Ecommerce SEO: The Definitive Guide for (2021)

What is Ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO is the process of making your ecommerce store online and getting quality customers for your product through SERP ( Search Engine Result Pages).

When someone searches for your product, you have to rank on the 1st page for a particular product query to get high quality buyer traffic.

In the ecommerce seo, You have to optimize your product headlines, product descriptions, meta data, Canonical url, internal linking, and navigational structure for search and user experience. 

Importance of Ecommerce SEO

1) Bring Audience and Keep the Website Active 

Marketing strategies may have changed over the years, but the basics remain the same. Product, price, place, and promotion take your brand to the target audiences. Your eCommerce website is a place where you sell the products, and SEO has been declared the best way to do so. 

According to BrightEdge, 68% of online searches start with a query on the search engines. Optimizing the eCommerce website to show up on the top results page will increase your chances of reaching users looking for a product you sell. 

It will urge the users to visit your website and check out the product. Constant activity on the website will result in further pushing the site up the search results. 

2) Cut down CPA and CAC Costs 

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) are two major expenses for the marketing department. It’s essential to know how much money you are spending on attracting a customer and how much you will get in return. 

It is known as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Your investment should be a lot less than the return for a business to be successful, isn’t it? 

SEO allows you to reach out to a wide range of target audiences for smaller investments. In fact, SEO is cheaper than PPC (Pay Per Click) ads that may or may not deliver the expected results.

Many brands have been redirecting the advertising money to SEO to improve the website rank and stay on the first search results page. 

3) Brand Authority and Customer Trust 

Search engines don’t rank any website at the top. Google changes its algorithm quite often to weed out fake and malicious websites. It believes in providing users with only the best search results for their queries. 

More than 3.5 billion searches are conducted every day on Google alone. That’s the level of trust users have in the search engine. When your eCommerce website shows up among the top 5 results, users are more likely to trust your brand and give you a chance. 

Moreover, Google itself chooses user-friendly, genuine, and optimized websites as per its 200 odd rules.

SEO gives you a chance to convince Google and the users that your brand is worth their trust. It helps build credibility and trust over time. 

4) Customers Are Always Online 

Yes! Your customers and prospective customers are almost always online. If they don’t find your ecommerce website when they are looking for products, they won’t be aware of your brand. SEO helps you attract customers to the website through several means. 

From sharing content on social media platforms to optimizing the site for mobile and voice search, writing creative product descriptions, uploading high-quality images, etc., SEO ensures that your brand and website are within customers’ reach. 

Even pinning the products on Pinterest or sharing a reel on Instagram can bring a fresh bout of traffic to your eCommerce website. 

You are likely to get more sales through these methods than by advertising on marketplaces like Amazon. Competition is too fierce, and the risk is high. 

5) SEO Is for the Long-Term 

One of the first things an SEO agency will tell you is that SEO is not meant as a short-term solution. Search Engine Optimization is, was, and will be a continuous process. Your website needs to be constantly upgraded and optimized to stay among the top search results. 

It’ll take some time to notice the changes through SEO. Some brands have waited as long as six months to see an increase in the website’s position on the SERPs. That’s because SEO relies on organic improvement and development. 

To summarize, your eCommerce website is more likely to benefit in the long term than immediately when you invest in SEO. Brands that have been optimizing their websites for years are now reaping the returns. 

6) Let Google Recognize the ecommerce Website 

Google has a whopping 92.03% market share, with Bing and Yahoo having less than about 4% together. Imagine the number of users your eCommerce website can reach if it’s optimized for the Google search engine. 

How will the giant recognize your website and promote your products if you don’t follow the rules of its algorithm? The solution is clear, isn’t it? If you want Google to recognize and index your website, you need to optimize the site, index the pages, make the interface user-friendly, and be accessible to everyone. 

SEO does all that and much more. SEO is now used in sync with SMM (Social Media Marketing), where the brand is promoted simultaneously on social media platforms and search engines. It increases your chances of being spotted by Google. 

7) Organic Growth and Natural Customer Creation 

No brand wants one-time customers. You want loyal customers who will regularly buy from your website and contribute to the monthly sales tally. 

SEO is synonymous with organic growth as it brings only those users searching for something you offer. SEO bridges the gap between you and your prospective customer. It helps you connect and create a bond that will last for a long time. 

Even though customer loyalty depends on several other factors, SEO is one of the stepping stones that set things in motion. Instead of pushing the products into the market, you’ll be pulling customers towards the brand. It will help sustain the sales graph even if you don’t spend heavily on advertising and promotional activities. 

8) Works for B2C and B2B Target Audience 

SEO is not limited to attracting only individual customers. It delivers excellent results for B2B marketing as well. 

According to Google, 89% of B2B researchers collect information through search engine queries and search results. If your website is not optimized for the search engines, you’ll end up missing your major B2B partners. They may not even know or see your brand in the market. 

These people are the ones who search intending to buy the products (in bulk). They are looking for long-term partnerships with brands and mutual benefits. Wouldn’t it be excellent for your business if you have an assured bulk order every month? For this to happen, your brand needs to be out there, and SEO will help. 

9) Set the Brand Apart from the Rest 

There is too much competition in the market, both offline and online. We cannot deny this, can we? In such instances, you’ll need to do whatever it takes to set your brand apart from others and show users that you are better than them. How do you do that on the internet? Through SEO, of course. 

Using the right keywords, sharing quality and authentic content, linking to social media accounts, backlinks from reputed sites, etc., are some ways to highlight your eCommerce website. 

A neat website layout and product descriptions without any typos and grammatical mistakes can create an impression on the users. It will also lead to a better website rank, which in turn, will bring more visibility on the search results page. 

10) More Traffic Leads to an Increased Conversion Rate 

Website traffic, conversion rate, sales, and profits are linked to each other. How they influence each other will depend on the kind of traffic you bring your eCommerce website. 

PPC and other paid campaigns are aimed to increase website traffic for short durations. The concern here is more about getting visitors than focusing on the type of visitors. 

In short, it may not affect your sales or bring you any profits. However, SEO works oppositely. SEO is all about bringing organic traffic to the site. It is about ensuring that people searching for a product will find it on your website. It will naturally increase the conversion rate and generate more sales, thus bringing profits. 

11) Reduce the Overall Marketing Budget 

As we mentioned in one of the previous points, SEO will help control your investment in marketing and promotions. Users find it easier to trust an organic search result than a PPC ad campaign. 

A study revealed that 70-80% of users ignored sponsored search results. Moreover, you cannot run a PPC ad for months and years. It was meant to be a short-term campaign. 

The only feasible way to promote the business for lengthy periods is through search engine optimization. If you are a small eCommerce business owner, you’ll find it easier to spend money on SEO than on various advertising strategies. 

Even during pandemic times, brands have continued to invest in SEO while letting go of other paid promotional activities. 

12) Achieve 360-Degree Results 

SEO deals with various aspects such as content, website architecture, meta tags, meta titles, page loading speed, mobile search, voice search, and much more. 

Optimizing the website for a search engine means making the website user-friendly in all ways. Even data security and data privacy play a crucial role since it’s an eCommerce site. 

Issues such as high bounce rate, cart abandonment, low traffic on the landing pages, etc., can be solved through SEO strategies. There are several free and paid tools to understand the website’s quality and improve it. 

The main job of SEO agencies is to handle look into each of these aspects and ensure that the eCommerce site is running smoothly to deliver 360-degree results. They help build a solid and loyal customer base.

How to Do SEO for Ecommerce Websites?

1) Start with Keyword Search 

Any SEO process should start with identifying the right keywords for the webpage. When it comes to eCommerce SEO, this is important. It can either bring the desired target audience to the product page or not even appear in the search results. 

Keywords are categorized based on the intent (buy or gather information) and commercial value. Though keywords with high density are preferred, it can be hard to rank for such keywords. That means your product page will take a long time to show up in the top search results. 

Coming to the intent, you’ll have to focus on both types to ensure that users know they can find the relevant information and buy the product from your website. Use online tools to find keywords for each product webpage. 

2) Work on the Website’s Architecture 

The website architecture is the layout and arrangement of the web pages to increase the site’s user-friendliness. 

Users don’t want to waste their time searching for a product on an eCommerce site. One look at the navigation bar or the header should tell them where the product is likely to be found. 

Categorize the pages based on the type of products and keep the hierarchy clean and straightforward. The final product page should not be more than two stages away from the home page. 

Interlinking the high-priority pages and categories is a great way to index them on Google. It also helps increase brand authority and will provide you with a clean URL structure that the users easily understand. 

3) Time for Technical SEO 

Technical SEO is an extensive task that involves numerous aspects to improve the website’s design and user interface. You’ll need to take care of the following factors-

• Identifying and correcting crawl errors so that Google’s bots can crawl the product pages and index them.
• Develop a mobile-friendly interface of the website. More than half the users use mobile phones for search.
• You don’t want broken links on your eCommerce website. These will really hurt the rank and visibility. 
• Check the canonical tags, schema markup, and robot.txt files to ensure that pages that need to be indexed can be crawled and pages that need to be private (cart, payment gateway, login credentials, etc.) are not detected by the bots. 
• Use the HTTPS secure site and renew the SSL certificates on time.

4) Don’t Ignore On-Page SEO 

On-Page SEO deals with more than the text posted on a webpage. Take care of the following-

• Include the keyword in the URL, title, title tag, and meta description. Don’t forget to shorten the URLs and keep them simple. 
• The primary keyword should be in the first 150 words of the text. That said, do not resort to keyword stuffing. 
• Use short tail, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords, along with semantic keywords, and include them naturally in the context.
• Optimize the images and videos. Change their alt tags to make it easier for Google’s bots to identify and crawl the product page.
• Link to other related products on the website and to reputed external websites for authenticity. 

5) Improve the Page Loading Speed 

Page loading speed is the time a webpage takes to load on a device. Though this can be affected by the type of device and the network strength, optimizing the website will increase this page speed. 

Any website that takes more than 2-3 seconds to load is at the risk of having a high bounce rate or irritating the users. 

Page speed is a part of technical SEO. However, we’ve highlighted it as a separate point to emphasize its importance. Compressing images, reducing the plug-ins and widgets, getting rid of clutter, and using prominent service providers to host the website can help increase the page speed. 

According to Google’s algorithm, the page speed is a ranking factor and can affect your brand’s visibility. 

6) Social Media Widgets for Easy Sharing 

A social media widget is a tiny clickable icon that allows shares of the webpage with just one click. If users like your products and want to share them with others, they will first look for the share options available on the web page. 

It takes the product to more audiences, brings more traffic, and increases visibility on social media platforms. Google considers Facebook as having high domain authority, and reference links from it will help boost the website rank. 

Social media widgets bring quality backlinks and take your brand wider into the market. Google has said that social media doesn’t directly influence the ranking. Yet, we have seen many instances where it has helped brands generate more sales and earn better profits. 

7) Link Building but Not Through the Link Farms 

Link building will help rank higher on search engines. But it is not as easy as it sounds. Google Core Web Vitals is the latest algorithm update, and the previous updates have tightened the rules for link building. The focus is on quality rather than quantity. 

A link farm is a service that helps add backlinks to the website and adds external links from your website to other sites. However, it is considered a black hat SEO practice and can lead to penalties or even blacklisting of the site. 

The right way to get backlinks is by-

• Writing guest posts, 
• Citations, 
• Sharing posts on social media, 
• Collaborating with influencers and other businesses, 
• Press releases, 
• Infographics, 
• Videos tutorials, 
• Online product manuals, etc., 

8) Blogs, FAQs, and Help Centers 

Are you wondering how blogs, FAQs, and help centers generate sales? Users don’t buy a product at random. They read about it, look for specifications, comparisons, user manuals, and other such details when purchasing. The blog section of an eCommerce website can be deal with-

• How to use the products, 
• How product X is better than product Y or Z, 
• Ways to make the product last longer, and other such topics. 

The FAQs and help centers should have answers to all queries a user would ask a brand-

• Brief history, 
• Pricing, 
• Discounts, 
• Shipping and returns policy, 
• Data security, 
• Loyalty program, 
• Account creation, 
• Order placing, etc. 

By indexing these pages, your website will show up in all the related search results and influence the user to buy the products. 

9) Use SEO Tools 

Yes! SEO tools have been developed for a reason. These help you understand your eCommerce website in detail and provide ways to identify and rectify the errors. 

You can also track your competitors’ websites using these tools. Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, Moz, Screaming Frog, etc., are some trendy SEO tools in the market. 

Hiring a reputed SEO agency will save your time and effort in managing the eCommerce website and optimizing it for search engines. The agencies already have paid subscriptions to SEO tools and will use them for your website. 

It will help you save money and get the benefits as well. Regularly performing the website audit and updating the site is the key to increasing your brand authority on search engines. Perform SEO audits occasionally for better results.