Do you own an online store and would like the whole world to discover it and buy your products? Don’t think it over: you need some SEO to place it among the first positions in the search results for the keywords you are interested in. Did you know there are SEO strategies that are specific to ecommerce?
What Is SEO for Ecommerce and Why Does your Store Need It?
SEO for Ecommerce is a combination of specific actions based on this business model’s characteristics and the CMS used on online stores. Implementing these techniques correctly can make the difference between success and anonymity in the digital world.
Ths guide will provide a detailed perspective of how to make the most out of SEO to improve your online store’s visibility on search engines, increase your organic traffic and, ultimately, boost sales.
This type of strategic actions focuses on optimizing the following aspects of your store:
- Product categories
- Product details
- URL architecture
- New categorization based on the SEO user
- Improve and optimize our content’s crawl
- More
But why is it important?
An online store needs traffic. This can be obtained through several channels, and search engines are some of the most important channels for users.
Gaining visibility through keywords whose search intention is purchasing means putting yourself in the right place when the customer is ready to make a purchase.
CMS Specializing in Ecommerce
A CMS (Content Management System) is a tool that allows you to create a website and organize, post and delete your site’s content. This software enables managing dynamic content, such as blogs, ecommerce stores and any type of website.
In the case of online stores, we could say that a CMS is the foundation upon which you build your site, similar to the walls in a physical store. There are several types of CMS, with some of them being specific to ecommerce.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms, and for a good reason. This system is easy toset up, even for people who are not experts. Its search-engine-friendly architecture and its capacity to efficiently manage technical features, like duplicate content, are some of the aspects that make this platform an attractive option for online store owners. In addition, its wide variety of applications and themes allow you to customize and optimize your store according to your specific needs.
Although this CMS makes managing your online store easy in many ways, it also has some features that make SEO efforts difficult to implement. For this reason, in many occasions, you will need a specialized developer to help you out.
Many CMS specialized in ecommerce are recommended based on their popularity and your business’s complexity.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce, thanks to being an open-source solution that perfectly integrates into WordPress, offers exceptional flexibility to customize your online store. However, the best SEO results are achieved by paying attention to its setup and optimization, which may require some experience and knowledge. This includes selecting plugins and themes which are compatible with SEO best practices and the optimization of metadata en product content.
Prestashop
Prestahop is the quintessential ecommerce platform, especially in Europe. Among its many advantages, some of its highlights are its flexibility and its SEO optimization capabilities for online stores. However, background knowledge and experience are needed to make the most out of it. Leverage its extensions and setups to ensure your online store is effectively optimized. Prestashop also provides tools to manage technical aspects such as duplicate content and URL structure.
Despite being one of the best CMS to work in ecommerce, it is also worth mentioning that almost all of its complements and plugins are offered for a fee.
Magento
Magento is the ideal option for big-sized online stores that require a solid and scalable platform. Magento’s customization and management options are unparalleled, but they also imply bigger responsibilities in terms of SEO optimization. Make sure you are managing technical aspects properly to avoid performance and SEO issues.
Benefits of SEO in online stores
Developing and executing an SEO strategy specializing in ecommerce is imperative to achieve significant growth for your online business. This process brings about many benefits for your project:
- Increased organic traffic: By reaching higher rankings on search engine result pages, you will gain more visibility, leading to more clicks from potential customers.
- Increased conversion: a more qualified traffic often represents increased conversion, given that visitors are more prone to purchase your products or perform the actions you want them to do.
- Increased visibility on products and categories: a well-executed SEO strategy places your products and categories in better positions among search results, making it easier for potential clients to find you.
- Increased credibility: users tend to trust organic results more than paid ads, leading to increased credibility and more visitor-to-client conversions.
- Competitiveness: within a highly competitive market, SEO is a fundamental tool for competing with other actors in your sector.
Key areas in SEO for ecommerce
When carrying out an SEO strategy for ecommerce, there are a few key areas that must be addressed comprehensively in order to reach optimal results. Some of these areas are:
- Crawling: the crawling process is essential for search engines to index your site effectively. Make sure that search engines can access and crawl all the relevant pages on your website and prevent them from wasting resources on content you do not seek to promote, like legal pages.
- Indexation: Indexation is the process through which your pages are included on search engine indexes before they are displayed among their results. Ensure all your important pages are indexed so that they can be displayed.
- Relevance: Content relevance, defined as the match between what the user searches for and the answer your content provides, is fundamental to attracting your target audience and satisfying their search intent.
- Authoritativeness: Authoritativeness is how important the search engine considers you to be among your competitors. This concept is related to popularity. We must keep in mind that this metric is not provided by Google, but other tools like Ahrefs (DA).
Authoritativeness or popularity depends on several factors, the most important being links leading to your website, specially those coming from semantically related pages.
The Importance of Crawling in Ecommerce.
We have already said it: for a search engine to display your website among its search results, it first needs to know you exist and be able to access your pages to learn what content they offer and how to rank them. In SEO, there are several ways to foster crawling:
robots.txt
The robots.txt file plays a crucial role, given that it is responsible for indicating search engines what parts of your website they should crawl or not. This allows you to favor the most important pages and block access to irrelevant or duplicate content.
Sitemap
The sitemap is a vital tool: it is an organized list of the most important URLs on your site. In the case of small websites it can be just one, while sites with many URLs can have different sitemaps (categories, posts, products, images…). Make sure you only include in your sitemap those URLs you want to be crawled and leave out the ones you don’t want the bot to crawl.
Web architecture and structuring
A well-designed and organized website structure facilitates both user navigation and search engine crawling. Carefully plan the hierarchy of your categories and products and make sure that internal links are set up logically and efficiently so that the search engine will discover them as it jumps from one to another. Avoid creating “orphan” pages (that are not linked to from any other page), as the bot will not be able to reach them, making them impossible to crawl, index and display in search results.
Internal Linking
Controlling the depth of your internal links is essential to guide the engines to your most important pages without getting lost in deep layers of content: make sure that all the pages of your site are less than 3 clicks from the home page and that the most important ones are linked directly from the main page. You can use the top menu, breadcrumbs, sidebar links, etc. for this purpose. However, the depth of internal linking depends on each project, the number of URLs you have and the hierarchy based on the importance of each one of them.
The role of indexing in online stores
Although exceptionally this may not be the case, usually only those pages that have been previously indexed appear in the SERPs, i.e. that the bot has crawled and entered in its index. In ecommerce it is especially important to control the indexing, both to ensure that all the products we want to sell are properly indexed and to control that thousands of pages with no SEO value are not indexed (discontinued products, filters, variations of the same product that can be considered duplicate content…).
Canonical
Proper implementation of canonical tags is essential to avoid duplicate content problems, as they tell search engines which is the preferred version of a page in cases where there is more than one, such as URLs with parameters.
Indexing status of relevant pages and the ‘no index’.
It is important to check the indexing status of your relevant pages and apply the ‘noindex’ tag appropriately on pages that should not appear in search results.
This HTML tag, located in the head of the web, is a directive given to crawlers to indicate whether or not content should be indexed. Within this meta tag there are different attributes such as ‘noindex,follow’ (tells the bots to crawl the links on that page, but not index it) and ‘noindex,nofollow’ (orders that neither index the page nor crawl the existing links on it).
Faceted navigation
Faceted navigation is very common in online stores, as it allows users to filter products based on the features they are interested in, displaying only the products that meet these conditions. The filtered product listings can be generated using JavaScript, parameterized URLs or even static URLs.
The uncontrolled creation of new URLs is the main problem that can lead to faceted navigation. In addition, the misuse of filters often causes problems of duplicates and wasting the time that Google spends on crawling our content (crawl budget).
Product indexing
An important decision within the SEO strategy is whether or not to index all the products and how to manage the URLs resulting from the search filters (they can be indexed or not and even treated as categories, if there are searches that justify it) to avoid problems of duplicate content and a disorderly indexing.
The relevance of content in ecommerce
As in any other online project, content management in an ecommerce is key to its success.
Keyword Research
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the most relevant queries for your niche market. Use keyword research tools to identify trends and opportunities. Don’t forget about search intent! If the user is looking to buy a product, we have to adjust to transactional terms, thus offering a useful response.
Quality content tailored to search intent
Create original and high quality content that matches the search intent of your users. Make sure that your pages offer valuable information and satisfy the needs of your visitors. If the user wants to find a product, opt for transactional terms; if, on the other hand, he wants to solve a question about
A major error often occurs in product descriptions.They tend to be very similar, if not directly the same, in a large number of websites, generating duplicate content problems. Don’t forget: add new information for the user and respond to their needs.
Create optimized content for categories
Do not neglect the product categories: generate original and optimized SEO texts, both initial and secondary, to work the content of your categories, with attractive and useful descriptions.
In some of the analyzed ecommerce stores, we have detected that they are not working properly SEO texts, since, or lacks initial text in which to reinforce the main KW, or secondary text does not have an optimized SEO headers structure.
We must not forget that our job is to conform to the quality and relevance guidelines set by Google, as John Mueller indicates in some of his speeches:
Choosing long tail keywords to grow
Long tail keywords are specific keywords, with fewer searches and less competition, which makes them ideal for attracting highly qualified traffic and increasing conversions. They are terms that are usually worked in subcategories.
Product sheets
Optimize product sheets with original and detailed descriptions, high quality images, relevant technical information and customer reviews. The following is an example of a poor product card that offers little information to the user, with no descriptive text beyond a listing or buyer reviews.
A contrary example can be found in some of the ecommerce that have relied on SEO Alive, whose product cards offer relevant and quality information to the user:
Creating a blog
A well-managed blog can be used, fundamentally, for two things:
- Putting non-transactional keywords to work, i.e. those semantically related to the product or sector, but which have no purchase intent or which are placed at other points in the conversion funnel.
- Position yourself as an expert in your sector in the minds of consumers. This way, you will gradually build a community around your brand, which will make you the first choice for your users when they are ready to become customers.
Design a content calendar to regularly publish articles related to your niche and use the blog as a platform to share relevant news and tips.
The authoritativeness of an ecommerce
We can define a website’s authoritativeness as the value that the search engine gives to it based on the reliability it considers its contents, the quality of its pages and, ultimately, its popularity. To calculate it, the search engine pays attention to certain signals: one of the most important is the backlinks from other pages.
Getting quality links through a link building strategy
Link building, or link profile building, is essential to increase your site’s authority. Design and execute a link building strategy that includes acquiring high quality links from relevant and trusted sources in your industry as naturally as possible. Avoid junk or spammy links, link farms and uncoordinated or too fast acquisition to avoid arousing the search engine’s suspicions, which can lead to a penalty.
Working on an international SEO strategy for online stores
If your online store operates in several markets or languages, it is essential to implement an effective international SEO strategy to take advantage of all of them without penalizing any of them.
Correct use of the hreflang tag
The hreflang tag is essential to tell search engines in which language or region each version of your content is available. Use this tag accurately to avoid duplicate content problems and improve visibility in local search results.
Beware of untranslated languages
Avoid leaving parts of your site untranslated, as this can negatively affect your SEO (duplicate content) and create confusion among users accessing different versions of your site.
Other issues to consider for good SEO for Ecommerce
In addition to everything we have already mentioned, there are some additional considerations that can significantly improve your SEO strategy for online stores:
Competitor analysis.
Perform a detailed competitor analysis to identify opportunities and weaknesses in your SEO strategy. See what those who are already where you want to be are doing and what you can do to differentiate yourself from them and stand out.
Architecture
Design a web architecture that is efficient and easy to navigate for your users and search engines. A clear and logical structure improves the user experience and makes it easier for bots to crawl.
Optimize metadata
Titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, headers and URLs should be optimized for SEO. Make sure that each of these elements is related to the content of the page and contains relevant keywords. An example of non-optimized metadata can be seen in ecommerce related to home appliances. Many of their landings lack metatitles and metadescription as can be seen in the following image:
An example of a correct metadata optimization can be found in some of the clients that have trusted SEO Alive. This ecommerce is working on the optimization of titles and metadescription, as well as SEO texts, images, etc.
Image optimization
Compress and optimize images to improve the loading speed of your site. Heavy images can slow down your website and negatively affect the user experience, which in turn can have a negative impact on SEO. Remember that images in ecommerce are very relevant, they help conversion. Compress and optimize images to improve the loading speed of your site. Heavy images can slow down your website and negatively affect the user experience, which in turn can have a negative impact on SEO. Remember that images in ecommerce are very relevant, they help conversion.
An example of errors with images in ecommerce can be seen in online stores related to household appliances. This ecommerce offers different broken images of their products, as can be seen in:
Video content
Video content can be a valuable addition to your SEO strategy. Create relevant and useful videos that complement written content and appeal to a wider audience.
Structured data implementation
Use structured data (Schema.org) to enrich your site’s search results. This can improve the visibility of your products and categories in Google’s rich snippets and increase CTR.
Product reviews
Encourage product ratings and customer reviews. On the one hand, this is a constant source of completely original new content that will help improve the online visibility of your products, and on the other hand, positive reviews can increase the trust of other buyers, increasing sales.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs improve user navigation and help search engines understand the structure of your website. Make sure they are correctly implemented and easy to follow.
An example of an incorrect implementation can be found in the following ecommerce. The breadcrumbs are implemented at the end of the landing page, making it difficult for the user to navigate through the website. In addition, this particular landing page does not have a visible menu, so the user cannot access other categories quickly, but has to reach the end of the landing page to continue navigation.
Ecommerce optimized for mobile
It is essential that your online store is optimized for mobile devices, as more and more users access the Internet and carry out their transactions via smartphones and tablets. If you don’t want to be left behind, make sure your site is responsive and offers a smooth user experience on mobile devices.
WPO (Web Performance Optimization)
The loading speed of your website is a critical factor for both SEO and user experience. Optimize the loading speed of the website by removing unnecessary elements, using image compression and taking advantage of the browser cache to reduce loading times.
Mistakes to avoid in SEO for ecommerce
We have already talked about everything that can and should be done to improve the SEO of your online store. In addition, there are certain very common mistakes, which we’ve all been through, that you should avoid if you don’t want to invalidate your entire strategy. Take note:
Inconsistent search intent.
No matter how hard you try, your business will never succeed if no one is searching for what you sell. Before launching your project, make sure that there is a real interest in your niche market and work to discover what your target audience’s needs are and how they name them when looking to satisfy them. Only then will you be able to align your web content with the search intent of your potential users.
Poor web architecture
Poor website architecture will affect both the experience of your users, who will not be able to find what they are looking for at any given moment, and the search engines, which go through your website jumping from URL to URL through the links between them. Take the time to design a logical web architecture.
Cannibalization
Avoid having your pages compete with each other for the same keywords. Make sure each page has a unique focus and competes for specific keywords.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content can seriously hurt your SEO. Avoid copying content from other sites or creating internal pages with similar content. Eliminate unnecessary duplication and, where useful, use canonical tags to tell the search engine what the main content is.
Uncontrolled indexing
Keep precise control over which pages of your site should and should not be indexed by search engines. This is especially important in the case of ecommerce, where product variations (by color, size…) and filter pages can generate thousands of URLs with no SEO value. Do not allow irrelevant or sensitive pages to be exposed to search engines, which can dilute the visibility of your valuable content. To avoid this problem, see the following point.
Use the robots.txt file to block access to sensitive pages.
Configure your robots.txt file correctly to tell the bot which pages it should not access, crawl and index. Also, use the ‘noindex’ tag on pages that should not appear in search results and use sitemaps correctly to guide the engines to important pages.
Forgetting about local SEO
Many online store owners overlook the importance of local SEO, forgetting that the physical location from which users perform a search has a key importance on the results page they are shown. If you have a physical presence or cater to local customers, this mistake can cost you potential customers. To work on local SEO:
- Register your business on Google My Business, directories and other local mapping platforms.
- Optimize your website with relevant local keywords.
- Ask for local reviews and participate in local online communities.
If you avoid these mistakes, you will be in a stronger position to make the most of your Ecommerce SEO strategy and achieve greater success for your online store. Remember that SEO is an ongoing, long-term process that requires constant attention and adaptation as trends and customer needs evolve.
Want to get started, but don’t know how? Contact us for a free SEO diagnosis of your project and let us help you get where you want to be, we have the experience and the means to get you there!
