Although nobody can deny the fact that SEO is the lifeline of eCommerce websites, most online stores show little to no interest in optimizing for the search engines. No doubt, Ads on social media, search engines, and display Ads networks are great, but relying solely on them for an extended period would only diminish your profit margins. If you, too, are neglecting SEO and relying heavily on paid Ads, you should know about two important facts: In this article, you’ll learn how online stores can drive organic traffic from the best eCommerce SEO guide.
- Paid Ads are best for driving traffic and sales when your website is new, and no one knows about it. They give you the early exposure you need as a new entrant in the market in return for investments in the form of CPC and others.
- Eventually, you need organic traffic for your online store. You can’t keep investing in Ads and diminishing your profit margin. It’s simple: You need free, quality, and recurring traffic.
When you are selling ‘women’s running shoes’ and some user is looking for one using relevant keywords on the search engines, you need your listings to appear as high as possible in the organic search results.
You may ask how to make that happen.
That’s what eCommerce SEO does. You learn about the search algorithms, optimizations, and tactics that help you push your website’s links on the SERPs when users make relevant search queries.
This guide will help you prepare a roadmap and explain stepwise what you need to do to make your eCommerce store SEO-friendly. Keep reading to learn about SEO for your web store in 2024 and beyond.
E-Commerce Keyword Research
It doesn’t matter if you are running a small eCommerce store or a full-fledged multi-vendor marketplace; keyword research is always the start of the race. Getting this part right is exceptionally critical, or you might end up
- targeting keywords that are difficult to rank for
- ranking for wrong keywords that bring traffic that does not convert
Be advised that neither of the above situations is ideal for any eCommerce business. You need to target the right keywords to rank for the keywords that bring quality traffic, not just a hopeless load on the website server.
Find these three types of keywords as per your niche and targeted customer base:
- Primary Keywords: Find primary keywords for your business that resonate with your niche and help you gain a unique brand identity. You need to use these keywords in prominent spaces, like your domain name and home page.
- Secondary keywords: Find 10-15 small-tail keywords targeting your primary and leading products. You need to use these keywords in the categories on your eCommerce store.
- Tertiary long-tail keywords: You need to determine at least 10-15 long-tail keywords for each secondary keyword. For example, if you have 15 secondary keywords, you have 150 long-tail keywords. These tertiary or long-tail keywords can be your product page titles, inside meta descriptions, and other on-page texts.
Now, you may ask how to discover the right primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords for your niche. I can suggest three prominent ways right upfront:
A Look at the Marketplaces:
Use popular marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Alibaba, BestBuy, and Walmart for keyword research. Find the most popular products in your niche that perform best on these marketplaces.
- You can traverse their prominent pages, such as the home page and featured product pages.
- You can get some decent ideas from their search autosuggestions. For example, I have searched about “n95 masks” and got several suggestions from Amazon’s search bar:
B Steal keywords from your competitor:
As shady as it sounds, it’s perfectly fine to stalk your immediate competitors. Just visit Google.com type your primary keyword, and search to drive organic traffic to online stores following the eCommerce SEO guide
Let’s take the “N95 Masks” as an example again:
Although we haven’t reached our target yet, we still got some excellent keywords from the search autosuggestions. Now, just hit the Enter and wait for the search results:
You can do two things here:
- Scroll down to the bottom of the SERP and check out the keywords in the “Searches related to n95 mask” section:
You have some more keywords now.
- Now, scroll up and choose a competitor from the search results who sells N95 masks like you. For potential keywords, visit the website and parse its prominent pages, categories, and product pages.
Note: Don’t blindly copy the keywords from your competitor’s website. There could be an N number of reasons for their higher ranking. Perhaps they have a better domain authority than your website. Just make a list of all the relevant keywords you get using this method and push them through the steps explained in the following section:
C Use SEO tools: eCommerce SEO Guide To Drive Traffic Doe Online Stores
You can use several SEO tools to discover relevant keywords for your niche and measure the keywords you have already found using the above two methods. Take Ahrefs, for instance. Ahrefs is a fantastic SEO tool that can help you with keyword research, competition research, and link building for your eCommerce website. Keep reading to learn how to drive organic traffic to eCommerce sites.
Besides, you can rely on other SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Moz, and UberSuggest. While Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free to use, you can pick one or two of the premium tools to get the best results. Premium tools are best for getting more detailed and graphical guidance, unlike Google Analytics, which is equally efficient but not easy to use.
Learn how to use Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner. These tools will tell you if you are using the right keywords by measuring the performance metrics.
Work on your Website Architecture and on-page SEO
Once you have the right keywords to target, it’s time to use them effectively. Begin by optimizing your website’s fundamental architecture for SEO.
Your site architecture represents how you set up your navigation flow, category pages, product pages, and the home page. Working on your site architecture will optimize your store, not just for SEO but also for the website’s users. To optimize this, you need to present your website’s most relevant content to your users and make the navigation as smooth as possible to drive organic traffic to online stores, following the eCommerce SEO guide.
- Make the architecture simple yet scalable
- Minimize the number of clicks required to reach your prominent pages
- Put your primary, secondary, and long-tail keywords in relevant pages, as discussed earlier
Note: Using a good eCommerce software or multi-vendor marketplace solution, you will get most of your website architecture sorted out of the box. It would help if you worked on your keyword placements to get the best results. So, choose your software carefully.
As per your on-page SEO, optimizing the website architecture and keyword placements will cover 90% of the job. The rest of the tasks can be completed by writing SEO-friendly content on the web pages. It may include-
- In-body copy of your home page and every Category Page with proper meta description
- Content on the Product Page, including the product description and user-generated content
- In-image Alt text, Meta Tags, and Descriptions for every image, including product images
- Metadata and description for every URLs on your website
- Modifying your robot.txt file for the intended site map
Technical SEO and SEO Audit
Once you finish your fundamental on-page SEO, it’s time to check where you stand in front of the search engines. You need to measure specific metrics and deeply audit your website. Doing this will help you to accomplish three primary goals:
- Firstly, you will have an overall picture of the quality of on-page SEO on your website and its current standing in the competition
- Secondly, you can create a list of tasks to be accomplished to improve your on-page SEO before you can move to off-page SEO
- Finally, you will get assurance that you are moving in the right direction as of now
Here are the things you can do to audit your website for SEO: Continue reading to learn how to drive organic traffic to eCommerce sites
A Crawl your website: eCommerce SEO Guide To Drive Traffic Doe Online Stores
You can use tools like Google’s search console or Beam Us Up to crawl your website and discover essential aspects such as:
- Broken links
- Missing Metadata
- Duplicate content
B Perform 301 redirects on other versions of your site:
If you have any other version(s) of your website’s URL, apply 301 redirects on all of them, keeping only one version for browsing. For example, you might have other versions of your URL such as
- http://yourdomain.com
- http://www.yourdomain.com
- https://yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com
Ensure you use only one while 301 redirecting others to it. Especially when you are moving from HTTP to HTTPS, you need to redirect your users to your new HTTPS URL when they type in the old HTTP URL.
Multiple URL variations will only confuse the search crawlers and flag duplicate content issues, which will hurt your SEO.
C Home Page audit:
Check your home page for SEO mistakes. Ensure it has proper H1, H2, and H3 title tags, keyword-rich Meta descriptions, and other metadata.
D Unique content: eCommerce SEO Guide To Drive Traffic Doe Online Stores
Make sure your website does not have duplicate content. Keep all your content on all the web pages Unique. If you have no other option but to use some of the content repeatedly on different web pages, for example, product descriptions of variations of the same product, you can use Canonical Tags to let the search crawlers know which pages to crawl and which ones to omit.
E Analyze Backlink Profile:
You can use a tool like Ahrefs to analyze your backlink profile. You need to discover three major things from this audit:
- Firstly, the quality of your Anchor texts
- Secondly, the quality of your backlinks
- Finally, broken backlinks
Once you have a complete profile of these aspects, you need to work your way around to –
- Make your Anchor texts SEO-friendly
- Disavow backlinks from irrelevant sources
- Fix the broken links
F Analyze Mobile-friendliness: eCommerce SEO Guide To Drive Traffic Doe Online Stores
Your website’s mobile friendliness plays an important role in Google SEO. Mobile-friendly and responsive web pages always rank better than pages designed with only desktop users in mind. So, ensure all your web pages offer the best user experience to your mobile users. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to check your mobile friendliness score and get useful recommendations.
G Analyze site Speed:
Ensure your website loads as fast as possible on all devices. A slower-loading website can never rank well, not at least in Google’s SERPs. If your web pages are taking more than 5-6 seconds to load, you need to work on reducing loading time to as low as 3-4 seconds.
eCommerce SEO Guide To Drive Traffic Doe Online Stores Final Words
In conclusion, Optimizing your eCommerce store on all these fronts gives you an SEO-friendly website. Once you complete these optimizations, you can use many other options to improve your prospects further and drive traffic using tactics like content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and link building.
You may adopt many other cutting-edge tactics to improve your SEO in the future. However, the basic steps explained in this guide are always important, and you need to address them as a priority before proceeding.