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Ecommerce SEO: A comprehensive guide15 min read

A comprehensive guide to breakdown the basic structure of Ecommerce SEO. This ecommerce guide is all you need to learn about optimizing your site, that sheds light into everything a SEO covers from keyword research to technical SEO to link building.
If you want to drive quality traffic to your site, you will need this guide to optimize your Ecommerce page to get the maximum benefits.

Importance of SEO

SEO is the way of taking your site to the masses, optimizing your page to meet the SEO standards means more organic traffic coming your way which indeed shows organic leads heading up to your site. Almost every top site that comes up at the top of a google or bing search just goes about to explain how effectively their SEO teams have been working to top the charts.
According to backlinko
Almost 37% of traffic to all ecommerce sites comes from Search engines.
44% of consumers buy their product by starting to search on Google.
23.6% orders directly come from the organic traffic as a result of good SEO.

Why Audit is important for a website?

Running Audit regularly helps in upholding the smooth functioning of the site and also ensures there’s no threat or problem with the SEO standards of your site. This provides the key to improve and optimize the site further to meet the SEO standards. There are processes involved in site audits like
• User engagement
• User experience
• Traffic
• Functionality
• Site health
• Website performance
A website audit can be broken down into the following aspects:
• Site health audit
• Website security audit
• Social media presence audit
• Conversion rate optimization audit
• Negative seo audit
• Competitor website audit
• Penalty and recovery audit
• Duplicate content audit
Let quickly get to the Ecommerce SEO guide

1. Ecommerce keyword research

Once you completed the site audit, Probably you set a plan and goal for a respective niche. Once you find the niche then go for a Keyword research. Keyword research is where everything starts with SEO optimization. It is not only the basic but also the important structure in building the SEO campaign as it intimates every other SEO related tasks that you carry out on your website.
Your keywords list has a direct influence on your technical SEO too. This is mainly because your site’s URL and architecture needs to take keywords into accounts.
So the first thing you should probably do in an SEO campaign is to find the right keywords that people search for and use only the best ones that can help you take away the ranks in a clean sweep. So how exactly do you do that?


How to find the right keywords?


First, know and decide what topic you are going to write about. Then You can find keywords by using Keyword Research Tools.
Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest both are keyword research tools that will help you find keywords When you enter your Heading or Search Term.


Along with finding them, you can also see their Search Volume, Search Difficulty, Competition Level, and Suggested Keywords related to your Heading.


Note : The Long tail keyword that consists of many related keywords clubbed together that have a better chance of converting than keywords with short phrases.


Tools for Keyword generator


There are plenty of keyword research tools available online that can help you increase your organic traffic by a huge 62.2% Some of the popular tools are Google Keyword Planner Tool It is a comprehensive tool that suggests keywords from across all the platforms.

There are various other popular tools for keywords research like
• SEM Rush
• Ahrefs Keywords research
• Google keyword planner
• Ubersuggest
You can choose any of these tools or find one that serves your needs online easily.

How to Choose Keywords

1. Volume

The most important aspect of choosing Keywords is largely based on the search volume indeed. Find the difference between High volume and low volume for your industry and product.

If you are a new site, find the low & medium volumes because most of the big brands are fighting for higher seach volume.
Low volume is a good start for beginners.

2. Competitors

Now you need to search keywords based on the competition to know how to reach the first page in Google search.

There are again multiple tools for searching keywords based on competition. One such tool is the Semrush Keyword difficulty.

This tool gives you a metric about how the competition revolves on that one keyword.
It’s simple, enter the keyword in the search box to find the keyword difficulty.
The harder it is to rank, when the difficulty percentage number piles up

3. Long Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search.

Long tail keywords have low search volume and High conversion rate. Here you can see the monthly searches of long tail keywords.

2.Ecommerce Website Structure

Site structure is basically how things are architecture and placed on your site that plays a very major part in determining the SEO standards of your site.

With Ecommerce sites obviously having more pages than a normal blog site, it is often difficult for search engines to find all your pages.

There are 2 ways to optimize your Ecommerce website to meet the SEO norms.

The first point is to make it really simple and not too deep for a user or google to get confused with.

This is a simple layout structure where the link authority is placed on the Site’s category and product pages. It helps to rank your site in Google and also easy for Google to index your pages.

The second point is to make sure every page on your site is three or fewer clicks away from the home page.

3.On page SEO

With the completion of Ecommerce page architecture, it is now time to move to page optimization. For almost all the ecommerce sites, it is the category and product pages that need the optimization as these are responsible for alluring more traffic and sales.

Still wondering how? A guy searching for Levi’s denim jacket size L is much better when it comes to shopping than a guy who searches just for a denim jacket. It is why it’s very important to optimize your product page and the title first.

Meta Title optimization

The rule is simple. Add your target keyword in your title tag along with tempting words like ‘Best price, etc as this gives scope for long tail keyword searches.

Also these extra words are what people commonly use while searching for their products. Some of the most common tags and terms people use are :

• Best
• Review
• Free shipping

The second method to optimize your title is to include terms like offer to double your CTR.
These magnetic terms along with target keywords are hard to resist for any potential buyers.

Some of the most commonly used magnetic words by people are:

• ‘Numbers’ OFF (30% OFF)
• best price

Meta Description Optimization

Description part of your site can be an important arena to pick up your on page SEO.

It also plays a key factor in helping you improve your site’s CTR.

The title keywords along with magnetic words that I listed above can be used for the description as well. You can add more terms as with the description tag, you get a lot of space to include more keywords and magnetic words to improve your overall CTR.

Some of the few phrases that have proven to work better are:

• Get Free shipping on all our products today.
• Save ‘numbers’ off on our product

There are still loads of terms you can experiment with. The idea is to include more magnetic and alluring words as much as possible.

4.Technical SEO

The importance of Technical SEO can’t be stressed enough as this is one of the important spaces for issues to appear as well, and even more for the ecommerce sites as they tend to have more pages under their skin. A technical SEO can often be the decider of a game between placing your page on the 1st position or on the 4th position.

Site audits are key in identifying the issues with your ecommerce sites and running these audits regularly can ensure that your site runs really smoothly free from any issues.

There are many tools available online to run audits frequently. Some of the most commonly used tools are

• Ahref
• SEMrush
• Uber suggest

Site speed

A research by Radware claims that the top 500 American ecommerce sites are 16% slower. The average loading speed has increased from 7.36 seconds to 8.56 seconds.

According to statistics, a business loses 25% of visitors if the loading speed takes over 4 seconds to load.

There are loads of reasons behind your ecommerce site being really slow, from setting up with a mediocre host to adding up more DNS lookups, the reasons can be many. But how do you optimize it?

There are some ways to lower your loading speed like reducing the size of your page. Other common ways to increase the site speed are:

• Use a cache and in memory technique
• Using content delivery network
• Optimize the image quality
• Compress data
• Monitor site speed
• Reduce round trips
• Optimize platform configurations
• Avoiding redirects

Duplicate content

Duplicate content can be a nightmare, first it confuses both users and google, and secondly it takes away the SEO ranking from your hands directly. Though unintentionally floated, many of the duplicate contents can often be a part of the negligence incurred.

There are different types of duplicate contents like URL duplicates where different URL leads to the same page. If you copy and paste from another ecommerce site, Google will tag it as a duplicate content. This is again an error that’s being overlooked.

As an ecommerce site, you are not the only one selling a specific manufacturer’s product. So copying the manufacturer’s own description for your site might be considered a duplicate content as there are other ecommerce sites selling the same products.

To fix URL duplicates, use 301 redirects to let Google know that different links on your site are not duplicates at all. Once you are done applying a 301 redirect, the status of the page will be changed to ‘Moved permanently’.

5.Content Marketing

Without any doubt content marketing can be the first person to get the necessary sales and conversions for any given ecommerce site. But does it really help with SEO and traffic? Short answer is YES, if you do it correctly.

Content marketing is all about understanding what your audience wants and you give them exactly what they want with a bit of keywords included in them. Go to forums, youtube comment sections where people talk about your product that you are selling.

H&M runs an online magazine for blogs and fashion contents. Check out the H&M magazine to know how they keep their audience engaged regularly

Look for the style and terms how they communicate with each other about your product. Now frame a content revolving around these keywords and phrases so it connects with your target audience better more emotionally as well.

There are lots of ecommerce marketing sites running a blog section about interesting topics related to their contents that helps them in ranking their page better and also brings more traffic to their site as well. Now that’s a win win situation for your site.

Post blogs regularly to keep the audience coming to your page, stay engaged and develop a connection with your brand.

Make sure your contents are SEO optimized as well before you go live.

6.Ecommerce Link Building

Link building is one of the hardest parts of the SEO optimization process. But it’s definitely not that hard if you know what people expect from your end. Consider you are selling a speaker or earphone, then making a short blog or video on topics like “Top 10 Songs of all time’ or something related to this will definitely help people to redirect to your landing page.

The key focus is to build more quality links as possible and increase your sites visibility as well.

Now the most sought after way to link building is featuring influencers on your ecommerce sit, this works really well if you are selling shoes or clothing lines.

There is also the video marketing strategy, to build links through video marketing. You can also enable product share feature, another great way to build links.

7. Product page optimization:

Product page optimization is the toughest part of the job as you want to write high quality content that needs to be on line with the conversion rate as well. So how exactly do you optimize it?

Description

Longer contents are ranked better in google. Period. So ensure you write a 350 – 400 words description that includes as much as keywords possible that also makes senses at any given point.

A detailed description allows Google to understand your product better, and the better it understands the better rank your page receives. Besides an in-depth product page description allows users to get a better hold of your products.

Images:

Keep your image optimized with the right size so that it doesn’t take forever to load. Ensure shrinking the size doesn’t deteriorate the image quality. An ecommerce site sporting real time photos, 360 degree photos and even enabling review images works wonders for the audience.

If it’s an ecommerce site selling apparel or clothing lines, models wearing the clothing line and writing down the physical attributes of the model like the height, shoulder’s length can revolutionize the shopping experience.

Reviews:

close to 7 out of 10 people prefer looking at reviews before getting a product so ensure you have reviews and ratings available on your product page effectively.

Including keywords is not for keyword density but for Google to understand your site better. Use it 4-5 times in your description to give Google a better perspective of your product.

LSI keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are phrases or words that are a close part of your main target keyword.

For example if your product is a sweatshirt, then your LSI keywords must be something like:

  • Winter sweatshirt
  • Cotton sweatshirt
  • Full sleeve sweatshirt
  • Warm sweatshirt

These are some of the most commonly used LSI keywords for the term Sweatshirt.

There are few ways to find them, one such is obviously heading over to Amazon, then look for terms that show up many times in the same category page. And that’s your LSI words for the product.

The other way to find is to enter your keyword in Google keyword planner and then look for the suggested keywords from the list.

Short URL

It has been clearly evident that google tends to rank better with a shorter URL than a page with a longer URL.

Look how tiring long URLs can be, the one in the above could have been more specific by getting rid of the unwanted numbers.

Since you frame an URL for an ecommerce site, your URL tends to have a longer format as you need to include categories, sub categories, products etc. But the idea is to keep it as short as possible as you don’t want to confuse Google with a longer URL.

Use a 2 word description for your category and product pages

For example

https://xyz.com/menswear

then for the final product you can use something like this

https://xyz/menswear/winterwear/levisweatshirt

See how simple that one went? Make sure you give a 1 or 2 keyword description making it easy for Google to understand so that your product can rank better.

8. Internal Linking

The idea is really simple. To link one page to another page in your very own website is a part of link building. when done properly, you can see direct changes on your site ranking.

Also the words that need to be linked between two pages must be an anchor keyword. This helps to understand the right target keyword.

9. Schema Markup

Google gets rich snippets from structured markups like Schema as search results. And the ecommerce sites have the benefits of using reviews as their most powerful rich snippet.

Schema is code developed on your site that gives Google and other search engines a better understanding of your products. By using Schema on your ecommerce page you can get reviews for your search results.

There are third party tools to enable schema markups on your site, as manually setting schema markups can be a painful process. Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup helper can be really handy in setting up your schema markup.

Using google search console enables you to check if your schema markup has been set right, if it’s enabled correctly, you will start seeing ‘Rich Results’ under enhancements.

If you have a rich snippet, you should be able to see it under the mobile usability bar.

10. Keep monitoring search console suggestions to optimize more.

Google search console is a free tool developed by google for ecommerce owners to see how their website actually looks. Keeping a close eye on the google search console helps you to optimize your SEO standards effectively. It helps you to monitor organic presence of your site.

Google search control lets google access your site, monitors the organic results and lets you know how well the site is performing and the issues that need to be fixed. It also helps big time when you want to remove an old content and replace it with a newer one.

All it takes is only a few minutes to set up Google search control for your site. You can enter your site URL in the search bar and hit ‘Add A Property’ and confirm it.

Once you are done with this, verify your account and link it with google account.

Conclusion

These are the basics that you should never ever look while optimizing your site to regain better SEO standards.

As always it’s never a one day process that you can get it done within 24 hours and never look back. Be consistent and wait till you start seeing good results. Good things take time and so should you be.

Perform on and off page SEO regularly and run frequent audits for smooth functioning of the site and also to see prominent organic results coming your way.

 

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