eCommerce SEO Services are marketing activities to make an eCommerce store sell more products from more natural, free search engine traffic. They are a variety of efforts to get more traffic to your site. They can be more subtle like conversion rate improvement activities. Ultimately it will be bringing more traffic that is likely to buy the items you have. With good eCommerce SEO Services, you can collect as much natural organic traffic as possible to make more revenue. Learn how we do this below.
Why eCommerce SEO is Important
eCommerce SEO is the backbone of online retail. Think of it as the store sign, but in the digital world. You got great products? Awesome, but without SEO, it’s like having a five-star restaurant hidden in an alley. No visibility means fewer customers. Period. SEO puts you on the map, right where your customers can find you. It’s not just about rankings; it’s about being part of the conversation. It levels the playing field against bigger competitors. Miss out on it, and you’re essentially rolling out a welcome mat for your rivals. So yeah, eCommerce SEO isn’t just important—it’s crucial.
7 eCommerce SEO Services
1 – Keyword Research
The bedrock of SEO. Know what your customers are searching for. If you miss this, you’re shooting in the dark. This may change over time too. We usually suggest going after easier words when you are new. As you grow, your domain ages and you get more links you might go after tougher words. To determine how good the past eCommerce SEO services are we review your traffic and what keywords they are coming to your site with now. Are they good keywords for people that are looking to buy or are they words information seekers would want? The best keywords will have high volume, low difficulty to rank, and then a high likelihood to buy. When doing this review you should consider keywords you do not rank for that you would like to rank for. Then looking at the first page of search engine rankings and determining why those sites rank is vital. Do they have better content? More High-quality authoritative links? Or an older more established domain? Understanding the best keywords and your path to rank for them is a vital start to your eCommerce SEO improvement project.
2 – On-Page Optimization
Titles, meta descriptions, and content matter. Make ’em clear and relevant. This is your product’s way to get traffic that comes directly to it and the visitor is looking for exactly what this page has. The search engines should see signals that show them exactly what it is about in clear concise ways. It is not easy and the more products you have the more time it will take. We can help you identify the best pages to work on and how we can gauge how long it takes your and our team to correct a page and what the results are. We will help you identify the point of diminishing return.
3 – Link Building
Think of this as networking for your website. Quality backlinks are like glowing referrals. They make you look good to Google. Speaking of referrals you do ask for those? Correct? You can ask for reviews on BBB, Yelp, Google Reviews and in your own e-commerce platform. They all are good but outside ones will count as links. The internal ones act more like unique content. You do like when your customers also help you write unique content.
4 – Technical SEO
This is the plumbing work. Site speed, mobile-friendliness, and clean code. If your site’s a mess, Google won’t invite you to the party. It also has been proven that the slower your site loads the less likely it is to convert. That is with the same exact products and design. For each 1 second delay your conversion rate will go down xx%. So you want it to load quickly. And there are new things like schema and Open Graph that tell search engines exactly what the content is about in easy to digest bits. We will help your team test for these and then overcome them. The great thing about fixing templates is you are really fixing multiple pages at once.
5 – Content Marketing
Beyond product listings, offer value. Blogs, how-tos, guides. They keep visitors engaged and coming back for more. Are your products confusing? Make them less confusing. Put pdf manuals, how-to guides and user videos online. Then propogate them to other places where people are online. Youtube, Instagram, Tik-Tok and Pinterest show people how great your items are and help people understand their features fully. It also shows how much you care. And it allows you to interact with public relations issues quickly and defuse the issue or have them bring it to your support team in a less public way.
6 – eCommerce Site Technical Audits
If you see dramatic changes in your website’s SEO rankings you should have a skilled SEO agency look for problems. This could have happened with an eCommerce platform change or theme redesign. It could have been from a hosting change. If there were changes to the category, product, or shopping cart pages that could be it. The key to eCommerce technical audits is to look for changing metrics. Has the conversion rate gotten worse? Did SEO traffic go down? Have the sources of traffic changed? For instance, if you are getting more social media traffic your traffic will go up but your conversion rate will go down. It is important to compare apples to apples and look at sales and the conversion rate for one channel only when auditing your SEO.
7 – eCommerce Taxonomy Optimization
Once the keywords are chosen and understood you should review sections of your site to rank for those words. Having the best, most effective category structure is a key part of your eCommerce SEO plan. This can be done by reviewing the on-page navigation of your site. Or use a database export of your products with their categories. The best taxonomy change projects will create a 10 to 30% improvement in SEO revenue. This will also give you good landing pages for email or paid advertising. A good idea is to consider how many products you have and the levels of your taxonomy. Is it 2, 3, or 4 levels deep? Is that like your competitors that have about the same number of products? Look at their categories and how they are different. Does their website have more or fewer levels of categories? Do they use the same keywords or names for their categories? If they are different are their rankings different than yours? This is an involved project and to do it the best way possible will involve changing the urls of many pages and redirects from old structure to new would be best practice. We have done this before. It is difficult but doing it correctly will bring your traffic numbers back up and hopefully improve in a week or two.
eCommerce Website SEO Tips by Page
Many activities can improve the SEO of your eCommerce site. Start with a review of your site, then research the categories, then review the product pages, and finally technical problems. It is also important to look at what keywords are ranking on your site now. Are they homepage keywords, category keywords, or product page keywords? If there is a section that does not rank like category pages that would suggest you have a problem there. Below we will talk about how to review each section of your website.
A – eCommerce SEO on Homepage
SEO on your eCommerce homepage is like most other websites. There should be good elements present like H1 of Heading 1 tag, title tag, and a description tag. The main keyword should be what companies call an umbrella keyword. It should encompass all you do and be what most customers would search for when looking for your products. What is your ranking for your umbrella term now? Do the competitors that are outranking you have older more established websites? Do their websites have more high-quality links? If not, there may be problems with your website design or copy. Resist the urge to focus on your brand name on the homepage. If you have an established site you should already have a number 1 ranking for your brand already. I would suggest looking to expand into non-brand related terms that you can rank for. These should be supported by your product categories and product pages.
B – SEO on Category Pages
Category pages are like the homepage but there are fewer products so the umbrella keyword for a category is smaller in scope. Your categories should be appealing and contain products of one type. They should focus on keywords with monthly traffic of several hundred searches. The products in a category should have part of the category page in their title so the category page has focus. You might also want space for several paragraphs about that topic on the category page. An appealing image for the category would be nice as well. Being unique from other categories increases the chance of their ranking much higher. Do your category pages rank now? What level of your eCommerce taxonomy are they? Is it 1 level deep? What about level 2? Do you have a level 3? Start considering if that structure is best. Is that what your competitors do with approximately the same number of keywords?
C – SEO on Product Pages
There are more product pages than any other page type so you should work on the SEO on them. But there is a Catch-22. Because there are so many it can be overwhelming. Once the homepage product classifications are done you can look for improvement in categories and individual product page content. There should be a review of the current content and where it is from. If a large percentage of your eCommerce product content comes from manufacturers’ copy, that will be duplicate content. That should be avoided as soon as you can. Do you have the sources to write better product descriptions? Can you augment the duplicate content with your ideas or customer reviews to make the content more original? Check the number of products, how they rank, and potential traffic. This way you can determine how much of your site can have new unique content written. The most important project is to see if the template for product pages is placing the content in the database in good places. So there should be title tags, the product name at top of page should be a Heading 1 tag, a description would be nice, schema markups, and other best practices. If some of those are not working well you should work with the developers to get them as optimized as possible. The great thing about this is that you are working on as many product pages as you have at one time. There are of course other SEO activities you can do on product pages. You can review what keywords are being focused on key products. You can make sure that the product page has the main keywords sprinkled across the page from title, description, content, and other places. Product managers often merchandise products with little SEO consideration. They really want to get the items online and presented well enough for people to buy. You should review the keywords of titles to see if they are helpful, clear, and may help with SEO.
D – SEO Tips for Your Blog Posts
The other pages of your eCommerce site other than home, category, and product pages are likely to be blog posts. You should choose those topics with some keywords that are easy enough for your website to rank for. There are eCommerce platforms that have blogging built into them like Bigcommerce or can add a blog platform for its strengths. With how search engines are working in 2023 it would probably be better if your blog is a folder and not a sub-domain. Some tools can tell you how much traffic a search term has monthly and its expected difficulty. You can also look at blog posts you have written before and how they rank currently. That is the most accurate way to determine how difficult of keywords to go for. If you are not sure what to write about you could consider improving an older post. You could also write a supplemental blog post elaborating on a past topic. Or do you have a new product? What about an in-depth write-up or review with a link to the product page where to buy it?
eCommerce SEO Services FAQ
Is SEO important for eCommerce?
Yes, more than any other type of website, SEO is vital for the good long-term success of an E-commerce website. The cost of paid advertising is a drain on profitability. The vast number of categories and products will make paid advertising difficult. You should not rely on it. eCommerce websites have many product pages that can focus on product and model names. Those pages also can include SKUs and brand names on them that people may search for. There are also category pages that should get SEO traffic. If one of your competitor sites can get a large percentage of their traffic from SEO they will be more profitable and it will create economies of scale that will be difficult to overcome.
How to SEO eCommerce Website?
There are quite a few ways to do SEO on an eCommerce site. You can get links and that would be off-site SEO. Better high-quality links will bring good traffic and be a powerful signal to search engines of your worth. The best type of links would be from noted product review sites and social media influencers. You can also have better category and product pages that do technical SEO better. You could also have better, more unique product text.
How to improve SEO of eCommerce website?
The easiest place to do SEO on an eCommerce site is on-page. That would be something that can be controlled and most likely done in-house. That would be better categories, product pages, and no technical problems. These could be fixing pages that don’t have a title, description, and heading tag. You may have category managers review copy and where they sourced it from. Make sure it is appealing to your customers and not duplicated on other places on the internet. You also could have your social media manager work on content that can go viral and make sales. Going viral would also get more links which would help off-page SEO.
Is SEO worth it for eCommerce?
Yes, it is. Especially if you already have an established domain with lots of links. Having a lot of products and the infrastructure to deliver them, is an advantage new companies will not have. If you have that already that is a great asset. Then doing more eCommerce SEO services on pages will have search engines will rewarding you.
Which eCommerce platform is best for SEO?
There are many eCommerce platforms on the market. The industry is maturing and only the best platforms are still supported. That means it is not clear which is the best SEO eCommerce platform. There is no one clear winner. Most modern eCommerce platforms can work well. There are many considerations for picking an eCommerce and SEO is not the only one. How many products you have, other systems like shipping and inventory, and cost should be considered. If it becomes harder and harder to get your CMS to do what you want, then you might need to switch.
What is the cost of eCommerce SEO services from an agency?
It depends on how you do it and how much you do in-house. Some activities can be done by a product manager or a social media manager. If you do not have those employees with the overhead to do that, you will have to hire an outside SEO agency. Additionally, the agency may be better at getting content written like blog posts. The best agencies will make you much more money than they cost. Really if they did not most companies would not use them long-term. We try to aim for at least a 10X return on our cost for our clients.
What is SEO and how does it benefit an eCommerce company?
There are 2 types of SEO, on-page, and off-page. On-page is just like it sounds, content on the page that allows search engines to understand what a page is about better. Off-page SEO is links that give search engines signals that content should get more traffic. These links may also create natural traffic of their own. Both are worthwhile practices and to ignore either is a mistake.
What are Shopify SEO services?
These would be services to help Shopify eCommerce stores to get more traffic from natural, free search traffic. They are the same as SEO eCommerce services but done in the Shopify CMS platform hopefully by someone that has experience doing so. The Shopify best practices for SEO are: Use SSL on domain, Use an SEO app, use great pictures, make sure the pages load fast and confirm you give great information on that page. There are some challenges in Shopify but they can be overcome. One is the urls of “collection” pages often point to a page url nested in the collection and the page loads but it points to a different canoncal url. We have fixed that before either with a better theme, updating the current theme to one that fixes this issue, or coding changes to the existing theme. It sounds like a lot of work but it looks better and improves internal linking structures. Search engines will respond in time with better rankings.
Conclusion – Hire an eCommerce Agency?
We have worked on clients Magento, Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, Shopify, and ATG stores. Not only that but we have also worked on our own eCommerce websites. Some of our clients are as small as 3 or 4 products. And some of them have over 55,000 products. There are differences and should use different tactics as your company grows. There are growing pains that happen as you outgrow a platform or a web design. We have seen them before and can help you recognize them even if your marketing experience is limited. Book a call with us today and let us see if our team and your current circumstances are a good match.
Please contact us to get our ideas on one of the eCommerce SEO Services listed above.
