E-Commerce SEO: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

If you are planning to launch an e-commerce store around a unique product idea, you might have thought of ways to get more traffic without spending money on paid marketing techniques. This is where e-commerce SEO takes the center stage. 

Amidst the industry jargon and changing search engine algorithms, it can be quite difficult for beginners to get the hang of the entire domain of SEO for e-commerce websites. That’s why we have created this beginner’s guide to help you understand why it matters and what you should do from the very start of launching an online store.

What is E-commerce SEO and Why Is It Important?

Let’s cover the basics first –

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing your business website in a way that attracts more organic or free traffic from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). By extending the same definition forward to an online store, you get closer to e-commerce SEO.

Consider this example to understand e-commerce SEO in a better way –

When you search for anything in Google, you are taken to a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), as shown below:

After the paid/sponsored ads, you will find ten search results as shown above. E-commerce SEO is about ensuring that your website pages appear among these top ten search results on the first page for the most common search terms (keywords) related to your business. 

SEO is indeed a low-hanging fruit for many e-commerce stores. Still, you can easily find online stores that are made live with little to zero consideration of search engines. Most business owners look at social media ads right from the very beginning, not knowing the fact that the ad spending is only increasing over time. You get the results as long as you are paying for those ads to appear. 

On the other hand, e-commerce SEO asks for upfront efforts. Once your product pages start to appear on rank, you can make sales on autopilot without a recurring expense. In terms of statistics, e-commerce SEO is important because:

• 44% of individuals start their journey as an online shopper with a Google search (Source)
• More than one-third of all traffic to e-commerce websites comes from search engines (SEMrush). 
• Lastly, around one-fourth (23.6% to be precise) of e-commerce orders are directly linked to organic traffic (Source). 

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Without further ado, let’s dive into the actionable part of this e-commerce SEO guide.

Step 1: Keyword research for e-commerce SEO

Keyword research forms the foundation of e-commerce SEO in several ways. It determines other SEO-related tasks you would do on your online store. For example, without the right keywords, you cannot optimize the product or product category pages. Similarly, the list of selected keywords also affects the technical SEO, site architecture, and product URLs.

Firstly, note that keyword research for e-commerce SEO is different from doing the same for a blog. You want to rank for commercial keywords or those indicating buying intent (like shoes for men, black dress for women, etc.). 

To find product-focused keywords for your e-commerce store, you can benefit from digging deeper into:

• Google

You can benefit from the Google search autocomplete feature that suggests relevant queries when you start to type a product-related query. Similarly, there are additional search queries at the bottom of the page that can be considered a goldmine for keyword ideas. 

• Amazon

Repeat the similar process of keyword research at Amazon to find product-focused Amazon suggestions. The process is similar: Search for a keyword relevant to your products and you will see potential keywords.

Once you have made the list of keywords this way, select the right one for e-commerce SEO based on:

Step 2: E-commerce site architecture

Site architecture mainly refers to the flow in which the pages on your website are arranged. While the right architecture is quite crucial for any website, it is doubly important for e-commerce SEO. That’s because most online stores have many more pages than any service-based website or blog. The right e-commerce site architecture will make it easier for both users and search engines to find all your product pages.

To get this right from the very beginning, follow the golden rules of maintaining the site structure:

• Keep your website architecture simple and easy to scale as your business grows
• Keep every page on your website to be three or fewer clicks away from the homepage.

If you choose a deep site architecture on your website, its authority gets diluted by the time a user gets to reach the product pages. Here is an example of a well-optimized site architecture that is good for e-commerce SEO:

Such an architecture also makes it easier for search engines to index every page on your website. Keep in mind that you do not want your website visitors to keep on pressing the back button to explore your website. Neither would you want to rearrange the site structure every time you add a new product page or category.

Step 3: On-page e-commerce SEO

Now that you are done with keyword research and site architecture, let’s talk about optimizing the product and product category pages that are going to have a major share in both traffic and sales. 

A perfectly optimized page has the following elements:

• Title tag

Target product-related keywords in the title tag and add both modifiers (like ‘Best, Low-Cost, etc) and click magnet words (like Lowest Price, X% Off, Sale, etc.)

• Description tag

Include keywords and click magnet words in longer business-oriented phrases to create a well-optimized description tag.

• Product and category page content

Here, your product descriptions should be 300-1000 words including sprinkled keywords in a natural flow (use target keywords 3-5 times). 

• URLs

Create short but keyword-rich URLs for both product and product category pages that tend to rank higher in SERPs. Here’s an example that includes category, subcategory, and keyword in it:

• Strategic internal links

Try to include an internal link from authoritative pages (the ones that rank high on search engines and attract a lot of quality backlinks) to product/category pages. 

• Technical SEO audit

Use tools like SEMrush and DeepCrawl for a comprehensive e-commerce SEO audit. Correct the errors that may come up, including:

• Unoptimized or missing title/description tags
• Duplicate content or thin content (less than 250 words)
• Missing ALT text
• Broken links
• Site speed

Step 4: Content marketing for e-commerce SEO

Content marketing refers to the strategy of attracting, engaging, and converting the target audience by creating relevant content in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc. It also helps in establishing your expertise in your niche, promotes brand awareness, and brings top-of-the-mind recall to increase conversion rates.

To utilize content marketing as a part of SEO for e-commerce website, you need to:

• Find where your target audience spends most of their time online
• Research what kind of words and phrases (keywords) they use to search for relevant products or product information
• Create a value-rich content piece considering these keywords and the end-user intent
• Share the content across different channels where your target audience stays active
• Repeat these steps to create and publish content for your e-commerce store

Step 5: Link building for your e-commerce store (off-page SEO)

Getting backlinks from other relevant websites having high domain authority to your e-commerce store can boost your rankings significantly. Since it is a part of off-page SEO, it is quite complicated and takes more time than tweaking any SEO tag on your website. 

To build quality backlinks to your website, you can:

• Partner with influencers in your industry/niche who have a large following and/or a high DA website but are not your direct competitors
• Build broken links by searching for websites in your niche having broken links and then contact the website owner to fix the link using your website URL
• Steal competitor’s links by checking from where your competitors are getting backlinks and then building similar links to your online store
• Do guest posting on different related websites in your niche to gain high-quality links and build relationships with the industry experts

The final word

There’s so much more that goes into defining various aspects of e-commerce SEO. Technical SEO, content marketing, link building – the list is long. But this beginner’s guide will help you set foot on the right path for now.

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