Home / eCommerce SEO: What Is It, And How Do You Make A Successful Strategy?
SEO is important no matter what type of website you have, and eCommerce stores are no exception. Gaining traction online can be difficult and with a multitude of channels at your fingertips, it can be tricky to decide where to begin. eCommerce SEO is always a great starting point as it’s ongoing, long-term and offers growth opportunities not always available to other options like paid or social channels.
Organic traffic is a pillar of any successful marketing strategy and is a great way to ensure long-term and effective growth without relying on sometimes expensive practices, such as advertising.
eCommerce SEO is pretty similar to normal SEO but focuses primarily on online stores. You are looking to improve the positioning of your pages on the search engine result pages (SERPs) to get your product in front of as many people as possible.
It relies heavily on optimising your website for a series of search terms that are identified in the keyword research phase. Ensuring your website meets the requirements to rank for these keywords is vital and involves many tasks, such as content writing, technical SEO and on-page tasks like metadata.
It’s not just about what the user or crawlers can see though, as eCommerce SEO also covers other aspects such as page speed, E.E.A.T signals and more. These factors all combine with your content to create an authoritative site that Google and other search engines want to rank highly.
Often people employ an eCommerce SEO agency when they are struggling to understand, plan and execute a successful eCommerce SEO strategy.
You may have read a bunch of content this year around shocking eCommerce SEO stats that have made you realise it’s time to improve your strategy.
There are many benefits to eCommerce SEO, and while they may not be felt instantly, your efforts will pay off over time.
The main benefits include:
These benefits will help drive organic traffic to your site that you can then convert into sales and, hopefully, long-term, loyal customers.
According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and if that’s not enough for you to consider your SEO strategy, we don’t know what is!
This is where it can get a bit daunting, especially if you’re an established store with a lot of products and ranges to think about. But the good news is, no matter where you are in your journey, the first step to creating an effective eCommerce SEO strategy is always the same.
That first step is identifying your primary focus for the campaign. This focus can be based on anything from markup on products to popular products, new ranges and more, but it will be up to you to decide this.
When creating your eCommerce SEO strategy, there are six main steps (excluding the one above) that you want to factor in:
Speaking from our experience, we are confident that the above steps will give you the building blocks you need to start driving more organic traffic to your site.
A core part of your strategy has to be keyword research. At Brave Agency, we have worked with a number of eCommerce clients that all have vastly different products and services on offer, but the strategy always begins with keyword research.
Identifying a range of terms you can target that relate to your product, your niche and your industry is vital in terms of driving a successful SEO strategy. When doing keyword research, it’s key that you don’t focus purely on your products, but on the long-tail keywords that may have a different intent. There are three main keyword intents that you will want to focus on and these are informational, commercial and transactional.
Informational keywords tend to be higher up the marketing funnel but drive traffic well, as they are often questions or relate to information about products that a user will need or want to know. An example could be ‘Do I need running shoes’. They are at the start of their potential customer journey and are undecided on whether they need shoes at all. This provides you with a good opportunity to create a detailed blog on the topic. Being able to rank for terms like this not only gets you in front of potential customers at the start of their journey but also helps you build trust from an early stage.
Commercial keywords are similar to transactional ones, in the sense that people are further down the funnel. They are at the stage where they either want to buy or want to shop around for the best deals. Commercial keywords are ones where the user has a clear interest in a type of product and is now looking for different brands or sellers of these products.
Finally, transactional keywords are when a user has fully decided they are ready to buy and are now looking for a specific product or service based on their previous research.
Incorporating an effective keyword strategy is vital in order to succeed with eCommerce SEO and without it, you could potentially be missing out on massive organic gains and brand awareness.
This is a simple concept but revolves around making your online store as user-friendly as possible in terms of navigating to the key areas. What use is there in having a detailed blog section with all your knowledge and expertise being shared, if no one can find it? Are your key products and services visible across the site and in the right categories that make sense to a user? These are the things you need to consider when evaluating your site structure.
Think of it in simple terms. If you sell running shoes, but also other running equipment, you want to ensure people can get to each of these product categories easily. You wouldn’t want to have your running shoes under ‘Running Accessories’ when the shoes are the key component to running. Having them in their own category, broken down into brands, colours, and styles makes more sense, and will help your users find what they want.
Technical SEO is not specific to just eCommerce websites, but instead something most sites need to consider optimising. It is the side of the site your visitors will not see, but it plays a key role in ensuring they find what they want, in enough time to convert.
Some of the main areas to consider when doing eCommerce technical SEO are as follows:
There’s much more to technical SEO for an eCommerce store than just the above, and here are five of our top tips for making your website easier to use.
Without technical SEO for eCommerce, your site may never reach the potential it could have, and that will likely mean a loss of sales and revenue in comparison to what you could be getting.
A core part of eCommerce SEO strategy and work revolves around on-page SEO and the optimisation of what search engines like Google and Bing are crawling. If this work isn’t done correctly, the likelihood of you ranking well is going to be so low that you will struggle with organic traffic across your entire site.
The key things to consider when doing on-page SEO for eCommerce are:
These are what you see when you search for any term on a search engine. The title tag is the main part of the search result and is what often encourages people to click through. It is also a main ranking factor for many search engines and is also one of the easiest parts of SEO to get right (provided you did your keyword research correctly).
Below is an example taken from our homepage, and it shows how we structured our title tag.
From this, it is clear to the searcher that we are an eCommerce growth specialist and a digital agency, along with our name. This is an example of a title tag that ticks all the boxes.
We have worked with many businesses across multiple industries where we have been able to implement proper title tags and that alone has resulted in vast improvements in their rankings.
While they’re not a ranking factor, meta descriptions are key to encouraging users to click through to your page – and for searchers who may not have heard of you before, that first click is key. You need to convince the user to click through to you over a competitor, as it is very rare nowadays that you will have no competition in the SERPs.
Our meta description for the same page as the one above is as follows:
As you can see, it makes it clear what we offer as an agency, highlighting our expertise in the competitive industry.
Having user-friendly URLs that follow a proper structure is not only good for crawlers but also for users on the site. Think carefully about how you structure your URLs to avoid unnecessarily long ones that look a bit more spammy.
For example, we wouldn’t want to have a long-winded URL for this blog like ‘https://brave.agency/knowledge-insights/ecommerce-seo-what-is-it-and-how-do-you-make-a-successful-strategy/’ when you could have what we went with in the end to make it less convoluted.
Content could be its own blog entirely, and we do have multiple articles covering this topic. When it comes to optimising your content for SEO, there are going to be three primary focuses to start with, and these are:
The content marketing funnel is still relevant today despite the customer journey becoming less of a funnel and the steps from interest to purchase are changing, so you need to be sure you are reaching your potential customers at every stage. The best and realistically only way to do this is via your content.
Working out a content strategy that suits your brand can be hard, but is not impossible. As mentioned above, start with the below points and go from there.
A fairly obvious one here, but optimising your product page content is a must. Having very short and non-descriptive product text has led to the downfall of many an eCommerce site, especially those selling products from other brands. You need to ensure your page is descriptive enough to engage the user, while also being unique enough and optimised that search engines think it is worth ranking.
There are many steps to this but having dedicated FAQs to answer common questions, a video showcasing the product, reviews from customers that highlight the pros of the product and then adding in internal links to related products or content can help you jump up the rankings.
This is especially important for those eCommerce stores that sell a lot of products that fall under one or multiple umbrella category pages. If you are an eCommerce store like this, then you may have certain products or ranges that you want to focus on, but they in turn fall under a wider category. An example of this could be a furniture company selling furniture by room or colour.
At Brave Agency, we have worked with multiple stores like this and, with a dedicated content plan as part of the overall eCommerce SEO strategy, have helped them rise up the rankings and drive organic traffic and sales. One such client has seen a 22% increase in organic revenue by optimising for organic search visibility, and fine-tuning content on their category pages for optimal conversion rates.
Examples of what makes good category page content include:
Plenty of internal links to related content or categories
Optimisation around keywords and long-tail terms people might search for
FAQs to answer common questions
General informative and helpful content that search engines are looking for
This can be a leading driver for organic traffic for any website, provided it is done correctly. While a lot of the time this content is used to engage with people higher up the funnel, it plays a big role in getting your brand in front of as many consumers as possible throughout their journey to purchasing. There is no one perfect solution to this, and it can come in many formats such as blogs, guides, FAQs, videos and more.
While this side of content production can seem quite daunting and overwhelming, so long as you have a comprehensive list of keywords from your research, you should have a lot of areas to cover for this.
There are many questions such as how much blog content is too much or how do you check the performance of the content you are producing, and these are important things to consider. But if you don’t feel comfortable researching, writing, publishing, monitoring and editing content yourselves, then there’s no harm in getting support from a dedicated eCommerce content marketing team that has experience writing for many industries.
SEO and CRO should go hand in hand, and it’s becoming more clear that a lot of businesses are not considering this when they make their strategies. It feels amazing driving a lot of traffic to your pages, but ultimately, if they aren’t converting then your efforts are essentially fruitless.
The content that you are producing needs to be optimised for search, but also for the user. Over the past couple of years, Google has put out multiple helpful content updates that are designed to provide a user with content that fits their intent and has the answer, products and information they need, rather than content purely optimised for search engines.
There is a fine balance to be had here, and it doesn’t just come down to the content you are producing, but also the pages that content is on. If the page is unappealing, has a poor layout or is just difficult to navigate, then the chances are people are going to bounce. If this happens, you will start to see your rankings fall, and all of that time and effort you put into this content has gone to waste.
Considering your user experience and content at the same time can elevate your efforts from good to great.
We’ve covered a lot in this article, and you might have been thinking to yourself throughout just how you do any of this. Well, thankfully, there are multiple tools and resources that are designed to help businesses like yours. In no particular order, here are some of our favourites to get you started.
A comprehensive tool that has everything from keyword planning to rank tracking and competitor analysis. SEMrush is a great tool to help you along every step of your eCommerce SEO plan, but it can be daunting and expensive. If you have never used a tool like this before then it is easy to become overwhelmed with the options available to you, and sometimes, you can even miss out on great tools that you never knew about. They even have their own guide to eCommerce SEO, albeit a basic one.
A tool similar to SEMrush in many ways with many of the same tools available but also at a similar cost. While lacking in some areas compared to SEMrush, Ahrefs still has the capability to do keyword research, content planning, competitor research and technical SEO health checks on your website.
Everyone should have heard about this tool by now and while AI is a topic that is widely debated in SEO and marketing as a whole, it does have its uses. Whether it’s helping with writing detailed metadata, helping you plan content strategies based on your criteria or even helping you with the writing of articles (if used correctly), it’s one that’s worth checking out.
Getting all of these tools can add a hefty price tag to your monthly expenditure, and that’s not always needed if you don’t know how to use them correctly. Luckily, an eCommerce growth agency like Brave has access to all of these and more, meaning you don’t have to worry about it.
eCommerce SEO is an ongoing and ever-changing area within the wider digital marketing sphere. Whether it’s changes within your industry, an update from Google or a shift in user behaviours, staying on top of this can be hard, and you are never really ‘done’ with your work.
Once one strategy comes to an end, a new one will begin, and you’ll often find you have to adjust strategies throughout their duration to account for these shifts.
Our advice to you is to keep content helpful, fresh and as unique as possible, maintain and improve your site’s technical health and monitor your competitors and users to stay ahead of the curve. If this is something you need help with or want to chat with experts on the matter, as a well-established eCommerce digital marketing agency, we can provide you with the guidance to go beyond.
Please select all of the services that are relevant.
Our website projects start at a minimum of £35k and typically range all the way to £150k depending on scope and functionality. Now we’ve been upfront with how much a project can cost hopefully you can be with your budget…