Ecommerce SEO: 12 Easy Ways to Rank Higher & Grow Sales
Do you remember everyone loading into the car to go to the store when you wanted to get a look at the latest toys or electronics? Or heading to the mall with your friends to shop for outfits and accessories?
With the growth of ecommerce—accelerated by the pandemic—so much of that has changed. Starting an ecommerce business or adding ecommerce capabilities to your current business is a smart way to stay afloat.
But how do you compete with giants like Amazon and Walmart?
Ecommerce SEO.
Today, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about ecommerce SEO, including:
- What ecommerce SEO is
- Why it’s important
- 12 ecommerce tips you need to take (now!)
With this guide, you’ll be well on your way to ranking higher in search results and increasing online sales.
In 2021, we’ve settled out at 15.3%, which is still an increase from 10% in 2018.
The buyer journey starts with a search engine
Forrester states that 71% of consumers in the US use a search engine to discover new products, brands, and services. If you are not ranking in search, you are missing out.
You need ecommerce SEO to compete with the big guys
It might feel a little like David fighting Goliath with just a sling and few stones, but there are ways to stack the odds in your favor to topple the giant armies of marketers you’re competing against. And SEO is one of them. If you want to compete online against giants like Amazon, Walmart, and others, you must win at SEO.
Ecommerce SEO yields multiple benefits
Better e-commerce SEO ensures that your products get discovered online, help consumers make the best buying decisions, and give them something worthwhile to share with their friends and followers.
Here are seven areas where you need to focus for better e-commerce SEO.
SEO is crucial, but it’s not enough on its own. Download our free guide to Google Shopping and start driving valuable traffic to your ecommerce store today!
Ecommerce SEO tips to rank higher & increase online sales
Many of these tips apply to SEO in general, but there are certain nuances that are specific to ecommerce sites.
1. Don’t strive for better rank—strive for page one
Online search is crucial throughout the customer lifecycle—from product discovery, to purchase decision to engagement and retention.
If “search is king” then “retail sites are queen.” If you are an online e-commerce retailer, you have to do more than optimize your ecommerce site. You simply can’t ignore how you rank in the search engines for your key product, brand, and service terms.
In global search, there is Google… and then there is everyone else. It is crucial as a seller that you understand what it takes to get discovered on Google, first and foremost.
Even when the purchase ultimately doesn’t happen online, 65% of consumers still research online before making their final purchase decisions in a brick-and-mortar store. This is known as ROBO (research online, buy offline).
If you are selling electronics, appliances, autos, or apparel, then discovery and consideration practices do matter online even if the purchase ultimately happens at a retail location 90% of the time.
If you have been selling online awhile, then you know the benefits of being on page one of Google.
While the top result on Google tends to have a click-through rate above 20%, anything after the first page falls below 1.5%—a steep drop-off—whether on desktop or a mobile device.
Your potential customers have to go somewhere to shop. If they are not purchasing with you, then they’re likely buying from Amazon or going to your competition instead.
Are you ready to reach page one?
2. Do your ecommerce keyword research
Ranking on the first page of Google is great, but unless you’re ranking for the right results, it’s not going to do a lot of good.
That means you’re going to need to do your ecommerce keyword research. But first, you need to understand the shortcomings of broad keywords.
Broad keywords tend to be very competitive, and it can take months or more to rank for them. They might also cast too wide of a net to capture your target audience effectively.
It’s a great feeling to rank on the first page of Google for a competitive search term, but for pages that aren’t ranking well, you should consider a long-tail keyword strategy.
It has been said that the “riches are in the niches,” and for good reason. According to Moz, 70% of search traffic comes from long tail searches.
The trick is to find the sweet spot of keywords that convert your ideal customers in search while also helping you rank. That is a win-win for your potential customers and you as a seller.
If you aren’t sure where to start, take a look at your competitors’ keyword data to get a better idea of which keywords they are bidding on.
3. Create an informative blog for your ecommerce site
One of the best ways to start ranking for your targeted keywords is by creating an informational blog. Once you do that, you can incorporate SEO into it by using keyword research to frame topics that proactively answer your customers’ questions.
Marcus Sheridan does a great job with this approach. He is frequently featured online for answering questions about pools. He answers the questions that buyers were asking, but no one else was bothering to answer. In turn, he became an early digital rockstar for inbound marketing.
By proactively addressing buyer questions online, this once-small pool seller quickly rose to page one on Google and is now a leader in pool sales.
Marcus even formed The Sales Lion to teach others how to be successful in ranking their site.
The benefits of blogs go way beyond higher search ranking. The conversion rate for websites with content marketing is nearly six times higher than websites without it.
Ecommerce content marketing will encourage your potential customers to spend more time engaging with your brand—helping them feel much closer to your brand than they otherwise would.
70% of consumers prefer to learn about a brand through a blog post rather than through corporate messaging. Help your audience get to know you and your brand by providing them with relevant, consistent blog content.
4. Optimize your ecommerce blog for SEO, too.
Not only should your site be optimized for SEO, but the blog content needs to be optimized too.
If producing content for your e-commerce site does not come naturally, don’t worry. You don’t have to create an airtight SEO strategy in one fell swoop. Just pick one channel and try it.
Take video, for example.
On average, web visitors spend 2.6 times longer on pages with video than those without it. Companies like ThinkGeek know this and use videos (optimized for SEO, of course) to drive traffic back to their website. With videos averaging around 600,000 views each, that’s a lot of potential web traffic.
5. Organize your ecommerce site structure
Structure matters in PPC, and it matters for SEO too. If your content is scattered all over the place on your site without any real structure, you will be working against your other efforts to improve organic traffic.
Search engines prefer structure when crawling your site. Put simply, it means that your most important content should be at the top of your site, and everything else should flow from that top-level infrastructure.
The long tail articles you create about topics that your prospects are searching for are a cornerstone piece in your foundation for bringing in customers that convert.
6. Link to product and category pages in your blog posts
Internal linking is another way to improve the structure of your website and make it more crawable for Googlebot—increasing your chances of getting discovered.
Include links to your product and category pages inside your posts to capitalize on the SEO traction you earn from your blog articles. This can also help your product pages to rank higher in the SERP for their related keywords.
Linking to your own content not only helps Google better understand the structure of your site, but it also makes it much easier for visitors to find and share your content, and stay on your site longer.
7. Stick to three levels of navigation
While structure is good, too much structure could hurt your ecommerce SEO. Ecommerce sites should not be more than three levels deep for site navigation. Any more than that and you will lose sales from poor navigation.
This goes for both your products and your blog. The deeper you ask a site visitor to navigate, the higher the likelihood that they never return from the depths. Keep simplicity in mind as you design and manage your ecommerce site and menus.
8. Keep URLS simple
Following the concept of keeping the number of levels on your site low for complexity, you should keep your URLs simple as well.
Make URLs readable with a glance. For example: mydomain.com/product-name not: mydomain.com/category/layer1/layer2/product-name and certainly not a string of random numbers and letters.
9. Include keywords in your URLs
One last tip: don’t forget that keywords still apply when considering URLs. As you can see from the graph below, keyword appearance in a URL greatly impacts your ranking.
10. Earn backlinks through authoritative content
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall, will it make a sound? No one knows for certain, but you know what is certain? If a site is on the internet and no other sites with authority link to it, it will never make a sound—especially not the sound of a cash register ringing.
This is an important concept to consider for your ecommerce marketing strategy. Backlinks are foundational for any site on the web and have long been known as an important ranking signal in Google.
The first and foremost way to earn backlinks is to create high-quality content and thought leadership pieces.
Another way to establish your authority online is through influencer marketing. It not only lends credibility to your story, but it also broadens your reach and creates better ROI.
Bigelow Tea enlisted the support of influencers to help boost their blog traffic and online sales.
Through the help of one influencer campaign, they saw 32,000 blog engagements and an 18.5% increase in sales.
Learn more about how to find influencers in your ecommerce niche.
11. Switch to HTTPS
Back in 2014, Google announced that they were using HTTPS as a ranking signal. This sent some shockwaves through the web development community. It had site owners and developers up in arms because it means that if your hosting platform isn’t secured with a valid SSL certificate, you’ll be penalized in Google’s results.
As if that wasn’t enough, Chrome now warns users that sites are insecure if they don’t use the HTTPS protocol for sites that request sensitive input data like passwords or credit cards.
Google recently announced they will be warning customers about every site still on HTTP. That site warning is a huge red flag to potential customers and could really lower your conversion rates.
Currently about 50% of the top 10,000 websites are using HTTPS.
E-commerce retailers should already be using SSL on their sites for security reasons and to give potential customers the security that they are working with a safe site and responsible site owner.
Most major shopping carts like Shopify and Bigcommerce now offer free SSL certificates with all of their plans, but if you’re self-hosted, you may need to set this up yourself.
Many hosting services like Kinsta integrate directly with Let’s Encrypt which provides encryption for free. Otherwise, contact your hosting company for specific instructions.
12. Make your site faster than fast
Site performance is a critical measurement area for any site’s SEO.
Harry Shum, head of AI at Microsoft says this: “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web.”
If your page load speeds are slow, potential customers will abandon your site before they ever see your products or services. Why risk it? Sites need to convert to survive.
Recently, Google just announced that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking consideration for mobile searches.
It should come as no surprise. The benefits for mobile far outweigh the investment, in the form of a better user experience that will convert to higher conversions and sales.
It’s easy to start testing for site speed, and you can’t afford not to. Use a free tool like Page Speed Insights to test your mobile performance, and then do the same for your web pages.
Sites like Shopify live and die by site speed metrics—and it’s paying off. Shopify Pay has an uptime of 99.8% and offers a 40% faster checkout than its competitors. That translates into an 18% increase in sales.
Get fast, test often and stay fast.
Good ecommerce SEO is not optional
The effort you make with SEO to improve your e-commerce site can pay off with higher sales and greater discoverability of your products, brands, and service. If your competitors are ranking higher than you are in Google search, it is because they are doing more of the seven tactics described in this article.
You want an edge. The retail giants are not going to make this easy on you or their other competitors. It will require an investment of time and energy to improve your ranking.
There is still a significant slice of the pie in retail available to online retailers that take the time to research keywords, produce engaging and helpful content, and optimize their site for form and function. Give your customers a reason to keep coming back for more.
Meet The Author
Brad Smith
Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, long-form content creators for SaaS companies. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, TheNextWeb, Shopify, Moz, Unbounce, HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, and more.
See other posts by Brad Smith
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