Ecommerce SEO: Step-by-Step Guide That Generates More Sales [2024]
Nirav Upadhyay
30th Dec, 2021
Let’s admit that the eCommerce sector is revolutionizing our shopping experiences. Online storefronts have become one of the trendiest revenue-generating business models for investors and entrepreneurs.
Who doesn’t wish to establish another Amazon or eBay, after all!
The already popular eCommerce stores gained an impetus by the pandemic. Statistics reveal that online shopping got boosted by a whopping 27.6% during 2020.
What else? The eCommerce stores will generate around 22% of global retail sales by 2024. Impressive, right?
So, do you have an eCommerce store? Are you not generating expected sales?
Yes?
It’s time to pull up your socks and optimize your venture to attract the highest sales. But how to do so? Through eCommerce SEO techniques, simple!
Don’t worry if it sounds horrifying to you!
Auxano Global Services is here to address all your store optimization concerns and provide a list of all SEO tactics in this Ultimate E-Commerce SEO guide.
But before we dive into the nitty-gritty of eCommerce SEO, we need to walk through some more statistics. Getting inspired is the key to excelling at SEO, after all.
- eCommerce stores are here to change the paradigm. About 95% of all purchases will happen online by 2040.
- Google’s organic traffic supplies around 43% of store visitors.
- As high as 68% of online shopping starts with genuine searches on the engines.
You can access all these features for an eCommerce store through SEO. Yes, that’s true!
Are you wondering about how to leverage the various SEO tactics in your storefront? Here’s your go-to resource to get an answer. Stay tuned!
What Exactly is eCommerce SEO?
Wouldn’t it be nice to discuss the meaning of eCommerce SEO before diving into the techniques? Cheers if it’s a yes!
Let’s not waste any minute and jump into understanding what we mean by eCommerce SEO.
So, what on earth is eCommerce SEO? Most of the stores are unoptimized. They neither appear before the target audience nor encourage them to convert. What’s the impact? Lower sales and profitability for the stakeholders.
However, you can check some store parameters and modify them to harness high-quality leads having the highest intention of moving down through your sales funnel.
All you need is to leverage some optimization techniques in your storefront to shape its bright future. That’s what eCommerce SEO is!
The eCommerce SEO techniques can eliminate the shortcomings in your store and inaugurate better than expected sales in a short span. Leading giants (including Amazon) leverage SEO strategies to maximize their online opportunities.
What are the Benefits of SEO for eCommerce Stores?
Although we could discuss the SEO strategies directly, spending some time penning down its benefits is an excellent idea. Isn’t it?
So, here are the advantages that eCommerce SEO unlocks for your online business. Watch out!
1. Higher Search Engine Ranks
Do you know that the top 3 search engine results drive the most number of clicks? Shocking, right?
So, getting a healthy rank on the search engines can fine-tune your eCommerce game dramatically. And that’s what we aim for through eCommerce SEO!
eCommerce SEO lets your store appear among the top Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Above all, it lets your venture join the high-ranking results on the first page!
2. More Organic Traffic
Suppose, your eCommerce store appears on the 8th SERP with a particular searching keyword. Unfortunately, your sales are lower than feeble in such a scenario.
Now, you leveraged eCommerce SEO techniques. Your eCommerce website made it to the 3rd SERP. You’ll begin observing massive traffic visiting your store and converting rapidly.
Adding to your delight, these are organic traffic hovering on search engines like Google.
As SEO begins showing its colors, your eCommerce store appears in the first SERP. Now, things will dramatically change for your venture! The higher search engine ranks will drive massive traffic towards your online venture.
3. Rapid and Higher Conversions
Do you know? One of the most unwanted drawbacks of paid marketing channels is that they attract store visitors and not potential customers.
However, you can trust eCommerce SEO techniques to drive organic traffic having an eagerness to rapidly convert like never before. These visitors are your leads.
Through eCommerce SEO, you will generate more and better conversions in the blink of an eye. That’s what you ultimately need, don’t you?
4. Retain Customers
Attracting new leads is a cakewalk. But what about retaining the existing ones? No one thinks about it. However, it’s one of the essential factors in determining a store’s success.
Since eCommerce SEO brings customers with the highest intentions to convert, they are more likely to stay loyal to your business for the most prolonged period.
Such a customer base will keep bringing massive sales to your doorstep, over and over again.
5. Enhanced Customer Experience
A better customer experience is everything to divert traffic from competitor websites towards your store. So, you can target the CX to boost your sales and gain a competitive advantage.
Luckily, eCommerce SEO associates a better customer experience for your online store. It imparts higher navigability to your website and makes it more accessible to the customers for the highest CX.
Besides, more benefits make eCommerce irresistible for site owners. Now that you are convinced of the SEO advantage for your store, let’s dive deeper.
Why Should You Invest in eCommerce SEO?
The advantages of eCommerce SEO are okay. But they don’t encourage you to invest in an SEO strategy. Is it so?
Don’t worry anymore! Here are some compelling reasons to help you understand that SEO is the best investment for your business.
1. Higher Brand Visibility
Brand visibility is everything when it comes to eCommerce success.
Luckily, you can get the highest brand visibility through SEO strategies. As you already know, SEO brings your online store to the top Search Engine Results Pages, you can fetch dramatically better ranks.
What’s the impact? Your dream of higher brand visibility gets fulfilled, making eCommerce SEO the best investment of your life.
2. Long-Term Impacts
Consistent and proper SEO efforts won’t disappoint you, even in the longest run.
Once you appear at the top of SERPs, your store gets better and better. Although you will require some optimizations even after that, it would be nominal and cost you almost nothing.
Isn’t it the best investment so far?
3. You Cannot Overlook the Affordability
Affordability is one of the key factors that edge eCommerce SEO over advertising channels.
Believe it or not, the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements are costly and cause a massive hole in your pockets. Even after so much investment, these marketing media attract visitors and not leads.
However, eCommerce SEO is better than any of these channels. They bring high-quality leads to your business without costing much. You can even leverage the tactics by yourself and harness the SEO benefits for FREE!
4. High Customizability
We understand that your online business is one-of-a-kind. So, an off-the-shelf marketing strategy won’t suit your venture.
Luckily, eCommerce SEO is the most customizable channel you will ever encounter. You can tailor the strategies according to your business and optimize the store for the best outcomes in a short span.
Indeed, eCommerce SEO can be the best investment as it is customized to fine-tune your business specifically.
5. Massive Social Media Presence
Have you ever found a business and gone to find its official social media handles? You must have. We all have done so once in our lifetime.
Why do we check the businesses on social media? It’s because we like to investigate their social presence, followers, and engagements before investing in them.
So, social media presence is a vital aspect for eCommerce stores.
You need to maintain a compelling social media presence to divert traffic from those platforms and search engines. How to do so? Through eCommerce SEO!
The SEO strategies optimize your business in all dimensions, including social media presence. The techniques offer a polished facade to your business, compelling the website visitors to find you on social media, follow your accounts, and engage with different posts.
6. Let Your Customers Find You
What’s the point in building an eCommerce store if customers cannot find you? You need to reach out to the customers at the right place and at the best moment. Only then, the leads will convert.
As eCommerce SEO improves your store rank on search engines, you remain visible to the customers when they search for something relevant to your offerings. All these factors, compel the search engine users to visit your store, engage with your offerings, and move down through your sales funnel.
7. Better Site Credibility, Higher Sales
We prefer shopping with a trustworthy business, don’t we? Much like us, most of your customers prefer engaging with your venture only if they find it sufficiently credible.
How to make your site look credible? How can you win-over audience trust towards your offerings? It’s through eCommerce SEO, simple!
The eCommerce SEO strategies fine-tune all crinkled aspects of your website. It polishes many factors like navigability that affect customer impression with your business.
Consequently, you can achieve better eCommerce credibility in the blink of an eye. Such reliability compels the users to engage with your business and convert more rapidly than your expectations.
8. A Remarkable Competitive Advantage
Even though eCommerce SEO is so essential, many businesses are miles away from investing in groundbreaking strategies.
So, you can turn all traffic towards your business if you leverage the eCommerce SEO techniques now! Yes, you’ve heard it correctly.
The sooner, the better.
As you leverage the SEO techniques in your website, fetching massive traffic, immense conversions, and higher profitability becomes a cakewalk. Consequently, you become a leader in the entire eCommerce landscape.
Indeed, a dream come true moment for you, isn’t it?
How to SEO Your eCommerce Store?
With the fundamental SEO knowledge discussed above, you are leveled up to understand the implementation part.
Let’s look at the famous eCommerce SEO strategies and get a glimpse of how to leverage them in your website. Keep reading!
1. Keyword Research is a Must (Seriously!)
First things first! You need to invest time hunting the best keywords for your online store. Although it’s highly boring, you cannot escape this step whatsoever.
If you miss out on finding the most appropriate keywords for your business, things might go wrong. You will jump onto phrases that already have immense competition.
Another real-life scenario can be that you will land at keywords that are low-target and do not fetch enough buyers for your business.
In any case, the situation isn’t ideal for your venture. So, keyword research is an unavoidable technique in your SEO strategy.
Here’s how to search for high-target keywords in your domain.
1. Conduct Research on Amazon
The Amazon search bar is your paradise for high-target keywords.
As you type something on the search bar, you will find numerous suggestions for completing your sentence. They resemble the high-target keywords for your business.
2. Competitor Research is a Point
You must have some stores that you admire and consider benchmarks in your domain. They are the ultimate competitors for your business.
So, what could be better than identifying the keywords your competitors use for ranking on search engines? Sounds like a plan, right?
Well, you can do so by using some best SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SpyFu and preparing a list of all high-ranking keywords in your domain.
3. Ahrefs – The Ultimate Keywords Tool
Ahrefs is an all-rounder. From keyword research to backlink building, it allows you to do everything from an SEO perspective.
All you need is to sign up with their platform, feed some domain-related terms, and bam! You will find a detailed list of all high-performing keywords in your domain with additional information like volume, rank, and ranking difficulty.
By the end, you will have a list of all the best keywords you will ever find for your eCommerce store. Keep the list handy as you will require referring to it frequently in all the steps mentioned below.
Moving on, let’s get a glimpse of all other must-know SEO techniques.
2. Tweak the eCommerce Site Architecture
Believe it or not, the eCommerce site architecture can dramatically affect your sales.
Now, you might be wondering how an efficient site architecture appears? Well, it encompasses the best navigability, easily accessible product pages, and highly simplified categorization.
Woah! That’s a lot to remember, isn’t it?
Why not follow the below golden rules when designing the eCommerce site architecture?
- All pages should not be more than three clicks away from each other.
- The architecture should be as simple and obvious as possible.
- Leverage high-target keywords to craft optimum URLs for all your pages.
All these factors will allow the search engine crawlers to go through your website rapidly. Consequently, you can expect the best rank for your store on high-target keywords.
You can put the above rules in action in the following ways:
- Give priority to the product pages having the store bestsellers. You would water the most fruitful plants more than the unfruitful ones, won’t you?
- Your homepage will create the highest impression on store visitors. Ensure that all product pages are directly accessible from the homepage.
- Impart the best navigation and embed internal links to the highest-authority pages on your website.
Bonus Tip: You can add related product suggestions on each page for enhanced cross-selling opportunities on your eCommerce store.
3. On-Page SEO: The Keywords in Action!
You must have guessed the meaning of on-page SEO by the headline.
For those who didn’t, don’t worry; we’ll discuss on-page SEO in detail right below.
So, what is on-page SEO? It is the method of leveraging the high-target keywords in the right places and getting the pages indexed on search engines.
On-page SEO has different types. What are they? You can have different on-page strategies for blog content, products, and category pages.
Let’s discuss this in detail.
On-Page SEO Techniques for Products:
Product pages are essential and direct your leads towards all the offerings listed on your website. Do you agree?
So, begin with optimizing the product pages, before doing anything.
All you need is to refer to the list of keywords made above and embed them in the following places on your product pages.
1. Page URL
You wouldn’t believe that search engines index page URLs. Yes, that’s true!
So, you need to leverage the keywords in the URL of product pages in the best way. However, that doesn’t mean stuffing the permalinks with keywords.
2. Product Page Title
The H1 tag of your product pages is the best place to leverage at least one high-target keyword naturally.
The product titles help the search engines understand the intention of your website and rank it thereafter. So, you need to wordsmith the title for maximum efficiency.
3. Product Description/Copy
The product description or copy has the highest number of words than anywhere else on the product pages. So, you have the best chance to throw some keywords in the content and rank higher on search engines.
Figure out some high-target phrases and leverage them in the description for the best crawling aftermath.
4. Image Text
Let the search engines understand the intent of product images by optimizing their descriptions. Additionally, you can implement some high-target keywords to get the best impact.
5. Meta Tag
The meta title and description have the highest impact in boosting your website’s overall rank. So, optimize these entities by leveraging the best keywords at the earliest.
You can follow similar techniques like optimizations for meta tags, page titles, image heading, body content, and H1 tag for blog content and category pages too.
4. Conduct Technical Site Audits
Technical site audits are necessary evils.
It can dramatically boost your website performance but requires diving deeper into the technical side of your eCommerce store.
What can technical audits surface for your website? Or, more precisely, what can you improve through technical audits? Here is your answer!
- You can check site speed and improve it to offer a better experience to the users.
- Technical audits can rank your website on the mobile-friendliness parameter. Furthermore, you can improve it for better performance on mobile devices.
- Do you have broken links on your website? Through technical audits, you can identify and remove them for better search engine indexing.
5. Local SEO: The Game-Changer!
Do you know? A majority of product searches have terms like ‘near me,’ ‘in the USA,’ etc.
Why should you care? It’s because customers are more likely to purchase from a local business.
So, you have a golden chance of investing in local SEO and wooing all regional customers for your business. Sounds like a monopoly, isn’t it?
All you need is to find some local keywords and embed them in all places on your website. From product pages to blog articles, you can leverage the key phrases for maximum store visibility on SERPs.
Besides, you can set up a Google My Business profile for your venture and attract massive traffic towards the website. It becomes essential if you have a brick-and-mortar type business.
How Can Auxano Global Services Help You?
The eCommerce SEO strategies discussed above aren’t as simple as they sound. They require immense investments of time, consistency, and dedication for things to work out as expected.
Besides, you require expertise to direct the campaign towards success. Sounds difficult? Don’t worry! Team AGS is here to help you.
We have the following attributes, making us the best eCommerce SEO agency out there. Watch out!
- Our team comprises SEO experts who have an in-depth understanding of search engine algorithms and optimization techniques.
- We have years of experience working with several eCommerce businesses belonging to diverse industries.
- Our team stays up-to-date with the recent transitions in the eCommerce SEO paradigm. So, our tailor-made strategies remain aligned with the latest trends.
Indeed, eCommerce SEO can help you lead the industry, gain maximum visibility on search engines, attract massive organic traffic, churn a higher revenue, and whatnot. But you might feel overwhelmed by the techniques when it comes to implementing them. However, with Auxano Global Services, the ride becomes simple, efficient, and fruitful.
So, what makes you wait? Connect with our experts now.
People also like to read:-
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Ecommerce SEO?
What are the benefits of eCommerce SEO?
What are the types of eCommerce SEO?
Why should I invest in eCommerce SEO?
Which is the best eCommerce SEO company?
About The Author
Nirav Upadhyay
Nirav Upadhyay is a Digital marketing Head at Auxano Global Services, a renowned Digital Marketing Company. He started his career as an SEO Analyst in 2006 and has been in the field ever since. He excels at Search Engine Optimization, SMM, SEM and Product Marketing. Alongside his work as a Digital Marketing Head, Nirav also contributes to publications such as Entrepreneur, Bloomberg Businessweek, CIO, Huffington Post, The Drum and TNW.