Advanced Ecommerce SEO [Complete Guide]

Congratulations for taking the first step towards transforming your business.

You have landed on this article, you must be making an attempt to find marketing strategies for your Ecommerce website or want to know how to optimize your store to rank in top Google searches.

In this expert-written guide you will understand how to generate more leads and customers for your Ecommerce site, I bet in the next few minutes what you learn will blow your mind.

So, let’s start by understanding some easy concepts and then dig deeper into the world of sales and conversion in your Ecommerce store.

Is SEO Important for Ecommerce?

Research says that around 70% of customers use search engines to find a product and know what others have to say about it before making their decision to buy the product and why not, when they can easily choose, compare and most importantly save their time while buying, who won’t?

I feel you won’t agree less that the Ecommerce business is trending and has totally overpowered the retail sales where a person has to visit the stores, spend long hours and load their cars with purchased goods. In fact, 43% of customers do online research while in the store. Your online store with a low operating cost which is also adding more value to your customers is definitely a win for everyone.

And to win, SEO comes in role!

Ecommerce SEO Marketing Is All About Knowing Customer’s Priority

Just pause and ask yourself, what is unique about your store? Who are your customers and what is that retains the interest of the customers?

“Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%”

If your site can offer a flawless interface to the customer, it will simply convert them into buyers. The entire purchase process should be seamless from adding a product to the cart, to going to the cart page and checking out the process. Let me explain

“Add to Cart” Button Directly Next to the Product Listing

In the below image you can see there are 2 ways of having an add to cart button.

Below is the 1st version users will have to go to the product and only then the product can be added to cart but a small tweak can make a big difference.

Better conversion strategy would be to put the “Add to Cart” button below all the products. Which means 1 less click & reducing the duration of the checkout process. See below.

This is a better strategy because in some cases users might just want to add the product to the cart without losing their current screen. It also saves time. If a user wants to read about the product in detail then there is always an option of doing that. So, basically we have just added a feature for better user experience.

Relevant Images and Description of the Product That Helps Customer to Make a Quick Decision

Customers develop a tentative understanding of the product from the pictures and the description you provide with the product, but before jumping to that we need to discuss how to optimize the URLs, meta descriptions, and other ranking factors on our website.

On-Page SEO of Ecommerce for Search Engines & Users

On-site SEO is the key to perfect eCommerce SEO as the buyer’s journey starts by searching for a product that leads him to your store to a qualified purchase. Your customers, as well as search engines, must get a clear understanding of your products at first glance. This can only be done by optimizing your meta tags, URL structure, heading tags, and images. Keep in mind that your goal is to get high visibility for more traffic.

Role of Your Meta Titles, Descriptions, h1’s & Images and URL Structure

Meta Titles, Descriptions, H1’s & Images, and URL Structure plays a very important role. If optimized correctly they can take your business to the next level. So, without talking much let’s go to the technical part of it and how to attract more traffic by Optimizing them.

Optimize Your Meta Title & Meta Description

Most eCommerce sites use a formula based approach to their meta tags, which looks spammy, and usually follow a pattern like this:

Buy <Heading/ProductName/Category> Online | BrandName

It’s easy to see why some Ecommerce stores do this, many have hundreds or thousands of pages. Writing unique titles and meta descriptions can be an overwhelming task

But here’s the thing:

A formula based approach isn’t ideal. It leads to incorrect meta titles and descriptions to a lot of pages. 

Now, I know what you are thinking. There is no way you are going to sit and write meta of each individual page. 

You are right there’s just no way to optimize each individual page one by one. So, let’s try to understand how to accomplish this task by understanding the core of ecommerce.

Your Ecommerce site pages can be classified as follows:

• Category/Collections pages
• Subcategory pages
• Sub-subcategory pages/2nd level subcategory pages
• Brand pages/Non-transactional pages
• Product pages

Since different levels in the hierarchy might contribute to traffic at different levels. It won’t make sense to make 1 template and use that for your whole website. Let’s see what you can do?

There are 3 different ways to go about optimizing these pages:

1. Dynamic optimization (We talked above)
2. Manual review and optimization
3. Combination of dynamic and manual page optimization (Recommended)

If you have thousands of pages, you can’t sit and rewrite all the meta tags right?

So how to save your time? Solution is to put your maximum efforts into writing well-optimized tags for the most important pages. Then use a templated approach for the rest.

I recommend doing manual review for some of the important pages on your site like homepage, non-transactional pages and your some product, category & subcategory pages.

Now you have a meta title & description ready for some of your most important pages. Then study each “set of pages”, and create a varied dynamic formula i.e. creating separate dynamic meta tags for product pages, category and subcategory pages. Let me give you one simple example of Product Page Dynamic Tags:

URL:
https://www.officemonster.co.uk/bookcases/deluxe-bookcase-1200mm-high-with-2-shelves-beech

Page Title:
Get Leading Deluxe bookcase 1200mm high with 2 shelves of oak | Office Monster

Meta Description:
Office Monster provides an online Deluxe bookcase 1200mm high with 2 shelves of oak products with great quality. Explore our wide range of high-quality products now! ✯ Enjoy Easy Returns ✯ Quick Delivery. Order Online Today!

Repeat the same process for other types of pages which are category & subcategory pages. BOOOOM! You now have meta titles and descriptions on all your pages just by writing well-optimized tags for some and then repeating that for the rest of the pages of a similar type.

Some tips to improve your meta tags:

• Optimize each product page for the focus keyword
• Keep dynamic elements concise and brief
• Your meta titles should motivate the customers to buy it
• Review how your competitor titles and descriptions are optimized. Learn from them and improve your titles

Now, let me explain how you should go about optimizing your H1 Heading Tag. You need to choose the focus keyword as your H1 tag of the page. If this is a product page, you can choose your product name as the H1 tag and category name for category pages. Just make sure that you don’t have multiple H1 tags on any page and they are not duplicating with each other.

URL Structure Optimization

I will try to explain this by definition. A URL is known as “Uniform Resource Locator”, URLs are read by browsers, human beings, search engines, and software. So an SEO friendly URL is the one that contains the attributes of that page. It should not have any random codes. You should aim to give max information about your product via URL itself, information like its category, type, and name of the product. Let me explain this with an example.

Bad URL:
https://www2.hm.com/en_us/productpage.0570002001.html

Good URL:
https://www.nordstromrack.com/shop/Men/Clothing/T-Shirts/Crewneck

If your URLs on your website are something like this, you need to immediately fix this. I would recommend keeping a “Uniform” URL structure clustered into a hierarchical way from top to bottom.

This is best way to structure your URLs:

• OnlineShop.com/category-name (category/collections page)
• OnlineShop.com/category-name/subcategory-name (subcategory page)
• OnlineShop.com/category-name/subcategory-name/subcategory-name (sub-subcategory page)
• OnlineShop.com/category-name/subcategory-name/brand-name/product (product page)

Now our Meta title, meta description & URL structure is ready. Let’s move towards how to optimize images on your website.

Optimizing Images (Alt, Size & Quality)

You need to ensure that the images you provide are of high quality and resolution. Make sure images should replicate the product you are offering as this will sustain the customer’s trust in you.

Refer to the two images below that show the difference in the quality of the image. Which one do you think will support buyers to make a decision?

Together with the image quality, you need to make sure that you don’t compromise with page load speed. High-quality images tend to have higher size which takes longer to load. A quick hack around this is to use JPEG images instead of PNG or GIF images because JPEG images can offer high-quality images even with size in KBs. Please refer to the image below.

Bonus Tip 🙂

While uploading images you can rename them and add descriptive names to make it easy for search engines to categorize them correctly.

Add a description to the product to give an extensive idea of the product. Use Keywords in the description to make it easy for search engines to find you.

Easy Checkout

“Seven of every ten visitors leave the checkout without buying. Optimize your checkout process to turn more visitors into customers.”

Once the customer has selected the product, you need to make it a convenient check out. Customers lose interest in the case of too many steps to check out and the final buy.

The following images show you the most effective way to design your check out.

Connect to Variety of Payment Portals & Make It an Easy Buy

As people are moving towards the online purchase, they ask for complete set up online, from knowing the product to the final payments. It is always advisable to connect the final payment to the known online portals.

Bonus Tip 🙂

All the above-mentioned website enhancements are important but to take it to the next level there are more things which you can do.

Showing Crisp and Clear Shipping & Offer Messages

Showing crisp and clear Shipping & Offers related messages to excite your customers into buying more.

Or something like this

Showcase Reviews on Products

According to a study conducted by GE Capital Retail Bank, 61% of shoppers read reviews before they purchase. According to a similar study from the Acuity Group, 41% of B2B shoppers behave the same — reading reviews before deciding to purchase.

Bonus Tip 🙂

Add the SALE Section!

Who doesn’t love a good sale? Some people will buy things they don’t even want or need simply because they’re on sale.

So, your shop is ready. Next is telling your target audience that your brand exists. You need to reach out to them and show them that you can add value and make their life easy

Without saying much let’s talk about the process where we will work on marketing our website to the outside world.

There are some pre-requisite of the market – you need to know your target audience, what they are typing while searching for your product. This is where knowing the right keyword comes into play. Let’s Know how!

Find the Right SEO Keywords for Your Online Store

How will a customer reach your site?…An obvious answer is through search engines or paid ads or email marketing but for everything you need the right set of keywords.

For searches, customers will insert a few words or a phrase to gather information or buy the product. So, if you want to be found, optimise your keywords.

Keywords are the building blocks of any SEO campaign. Your list of keywords have a direct impact on your Google ranking. So choosing the right keywords for your Ecommerce website is what you really need to work with.

Here is my previous post on how to find the right keywords for your business.

Don’t have enough time to read another blog?…here is a quick summary to the blog:

• Identify all the terms related to your business,
• Know your targeted audience to decide list of keywords,
• Think of all the possible combinations user can attempt to search for,
• Add long tail keywords,
• Know your competitor’s keywords using tools like SEMrush, Buzzsumo, search metrics,
• Spy competitor’s keyword strategy,
• Check performance of existing keywords – ranking, difficulty, location, trending topics,
• Find new keyword opportunities analyzing users’ search and changing market trends using tools like Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Market Samurai, Long Tail Pro, Google Suggestions etc.
• Filter keywords to create a final list based upon competition and searches.

Bonus Tip 🙂

Focusing on long-tail keywords is a great way of getting relevant traffic. Long-tail keywords are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly searched for keywords. Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value.

Understanding the Site Structure & Navigation for Your Store

Site structure and navigation is a way by which users navigate to a product’s location. It begins from the main menu to finally navigating you to the final product.

Here, just check whether your website is optimised to make it a smooth navigation for the users to reach out to your final product.

Plan Website Structure Carefully

A well structured website that has all the relevant information on the first page of the website is what really ensures customer’s longevity and revisits the website.

So, let me tell you, how it works..

Reducing the conversion steps to reach out to the final product is what you need to target as that gives a good experience to the users and ease to reach to their final buy.

Let’s Understand What Breadcrumbs Are

Another important thing is to check the breadcrumbs on your website.

Breadcrumbs in simple words is your menu bar on the first page of your website that navigates the user’s location, moving from one page to another and then back to homepage. It comprises all the categories followed by the subcategories of the products available on your site.

Breadcrumbs are very important for an Ecommerce site as it focuses on categorization making the site more presentable and easy for the user to search the product. It enhances the chance of people exploring all the aspects leading to a good buying experience.

The Future of E-Commerce: Content Is the King

A good content is what you simply need to bring to the users as it holds the power to drive traffic on your Ecommerce website. Content marketing can give 6 times higher conversion rate of websites

Well, writing good content is what we explain to you here,
You are already handy with the keywords and phrases that customers might be looking for in their search so all you need is to develop is a good piece of a written blog for the customers to understand the product. This will help your customers to stay connected with you as blog posts keep them engaging. In fact, blog posts can convert more potential customers into buyers than any other traditional marketing strategy.

After working with industries like furniture, CBD, office products, Apparel etc., I can say that content is the game changer when it comes to growing and marketing an ecommerce business. Not just that it also helps in branding as well.

Bonus Tip 🙂

Video Content for Visual Information

Include links to the product in your blog to make it easy for the customer to jump to your final product and make a buy.

You can even produce a good piece of content through video that gives clear description and product previews. This enhances the footfall of visitors on your website.

Here is a good video example where product is explained by a video for customers.

And once you are able to reach out to your target audience with good content marketing…all you would need is to shout out loud… and tell We are open!

I will talk about Guest Posting and other off page marketing strategies using content towards the end of this article.

Good SEO Is a Necessity, Not an Option

First ask yourself, what is a good SEO? And why is it really needed for your Ecommerce site?

Let me get straight, If you want to stand strong, SEO is the pillar.

There are some technical – ON page aspects of SEO that ask for your little efforts and they can pay off higher sales to you. This includes title tag tag and meta description that helps search engines filter your content and make you one of the google top results. 

You need to optimize Keywords and content along with title tag and meta descriptions to drive more traffic to your website.

Next, Have you checked the page loading speed of your site?

“Google research says 53% users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.”

To check the speed of your website Google has provided a good tool Pagespeed insight. Check now so that users always leave your site with a purchase.

Another check, Is your site mobile friendly?

“Research reveals that over 60% of online traffic now comes from smartphones and 50% of mobile user activity results in purchase.”

So, you need to check the responsiveness of your site. You can use the Google tool Responsinator to check the mobile friendliness of your site.

SEO Link Building Tactics for Ecommerce Businesses

Ecommerce business is all about making connections be it with your users or other online websites. When other websites link back to you it sends signals to Google that your site is worth ranking. Link building is one of the off-page SEO strategies that brings organic traffic to your website.

Here are few strategies you can use to create backlinks for your website:

1. Go for guest posting – Post your content to other large sites that link back to yours as it’s an excellent strategy to increase readers and visitors to your site.
2. Invite bloggers to review your products to drive more site authority – High authority corresponding to high reliability. In some cases you might have to ship them your product free of cost so that they could try that and share their experience with the audience of their blog.
3. Offer your content to other bloggers as a resource – It’s like a give and take process. You can write content and  help in saving time for bloggers and journalists. Since you are helping them out with their work you will get acknowledged on their sites.  
4. Create an account on HARO – HARO, Help A Reporter Out, a well organised website where journalists send you queries which you can respond to as per your set skills. Once you answer the Journalist’s queries and manage to get published in their content, banklink is promised.
5. List out in the web directories of your niche – Directories are the best source as it provides a complete list of owners and websites of your industry. So it’s like being the part of a group with people from your industry.
6. Coupon Submission – As an Ecommerce website, it is always smart to offer deals and coupons for your users. Connect with websites that list coupons from various Ecommerce websites. Getting listed in these websites will not only fetch you a backlink but will drive traffic to your site.

Some of the Top Coupon Sites I Am Listing for You:

Coupon Sites
supplier.leesburgflorida.gov
healthylifeassist.com
seniorlife.co
localoffersdirect.com
bulaclassifieds.com
pingdirapp21.directoryup.com
sharingmarketplace.com
dentist.im
cgmimm.com
midibiz.com
shopfloridabiz.com
ethioffer.com
directory2020.com
bankruptcyanswerstoday.com
nearme.attorney
ishopblack.com

7. Get Listed Vendor and Partner Sites – As you are selling a product on your Ecommerce website. You must be in link with wholesalers for buying material for your product and sellers for selling. Ask these people to talk about you and your products on their sites. This is the double benefit of getting a review and a backlink.   

8. Earn Recommendations – Once you deliver the product, ask your users to recommend you. Just try to enter yourself in credible lists. You can give small discounts to those who mentioned you in their social media accounts. Lot of customers manage a blog or other media to ask them to share their experience of using your product. This also adds authoritativeness to your website.

9. Top Ecommerce Businesses – Try to get Listed in Blogs which talk about Top Ecommerce Businesses for example while searching for “Top Ecommerce Businesses in New Jersey” I found these websites and they are definitely good areas to get listed for good SEO and traffic. Not just that, it also adds a trustworthiness factor for your store.

• https://www.zippia.com/company/best-retail-companies-new-jersey/
• https://www.thomasnet.com/northern-new-jersey/ecommerce-services-25421009-1.html
• https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/new-jersey-commerce-companies#section-overview

Bonus Tip 🙂

You can ask Influencer websites like Famebit, Revfluence to talk about you and your product by giving them good deals.

To reduce the length of this article as it can become little overwhelming for some readers we have made another detailed post on How to do Off page SEO to learn other important strategies like

• Press Release
• Social Media activities
• Blog Commenting
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Sharing
• Classified Submission
• Infographics Submission
• Forum Submission
• Video Submission
• Q & A forum Submission
• Resource page link building.
• Local SEO
• Getting link ideas from competitors
• Broken Link Building

Before ending this discussion of link building, I want to bring something very important to you. Please use the above mentioned strategies and other white hat link building strategies to create backlinks. Purchasing links is a strict NO NO.. If you buy links or do something wrong to make quick bucks then your condition can also be like the guy mentioned in the image below.

To understand On page and Off page SEO for your website more deeply, here is my another guide where you can make a quick read and guide yourself.

Measuring SEO Success for An Ecommerce Website

I hope my insights to perform SEO for your website has helped you. But, if you are making efforts, how will you determine if they are results worthy or not?

Even after optimizing your Ecommerce website, how will you Judge the outcomes?

Let me share two simple ways for it,

1. SEO tools – Yes, Google provides you some SEO tools like Ahrefs that can help you track the SEO activities and their outcomes for your website. Try them out.
2. SEO dashboard – Your analytics account allows you to set up an SEO dashboard that analyzes the results of your SEO.

So not just putting in but knowing what you have achieved will be available to you!

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Ecommerce SEO Case Studies

Below are some websites where we have worked earlier, and provided remarkable results. In these cases we focused not only increasing the traffic but also worked on making sure our clients get quality traffic for higher conversion.

Example #1: My client ecommerce site increased organic traffic by 1880% in 2 months.

It is a huge site with thousands of products related to motocross & ATVs. They were struggling to pivot the trend of organic traffic going downward. It was a very interesting and challenging project at the same time as there were hundreds of optimization possibilities due to the scale of the website. It was the most tricky part to choose what needs to be done and how. I helped them by implementing all the strategies mentioned in this article and rolled few more updates to the on-site SEO integrating following:

• In-built dynamic on-site SEO features
• 301 redirects for all 404 pages
• Silo structure optimization
• Keyword density optimization
• Cleaning all toxic links
• Google Penalty check and more.

Moreover, I implemented advanced level optimization on the site through various A/B Testings and Google Analytics review such as Heatmap analysis. Once these changes were done, the client was excited seeing skyrocket traffic daily. He was pleased with my work just like other clients. I know doing all these steps can be a little overwhelming but they are worth it. If this is something that you are looking for feel free to reach out to me via our contact form or give a call at +1-973-327-3771 or email me at info@incrementors.com

Example #2: Link building efforts show the huge improvement in organic traffic. 

We have created lots of high quality backlinks in the last few months and you can see the improvements, my client ecommerce site organic traffic increased by 3 times.

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So, finally you have reached the end of this article. I am sure you are now ready to take your ecommerce store to the next level. Thanks for spending some of your precious time on our website. Just to show our gratitude, here is 1 last tip from us…

Thank You Page With an Offer

Have you ever thought that the Thank You page which comes when the purchase is done can also be used as a way to engage with your buyers.

To get the answer of this please read below the answer of “Jacob Landis-Eigsti”.

We asked some of our Industry experts about the tips they can offer to generate Ecommerce website leads. Below you will find a couple of new things to learn which are not mentioned in the above 6000 plus Words article.. 🙂

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions

Why is SEO needed for ecommerce?

Yes, SEO is important for E-commerce as it holds the power to raise your sales and leads by generating organic traffic for your website. Investing for good SEO of your site can bring you good sales that will last longer as once you have buyers and established trust, it will be a long term connection.

How is Ecommerce SEO different from normal SEO?

Ecommerce sites focus on the sale of the product which other merchants are also selling that is why Google ranking is not just based on the SEO aspects but requires other good quality signals such as additional information for the users, site navigation.. Ecommerce SEO focuses on the branding of the product and thus optimized to make it a smooth reach for customers to the final product whereas normal SEO focuses on the services they provide.

Do you need an SEO agency for your Ecommerce site?

It purely depends on your goal, if you want to generate good leads in a short span of time such that its results lasts long, SEO is a good choice.
Facts says that SEO has the highest ROI for any Ecommerce site.

Does Ecommerce SEO cost more than normal SEO?

Ecommerce SEO does not cost more than normal SEO. You pay for the quality and results of the work not for the Industry so it purely depends on the nature of the work as the SEO company is providing you.

What results can I expect from the marketing of my website?

Google ranking is the prime result you can expect from marketing of your website. Secondary results you can expect would be traffic, leads, backlinks, reviews and recommendations, Good quality content. 

Is it profitable to do spend on SEO in 2020?

Definitely, when 2020 is a growing era of the majority population shifting to online buying. SEO can help you standout amongst your competitors. Especially when the entire nation is in lockdown and need for eCommerce is more than ever.

How can e-commerce SEO help my store?

E-commerce SEO can help you generate more sales and leads by optimizing your site over aspects like keywords, content marketing, link building ,on page and off page SEO.

How can I make my eCommerce website more attractive? 

For an attractive eCommerce site, incorporate these basics 
good quality and professional images
a well-organized layout,
sufficient information,
easy to navigate,
Customer reviews and feedback

Which is better, WooCommerce or Shopify?

Both Shopify and WooCommerece have their own advantages. Shopify offers fixed pricing whereas WooCommerce offers more flexibility with pricing as it’s free but involves extra costs for hosting, domain name and security. Shopify on the other side is beginner friendly but WooCommerce is not. 

How much does an eCommerce website cost?

An eCommerce website can range from $5 to million dollars depending purely on your decision to incorporate the features. You need to think a little wide on this perspective as it will involve your initial investment over hosting, domain name, customization, configuration, marketing expenditure and other miscellaneous expenses. Apart from this, don’t forget about the outdated products that will be included in your loss statement.

What are the top eCommerce companies? I want to learn by reviewing their structure..

Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Etsy, Home Depot & Best buy are the top eCommerce companies but these sites sell everything. So, to understand the structure better you should look at your top competitors. Reviewing Competitors is the best way to plan everything for your ecommerce business.

What is the best ecommerce CMS?

Shopify – Shopify is a SaaS ecommerce platform which helps in creating a visually appealing online store. This platform has easy-to-use templates and CMS features. These days Shopify is highly in trend.

WordPress –  WordPress is the most dominant CMS in the industry. More than 80z5 content-based sites are made in WordPress. To convert any WordPress into ecommerce all you need to do is add the WooCommerce plugin. It’s an open-source platform free to download, making it a great fit for small and medium size business.

BigCommerce – BigCommerce is a SaaS ecommerce platform which is easy to streamline your content, ecommerce, and store management for a monthly fee.

Magento – Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform and is available in self-hosted and cloud-hosted options. Magento is a sophisticated program that is a viable option for larger businesses with developer resources. 

Some other fairly popular CMS are Prestashop, OpenCart, Wix, Volusion, Sitecore, Joomla, Drupal etc.