Ecommerce Seo -The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites

The e-commerce industry is currently valued at $5.7 trillion globally and is expected to reach $9 trillion by 2032. Ecommerce seo is required to rank your website on your desired keywords.

Congratulations! 

As an e-commerce business owner, you are part of this huge and rapidly growing industry. This article will help you in many ways, and I'm sure you will enjoy reading it.

Before we dive deep into making the most out of your business using SEO for e-commerce websites, there are a few things we need to pay attention to.

Due to AI, we are seeing layoffs almost everywhere.

As a result, people are slowly losing trust in jobs and job cultures and are more inclined towards building something on their own. 

This clearly indicates the competition. 

But fear not! The fact is, where there is competition, there is money. 

In this article, we will guide you on how to outrank your competitors easily, stand at the top, and maintain the top position on search engines so that it becomes a nightmare for your competitors to beat you. 

Roll your sleeves up. We will guide you through proper SEO for e-commerce websites.

SEO For Ecommerce Website

Let’s understand how to rank your e-commerce website with SEO using a small story. 

There are two girls in a city, one named Alia and one named Sonia. They both are madly in love with a guy. 

You thought I'd say this?

Haha, no. 

Actually, they are madly looking for a business development manager job that they love the most, and they both worked really hard.

Unfortunately, there is only one position to be filled. Both Alia and Sonia have great skills required for the job, but only one can get the job. 

The boss couldn’t decide whom to hire and gave them a test. 

He asked them to present their skills and work in a presentation. 

They were ready with their presentations the very next day and were excited to showcase their work to their boss. 

The boss sat in his wonderful, comfortable chair, and both of them shared their presentations. 

Finally, Alia was hired, and Sonia couldn’t make it. 

They both had great skills and were almost similar, but why was Alia hired? 

Just because of one thing: PRESENTATION. 

With this being said, we are now entering into our first step to rank our e-commerce sites on search engines: presentation and architecture of the site.

Proper Structure Of Ecommerce Website:

Just like Alia grabbed her dream job by presenting her skills and work in a better way compared to her competitor Sonia, we need to present and structure our e-commerce website better than our competitors and make it easy for our audience to navigate.

Now, let's talk about the structure of the site. 

First, think of a proper structure for your website, how you want it to look, the color theme as per your brand, the About section, Contact section, Blog section, Policies, and Product section.

You can get idea from below image.

Let’s suppose I'm a jewelry business owner. I have an idea of how my site should look, and here it is:

The header of my site will have these: Home, About Us, Our Collections, Shop, Contact Us, Create Account icon, Cart icon, and a search bar.

My left sidebar will have these product categories:

- All Products

- Bangles

- Chains

- Chokers

- Chur

- Earrings

- Lahari

- Mantasha

- Necklaces

- Pendants

- Sankha & Pola

- Sitahar

- Tie Chains

The central and right side of my site will be filled with product images, descriptions, and an "add to cart" button with 3 products listed in a row. Then comes my footer, where I will include some policies, address, and features of my business.

With this, my structure is done and it's easy and simple for users to understand. 

This seems simple, but you have to get it right to ensure your users are not bored by the presentation and overall look of your website. Make it very easy for them to navigate.

In my example, if you observe, I have given the left sidebar where I have mentioned all the product categories. If someone is looking for bangles, they will simply click on bangles and look at all the different sets of bangles listed on our site. 

After making sure you have a proper structure, now shift the focus to product images, meta descriptions, and title tags.

Make sure to write proper, well-optimized, and catchy descriptions and provide high-quality images. This helps in increasing the CTR and thus the ranking.

1. Header: While working on your product pages, make sure to use header tags properly. For example, if my product is gold bangles, I'll use "Gold Bangles" as the H1 header tag.
2. Product Page Description: Product page descriptions play a vital role in helping rank your site on Google because here you can use keyword-rich content and optimize the pages accordingly.
3. Product Images: It's very important to remember to optimize images for page load speed. The attention span of users these days is very short, and if your site loads very slowly, it’s obvious that you won't see results. Use alt tags, ensure the quality of images is good while keeping page load speed in mind, and make sure to use keywords as filenames.

>> Use simple URL structures: This helps users have a clean experience, and they can easily remember the URL if they need to. Just focus on making everything easy for customers.

All these make the site very user-friendly. They will fall in love with your site. That is exactly what Google or search engines need. When people love your site and spend a good amount of time on it, an indication will be sent to Google, increasing the chances for your e-commerce site to rank using SEO.

Keyword Research and Understanding the Intent:

It is very important for you, as a business owner, to understand the intent of your users and optimize everything accordingly. It is important to catch the pulse and serve them accordingly.

Since it's an online store, you can understand their pulse by doing proper keyword research. There are different tools to perform keyword research.

In the below image you can see the keyword intent, difficulty, volume and Global search volume to get an idea of the targeted keyword to rank it via seo.

In the above image tool used is Semrush You can also use other seo tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Google Keyword Planner( This is used for paid Ads).

Need some tips on where to begin? Let’s go.

>> Go broad and choose any random keyword that comes to your mind and begin there. 

For example, if I am in the jewellery business, I will start with “best jewellery store.” or "Buy Jewellery Online" I will just go to Google and type in my keyword. While typing, I can see some suggestions, and at the end of the search results, I can see some related keywords. I will take these into consideration and get back to keyword research tools to perform my keyword research.

The best practice is to start with low-competition keywords and then gradually increase the level of keywords. This brings initial traffic to my site, and then I can slowly grow my site from there.

Quick general tips to structure your Ecommerce website:

1. If you have something of your own, you can test the structure.
2. If you are just starting out and have no idea how to make your site look, just look at your competitors' sites and make yours better.

Hope you are clear with the first step and now let's dive into the second step of SEO for e-commerce websites, to rank them in this fierce competition.

Okay, back to our story: Alia successfully grabbed the job. But that doesn’t mean she will sustain it just like that. 

There is fierce competition these days, and everyone has to give their best at their job. Otherwise, it is obvious that you will be fired.

Now that Alia got the job and is happy, she is also very clever to understand what the job demands. If you remember, Alia is a business developer. It is very important for a business developer to have a good network to get more business for the company she is working for.

With this being said, we are here with our second point: network, aka links.

Link Building:

Build Quality Links for Your E-commerce Site to Improve Your Ranking.

Cheap networks yield cheap results. Likewise, cheap links yield cheaper rankings.

So, it is very important to build quality links and increase the credibility of your site.

There are different ways to build backlinks to your site, and some of them are:

- Building internal links

- Designing and distributing infographics on social media

- Creating guest articles

- Publishing whitepapers and case studies

- Running social media advertisements

- Releasing press announcements

- Engaging in blog discussions and forum posts (where permissible)

Generally, e-commerce owners overlook building backlinks to their stores and sites. This is a common mistake, and they think they can rank their sites without proper backlinks. But it is very difficult to rank sites without proper backlinks in place.

Now that Alia happily joined her dream job, as a business developer, it is very important for her to understand the needs of her clients, reach their expectations, and at the same time find new customers for her business.

With this being said, we are entering our third point, which is keyword research and understanding the intent.

You can use websites like SERPZilla to get links for your ecommerce Websites.

Periodical Updates of Website:

We’ve seen the story of Alia. She is doing great, but there is no guarantee that she will remain great if she doesn’t keep on updating her skills. That’s why it's very important to keep updating.

Likewise, it’s important to update the content on your site, make sure everything is in place, and write product-centered SEO articles and comparison articles by doing proper keyword research.

Also, keep updating and optimizing the site at definite time frames. 

Let’s now jump into one more important aspect of ranking e-commerce sites: Technial SEO of your ecommerce website.

It might sound a little tricky if you are new to SEO, but as always, let me make things easy for you.

Technical SEO:

Most people talk about on-page and off-page SEO, like adding keywords in the article at appropriate places and giving social signals. But there is more to it. Let me explain.

>>Just like Alia made a crystal-clear presentation about her skills, certifications, and other extracurricular activities that she possesses and clubbed everything in a presentation, presented to boss and grabbed a job, we have to do same thing with our site by adding everything on our site into a file and present it to google, and that is called a Sitemap.

Sitemap:

A sitemap is a file where you provide all the information that exists on your website, such as content, images, product pages, product categories, videos, etc. 

You can create a sitemap manually or use tools such as Google Webmasters, Lucid Site Map Generator, and Power Mapper. 

It is easy to create a sitemap, and it is advised to create HTML sitemaps instead of XML, as bots crawl HTML in a better way and bring some glory to your site.

Note that pages ranks better then you blogs to focus more on ranking you pages and especially local pages. For example: Buy online "Jewellery in New York".

Is creating a sitemap for my e-commerce store important?

Yes, it is. When you submit it to Google, Google will be able to read all the data that is present on your site and help in getting you good rankings. 

Now, let's discuss one more point, which is the SSL Certificate.

SSL Certificate:

If Alia had told her boss that she got certifications but couldn’t show them, would the boss trust her? 

No, right? 

In the same way, if your site doesn’t have an SSL certificate, your users will not trust you even google will not rank you on many keywords because of this. SSL is one of the most crucial ranking factor in SEO.

Especially since many frauds happen in this industry. 

So, if you want to gain the trust of your users that your site is genuine and give them confidence, an SSL Certificate is necessary. 

However, it has little to do with SEO and rankings, but it's always good to have one.

You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to audit your site and find if there is any issue with technical SEO. 

Audit the site for minor things like broken links, error pages, duplicate content, and page loading speed, and optimize everything accordingly.

With these steps of SEO for e-commerce websites, when implemented with the right tools, it’s obvious that you’ll see your site on top of search results.

Conclusion

This was detailed Ecommerce SEO Guide for ecommerce websites to take care of these important SEO factors to rank #1 on your desired keywords. Also one pro tip: Add you major pages with keyowords add it into header or footer. This gives signal to Google of most important pages on your ecommerce store and Google will rank you higher.

Also as per my personal experience pages ranks better in search results. Also optimize your keywords for Local SEO.

Tools like SEMRush will help you find keywords on which you can work and expand your organic reach.

If you are owning one seo website and want to rank fast and need assistance you can email us at amitmishra@tryootech.com or amit@bizgromedia.com.