Ecommerce SEO Guide: Flood Your Ecommerce Sales

SEO (search engine optimization) is a word that has prevailed deeply into Ecommerce entrepreneurs. Since the SEO strategies, you apply to your Ecommerce business can be a deciding factor in your business’ success.

Why? Because SEO allows your business to generate organic traffic without spending a fortune on promotional marketing. It is a long-term strategy that can generate a sustainable amount of traffic to your website in the long run.

In this guide, we will walk you through everything you need to know about SEO if you are running your Ecommerce business, from  Ecommerce SEO keyword research to Ecommerce website architecture, On-page SEO to technical SEO for Ecommerce sites, and content marketing to off-page optimization SEO for Ecommerce sites.

Ecommerce SEO keyword Research

Proper keyword research and selection is the soul of search engine optimization for Ecommerce websites. If you optimize your Ecommerce website pages using the wrong keyword, you may not derive your desired amount of organic traffic, which will also result in low sales volume.

Find Product and Category Pages  Keyword For Ecommerce

It would be best to optimize your category and product pages using your targeted keywords to increase organic traffic. Use your targeted keyword in meta title, slug, and H1 tags for proper optimization. In addition, it will help search engine algorithms crawl your pages and show them against relevant search queries.

Choose Keyword For Product and Category

When choosing keywords for your product or category pages, you must consider the keywords search volume, intention, and competition.

Search Volume –  The search volume of keywords shows you how many people are searching for that exact same keyword. However, high search volume might also mean high competition. Therefore, be considerate while selecting your targeted keywords.

Product-fit Keyword –  These are the phrases related to your specific product/service offerings. Marketers also include these keywords in their strategy to make it easier for their targeted audience to find their products through a search engine.

Intention –  Keyword intent refers to the searcher’s intention for the search query. While selecting the keyword, ensure to identify the search intent against each keyword to publish relevant keyword-optimized content pieces.

Competition –  Most keywords with high search volume are difficult to compete against already high ranking results. When choosing a keyword with a higher difficulty level, the domain authority plays an integral role. If your domain authority is good, you may be able to rank higher, targeting a difficult keyword.

Tools For Ecommerce Keyword Research

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• MonsterInsights
• Google Keyword Planner
• Rank Tracker
• KWFinder
• Growth Bar
• Long Tail Pro
• Keyword Tool
• Majestic

Keyword Targeting And Page Optimization

Keyword targeting and page optimization start by conducting thorough keyword research and enlisting the ones relevant to your business, product, and categories into different groups. Moving forward, select a keyword from the shortlisted keywords and turn them into real headlines and titles to get ranked in the SERPs.

Ecommerce Website Architecture

Proper website architecture is essential for any Ecommerce business. Whether you go with a two-tier or three-tier architecture, it will help in your overall profitability. A two-tier architecture incorporates a client computer with a database server, while a three-tier architecture has a client, server, and database. In simple words, website architecture is how a website’s pages are structured and linked together.

If your Ecommerce website has a well-structured architecture. It will provide your business with the following benefits:

• It will enhance your website user experience.
• It will help reduce your website’s bounce rate and increase your retention rate.
• It will help you retain your website visitors and convert them into sales.
• It will also increase your chances of ranking higher in the Google SERPs and help index your pages more relevantly.

Two Main Rules of Ecommerce Website Architecture

Rule # 1 - If your website architecture is too complicated, you will lose your visitors faster. Therefore, make sure to keep every website product or category page not more than three clicks from your homepage.

Rule # 2 – Moreover, implement an Ecommerce website architecture that is simple to gauge by your non-technical visitors and easily scalable. For example, if you want to add more categories or product pages in the future, you can easily create new pages without disturbing your website’s architecture.

Example – How To Setup an SEO and User-Friendly Architecture For Ecommerce Website

To set up a user-friendly and search engine optimized Ecommerce website architecture, follow the steps enlisted below:

• Use a ‘Flat’ architecture that enables your website users and search engine crawler bots to reach any page in 3 or fewer clicks.
• Focus on creating a simple and easy to understand architecture by incorporating category pages. For example, your Ecommerce website selling cosmetics should categorize its products into face, eyes, lips, etc. This categorization will make sense and allow users to navigate their desired pages easily.
• Make use of structured URLs that logically follow your category pages. For example, https://dummy.com/category/sub-category
• It is better to use HTML navigation links rather than relying on search engine bots to crawl your JavaScript.
• Focus on incorporating well-thought-of internal linking with keyword-rich anchors to give the search engine an idea about your website's depth and architecture.
• Most visitors lose interest in your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load; therefore, they also optimize your web pages for quick load time.

Example – How Not To Setup Your Ecommerce Website Architecture

You should be wary of some ‘don’t’ in website architecture. Some of the key don’ts are listed below:

• Don’t use a deep Ecommerce website architecture as it can make navigation difficult for visitors to reach their desired page. In addition, if the user interface is not easy to navigate, visitors will leave your site and buy from your competitor.
• If your website has thousands of pages, don’t rely on one-click website architecture. Instead, add categories for a more refined and simplified user experience.

On-Page SEO for Ecommerce Website

On-page, SEO can help you generate more organic traffic, enhance their user experience and retain them long enough to convert into sales. However, if the website’s on-page is not search engine optimized, your website will not rank in the SERP, and you will not get any visitors from there.

Therefore, in this section, we will guide you on optimizing your pages perfectly to rank higher and engage visitors.

How to Optimize Ecommerce Page Perfectly

Following are the key elements that you should work on if you want to optimize on-page SEO for Ecommerce website:

Title Tag

Add modifiers like buy, cheap deals in your title tag to grab searchers’ attention.

You can also use click magnet words like affordable price and X% off to increase the page CTR (click-through rate).

Description Tag

You can also increase your CTR by optimizing your meta description by incorporating phrases like ‘Great Choice’, ‘Free Shipping, and ‘Items on Sale.’

Product and Category Page

To optimize your product and category page, write valuable content over 1000 words in length. Moreover, include your targeted keyword three to five times to signal search intent bots about your webpage’s intent and align it against relevant search queries.

Technical SEO for Ecommerce Store

Writing SEO-optimized content is important, but what if your website’s technical SEO fails? For example, you have written and published a great piece of content, and your subscribers and followers were eagerly waiting to read it, but the link failed; it took 10 seconds to load the page. This lag in loading will frustrate your visitors, and they will leave your website.

When your page load time is 10 seconds, your bounce rate jumps to 123%; hence you are not getting any organic traffic because of your website’s technical issues. Technical SEO includes issues such as broken links, page load speed, website structure, etc.

All the key elements of technical SEO for Ecommerce stores that should be monitored are enlisted below:

• Page load time
• Mobile optimization
• Link health
• Broken Images
• 404 pages
• Duplicate content
• URL structure
• Crawl errors
• Site security
• Schema

Run Technical SEO Audit on Ecommerce Website

To assess your website performance on a search engine, you need to evaluate each technical SEO element you run a technical SEO audit. Therefore, before taking any action, it is advisable to run technical SEO on your Ecommerce website. It will allow you to find and fix exit points, outperform your competitors, and identify opportunities within your website to optimize effectively for search engines.

While performing an SEO audit, ensure to look out for four key performance metrics enlisted below:

• Check link quality references and identify redirection errors.
• Analyze and monitor your website SEO’s backend factors, including indexing and hosting.
• Identify your website’s frontend SEO issues related to metadata, content, and keywords.
• Check if your website is mobile optimized and user-friendly.

These four pointers will allow you to conduct a thorough audit of your website and help you identify and fix issues limiting your website’s SEO performance.

Fix Technical SEO Errors On Ecommerce Websites

Now that you understand how to run a technical SEO audit, we will guide you about common technical SEO issues and fix them for a better-performing website.

1. No HTTP Security –  Security has become an important factor in ranking your website on Google. If your website is not secure, you will see a grey background with a clearly stated ‘not secure’ warning while browsing your website through Google Chrome. It can instantly turn off your website visitors and may leave immediately.

How To Fix?

Step#1 - Acquire an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority for your website.

Step#2 - Install the certificate to make your website secure.

2. Incorrect Site Index –  To check if your website is properly indexed or not, search your website using a query with ‘site:brand name’; for example, site:ranktopseo.com. If your website pages do not appear in the SERP, it means the indexing is incorrect. Google only considers and ranks indexed websites; otherwise, your website does not exist.

How To Fix?

Fix#1 - If your website is not indexed, you can add your website URL to Google.

Fix#2 - If they showed you results that were much more than what you have on your website, then check old versions of your website that are indexed and use proper redirection indexing.

Fix#3 - If the search results are much less than expected, check the indexed pages and cross-check with your website pages. If it still doesn’t give you clarity, check Google Webmaster Guidelines to check if your unindexed pages are compliant or not.

Fix#4 – If the results were different than what you expected, then you should also check that you haven’t added the ‘non-index’ meta tag mistakenly.

Fix#5 – Something robots.txt file also block your webpages. So, if none of the fixes help you out, check this file for clarity.

3. No XML Sitemap –  XML Sitemap is an important element of technical SEO for Ecommerce store as it allows Google bots to understand your website structure and crawl webpages intelligently. To check whether your website has a sitemap or not, add /sitemap.xml after your website URL in the browser’s URL bar—for example, . If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, you will be on a 404 page.

How To Fix?

Fix#1 -  Create your website sitemap using the XML sitemap generating tool or hire a developer to do it for you.

Fix#2  – If your website is on WordPress, you automatically generate the sitemap using the Yoast SEO plugin.

4. Slow Page Load Speed – It is another important metric used by Google to rank websites. When your website does not load within 3 seconds, visitors can go to your competitors’ websites. If your website takes more load time, use Google Speed Insights to identify issues with your website.

How To Fix?

Reasons behind the lagging page vary in complexity. Therefore, if you find it difficult to optimize yourself, ask your developer to find the optimum solution.

Possible Solutions – To optimize your page speed, you can compress your website images, improve server response time, enhance browser caching and minify JavaScript.

Content Marketing for Ecommerce

Content is important for every business with a digital presence, but for Ecommerce websites, its significance increases ten folds. Because effective content marketing allows online retailers to build a sustainable relationship with their prospects and cover every step of their journey. It also assists Ecommerce websites in retaining customers and increasing their lifetime value.

Find Your Targeted Audience Hang Out Online

You can leverage content marketing, but first, you need to find where your targeted audience spends their time. Therefore, start by creating buyer personas, finding out which social media platforms are active, identifying competitors, and surveying your customers.

For example, if your Ecommerce website sells cosmetics, your buyer persona will mainly be females aged between 18 to 40 years, active on Instagram and YouTube, and following beauty bloggers. This information will give you a clear insight into where you should direct your content marketing efforts.

Learn And Choose Phrases What Audience Use

Effective keywords research and selection are key elements of content marketing. Whether you are writing a product description or a product review, your web page to be discoverable via search engines. You need to include and target keywords based on their search volume and competition difficulty. Therefore, start by making a list of keywords that align with your business goals.

Create Outstanding Content Around That Phrases

Now that you have a list of keywords, you start creating titles around these keywords and create content that provides value to the searcher. One quick and effective to find a topic against your targeted keyword is to search that keyword on Google. The results will give an idea about the user’s intent and what content piece you should create.

Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

Off-page SEO for Ecommerce involves marketers' efforts for link building. It is the tricky part of SEO strategy. It may seem challenging, but it is also rewarding. First, it helps you increase your domain authority; a higher domain authority allows you to rank higher in SERP and increases your chances of ranking higher against difficult keywords with high search volume.

Free Giveaways

People love freebies and discounts. Therefore, free giveaways are a good method for link-building and collecting data that can help you strategize your marketing campaigns.

Influencers Outreach

Another link-building method is to identify and reach out to your industry and niche-specific influencers and collaborate with them to attract more qualifying leads. Moreover, it also helps increase your website’s EAT.

Event Sponsor

It is a method in which you leverage national and international events to get links back to your website. You can do so by hosting an event yourself or becoming a sponsor.

Cold Outreach

In this method, you send out emails for link building. You start by introducing yourself, tell them about your best blog and where it fits, and ask them nicely for the link back to your website.

Broken Links

In this method, you find broken links on websites and reach out to the webmaster to receive a backlink against the identified broken link.

Conclusion

In this guide, we touched on vast subjects related to Ecommerce SEO to help you flood your sales. First, we discussed Ecommerce SEO keyword research, Ecommerce website architecture and enlisted tips to improve your on-page SEO for Ecommerce website. Next, we discussed the technical SEO elements and common issues and shared tips to solve these issues. In addition, we also guided you regarding the importance of content marketing and the different link-building methods you can use to increase your domain authority and EAT.