Most digital e-commerce marketing strategies heavily emphasize paid advertising and social media, but e-commerce professionals understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO). A good SEO strategy can help your eCommerce website improve its ranking in Google searches and drive more converting traffic.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best opportunities to reduce your reliance on paid channels, rank higher in Google searches, and get more organic traffic to your website. You want your website to rank high for these specific terms and the products you sell. The higher you rank in search engine results, the more traffic your website gets, and the more customers you get, which leads to more sales. Many companies pay for search engine rankings through Google Ads.

But to achieve organic coverage, you need to maintain your SEO regularly, analyze your SEO performance regularly and invest time in your website. Depending on your budget and sales goals, you can use PPC and organic SEO to expand your reach. SEO is a long-term, cost-effective form of sales and marketing if your business has a limited budget.

On-page SEO and Techniques to boost organic traffic

On-page SEO for eCommerce platforms ensures your keywords are in the right places. This is a way to ensure that Google has an accurate understanding of the content of your pages. On-page SEO is essential because it helps you appear in other search engine results page (SERP) features. Factors involved in SERP rankings include:

Optimize your website and listings for keywords

Before diving into anything technical on your website, ensure your products and pages are optimized for the keywords your target audience will likely search for.

You’ll get good keyword ideas, traffic estimates, and bid estimates from this free tool, but if you have the budget, paid tools can give you more insight into keywords, traffic trends, and your target position competition stands.  

No matter what tool you use, create a plan of action to target more keywords in your products and pages. Include keywords in product descriptions, category pages, FAQs, and product titles when necessary. Refrain from overloading; be careful when posting product pages to get keyword opportunities.

Make your product page experience fun.

Now that you’ve started doing keyword research on your plan, it’s time to review your product pages to see how to improve your customers’ buying experience.

Above all, Google has boosted its search volume many times in recent years, putting high-quality content at the forefront of search results, and e-commerce is no exception.

Google implemented E-A-T (Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines to urge brands to be more conscious about their published content. Focus on quality when publishing. Be as informative and honest as possible with her audience. Not only does this raise the bar for brands everywhere, especially e-commerce brands.

Use structured data for rich snippets.

It’s time to move on to some technical qualities you can add to your eCommerce website with product content optimization. Structured data markup is one of the most important features you should look for added. In short, this tag provides more details about your product before users visit your website. 

Improve Your Website’s Navigation and Structure

While every eCommerce site differs, the average time a user scrolls on a site before deciding to leave is 10-20 seconds. If your site is challenging to navigate, your categories could be more organized, and users who aren’t attracted to your brand within that time frame look elsewhere. Improving navigation and site structure is important for SEO and the overall user experience.

The proposal has two main components. The first is navigation improvements, which can be done by adding breadcrumbs. Clean URLs are designed to improve usability and accessibility by being intuitive and meaningful to your visitors and Google.

Clean up broken links and improve your 404 pages.

Broken links have always been negative in SEO’s eyes. Not only do they affect the performance of your website, but also the customer experience. If you link to disabled product pages and categories, you stop users from dying. Some people may stay and hit the new page; others may leave your website.

However, it’s not the end if you still need to get some broken links. This is where an optimized 404 page is handy and can direct users to other parts of your website to discover new products. 

Secure your store with HTTPS.

As a store owner, you collect information from your customers after every purchase, every email sign-up, and every SMS message sign-up. You will want to ensure that all information collected is encrypted and secure.

This is evident from a customer confidence perspective. If someone is browsing your eCommerce store and feels unsafe, they might hop elsewhere. If you need another reason to do so, Google has declared HTTPS a website ranking factor. In the end, most really high-quality websites moved to HTTPS.

Fortunately, most eCommerce platforms offer SSL as standard or can be purchased anytime. While this is one of the basic e-commerce SEO tips, it’s critical to the success of your online store.

Page Speed Improvements

It’s no secret that Google has included page speed as one of its ranking factors. Page speed connects buyers to the products they seek as quickly as possible.

A slow page-loading experience will hurt your traffic and SEO. Some eCommerce website builders offer a slow loading option by default. Other sites may include lazy-loaded applications.

Optimize your mobile store.

Google announced in 2019 that it would use its mobile crawler to crawl websites. This means it scans the mobile version of your website, weighs its performance and benchmarks, and ranks you accordingly.

A good rule of success for eCommerce merchants is to review mobile pages before publishing them and ensure the content and browsing experience are similar.

Create a blog for your online store.

A proven way to drive traffic to your online store is through blogging. While starting a blog can be daunting for a new brand, it can also have long-term benefits. For example, your blog could rank for various keywords related to selling products and your industry. Your blog will then be used to increase your product page views, thereby increasing your chances of winning a sale.

But even if your blogs aren’t making money, they can provide product education and be used to build your brand identity. 

Get backlinks  

A backlink is when any other website links to one of your products, pages, blog, or other content. This indicates to Google that this other site considers your content authoritative and worthy of a link. The higher the quality and quantity of your backlinks, the higher your website ranks.

Backlinks are one of the most productive ways to scale eCommerce SEO and get referral traffic from other websites. However, getting those links can be a daunting task. For seasoned digital marketers, you can publish advanced eCommerce link-building strategies such as broken link building, reverse image search link building, statistical reports, and more!

Internal linking to your products, categories, and blog

While backlinks are hard to come by on your own or organically, there is a linking procedure you can do that can immediately impact your e-commerce SEO. This practice is internal linking.

When you link internally to your product, category, and blog pages, you pass ownership of the link to that page. The more internal links pointing to a particular product or page, the more Google will show that it should prioritize that page.

Internal linking is a good SEO practice, and there are signs that it works positively.  

In addition to SEO, linking to your product on a “top ten” or “how-to” blog you write will help customers find out new products you have to offer. This creates a win-win situation for your brand when they click through and increases your referral traffic.

Avoid creating duplicate content.

With so many products on your website, it’s hard not to create duplicate content and product descriptions, categories, and titles that look the same. But managing duplication is important.

If you’re a new e-commerce brand, stick to one keyword for your category. You can use the previous keyword research examples to discover the keywords you want to start targeting. If you’re an established e-commerce brand, audit your site and see where you have duplicate categories.  

Conclusion

There are many ways to get traffic, from social media to paid advertising to email. However, only search traffic is reliable, free, self-sufficient, and relatively easy to obtain. If you want your website to get a lot of traffic and receive the visitors you expect, knowing the ins and outs of e-commerce SEO strategies can change your business.