STUDIO FIVE

How to Succeed in a Competitive Market

In the ever-evolving online retail landscape, mastering the art of e-commerce SEO is essential for any business owner looking to thrive. As competition intensifies, understanding how to improve e-commerce SEO can significantly impact your site’s visibility and ranking potential. This blog post will delve into actionable strategies and best practices to enhance your e-commerce site’s search engine performance.

In 2024, 43% of e-commerce traffic comes from Google search results.

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Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your online journey, you’ll discover valuable insights to elevate your brand and attract more customers. Join us as we explore the critical elements of effective e-commerce SEO and empower your business to achieve its digital marketing goals.

Improving E-Commerce SEO is Different

Organic traffic is unlike any other marketing traffic source. Every site visitor is free, and every free session is a potential sale. Unlike paid search or social campaigns, organic users don’t have immediate marketing costs.

Ecommerce websites on the first page of Google search results have an average conversion rate of 10.18%.

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However, many online retailers often get caught in a holding pattern for e-commerce SEO growth. They’re unsure how to build landing pages that draw high-quality traffic and perform well in search. Unlike paid traffic, increasing your visibility organically isn’t as simple as increasing your advertising budget.

If you feel like you’re hitting a wall for the types of effective e-commerce SEO you can create, we’re here to help. Follow this guide to help you increase your site’s ranking potential. These tips will give you a baseline to review your site and identify where to focus your efforts this year and beyond.

Before You Begin

Our team developed this report based on our strategic opinions of the market, guided by current developments, best practices, and data. What works for the industry might not work for your site, and we cannot promise that you’ll see positive gains even if you implement every change.

Any changes you make to your website should be done carefully. This way, you can see what works for you—and what doesn’t—and adapt your strategy before any changes become permanent.

Best Practices to Improve E-Commerce SEO

1 – Perform Keyword Research That Considers Buyer Intent

Don’t focus exclusively on the most popular keywords in your industry when performing keyword research. It’s essential to factor buyer intent into the mix.

Buyer intent relates to the intention behind a search query. To identify it, look at the phrases and terms people type into search engines when searching online.

There are two main types of keyword intent:

• Informational keyword intent: These searches contain “How do I?” or factual queries. In these cases, the searcher seeks more details about a subject.
• Commercial keyword intent: These searches occur when a searcher knows what they want but doesn’t know where to find it. They may type in search phrases like “buy smartphone” or “find London hotel deals.” Users of commercial keywords usually have more intent to purchase.

There are various ways to determine keyword intent. You could use a keyword tool like Google’s keyword planner. You could also use a tool like Ubersuggest. This tool is helpful for content writers, bloggers, and copywriters who want to generate new content ideas or investigate user search queries. Consider using Answer the Public. With this tool, you enter your keyword on the home page to discover precisely what people are asking about.

2 – Don’t Forget Long-Tail Keywords

On SERPs, long-tail keywords usually appear on the right side of the page. A long-tail keyword is a term that typically has a low search volume but is still relevant to your business. It usually converts well because it matches the searcher’s needs better. It also tends to generate higher traffic volumes.

Long-tail keywords can reveal what your customers are looking for and their intentions. For example, “shoes” is a short-tail keyword, but “best walking shoes for summer” is a long-tail keyword, which provides more information about the customer’s likely next steps and intentions.

Try to rank for long-tail keywords because they’re a valuable traffic source. They’re beneficial for:

• Competitive niches
• Increased conversion rates
• Ranking new sites more easily
• Quick wins with a limited budget

You can find long-tail keywords using Google’s “People also ask” feature or a free keyword tool like Keyword Tool orWordStream.

3 – Let Search Engines Read Reviews

One way to attract new customers and increase your visibility is with unique, informative content on your product pages. You might have the bandwidth to constantly create new content if you have hundreds of product pages. One option for developing a steady stream of new content is with product recommendations and reviews. Your customers submit reviews and serve as salespeople to convince others to convert.

Almost 90% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family members, which means a few reviews can go a long way to boost your conversion rate.

Highlighting these reviews on your site is great for users and your e-commerce SEO efforts. Content-rich reviews provide fresh updates to your pages, which Google rewards, and enhance the context crawlers need to understand why they should show your product in a search result instead of one of your competitors.

Unfortunately, some of the most popular product review tools display this rich, valuable content in a way search engines can’t read. With these tools, reviews are injected into your page via JavaScript, and the actual review text is absent from the source code. While Google is improving at understanding this complex coding, it’s imperfect. If search crawlers have difficulty understanding your JavaScript, then it will be ignored entirely.

When building a review platform, choose one that embeds the review content directly into your site’s HTML. This guarantees that users and search engines can read these endorsements, improving your long-tail keyword listing and increasing qualified traffic leads.

4 – Improve Your E-Commerce Content

Written content plays a vital role in your SEO for e-commerce strategy.

Uploading regular, high-quality content is an excellent way to improve e-commerce SEO. High-quality content does all of the following:

• Attracts organic traffic
• Helps you build trust with customers
• Boosts your website rankings
• Enhances your reputation as an expert in your niche

You can include many different types of content, including:

• How-to articles
• Articles that answer frequently asked questions
• Updates on new product launches
• Glossaries
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Testimonials
• Video demonstrations
• Question and answer sessions
• Webinars

To improve your e-commerce content:

• Research your audience and get to know them better. This understanding will help you create content that addresses their everyday concerns and suggest products that solve their problems. You can use buyer personas to help you do this.
• Find out what kind of content your audience prefers. Your content data should identify the content types that get the most views. You can also survey your customers to uncover this information.
• Maintain a regular content calendar to streamline your content production and keep your content creation efforts on schedule.
• Target your content at every stage of the customer journey.
• Use A/B testing in key areas like titles.
• Finally, measure your performance and tweak your content strategy if necessary.

5 – Use Schema Markups

You can use schema markups to improve your SEO for e-commerce activities. These HTML tags provide additional information about the content on your web pages.

According to Schema, over 10 million sites use Schema.org to mark up their web pages and email messages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex, and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.

When you use schema markup, it produces rich snippets. Search engines use these to show more information about specific items in search results. They also help users find what they are looking for. When properly integrated into your code, this Schema data enables Google to render more effective search results and can positively influence click-through rate.

Rich snippets include product markup, music, and review snippets. In e-commerce, you mostly use these kinds of Schema:

• Product schema: This provides rich product information, such as images, price, and availability.
• Review schema: This enables online reviews.
• Product availability schema: This is a list of products that are available to purchase.
• Video schema: This is a type of metadata used to describe the content of a web page containing an embedded video.
• Price schema: This enables sharing product pricing information with search engines.

6 – Create Dynamic Meta Descriptions

The meta description appears directly below a page title in the SERPs. Google doesn’t read what you write in the meta description, but your customers do. In addition to the title and the URL, it’s the only information they have on your site before they decide whether you get their click.

For e-commerce sites offering thousands of products often replaced seasonally, finding a way to write engaging meta descriptions at scale is challenging. Some companies invest time creating a unique description for every page, but that’s not feasible if you’re a small business or major department store retailer.

Smart SEOs use “Concatenation schemas” and establish a set of rules to automate meta description creation while generating unique content. Microdata is a tiny bit of code that automatically uses a predetermined set of rules to write relevant descriptions.

For example, the following rule could be written for photography retailer B&H Photo:

Shop for PRODUCT NAME at BRAND. BRAND provides SUBCATEGORY and CATEGORY for all photography and electronics enthusiasts.

In action, the product description looks like this:

Shop for Canon EOS Rebel at B&H Photo. B&H Photo provides DSLR Cameras and Digital Cameras for all photography and electronics enthusiasts.

This Schema allows you to update your entire site automatically instead of taking days or weeks to update a category. With a little testing, you should be able to find a description that improves your organic click-through rates.

7 – Only Index One Version Of Your Domain

Speaking of duplicate content, you want to ensure only one copy of any page on your domain. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for companies, even large ones, to have their entire website duplicated. This usually happens when a site has an active “www” and “non-www version,” like a page that starts with “https.”

When you have multiple duplicated sites, your pages compete against each other in search, and competitors with only one page for a given product will outrank you.

Duplicate pages often occur when subdomains aren’t blocked by Robots.txt files, gated behind a password-protected log-in wall, or redirected to the main www page. Search engine crawlers find duplicate pages and split equity between them in the rankings. Instead of one page getting 100% of the value, two pages get 50%.

There are multiple steps you can take to identify if you have multiple versions of your domain indexed:

• Crawl on your webpage using a tool like Screaming Frog, Dead Link Checker, or Dr. Link Check
• Review Google Analytics data for organic landing pages to see if unwanted subdomains appear.
• Search Google’s index of your site using advanced modifiers, such as “site:my site.com—inurl:www,” to display all indexed pages on your site that are not located in the www subdomain.

Ideally, you will block any duplicate pages before creating them, but if you notice them in your index, update your robots.txt as quickly as possible.

8 – Canonical URLs

E-commerce sites have some of the messiest and longest URLs you find online. The bigger the store, the worse it gets, as including parameters from search and navigation systems can add millions of unique URLs based on click paths.

It’s not uncommon to see large retailers with up to 1,000 URL variations for a single product. This outcome is often unavoidable thanks to search functionality since the last thing you want to do is prevent your customers from finding the products they’re looking for.

Unfortunately, this scenario is troublesome for retailers and brands since it wastes Google’s time as the crawlers track down and index every URL version.

If this is the case with your business, you should eliminate index bloat by using canonical tags and Google’s parameter exclusion tool.

9 – Limit Architecture Depth

Reducing the depth of your website’s architecture can increase the rankings of your core category pages by consolidating site equity. Usually, the best practice within e-commerce SEO is to construct a more horizontal architecture that limits the depth of pages that Google must absorb to find and isolate categories.

In e-commerce, it’s not unusual to see architecture that seems to go on forever, such as:

Home > Category > Sub-Category > Family > Brand > Product

While this granular architecture might make sense for your products, it buries those smaller category pages. Each time you create a new branch, you’re making it less likely that Google will assign any value to that page.

Developing a shallow site architecture, with most pages located only one or two subcategories off the primary domain, increases the value that Google assigns to each page.

10 – Make Sure Your Site Is User Friendly

In e-commerce, attention to your site’s UX—or user experience—is crucial. Good design makes your site more visually appealing and enhances its UX.

Your site must work well and look good. Ensure that ads don’t interfere with the user’s view of the content. Ensure people can navigate your site easily and that it’s intuitive.

Presenting your user with a mobile-friendly website is a no-brainer. While most of your orders might be attributed to desktop users, you need to understand that many of them will have started their experience on their mobile. Disappoint them there, and you lose a sale.

54.67% of the global website traffic comes from mobile devices.

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Check your mobile-friendly credentials with Google’s mobile-friendly test. You don’t need to test every page on your site, but I would test all your page templates, including your product, about, home, cart, and checkout pages.

It’s important that shoppers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, remain engaged while on your site, and generally have a wonderful experience. If Google thinks your website offers visitors a better experience, it may rank it higher.

To improve UX, ensure your site:

• Loads quickly
• Is mobile-friendly
• Is clutter-free
• It is easy to navigate
• Includes CTAs
• Uses consistent styling
• Is accessible

11 – Optimize Your Product Pages

You can use on-page optimization techniques to attract and acquire new customers and gain more conversions. It’s a good idea to focus your efforts on the areas of your e-commerce site that matter most. These are your:

• Product descriptions
• Images
• Reviews

Product descriptions

Before you start optimizing your product descriptions, ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most critical elements on the page?
2. How can you maximize the visibility and impact of these elements?
3. How can you use this information to improve the effectiveness of your product descriptions?

To optimize product descriptions, you can consider:

• Adding high-quality, unique images
• Including keywords
• Including keyword-rich descriptions
• Adding CTAs
• Including testimonials

Images

Images and photos can make a page look more attractive and engaging but can also be distracting. So, avoid using too many of them in descriptions.

By optimizing your images for SEO, you should get higher search engine rankings and more traffic from potential customers. You may also gain traffic from social media channels.

To optimize your images:

• Choose suitable images in appropriate sizes
• Include captions with ALT tags
• Use the correct keywords in file names

Reviews

Reviews are vital for your success in e-commerce. They help consumers decide whether to buy a particular product or do business with an online store. Reviews also help you build trust with consumers and improve conversion rates.

Encourage customers to leave reviews by sending automated messages whenever they purchase something from your site.

12 – Avoid Duplicate Pages and Duplicate Content

Many online retailers fall into the trap of including duplicate product descriptions and images on their websites. You can reduce the amount of duplicate content on your site by:

• Using a CMS with site-wide 301 redirects or adding canonical tags on every page that you know might have duplicates, for example, pages with similar titles or that share an identical URL
• Adding a suffix to the URL
• Using different product images
• Adding unique keywords on other pages

13 – Keep Your Product Descriptions Unique

Along with meta descriptions, you also want to ensure your product descriptions are unique.

Unique content became a priority after Google released its Panda algorithm, which focuses on promoting high-quality content relevant to users. The goal was also to penalize duplicate content scraped from other pages.

One of the first steps to boosting your e-commerce SEO efforts is to identify any content on your product pages that contains duplicate copy, particularly pages with the same description as products offered by competitors or manufacturers.

Once you identify duplicate content, rewrite it from scratch. Fresh content will make your content unique compared to your competitors, and well-written descriptions will provide Google with additional context around what you’re selling, increasing the likelihood that they’ll show your product for relevant searches.

If you need to prioritize your content and have a seemingly endless list of product descriptions ahead of you, create content for your highest-margin and best-selling products first. Then, develop a strategy to replace duplicated descriptions in phases or as new products are added to your lineup. Eventually, you will convert your entire site to the new descriptions.

If you sell your products through other marketplaces, like Amazon or eBay, use the manufacturer’s descriptions so your unique content isn’t shared across the web.

14 – Add Pagination Elements to Category Pages

On category pages with thousands of products, the last thing you want is to force users to load everything at once and then scroll through listings until they find something they want. Most e-commerce websites solve this by breaking up the category into easily digestible pages with just a portion of the listings, typically with 25-50 items per page.

While this is great for customer experience, it can negatively impact your e-commerce SEO as Google isn’t sure which category page to display for users in search results. Adding SEO pagination elements with “rel=next” and “rel=prev” tags tells Google and other search engines how pages are related.

Smart web developers will allow users to view all the listings on one page. If you decide to add the option to your e-commerce pages, follow the canonical rules outlined by Google to prevent confusion and penalties by the search crawlers.

15 – Secure Your Website

Retailers rely on customer trust to convert them. If your customers don’t think your website is safe, they won’t give you their credit card or other personal information. If you want to continue driving organic traffic and help customers trust your brand, you need an HTTPS environment.

You must renew your SSL certificate yearly to ensure the security of your checkout process. You also need to secure your entire online store and ensure that it is hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), which means the site’s data, including customer information, is encrypted.

Google is actively encouraging HTTPS as it is a confirmed ranking factor. 

Be sure to inform your users about your site’s security measures, particularly on the cart and checkout pages, by prominently displaying your SSL provider’s security seal.

16 – Prioritize Speed

As of July 2018, page speed is a ranking factor in Google’s mobile search results. Along with impacting your e-commerce SEO, site speed significantly affects the user experience. An average increase of one second in your mobile site speed can increase your bounce rate by 8.3%, decrease your conversion rate by 3.5%, and decrease your pageviews by 9.4%.

Google’s best practices recommend that a page load in under four seconds, and the faster your site becomes, the better. SEO experts must quickly identify and correct anything slowing your page speed down.

Start by monitoring the bounce rate, load time, and time on site to understand the health of your site speed. You can also use free tools, such as Web Page Test, to identify bottlenecks in page speed.

17 – Deindex Discontinued Products

When your products sell out, you likely set up a 404 error page on the site, meaning the page no longer exists. Doing so means browsers won’t find any information if they attempt to navigate your site or visit the page through an existing link. Unfortunately, these 404 pages are often linked to internal and external sources and confuse Google crawlers with too many redirects or dead ends.

Instead, reduce 404 pages by establishing a process to gracefully remove the old page from the Google index quickly. You can also automatically redirect users to the category, brand, or family page so users can keep browsing even if that specific product isn’t available.

18 – Drive Social Signals

Social media interactions help drive branded searches, increase visibility, and help companies develop an online community of active fans. While there is no direct correlation between social media and e-commerce SEO, social media can be a powerful traffic driver that points social crawlers to your website’s health and value.

More importantly, however, social media allows you to reach and interact with your users. Facebook and Instagram accounts give you ways to answer questions and showcase the human side of your business. The most successful e-commerce companies on social media genuinely connect with customers and provide real value online.

19 – Utilize Dynamic Sitemaps

One of the biggest opportunities in e-commerce SEO is in long-tail keywords. These search queries typically have four or more words and do not have a large search volume. What they lack in volume, they make up for in revenue, as these terms typically have a higher conversion rate because customers using them are generally closer to making a purchase.

Properly targeting long-tail keywords requires content creation deep within your site structure. While these pages might have the answers your customers are looking for, Google must find them and crawl them to assign value to the search results.

One way to take advantage of long-tail search terms is with dynamic sitemaps. Dynamic sitemaps are auto-generated XML files that outline all URLs on your website in a format that makes it easy for Google.

Essentially, you are giving search engines hints into how your pages are stored and classified to make their job easier when crawling.

Creating a dynamic sitemap is easy, but maintaining it is not. When shared with search crawlers, e-commerce sitemaps can become outdated, have broken or missing URLs, or even be missing altogether.

Consider investing in a tool that auto-generates dynamic sitemaps. This way, you can feel confident that Google’s crawlers get the information they need daily and that the URLs are up-to-date and accurate.

20 – Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search adoption has grown significantly in the past few years and is poised to continue through 2024. More and more consumers are using voice to perform search engine queries, find local businesses, make purchase decisions, and more.

In 2024, voice shopping will account for over $3.3 billion in consumer spending. Today’s marketers must understand their consumers’ voices to take advantage of this revenue-driving growth opportunity.

40.7% of all voice search answers are taken from Featured Snippets.

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Consider developing an answer section of your site, like a FAQ page, to address questions. You can also use Schema markup to list answers directly on your product pages.

To understand what questions to answer, look at the historical data gathered by your on-site search or through online queries on Google’s Search Console. Notice the questions that users are already asking and give them a way to find the information they need.

Be sure to make each question a unique page and answer the question in as much detail as possible to appeal to crawlers and voice search users.

21 – Invest in Local SEO

Do you have physical stores and an e-commerce presence? Creating local pages can drive substantial e-commerce SEO improvements to both branded local and non-branded local traffic.

Local results appear when a user geographically near your store searches for products or services that you offer. Potential customers can learn your hours of operation, directions to your location, and any upcoming offers or events.

If you want to maximize your local SEO benefits, your local site should appear in the root URL (e.g., Mysite.com/stores/Seattle). Not only will this make your locations easier to discover for users, but it will also allow Google to assign some of the equity your e-commerce store has to your physical location. Search engines are more likely to show your business location when local customers search for your products.

22 –  Help Google Understand Your Video

Video content is a great way to drive brand visibility and boost your e-commerce SEO. Almost 65% of customers say they bought a product after watching a branded video on social media. Furthermore, video content can drive a 157% increase in organic traffic paired with valuable text.

Many brands must remember to provide written transcripts when uploading video content. Google will see that you posted a video, but without the transcript, they won’t have any context for what it is about.

If you plan to make videos frequently, consider uploading the video to YouTube and placing it on your website with the transcribed audio below. Make sure to format the text so it is easy to read. This gives Google context for your video and appeals to customers who want to learn what the video is about before they press play. Use headings to separate different ideas and split the text into small, easy-to-skim paragraphs. Essentially, your video content becomes the blog post for the video.

23 – Keep an Active Blog

Blogging has become one of the prominent inbound marketing tactics of recent times, but it’s still not a mainstay for e-commerce sites.

Ecommerce websites with a blog tend to get 434% more indexed pages.

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It does have a deserved place, though. The caveat is that if you haven’t invested in your product copy or the copy across your informational pages, then blogging may be moot. Prioritize your informational copy first.

Once you’ve done that, consider funneling more resources into blog posts. You might start by identifying your priority products. Is your audience researching those products? Are they searching for information not typically found on the same site that sells the product? If so, then there’s a significant blogging opportunity.

Create a streamlined experience for your users. Be the general source of information about the product and then offer it to them via your site. It sounds simple, but the research-to-purchase experience is disjointed in many customer journeys.

24 – Promote Your Content

Retailers often overlook traditional outreach strategies but serve as powerful traffic drivers and link-building tactics that can improve your e-commerce SEO. Suppose a blog, website, or influencer that your customers trust appreciates your content. In that case, they share it with their audience, driving traffic to your page, increasing your overall reach, and building a valuable page backlink.

To create quality backlinks:

• Write guest posts
• Use social media ads
• Share content on social media
• Issue press releases
• Create infographics and share them online
• Publish whitepapers and case studies

In today’s SEO environment, link quality trumps quantity. A link from a trusted website counts more than any artificial links placed in comment sections, forums, or related low-quality sites.

92% of marketing specialists claim link building will be a key ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm in the next five years.

Search Logistics

You must create something worth linking to to build natural, authoritative links. Whether this is an infographic, interactive page, or original research, it must engage your readers. By making your content educational and not promotional, partner publishers will be more open to presenting it to their audiences. You must start with great content before others want to link to it.

An important note: Avoid buying links. Some paid links violate Google’s guidelines. In addition, cheap links are often low quality. Poor quality links lead to lower rankings and reduced traffic. They can also negatively impact your site’s reputation.

25 – Clean Up Your HTML

HTML is the code and other elements within your web page that tell a customer’s browser how to display your content. Google also uses HTML to understand the context of the content and how it’s shown to human visitors.

Without HTML, your customers would see either a blank screen or a mass of illegible text. Title tags, meta descriptions, and headers help people understand what your page is about and how to find the most relevant information to them quickly.

Google uses your HTML information to understand the relevance of your content. Effective HTML use is a ranking factor, as the easier it is for a crawler to determine what your content is about, the easier it is likely to be for users.

Review your HTML to ensure it isn’t outdated, bulky, or doing more harm than good. A few cuts could improve your e-commerce SEO while increasing your overall site speed.

26 – Identify Opportunity Pockets

Likely, the rankings on your site vary widely. Many categories and product terms likely rank well, while some are much deeper in the page listings within Google. Your core items drive the bull of your organic traffic, while lesser products have difficulty generating links.

Strategic e-commerce SEO teams will follow a daily process to review these rankings to isolate the categories and product detail pages that need improved content efforts. A tool like SEMRush gives you an updated view of your position in organic search and estimates how that positioning should translate into traffic.

You have a limited number of e-commerce SEO resources. Use this data to find low-hanging fruit that you can easily optimize for greater results and low-performing pages that should be doing better.

Don’t Let Your Competitors Get Ahead of You

Many online retailers find themselves stagnant in their e-commerce SEO growth, trying to figure out how to create effective landing pages that attract high-quality traffic. Unlike paid advertising, enhancing your organic visibility requires a strategic approach rather than a larger budget.

Following our expert e-commerce SEO guide can unlock your site’s ranking potential and drive substantial growth. Contact us today for more information on implementing these strategies effectively.