The complete guide to creating an effective e-commerce SEO strategy 

What are the benefits of an SEO strategy for your business? 

Being visible in the search engine results pages when potential customers search for your products is going to have one main benefit: it’s going to drive traffic and potential customers to your website. Then, your website needs to play the role of converting them into paying customers. 

Here are just some of the benefits of an effective e-commerce SEO strategy: 

• Provides increased brand visibility: When your website appears in the search results for relevant search terms, you’re more likely to drive visitors to your website. Very few searchers will click through to the second page so ensuring you’re at the top of the results will help you to drive more traffic and sales for your business. 

• Provides higher conversion rates: If you can appear in the search engine results for relevant terms, you’re able to directly reach the people who are actively searching for your product. These visitors are much more likely to buy from you as a result.

• Offers a cost-effective marketing strategy: An effective SEO strategy should be long-term. When you optimise and tweak your website, it can take 6-12 months to start seeing real results and hitting those top positions. However, once you reach those positions, you’re going to keep driving traffic to your website over the long-term, so the work is worth it. This is in comparison to paid strategies, which stop delivering results the minute you stop paying.

• Drives improved local visibility: If you have a brick-and-mortar store or you serve customers in a particular area, SEO can really help you to ensure your business is visible locally, helping to drive traffic to your website or footfall to your shop. 

• Offers data-driven insights: The tools you use to track your SEO results, such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console, provide you with great insights into the keywords that are driving results for your business along with demographic information such as location, interests, age and gender. These insights can help to inform other parts of your digital marketing strategy by giving you a better idea of who your actual customers are. 

SEO not only helps to drive increased traffic and sales for your business, it provides a sustainable and cost-effective strategy for long-term success. SEO will support your other digital marketing activities, so it’s something you should invest in if you want to drive results for your business. 

If you want to know more, read our blog: Top 10 benefits of e-commerce SEO. 

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How do you increase organic traffic to your e-commerce website? 

Driving organic traffic is usually the main aim of an SEO strategy and provides a cost-effective strategy for driving results for your business. This is the traffic that’s driven to your website that you haven’t paid for through strategies such as paid search or social media ads. 

Organic traffic not only increases the number of people visiting your website, it helps to draw in the right visitors - the visitors who are actively looking for the products you have on offer. 

Let’s have a look at the elements of SEO that can help you to increase organic traffic to your e-commerce website… 

Technical SEO: Is your website performing as it should? 

SEO is about more than just optimising your website with the right keywords. Search engines such as Google now like to see that your content is not only targeting relevant keywords but that it’s easy for your visitors to use too. 

Technical SEO refers to any work you do to your website that helps search engines crawl and index your site more effectively. It’s about optimising the structure of your website so that both users and search engines understand it. 

Here are some of the elements you should be considering and optimising when it comes to technical SEO. This side of SEO forms the building blocks of your strategy. If your website’s not structured properly, any on-page SEO you try may not be as effective. 

Site architecture

Your site architecture plays a huge role in user experience and SEO. You need to make sure your site is structured logically and make it easy for users to navigate to the pages they need. In addition, this helps search engines form an understanding of your website and the products you offer, too, so that they can rank your site accordingly. 

Use your product categories and sub-categories logically and break them down into the sections your customers might use to look for your products online. 

Mobile optimisation 

More purchases than ever are now made on smartphones. So you know what that means? Your website needs to be fully optimised for mobile. If you want people to buy from you, you need to make sure that your site loads quickly on mobile, is responsive and easy to use on a mobile device. 

Site speed 

Site speed is a huge ranking factor so you need to make sure your site loads as quickly as possible when a visitor lands on it from the search engine results. Users don’t like to and won’t wait around for a site that takes a long time to load. So, if your site is slow, you can expect users to navigate back to the results pages and visit one of your competitors instead. 

Schema markup 

This enhances the way search engines read and represent your website in the search results. It allows you to provide search engines with detailed metadata to improve your website's attractiveness and visibility. 

Canonical tags and duplicate content 

Duplicate content can penalise your site and impact its performance. For example, an e-commerce site may end up with similar or identical products displayed on different URLs. You can manage this by adding canonical tags to your website, which tell search engines which pages they should prioritise and which to ignore when showing your website in the search results.

If you’d like to know more about the key elements of technical SEO to look out for, read our blog: Technical SEO for E-commerce: Why isn’t your site performing as well as it should? 

On-page SEO: Ensuring your website ranks highly 

On-page SEO is all about optimising individual web pages to ensure your website appears in the search results when your customers are searching online. 

You’ll need to optimise a range of elements on your website including: 

• Meta titles and descriptions
• URLs 
• Content 
• Images 
• Header tags 
• Internal links 
• Blog content
• Out of stock items 
• Customer reviews 
• Website usability 

Looking after these elements will help users to find what they want on your website and will also help search engines to understand and rank your site accordingly. 

If you’d like to know more about how to optimise your on-page SEO strategy, read our blog: A guide to on-page SEO for e-commerce: how to ensure your site ranks highly. 

Keyword research for e-commerce 

When someone searches on a search engine, they use keywords or phrases to find the information they want. The search engine then determines which websites to show that searches using a number of factors. 

One of those factors is the keywords used on the website and their relevance to the search performed and to the user’s intent. 

Optimising your website for relevant keywords will ensure your website appears at the top of the search results and help to drive traffic to your website. But, where do you start? 

Step one: Make a list of keywords 

The first place to start is making a list of all your products and categories and then use a variety of tools to find the keywords searchers are using. Record the keyword, search volume and the amount of competition around that particular keyword. 

Step two: Check keyword intent 

Once you’ve got your list of keywords, consider each one's intent. For example, is someone using a particular keyword just looking for information, or are they actively looking to buy? This will help you understand what type of content you should create to satisfy that user.

Step three: Categorise your keywords 

Separate your keywords out depending on the type of content you’ll need to create to meet the needs and behaviours of your potential customers. Once you’ve categorised them, think about how each group of keywords will help you meet your business goals and prioritise them. 

Step four: Create a keyword map 

Now, you can create a keyword map to guide your site architecture and content strategy. This will help you to map keywords to relevant pages of your website and allow you to optimise your site accordingly. 

Where do you use these keywords on your website? 

Once you’ve got your lists of keywords, you can optimise your website with them. But where do they go? 

• Page titles 
• Page descriptions 
• Page headings 
• Product descriptions 
• URLs 
• Category descriptions 

For more information on conducting keyword research for your e-commerce website, read our blog: How to perform keyword research for e-commerce. 

How to improve e-commerce category pages for SEO 

Optimising the category pages on your e-commerce website can significantly increase visibility, enhance user experience and boost sales. But, what are the steps you should take to optimise them effectively? 

1. Understand how keywords can help to drive traffic and where they should be used 
2. Optimise title tags and meta descriptions 
3. Improve page content 
4. Structure URLs 
5. Use high-quality images and optimise alt text 
6. Enhance user experience 
7. Utilise internal links 
8. Monitor performance and optimise continuously
9. Keep content up-to-date 

Category pages are the pages many visitors to your site will land on when they’ve performed a search online. As a result, you want to make sure they’re visible when potential customers are searching for your products and that they encourage visitors to convert once they’re on your website. 

Want more info on how to optimise your category pages? Read our blog: How to improve e-commerce category pages for SEO.

What about local SEO for e-commerce? 

Local SEO is another way to significantly increase your store’s visibility, drive more targeted traffic and boost sales for your business. 

What is local SEO? 

Local SEO helps you to focus on reaching potential customers in a specific geographical area. If you have both an online store and a physical store, it can be a highly effective strategy. 

Broader SEO strategies help you to reach a global or national audience but local SEO is more targeted. 

The benefits of a local SEO strategy include: 

• Increased visibility in local search results 
• Higher conversion rates 
• A competitive advantage in your local market 
• Enhanced trust and credibility

How to optimise your e-commerce store for local SEO 

Just like a broader SEO strategy, you’ll need to optimise various elements of your website to ensure it appears in the local search results. 

These include: 

• On-page SEO: conduct keyword research to find the search terms your local customers are using and then use them to optimise your page titles, descriptions, on-page content and URL structure.
• Set up and optimise your Google My Business profile: Your Google My Business profile will appear in the search results and display information about where potential customers can find your business and how they can get in touch.
• Optimise for mobile: As with any part of SEO, ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly is crucial. Especially as so many local searches are now conducted on mobile devices when searchers are out and about. 
• Local content: Create blog posts, videos or other types of content that will resonate with your local audience. Think about the content they might want to see and might be interested in to drive awareness for your business locally. 

To find out more about local SEO for e-commerce, read our blog: Local SEO for e-commerce: Your complete guide to optimising your online store.

Common SEO mistakes in e-commerce and how to solve them 

Now you know about all the elements that go towards a successful SEO strategy for your e-commerce business, let’s have a look at the common mistakes we see made when it comes to e-commerce SEO and how to solve them. 

1. Ignoring best practice for product descriptions: don’t just rely on manufacturer descriptions for your website. This can lead to duplicate content and result in your website being penalised. Always create your own unique product descriptions for your website. 

2. Failing to optimise for mobile: We’ve mentioned this a number of times already in this blog, but it’s definitely worth mentioning again. Not having a mobile-friendly site can really impact SEO performance so always ensure your site is as responsive as possible. 

3. Not using SEO-friendly URLs: URLs and your site structure need to be organised logically to help both search engines and users navigate your website. 

4. Overlooking internal linking: Internal linking is another way to improve site navigation and helps search engines to index your site more effectively. We recommend strategically linking to relevant product and category pages where you can.

5. Not focusing on content beyond products: Optimising your product pages is great! It means users will find individual products after searching online. However, it’s important to create other types of content too, such as blogs, how-to guides and other resources that are relevant to your products.  

These mistakes are easy to make but they’re also easy to fix too. Review your website on a regular basis to ensure you’re not making these mistakes and rectify them as soon as possible. 

For more details on the common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them, read our blog: E-commerce SEO mistakes and how to avoid them. 

Key takeaways 

If you want to grow your e-commerce business, an effective SEO strategy is a must. It ensures that potential customers find your products when they’re actively searching online. Plus, because you’re driving people to your website who have been looking for exactly what you offer, they’re more likely to convert too, driving sales for your business as a result. 

If you’d like to know more about how SEO could benefit your business or if there are any improvements you can make to your strategy, book a free 30-minute consultation with one of our experts.