The Ultimate E-Commerce SEO Guide

Sick of the low organic traffic on your e-commerce website? This e-commerce SEO guide will show you step-by-step what you can do when you don’t have a million dollars to invest.

E-Commerce SEO has a whole series of problems associated with it. There are lots of SEO experts who will tell you to try and rank for less competitive Keywords.

That’s a really good idea.

But here’s the problem:

Even Amazon vendors are doing the exact same thing. The result is that there aren’t a lot of low-competition keywords lying around.

In this four-part E-Commerce SEO Guide, I am going to show you how you can work your way around the big brands to rank for competitive keywords.

Chapter 1: Keyword Research

You have great products and you read a ton of blogs that tell you how to market them. But somehow, it’s not working.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that Keyword Research for e-commerce websites does not get executed well enough.

And yes, it needs to be done for each product.

The biggest problem is that most e-commerce SEO guides will tell you how to find easy keywords to rank for. But sometimes, that is just not possible.

Why? Because your competitors read Brian Dean’s blog too! Now they have taken some of the best keywords you can try to rank for. Even the easy ones.

Now, there are many different ways to approach keyword research for e-commerce SEO. I personally recommend using Ubersuggest, Wikipedia, and Amazon.

Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that tells you the Search Volume of the keyword and the difficulty level for SEO and paid campaigns for that keyword.

My Process:

Step 1: Find the seed keyword for your product. For instance, let’s say that you are trying to rank for this product:

This is a gold-colored tie. So, let’s plug in the keyword ‘gold tie’ into Ubersuggest and see what it spits out.

As you can see, this is a pretty competitive keyword. Good news, though!

Check out the SERP Analysis column. The #1 listing is for Amazon. So, let’s head there!

Step 2: Check out your competition.

Type in ‘gold ties’ into Amazon and check out your competition.

Just eyeballing it, you can follow this pattern:

 Brand Name + Gender + Solid Color + Size + Tie Color + Tie Type.

 Here’s how you can leverage this:

1. Name the product in this exact pattern. In our case, it will become ‘KNotforSale Goldsmith Tie – Gold Pattern 3.5” Formal Tie for Men’.
2. Your keywords for the product description are now:
   Men’s gold tie, gold formal tie for men, gold tie.
3. Let’s take it one step further and include even the material (satin). So, our keywords are now:
   Men’s gold tie, gold formal tie for men, gold tie, satin formal necktie, satin gold tie.

(A quick search on Wikipedia will tell you that ties are also known as neckties.)

We now have a variety in our keywords. The problem is… these are all either hyper-competitive keywords or keywords with no search volume.

This means that you either have keywords where you can never rank high or keywords which absolutely no one is looking for.

So, how do we go about it?

Step 3: Check out your competition. I mean competitors that are not Amazon or Flipkart or other million-dollar ventures. How about ties.com? Let’s see what they have to say about gold ties.

You can see their entire site structure right here along with the keywords that they are using. This will come in handy later on.

Here’s the problem, though – still the same keywords. The worst bit is – they are all fairly competitive keywords. (Of course, we ARE getting them from the existing competition!)

Does this mean that you give up? NO!

There are tons of ways to rank for the competitive keywords in any niche and that is the main objective of this blog.

Chapter 2: Title and Meta Tags

The title and meta description to your page will make or break the deal. Don’t forget to use at least a couple of keywords in the title and meta description.

The purpose of the title and meta tags is to make your search results click-worthy.

Why is this important?

If your customers are clicking on your website instead of your competitors, what does that tell search engines like Google?
“Hey! Look, guys! People love this link. Let’s give it a higher ranking!”

Here are a few quick hacks that you can use to improve your Click-Through Rate significantly:

Use Click Bait such as:

• Free Shipping.
• X% Off On _____ Products.
• Save Y% On _____.

Use Geo-Modifiers such as:

• Free Shipping Within ______
• Use Coupon Code X for ______ Locations
• Buy the Best _______ Products in ______ Location.

Use Descriptive Modifiers such as:

• Cheap ______ Products.
• Buy the best _____.
• Luxury ______ Products.
• Great Selection of _______ at Affordable Prices.
• Get the Best Deals On ______ Items.

A winning title and meta description can help you leap over the rest of your competition.

If you feel like you have too many pages, go to your Google Search Console and find the top three pages that get most links. Then head over to Google Analytics to find the three pages that get the most traffic. Lastly, list the top ten products that you want to start selling.

Start with these top sixteen pages. The rest will follow. Trust me, it’s well worth the effort.