5 Ultimate eCommerce SEO Tactics that will help you Rank Higher and Generate More Sales

Search Engine Optimization is an art of optimizing websites around specific keywords to make them rank higher in the search results. Although there is a lot known about SEO’s technical aspects, there is a creative design and user-experience side to it as well. When it comes to eCommerce SEO, paying attention to the little details goes a long way.

Optimizing your website means creating the robust result for your target keywords. The role of a search engine is to answer all the user’s queries so that they don’t require returning back for another explanation or answer.

So how is it done?

• Get your target audience talking about you (linking)
• Provide a better user experience through a more intuitive interface, better mobile experience, faster site, etc.
• Use better examples, videos, and images to explain your points
• Provide systematic answers to the extensive range of questions on particular topics

This is the definitive guide to eCommerce SEO tactics where you will learn everything you need from keyword research to optimize your e-commerce site, link building, technical SEO, and more.

Let’s jump right in…

You must be aware of using HTTPS sitewide, especially if you are running an e-commerce store. If you are not, you are facing some serious threats.

Why is HTTPS essential:

Every e-commerce site has forms that collect personal user-data in order to make the experience better. So using HTTPS through the site is a good practice as it ensures all the user information is encrypted that includes financial details as well. Moreover, if your e-commerce site is serving content over HTTPS, then there is a slight ranking boost as well, as per Google. 

E-commerce Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step towards an effective eCommerce SEO campaign. In simple words, without keywords, you cannot optimize our category and product pages.

On the other hand, keywords also influence your site’s technical SEO as well. That is, the URLs and the site architecture require keywords for proper optimization. 

The best ways to keyword research:

• Amazon: it may be your competitor but being the most prominent online marketplace, it is a goldmine that features all the necessary product-focused keywords. Simply type the main product name in the search box and see what suggestions show up. The suggestions will be your keyword ideas.
• Competitor Categories: another effective way to keyword research is to see what keywords your competitors are using. You can steal their ideas (only keywords) and use them to rank your product higher. Just type your main keyword into the search engine. The first 3-4 links in the search results are your competitors. Review their product pages and look for potential keywords.
• Keyword Research Tools/SEO Tools: there are plenty of keyword research tools available, which you can use for building backlinks, competitive research, keyword research, and more.
• Wikipedia: this may sound stupid, but Wikipedia is the best platform for keyword research. Simply type the keyword describing the product or a category that you are selling. Next, scan the words that relate to your main keyword or product category.

Choosing the right keyword for your category and product pages. Once you have shortlisted the potential keywords for your e-commerce site, it is time to determine the keywords that you will be using.

1. Search Volume

There is no fix search volume recommendation to give because if even no search is conducted with a particular keyword, it doesn’t really matter how competitive Google’s first page happens to be or how well it converts. For some niches, 100 monthly searches are a lot, and for some, even 1000 monthly searches aren’t enough. The more time you spend on research, the more you will understand what constitutes of low volume and the high volume search term in your niche.

2. Keyword Product Fit

Another thing to look after is the keyword product fit. It doesn’t help if the keyword you have chosen does not match with what you sell, even though that particular keyword gets thousands of searches. So make sure that the keyword you have chosen fit well with what you sell.

3. Know your Audience

Before applying the keyword, check its competition rating. Determine who your searchers are and can they be easily converted into buyers. Google Keyword Planner allows you to determine this aspect. It is recommended that you stick with medium and high competition keywords.

4. Know your Competition

Using a robust SEO tool, you can determine the competitiveness of a particular keyword.

On-Page SEO

Optimizing your product and category pages will allow you to generate high traffic and sales. For example, searching for ‘wooden cutting board with handle’ is much closer to generating sales than someone searching for ‘cutting boards online.’

Even though you would want to add a primary keyword to the title, adding modifiers can help your product show up for more long tail searches. Modifiers are the terms that can be used to describe a product. In our example, the word ‘wooden’ is the modifier.

The most common modifiers used when searching are:

• Free shipping
• Online
• Best
• Sale
• Deals
• Cheap/lowest price
• Review, and more…

Apart from long tail keywords and modifiers, creating content is also of utmost importance. If possible, try to write 1000+ product descriptions that include all the primary keywords, secondary keywords, and long tail keywords evenly.

On the other hand, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are phrases and terms that are closely relatable to your primary keyword.

For example, if you are optimizing your website around the keyword ‘cutting board.’

The terms closely related to your keyword include:

• Chopping board
• Vegetable chopping board
• Fruit cutting board
• Professional cutting board, etc.

Website Architecture

How your e-commerce website pages are arranged and organized can have an impact on your whole eCommerce SEO strategy. Your website must be optimized for both desktops and mobile users so that they can easily navigate the products.

The most important thing to remember is to keep things scalable yet straightforward and make sure that every page of your website is just fewer clicks from the homepage.

Technical SEO

As there are multiple pages on an e-commerce website that’s not only hard to manage but to optimize as well, technical SEO plays a crucial role.

In simple words, technical SEO can be the difference between the 4th position and a coveted No.1 ranking, if you are your competitor are even-steven. So it is often the tiebreaker on the search engine’s first page. 

The technical SEO can be affected due to several factors

• Too many pages – thousands of pages on an e-commerce website is a technical SEO nightmare. So it is extremely important that you identify the pages that can be non-indexed or deleted without having any consequences
• Duplicate content – as there a multiple pages, creating unique content are a challenge, and it can plummet your website in search results. The best way to deal with this issue is to non-index the unique URLs that your product or category filters are generating.
• Thin content – thin content can compromise your whole SEO campaign. It is extremely difficult to write unique content about similar products. To avoid this issue, you can write the content in templates, that is; start with 50-100 word introduction, then bullet list all the features, next, thoroughly explain about the product, and finally a 50-word conclusion.
• Site speed – site speed directly affects your eCommerce SEO campaign. Your site pages may load slowly due to factors like bloated e-commerce platforms, large image files, slow servers, and hosting. The best way to tackle speed issue is to upgrade your hosting, optimize image size with compression, and invest in a CDN.

Link Building

Link building gives your category and product pages a sudden boost in the search results. Links that point directly to your category and product pages are more powerful. Here are some steps to effective link building.

• Ask for backlinks
• Build a strong relationship – target niche-related communities like social groups, blogs, and forums
• Give testimonials as it helps you get backlinks and potential traffic from sites that have higher approval rate as compared to link request emails
• Start a blog and write posts on a regular basis
• Recover dead backlinks that are linking to a non-existent page that shows HTTP-code 404 error

Final Words

It is easier said than done. eCommerce SEO campaigning requires months of regular practice and deployment of strategies in order to see the results.