Comprehensive Guide to Ecommerce SEO

E-commerce SEO is the process of getting people to visit an online store from search engines without paying for ads.

This detailed guide goes over everything you need to know about search engine optimization for eCommerce sites, including its importance, quick tips, and tools for success. You'll also learn some long-term strategies that will help your eCommerce site grow naturally over time.

Why Ecommerce SEO Is So Important

A recent study by Statista found that search engines are the best place for people all over the world to look for products online. 40% of online shoppers use search engines to find what they want, while only 21% go straight to a brand's website.

In short, people who want to find a product are more likely to use Google, Yahoo, or Bing than to go to your site. For smaller online stores that aren't as well-known as Nike or Gucci, the chances that people will go straight to your website to buy something are much lower.

You can only reach customers if they know about your brand if you don't use eCommerce SEO. Usually, this requires a lot of money spent on advertising and social media. There's nothing wrong with using ads to drive e-commerce sales, but once those ads stop running, your sales will drop like a rock.

SEO for shopping sites is different.

By putting search engine optimization first, you can get more people to visit your site without paying for ads. The more traffic you get, the better your products will rank on search engines for a given search. This traffic makes growth grow faster and faster.

The great thing about e-commerce SEO is that it can help you make a lot more money from sales without making more sales. Even if your conversion rates stay the same, if you get 10 times as many visitors, you can make 10 times as many sales. The math is easy.

E-commerce SEO strategies will always be on your site. E-commerce SEO is a long-term investment in the success of your online store, unlike ads that hurt your bottom line as soon as you stop running them.

This also lets a lot more people see your brand. You can sell to anyone who uses a search engine to look for related keywords. These people don't need to know anything about your brand or even that it exists.

Shoppers don't have to follow you on social media or sign up for your email list for you to target them. This lowers the cost of getting new customers. All they have to do is use Google to look for what you're selling.

Let's look at a real-life case study from Savory Spice, an online store that sells herbs and spices, to show how powerful eCommerce SEO can be.

The brand worked with a digital marketing company that came up with an SEO plan for the next 12 months. They focused on keyword research, site structure, URL changes, on-site SEO, backlinks, technical SEO, and other best practices.

Within a few months, they could already see big changes. In October, Savory Spice got 184.9k organic clicks, which is a lot more than the 72.3k organic clicks it got the year before. That's 156% more than before!

In the second half of the year, the site's organic traffic reached 964.4k, which was up 107% from the same time last year.

Even after the SEO project was done, Savory Spice's organic search traffic continued to grow each month:

• January — 206.9k
• February: 211,500
• March — 227.9k
• April — 264.9k

This case study shows that putting money into e-commerce SEO pays off both right away and in the long run. Even if you stop some of your e-commerce SEO efforts, the benefits will still be there.

Quick Tips to Improve Ecommerce SEO Today

For any eCommerce search engine optimization campaign, you must have a good SEO tool, and Ahrefs is the best one on the market.

Ahrefs is a complete set of SEO tools. It has tools for researching keywords, analyzing competitors, doing site audits, and more. You can also use Ahrefs to find out what kind of content is most popular in your industry.

This kind of information is very useful for websites that sell things.

You can also easily keep track of how your ranking changes over time with Ahrefs. So that you can quickly tell if your SEO efforts are working or not.

Plans begin at only $99 a month. If you sign up for a year's worth of service, you'll get two months free.

If you're new to eCommerce SEO, it might seem hard or scary, but these quick tips will help you get going right away and build momentum. You can use these strategies right away and see results quickly.

Tip #1 — Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important part of any SEO strategy for e-commerce. It tells you what people are looking for and which keywords are worth pursuing.

Even if you have never done this before, Ahrefs makes it easy. Just type in the keyword you want to find, and the software will do the rest. You'll see something like this on the report:

Pay attention to the number of searches and how hard the keywords are. The key is to find a middle ground between the two.

For example, if 50,000 people search for a term every month and it has a difficulty rating of 97, it's probably not worth your time. Even if the keyword is very relevant to your brand and industry, there isn't much chance that you'll rank for it.

Instead, you can go after the easy things. These are keywords that are searched for less often and are easier to use. You'll have a much better chance of showing up in search results for these words.

Ahrefs will also show you all related terms and other keyword ideas that you can use as inspiration.

Tip #2 — Optimize Your Product Descriptions

Once you have a list of the keywords you want to use, you need to figure out how to use them in your product descriptions. One of the best ways to improve how your products show up in search results is to do this.

Write long descriptions of your products and use the keyword you want to rank at least three to five times. Try to write 500 to 1,000 words or more whenever you can.

This lets you target several keywords that are related on the same page.

For example, let's say you're selling kitchen appliances online. A pressure cooker is one of your most popular items.

You should probably include keywords like:

• Stainless steel
• Slow cookers
• 6 quart, 8 quarts, etc.
• Automatic \sProgrammable \sTimer
• Stews and soups
• Recipes
• Safe for the dishwasher

People would search for all of these things in addition to "pressure cookers." So, you need to include them in your product description.

Tip #3 — Create a Logical Site Structure

SEO depends on how an e-commerce site is set up. This means how your site's pages are put together.

When you optimize the structure of your site, you kill two birds with one stone. First, it improves the user experience by making it easier for people to find their way around your site. Second, it helps search engines find products in your store and figure out which pages are the most important.

As products and categories are added or taken away from e-commerce sites over time, many of them lose control of how their sites are set up. The best thing to do is to keep things as simple as possible.

Here's the rule of thumb. Your home page should be no more than three clicks away from every page.

A well-structured e-commerce site might look like this:

Home Product Category Subcategory Product

Now, let's replace those with real products and categories:

Homepage Sneakers Training Adidas Running Sneakers

Homepage Sneakers Basketball Jordan 11s

Home Formal Oxford Black Leather Toe Cap

https://www.espinspire.com/local-seo-services.php

You know what I mean.

Tip #4 — Use Keyword-Rich URLs

Research shows that URLs that are shorter tend to rank higher on Google than URLs that are longer.

E-commerce sites are usually at a disadvantage here because the URL structure will include your categories and subcategories. For instance: https://yourstore.com/category/subcategory/productname/

If your URLs are going to be longer, make sure you use keywords to your advantage.

For example, let's keep using a site that sells sneakers and other shoes as an example. On the back end of your inventory, you might have SKU or product ID labels on all of your items. But you shouldn't use those in URLs.

Let's compare two examples:

https://yourstore.com/categoryID.7649872

vs.

https://yourstore.com/running-sneakers

In terms of SEO, the second URL is much better. No one will use a search engine to look for your backend category ID strings.

Long-Term Strategies For Ecommerce SEO

Many SEO strategies need time, patience, and extra work. These strategies won't pay off right away, but they will in the months and years to come.

Strategy #1 — Run Technical Audits

Many people who run eCommerce sites don't know much about technical SEO. It involves making changes to your site and server that are aimed at search engine crawlers. This improves how your site is listed in search results.

This is another time when it would be helpful to have an SEO tool.

The site audit feature of Ahrefs lets you see what's going on behind the scenes of your site.

The cool thing about Ahrefs's site audit reports is that they have a lot of information. The report not only points out SEO problems but also tells you how to fix some of the problems.

Still, some of the solutions aren't always easy to figure out. If you're not very tech-savvy, you might need to hire a developer to fix some of the SEO problems that your audits find.

Not every technical problem can be fixed in a day. You should also run these reports often since new problems can arise at any time.

Strategy #2 — Link Building

Link building is the process of getting other sites to link to yours. The best backlinks come from high-authority sites in your industry.

Search engines like Google use the backlinks to your site to decide how to rank it. As you keep building backlinks, your position in the SERPs will go up.

But it takes time and works to build quality backlinks. There are many different ways to use this strategy, such as:

• Guest blogging
• Cold approach
• Broken link building
• Unlinked brand mentions
• Recovery of a lost link
• Taking links from competitors

Ahrefs is a great tool for any strategy for building links. You can look into the backlinks of your competitors with the site explorer tool.

Then, you can use those backlinks to make a list of people you want to reach out to for your outreach and other campaigns. This is a more advanced SEO technique, but it will help you build a backlink profile that gives you an edge over your competitors.

Just know that building links will take a lot of time and work before you see any results.

Strategy #3 — Blogging

People don't often think of blogs when they think of e-commerce sites. But blogging is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your site without paying for it.

It's a great way to target long-tail keywords that go beyond your product pages. People who aren't necessarily shopping right now but are just looking for information can find you through your blogs.

Blogs are great for SEO because they keep people on your pages for a long time, which is something Google's algorithm looks for.

A blog post is also easy to share, so it's possible that your readers will put it on social media or send it to their friends via email. On a product page, this is probably not the case.

One bad thing about blogging is that you have to wait a while to see results. If you post a blog tonight, you won't see more organic traffic tomorrow or next week.

But if you stick to a plan to post at least two or three blogs per week for the next year, you'll see the results of your work in the future.

Next Steps

You can't run SEO campaigns well if you don't have an SEO tool to help you. Ahrefs can help you with all of your eCommerce SEO needs, and you can use it to put the tips and strategies in this guide into action.

For success, you must use an e-commerce platform that is already optimized for SEO. Most of the hard work has been done for you already. Check out our guide to the best eCommerce platforms to see if your solution made the list; go to website