Ecommerce SEO: What Is It and How Does It Boost Your Online Store?

Ecommerce SEO is the strategy of optimizing your online store to rank higher on search engines like Google. By improving your site’s visibility, you attract more visitors searching for your products, leading to increased traffic and higher sales potential.

Ecommerce SEO involves several key techniques, such as link building, keyword optimization, and on-page improvements. These strategies work together to increase your website’s visibility and drive more organic traffic.

While larger companies may hire dedicated SEO teams or outsource their efforts, smaller businesses often adopt a cost-effective, DIY approach. Whether you’re familiar with SEO or not, understanding its importance is essential for boosting ecommerce success.

Why Is SEO Crucial for Ecommerce Success?

SEO plays a vital role in ecommerce. When customers search for products on Google, they see the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If your site isn’t properly optimized, it will rank lower, making it harder for customers to find your store. Without visibility, potential sales are lost.

Consider ecommerce SEO like the layout of a grocery store. The most popular items are placed at eye level, making them easy to grab. With SEO, your products can be placed front and center in search results, ensuring they catch the eye of potential customers.

Essential SEO Strategies for Boosting Your Ecommerce Website

Navigating SEO for ecommerce websites can be challenging, especially if you're not well-versed in the necessary tools and strategies for optimizing your site for search engines. To help you succeed, here are the essential focus areas to enhance your ecommerce SEO.

Website Page Structure

If your website is hard to navigate, it's not just your customers who will struggle—search engines will also find it difficult to index your site. A well-structured website is crucial for optimizing your ecommerce store. Below are some essential SEO tips to help you structure your site effectively and improve its visibility in search engine results.

Implement a Silo Structure for Better Website Organization

Once you've chosen your website theme, the next step is to organize your pages effectively. A well-structured layout typically includes a home page, main categories, and individual product pages, commonly referred to as a 'silo structure.'

Organizing related content improves the user experience and makes it easier for search engines to index your site. For instance, if you run a bakery, your site layout could feature a central home page along with three key category sections: breads, desserts, and muffins.

Each category will then feature specific product pages. For cakes, you could have dedicated pages for sheet cakes, cheesecakes, and decorated cakes. Additionally, it's important to include essential pages like a contact page and an 'About' page that shares your story, providing visitors with a comprehensive view of your brand.

Improve Navigation

Visitors should be able to return to your home page in no more than three clicks. If navigating back home is difficult, it can lead to a frustrating experience for users. This principle applies to search engines like Google and Bing as well.

As your website grows and contains more pages, it takes longer for search engines to crawl your content. Therefore, it's essential to have a well-structured site that avoids 'orphan' pages—those unlinked pages that don't lead anywhere else on your site. This approach benefits both users and search engines.

Optimizing Keywords

Understanding your audience and their search behavior is crucial for developing an effective SEO strategy for your ecommerce business. Keywords are the terms that potential customers enter into search engines, making it essential to incorporate the right keywords into your website to enhance visibility.

Below are key factors to consider when optimizing your site with relevant keywords.

Utilize Keyword Research Tools

Begin by researching the most effective keywords for your products. Tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Similarweb are excellent for identifying high-volume keywords. Once you’ve established your keyword strategy, you can take advantage of features within these tools to monitor keyword performance over time

Focus on Keywords Throughout Your Website

Incorporate keywords into your content, such as blog posts, but also remember to include them in your URLs, image file names, meta tags, and titles.

Equally important is the ongoing creation of keyword-rich content that encompasses various keyword types, including short-tail, long-tail, and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. Below are some examples.

Using Content Marketing to Boost Online Presence

The more content you create, the greater the chances for search engines to discover your site. While search engines can still identify ecommerce websites that primarily serve as stores, they may struggle to achieve higher rankings.

If you want to enhance your ecommerce site's visibility, consider optimizing your existing content. Below are some effective tips and best practices for ecommerce SEO.

Follow Best Blogging Practices for Better Search Rankings

Blogs and other non-commerce content should ideally be between 1,400 and 1,700 words. While page rankings fluctuate frequently, recent studies indicate that content within this word count tends to be shared more often.

Enhance Product Descriptions with Optimization

Product descriptions and short-form content should generally be more concise, typically ranging from 50 to 250 words based on your requirements. It's important to maintain a consistent tone and voice throughout this type of content.

Regularly Post New Content

Another effective strategy for ecommerce websites is to update content regularly. By creating fresh and consistently updated material, you keep your site visible to search engines while providing visitors with reasons to return.

Staying current not only keeps your audience engaged, but also contributes to building domain authority, which can enhance your website's rankings. Inviting guest bloggers is an excellent way to introduce new and engaging content. Additionally, don't overlook the power of social media; it's a valuable tool for promoting and sharing your content.

Establishing Connections Through Link Building

If domain authority serves as a resume for your ecommerce website, then link building can be likened to obtaining strong references. Link building involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites that direct traffic back to your own. While it requires effort, there are numerous strategies to effectively achieve this.

Begin by Engaging Your Partners

Obtaining backlinks from partners and affiliates is a straightforward method for building links. Regularly check for broken links to maintain the effectiveness of your connections. Two-way traffic benefits both parties involved. This is why inviting guest bloggers is an effective strategy to generate more content while also enhancing domain authority. Additionally, exploring associations and sponsorships that feature your logo can provide valuable opportunities for acquiring backlinks.

Generate Links via Social Media

Another effective strategy for ecommerce websites is to leverage social media. Sharing content is crucial! When your linked content circulates, it directs traffic back to your site. The more organic traffic you can generate, the better the results. Additionally, consider researching your industry and reaching out to bloggers or influencers to get featured in 'Top 10' lists and other listicle mentions.

Monitor Brand Mentions

Utilizing tools like SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring Tool allows you to identify where your company is mentioned without receiving a backlink. Don’t hesitate to reach out and request a backlink for those mentions.

Boosting Your Site's Speed

Having excellent products in your ecommerce store won’t matter if your website is slow. A sluggish site can be a significant issue. Fortunately, several strategies can help improve your site speed after you conduct a basic speed test. Here are some effective ways to reduce latency and enhance loading speed.

Optimize Your Plugin Usage

Choosing the right plugins is as crucial as having clean code. With thousands of plugins available for WordPress, it can be challenging to determine which ones to select. If you're uncertain about any plugins, several online tools can help you evaluate their quality.

Using poorly designed plugins can not only slow down your site for visitors but also negatively impact your ranking and domain authority. If you decide to use plugins, make sure they do not hinder your site’s performance. Prioritize quality over quantity; the more plugins you install, the longer it takes for your site to load, which can harm your SEO efforts.

Make Use of Caching Plugins

Have you ever noticed that some websites load significantly faster on subsequent visits? This is due to caching. Caching stores resources such as logos, images, and stylesheets, which helps websites load more quickly. A slower webpage can negatively impact the user experience (UX). We recommend compressing images and site content, as well as using plugins like Cache Enabler and Jetpack to enhance performance.

Fix Broken Links

Using tools like Screaming Frog or plugins such as Broken Link Checker can help you identify broken links on your site. These broken links can slow down your website and indicate where you need to set up redirects. Remember to keep redirects to a minimum, as both search engines and users prefer quick access to your site.

Optimize PHP Performance

Have you ever received an email about a limited-time sale, only to encounter an error at checkout? This often happens when there aren't enough PHP workers available. The key to improving speed is ensuring your store can handle the traffic it receives.

Dynamic managed hosting allows you to accommodate more users simultaneously. Unlike static websites, such as blogs, ecommerce sites need to manage concurrent users due to various processes like adding items to carts, checking out, and processing payments.

This is where performance and scalability become crucial. If your website is slowed down by poorly functioning plugins or content that takes too long to load, an increase in traffic can temporarily overwhelm your site. A downtime not only frustrates customers but also results in lost sales and revenue.