 101 fundamentals to boost your organic search ranking and traffic.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO optimization. If you don’t know what terms and phrases your customers are searching for, how can you optimize your website for them?
One of the unique challenges of ecommerce SEO compared to standard SEO is the need to thoroughly map keywords for each stage of the buyer’s journey, from initial awareness to making the purchase. Every page of your website should include keyword-friendly copy along with branded keywords to help boost brand visibility.
A keyword matrix is a useful tool for organizing a master list of keywords and narrowing down the best choices for each page. It factors in keyword difficulty, search volume, and search intent to help analyze each keyword’s performance potential.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is one of the most essential—and most frequently overlooked—components of ecommerce SEO and SEO in general. In fact, no matter how targeted your keyword research is, how well-organized your interior pages are, or how much informative and authoritative content you have, without solid technical SEO, your site is going to be set up to fail. Technical SEO is the foundation for SEO success.
And in this age of instant information, users have little tolerance for websites that are slow or clunky. According to research published by Radware, 51% of online shoppers will not complete a purchase if the website is too slow.
Hiring an SEO expert to perform a comprehensive SEO audit can help ensure your site is up to snuff technically and ready to maximize conversions. Using special tools, the SEO specialist duplicates how Google sees your site, keeping an eye out for any red flags that would affect traffic, such as:
Duplicate Content
Missing/Duplicate Metadata
404s and Other Broken Links
Poor Mobile Performance
Poor Page Speed
Poor Internal Linking
Multiple Site Domains
3. Site Architecture
Many online retailers are surprised to learn that providing a clean, user-friendly experience is an important part of ecommerce SEO. One of the best ways to improve your site’s UX is by reworking your site architecture and navigational structure to make it as sleek and intuitive as possible.
Getting traffic to your website is just step one—making sure users stick around and view the most relevant content on your site is the next hurdle. Users should never have to click through three or four pages to reach one of your main category pages; that’s a surefire way to frustrate them and cause them to lose interest.
Additionally, poor site architecture makes the search engines work extra hard in finding these pages—not a good idea when so much of your potential traffic is riding on how the search engines rank your site. Another critical component of good site architecture is ensuring that your URLs incorporate targeted keywords from your earlier research.
4. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the content on each individual web page based on your keyword research. For ecommerce websites, product and category pages are the most important pages you want to rank for. When a user clicks these links on Google, they will be in a prime position to make a purchase directly from your site.
Here is a summary of the on-page content that should be optimized using targeted keywords:
Page headings and subheadings
Body copy (i.e. product descriptions)
Image alt text and image names
Metadata title tags and descriptions
Blog posts are another important form of SEO content for ecommerce websites. By publishing targeted blog posts featuring your keywords, you can build valuable backlinks to your products and improve your odds of ranking for those keywords.
5. Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your site from other websites. The more people talking about (and linking back to) your brand online, the better.
When these links come from sites with a high domain authority, Google is much more likely to rank your website favorably. There are a number of ways to gain backlinks, some of which involve outreach to a partner or influencer in your industry.
Examples of authoritative backlinks include being featured on a partner’s resource page, or having your product reviewed and linked to by a respected industry expert. Publishing a guest post on another website (with a link back to your ecommerce site) can also help give your rankings a boost.
Ecommerce SEO Checklist
Regardless of the size of your ecommerce business, building a solid foundation of ecommerce SEO is key to scaling up your operations and accelerating future growth.
To summarize, these are the action items that should be on every online retailer’s ecommerce SEO checklist:
Conduct keyword research and optimize website pages with keyword-friendly copy.
Perform a comprehensive SEO audit and correct issues such as duplicate content, broken links, poor internal linking, slow site speed, etc.
Build site architecture that is sleek, clean, intuitive, and user-friendly.
Optimize all on-page content, including category pages, product pages, blog posts, etc.
Acquire backlinks from other high-quality, authoritative websites.
Ultimately, optimizing your ecommerce site for search engines is an excellent way to boost both the quantity and quality of traffic to your store, which translates to a higher sales volume. If you want to drive more customers to your ecommerce site, investing in a solid SEO strategy should be at the top of your to-do list.
Partnering with an SEO agency that specializes in ecommerce is the best way to ensure that your online store is optimized for maximum sales and positioned to generate long-term results. Still have questions about ecommerce SEO? Contact our team of experts and request your free SEO quote.