SEO for eCommerce: A Definitive Yet Simple Guide For 2022

Semil Shah
February 3, 2021

Link buildings, keyword research, and optimizing the web pages are a few things that most businesses consider while doing SEO. But, what if that SEO is for an eCommerce website? The things need to be on-point as we have to reach out to the brand’s target audience. Brand awareness and marketing are two inclusive things. SEO for eCommerce is not an expense but a long-term investment. As Camilo Olea rightly says, “Building an eCommerce platform is the first step. This is your business and you need to invest to make it grow.” It’s a million-dollar statement for running a business. You require an optimized website, target audience, and an excellent budget to pay for necessary tools. It creates the importance of SEO in eCommerce that lets you drive more traffic to your website. Even an eMarketer report also states that eCommerce sales will be $27 trillion in 2020. Still, a few online marketers are unaware of the eCommerce SEO concept or do not want to use it to fear unnecessary expenses. After reading this comprehensive guide, you will come to know as a B2B or B2C online seller what you were precisely lacking. Indeed, eCommerce SEO is one of the best parts to boost your business growth. Get answers to your how, why, what, etc., through this simple 2021 guide.

How to Get Started SEO for eCommerce?

As we all know, Amazon is one of the best online eCommerce marketplaces to buy and sell products of various types. According to the Fortune, the online retailer Amazon would witness the market share growth to 50% by the year 2021. It showcases how the online eCommerce giant is gaining strength in the market. This is because their market strategies revolve around the customers. The product pages are fully optimized to show results with minimum keywords too. Therefore, as an eCommerce seller, you need to include SEO as your dominant factor to reach out to your target and potential audience. Are you ready to learn how SEO can uplift your eCommerce business? If yes, then read out this exciting yet straightforward eCommerce guide to acknowledge A-Z online business learning.

Keywords: What My Customer Is Thinking?

This is the foremost thing where everything starts. People find products based on keywords depending on their intent. It can be ‘sports shoes’ or ‘puma black sports shoes.’ If the customer is loyal to one brand, they will prefer buying from a particular company. The customer for whom style, comfort, or color variation is significant can search with other brands. As Simon Ensor says, “Firstly focus on the searcher intent. This must underpin all your activities like research, creation, and distribution. What is the searcher trying to find, and how is your content helping them to reach this goal?” Here, SEO specialists play an important role, like SEO for eCommerce websites must follow tailor-made SEO strategies. If you want to find relevant keywords for your eCommerce website, then Ubersuggest and Google AdWords Keyword Planner are two important tools. Even a few SEO experts state that long-tail keywords will become essential in 2021, as voice search is peak. This way, people can ask a full-fledged question to get answers to their queries. Optimize your product and category pages to make it easier for the audience to find the relevant products. SEO experts need to use product-focused keywords instead of informational keywords. You can head to various popular eCommerce platforms to search for keywords like Amazon. It will help you to not only find the product keywords but category keywords too. Pro Tip: Do use long-tail keywords for your product and category list to improve its search results. But, never stuff your blog posts or product descriptions with unnecessary keywords. Instead, focus on developing unique and customer-oriented content.

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Site Architecture: Make Product Search Easy For Your Customers

Optimizing your website pages, category, and product pages becomes necessary to help your customers find the products within less time. Of course, no customer will put effort into staying on your page if they cannot find the right product. Time is ticking, peeps! Therefore, for better SEO purposes, your site architecture must look something like the below image. It will make your web page both Search Engine and user-friendly. The best eCommerce SEO depends on the right organization of your eCommerce website. The simplified structure will help with the following:

Reduction in the bounce rates that is a result of frustrating navigation on the website
Crawling for Search Engine becomes easier that results in ranking the seller’s website
A well-knit site architecture will help you to make your site scalable

Apart from this, optimize your site URL too. It is necessary to make the URL SEO-friendly by inserting a keyword also. The site URL must go with your brand’s name, so your consumers find it easily on the internet. Pro Tip: Avoid using lengthy URLs, as they are hard for Google crawlers to read. Your URL must be optimized, providing clear information about your brand, category, and product. Like, www.thebeerdealer.com/beer/wheet-beer Well, the SEO specialists, while optimizing the URLs, must take note not to add any product ID numbers in the URL that may become difficult for users to find your product. Keep it simple like the above example URL.

On-Page SEO: Get Lion’s Share of Organic Traffic

On-Page SEO for an eCommerce website means that it’s the time to get your product and category pages optimized. If done right, you can attract maximum internet traffic to your website. Ultimately, for on-page SEO, you need to create content that is on-point with your brand. Experts recommend using high authority websites for link building. The significant part is to optimize your website code, Meta tags, site structure, and other on-page elements. Let us now see what all On-Page SEO involves:

Optimize the Title Tag: If you are looking forward to ways to improve SEO eCommerce websites, then you must include the target keywords into the Title tag. Do add modifiers to make your product appear in the top searches. You can even add words like ‘this much % off’, ‘free shipping’, ‘25% off’, ‘guarantee’, etc. Like, “Buy Nike black sports shoes at 25% off”. It will attract more traffic.

Optimize the Description Tag: Below Title Tag, Meta description appears in the SERPs. To optimize the descriptions, you must write it up to 150 characters, personalized description, crisp and precise, and give special attention to perks for the buyers.

Product and Category Page Optimization: For optimizing these pages, produce 1000+ words detailed description to rank on Google. Do spread the targeted keywords three to five times in the content to make Google understand what your page is all about. Moreover, use LSI keywords in your content to connect the sentences, which will be near your targeted keywords.

Optimize Your Product Images: Page speed is everything while ranking your eCommerce website or web page. If your page loading time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, you can see a bounce rate jump to be 106%.

To avoid this mess, optimize the product images into WebP or PNG formats. The SEO expert must make the filename more descriptive to let the search bots understand the image. Do not add numbers to your product image. Instead, add the product name with a relevant keyword. Moreover, do not stuff the keywords. Optimize Your Content: You need to produce high-quality and customer-oriented content for the category and the product page. The content writer must use long-tail keywords as the conversion rate is 4% to 5% higher than the short-tail keywords. Compile the effective keywords by studying your competitor’s too.

Link Building: Get Set Go to Improve Your Search Engine Visibility

“Typically, internal website links will not cause you any kind of trouble.”- Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam, Google.

Until you are into copying each and everything from a competitor’s website, Google is fine with your Link Building style. No penalization, no headaches! However, Link Building is a broader aspect. Many experts have spoken about how these ‘Backlinks’ provide a boost to your website during Search Engine findings.

Like, this YouTube video showcases the importance of Link Building for SEO and getting real results.

You will come to know how strategically placing the internal links from ‘authoritative pages’ to the ‘high-priority category and product pages’ can help your eCommerce business to grow. Even linking these Backlinks on the ‘keyword-rich anchor text link’ will quickly improve your eCommerce website’s Search Engine visibility. With Page Rank Algorithm, Google also checks how many posts are linked with a particular content. Therefore, the Link Building game is said to be the most powerful. So, the sellers must use the product pages as the Linkbait. It means, if you cannot revamp your category page due to its design and site architecture, then form an internal link to the specific product page. This will help customers to view and find the product easily. Hyperlinking the right URL does a great deal. Pro Tip: Do work on your sales or deals page as it works as a major attraction for your customers. Adding words like Black Friday sale or some Holiday season discount will help manifold. It shows that SEO is not only important for any eCommerce website but beneficial. Along with Link Building strategies, it also improves search engine visibility, cost-effectiveness, and digital promotion.

Content Marketing: Put Creativity to the Best Job

Content occupies 100% of your website’s place apart from ads, images, and videos. Well, they also constitute the content only.

But, almost 60% of sellers find it difficult to produce engaging content. Even a few eCommerce sellers do not know about the SEO-based platforms that can serve them better. Therefore, it’s mandatory to acknowledge the best eCommerce platform for SEO and the right content marketing strategies to put your creative foot forward.

Like, the following eCommerce companies utilized content marketing as the source to boost their ROI by targeting their immediate audience. These brands are Angie’s List, Venngage, Bespoke Post, Boll & Branch, etc.

If you closely study these brands or the overall content marketing strategy, you will realize that they gave equal importance to SEO. Moreover, their content marketing also included:

Creating informative and helpful posts
DIY content
Link building to high-authority sites
Using well researched product-based keywords
Crisp and clear content without stuffing unnecessary keywords
Great use of videos and high-quality images
Put an exact link to the category and product page
Producing SEO-optimized content
Using conversational tone

On top of all this, all these brands did branding along with content marketing too. They produced well-researched content that appeals to the very eye of the audiences. So, if you are looking forward to reaching out to your target or potential audience, then encourage creativity and flow in your content along with branding.

Pro Tip: Do not produce duplicate content; do check out the grammar, efficacy, and yes do not stuff it with keywords feeling it will improve the website’s ranking. Rather, make it crisp and customer-oriented.

eCommerce SEO: Do not Lose Your Patience!

We all know Rome was not built in a day! So, your eCommerce website will not show results and increase conversions instantly. Everything requires consistency and a strategic approach.

If you are keen to carry out SEO for eCommerce website, you must follow a systematic approach and keep a close eye on market behavior. You can even avail of experienced SEO services from a reputed company like Shrushti. We provide a full SEO package at competent pricing.

Moreover, cater to your consumer’s demands and start building relationships before calling on your customers to buy the products. So, follow this above comprehensive guide, and create a well-knit market approach to achieve long-term success.

About the Author

Semil Shah

My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.