The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-Commerce Websites

If you’re an e-commerce website owner, then search engine optimization (SEO) is important to your bottom line. For potential customers to find your products in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and click on your site, you need to rank higher than your competitors.

This means investing time and money into your SEO strategy, which includes working with services for SEO. To succeed in your online store, you need to learn about e-commerce SEO.

What is E-Commerce SEO?

E-commerce SEO refers to optimizing an online store for search engines. Your site will rank higher if you optimize for users, create pages with keywords and user intent, and get backlinks on other sites. 

Writing long product descriptions and blog posts with relevant keywords can help your site rank higher. Backlinks from relevant sites also boost your online store’s ranking.

Regular updates of your blog posts and product pages show search engines that your site is still active and has fresh content. 

Tactics for Optimizing Your E-Commerce SEO Strategy

A solid SEO strategy includes optimizing an easy-to-navigate website with relevant keywords and other marketing campaigns. By following these strategies, you can increase traffic and bring more brand awareness to your site. 

• Keyword Research

You need to make sure you find the right keywords for your e-commerce website. This helps drive more traffic to your website. When developing an e-commerce SEO strategy, it’s important to conduct keyword research.

• Focus on relevant keywords: Choosing keywords with high search volume and low competition allows your site to receive more visitors. Ahrefs lets you review search volume data and shows you the keyword difficulty (KD) or how much competition there is for that keyword. You can also use Google Keyword Planner for free to see volume data. 
• Measure difficulty in ranking: Page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA) show how difficult it is to outrank organic search results. If the numbers are large, it will be harder to overturn the results.
• Choose relevant keywords: Product-focused and high-intent keywords are the priorities for e-commerce SEO. You want to use keywords that people often choose to find relevant products based on where they are in their buyer journey.  

People who search for the broad keyword “women’s shoes” are still researching and not yet ready to buy. Long-tail keywords such as “women’s athletic shoes size 12 wide” means the customer is ready to make the purchase because the keywords specify what they are looking for. 

The design and structure of your website should be user-friendly, so people can find anything they are looking for in a few clicks. This will make it easier for them to use the site. You can improve the user experience (UX) for your visitors to your website. If you need help planning your website, you can hire a professional internet marketing agency. 

An ideal e-commerce site should have a low load speed and reduced bounce rates that can occur when visitors abandon your site due to frustrating website navigation. As a result, you’ll also make it easier for search engines to index your site, which is critical for ranking and maintaining link authority. 

Many stores have thousands of products that can lead to duplicate content issues. This results in multiple site pages and affects how quickly search engines can crawl your site. Your site structure should be as follows:

• Use canonical tags: Specify which product page is the primary page using canonical tags. These tags tell the search engines the primary page you want to show in the search results.
• Index relevant pages: List product pages based on how much traffic they receive. If your website gets many customers searching for a specific product, put that page first on your site.
• On Page SEO
  
  On-page SEO for e-commerce puts your keywords in the title tags, product descriptions, and images. Your products can appear in other SERP features like Featured Snippets by using the appropriate keywords, which answer a specific question and appear above the top results.
• Optimize your title tags and meta descriptions: Use the target keywords in the title tags and meta descriptions. Each title tag and meta description must be specific and relevant to the page. One strategy for capturing a shopper’s interest in a meta description is to offer incentives such as discounts or buy-one-get-one deals.
• Use relevant keywords in product descriptions: Write long, in-depth descriptions for your products to help the search engines rank your page better. You can use a few relevant keywords on each page to help Google figure out what you’re offering.
• Don’t forget to optimize your images: Change the file name of an image to be more descriptive for SEO purposes. Instead of using the default image file name of IMG082491.png, you can use the product name and relevant keywords like heels-black-leather.png. Using the keyword and product name also applies to the image’s alt-text, which is the line of code that shows what’s in the image.
• Content Marketing 

Content marketing for e-commerce sites is a great way to get more traffic. When you put out high-quality content, it will attract visitors who are interested in your products.

• Use topic clusters in your blog: A topic cluster has a pillar page that serves as a hub for related blog posts. Creating topic clusters will increase the ranking of your website in the search engines by providing a structure for your pages and backlinks. Make sure you use relevant long-tail keywords within your blog posts.
• Share your content on social media: If you post and share interesting content on social media, this helps your site’s ranking. Social media share buttons on product pages can improve the ranking of product and category pages in the search results. 
• Take advantage of video marketing: You can’t afford to neglect videos in your SEO strategy. 90% of customers report that videos influence their shopping decisions. You can incorporate relevant keywords into the video descriptions and title tags. Videos are shareable across multiple social media platforms, making them worth the effort involved in video marketing.
• Link Building
  Google still considers links one of its top ranking factors, so having a great SEO plan is important for an e-commerce website. Networking with other websites, influencers, and suppliers can also further increase organic traffic. 
• Connect with your suppliers or distributors: Wholesale suppliers or distributors often have lists of retailers on their sites to let people know where they can buy the products. If you are a reseller or have a retail e-commerce store, ask your supplier or distributor to list your site. 
• Search for broken backlinks to your site: Try to find broken links from your website on other sites and reclaim them by reaching out to web admins. You can use the Semrush Backlink Audit Tool to find backlinks to your site from other authoritative websites. 
• Research influencers on social media: Social media is a good way to find influencers in your niche. You can pitch your product or services to them and ask if they would like to share them in upcoming social media posts. 

• Get Started With e-commerce SEOSuccessful e-commerce SEO is a process that requires both time and patience. If you’re serious about increasing your web traffic, then it will be worth the effort to implement these tactics as part of your marketing strategy. With Rezolutions Design as your partner in digital marketing, we can make the journey easier. We can give guidance on how to improve your e-commerce website for better rankings and help you implement useful SEO tools. Contact us today to get started on boosting your digital presence through effective SEO techniques.