SEO Best Practices For eCommerce: How To Streamline Your Optimisation Efforts

Looking for ways to optimise your eCommerce site and improve its SEO performance? Find all the SEO best practices for eCommerce businesses here.

Operating a successful eCommerce venture means attracting as many customers to your website as possible. To do this, you’ll need to optimise your web pages so that they fit all the criteria for appearing on search engine results pages, a process known as search engine optimisation (SEO).

ECommerce websites tend to have a lot more pages than other commercial domains, largely due to the wide range of products and categories on sale. This means it’s all the more vital for eCommerce companies to invest in SEO strategies as they seek to outperform their competitors.

To boost your site’s digital performance, you can secure professional eCommerce SEO services. This will help you avoid optimisation issues like keyword cannibalisation and allow you to create a tailored SEO campaign for eCommerce pages. But equipping yourself with a foundational understanding of SEO best practices for eCommerce is still beneficial, as you can stay well-informed about the strategies being used by your digital marketing agency.

This guide will outline the different SEO strategies and best practices you can implement to boost online traffic to your eCommerce site without depleting your own internal resources. It will cover SEO optimisation strategies regarding content, on-page features, off-page features, and technical foundations.

The Importance of eCommerce SEO

SEO is exceedingly important for anyone with a digital presence, but it’s especially vital for eCommerce sites. Without it, you’ll find your web pages significantly underperforming, lacking in visitors, and sliding down the rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Through simple yet calculated optimisation techniques, you can enhance your outreach and attract more potential buyers to your online store. Once there, on-page content optimisation can increase eCommerce website conversions by turning casual browsers into paying customers. This boosts your profit margins and expands your customer database, driving growth and success for your eCommerce business.

Best SEO Strategies for eCommerce Sites

The following sections will explore the best eCommerce SEO strategies in more detail. They will cover everything from optimising your content and page layout to constructing rigorous backlinks and digital foundations to boost your SERP rankings.

Content Optimisation

Content is vital to SEO – especially for eCommerce websites, where there is generally so much context to be given surrounding products and categories on your store. Thankfully, with a little thoughtful content optimisation, your pages should be able to rank for a variety of related keywords with higher search volume.

Strategies such as inserting relevant keywords, writing SEO-enhanced product listings, and aligning your page content with user search intent can boost your site’s performance on SERPs and attract more online traffic.

Here are some of the best content optimisation strategies for eCommerce sites:

• Include relevant keywords – simple yet effective, adding the right keywords will make your content more relevant and thus, more likely to rank higher in SERPs. Keywords should reflect user intent and relate to each individual product.
• Write descriptive and engaging product descriptions – gone are the days of stuffing adjectives into a product description to rank higher on SERPs, as Google now favours well-written and authentic content. Your product descriptions should reflect this by focusing on the customers and highlighting any USPs.
• Add user-generated content – by including user-generated content, such as reviews and testimonials, you can boost the SEO performance of your site. Search engines value authentic content, and what better way to show authenticity and reliability than by adding genuine user reviews to your product pages?
• Align content with user intent – create product descriptions and page layouts that reflect what your site visitors want. Since your primary aim as an eCommerce site should be to convert visitors to buyers, your keywords should be transactional and your site should be designed in a way that lets users find products easily.

Content optimisation is the one of the most straightforward and high-value SEO strategies you can implement for your eCommerce website. This is because including keywords will naturally position Google to view your website as an authority in its industry or niche.

On-Page Optimisation

Next, we’ll examine the on-page optimisation strategies you can use to further boost your eCommerce SEO and win more customers. On-page optimisation refers to the process of fine-tuning the surface elements of your web pages to boost SEO performance. The following strategies are on-page SEO best practices to help you attract traffic and make your site more appealing to search engines:

• Create seamless site navigation – to maximise your conversions and search engine performance, your site should be easy to navigate. This includes creating a straightforward navigation bar, adding thoughtfully designed landing pages to support digital advertising, and ensuring your product pages are indexed alongside your category pages.
• Invest in user experience – your customers will not buy anything if your site is difficult to navigate, visually cluttered, or slow to load. A poor user experience (UX) will lead to distrust and contempt for your site, which will effectively deter customers and damage your brand reputation. Investing in UX with a clear interface design and quick loading speeds will boost your site’s SEO performance.
• Write SEO-optimised metadata – writing a meta title and meta description for each individual web page gives you a chance to rank higher in SERPs. Include your primary keyword in the metadata to boost your page’s visibility in relevant searches.
• Add internal links – inserting internal links into your product descriptions will improve your site structure and distribute link equity. It will also help your customers navigate more easily and enhance the credibility of your web pages, further boosting your whole site’s SEO performance.
• Create clean URL slugs – don’t over-complicate your URL slugs, just as you wouldn’t overcomplicate your core domain name. Creating simple URL tags for your products will further boost your performance on Google rankings.

On-page optimisation dips into the more technical areas of SEO and is equally important as optimising your content. Seamless navigation, internal links, and SEO-optimised metadata and URLs all facilitate a better UX for the customer, leading to more paying transactions and enhanced brand reputation.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation involves building your reputation and credibility outside of your website. It’s an SEO marketing technique that’s important for eCommerce sites, particularly to raise awareness, attract a wider customer database, and build trust among potential buyers.

Here are some key off-page optimisation strategies for improving eCommerce SEO:

• Build high-authority and highly relevant backlinks – backlinks add credibility and authenticity to your site by telling search engines that your content is trustworthy and authoritative. You can build backlinks in many different ways, including through marketing outreach (i.e. paid backlinks or paid guest posting) or forming professional partnerships with other sites like local blogs that are related to your industry or niche.
• Utilise social media – establishing social media accounts for your eCommerce platform will enhance your brand visibility and referral traffic, helping your business reach a wider audience and bring in more customers as a result. Make sure to include links to your socials on your site to further improve your site’s SEO performance, reputation, and engagement levels.
• Leverage influencer marketing – modern SEO advertising techniques have led to a rise in influencer marketing, where businesses will pay influential people to endorse their brands. Leveraging influencer marketing can generate buzz and backlinks for your eCommerce store, improving your outreach and customer acquisition rates.
• Optimise your Google Shopping product feed – with the development of Google Shopping listings appearing in Google results for commercial intent keywords, eCommerce business owners now have the opportunity for their products and prices to appear directly on Google. This means prospective customers can engage with your products well before they even decide to click through to your site. This preliminary level of engagement may also aid in boosting your site’s conversion rates, as customers who click through are increasingly likely to buy rather than just being curious.

ECommerce sites that implement strong off-page optimisation strategies will boost their SEO and rank higher in SERPs, attracting more customers and boosting profit margins.

Technical Optimisation

Finally, just as UX design is just as much about coding as it is about design, so too does SEO have its own technical components. Technical optimisation techniques involve adjusting the more technical aspects of your site, such as data, code, image tags, and schema markups, to enhance its performance. The following list illustrates some key technical optimisation strategies to enhance your eCommerce site’s SEO:

• Harness programmatic SEO – programmatic SEO involves creating tailored templates and feeding them into automation software to generate SEO-optimised content for your web pages. Harnessing the power of programmatic SEO can save you a lot of time and effort.
• Implement schema markups – schemas give search engines information about the type of content on your site. By implementing strong schema markups, you can make your content more relevant to search queries and let search engines display your site more often. This improves your click-through rates and online traffic.
• Optimise your site for mobile users – a huge part of internet browsing and online shopping occurs on mobile phones. If your eCommerce site isn’t mobile-optimised, your potential customers will simply take their business elsewhere. Improving your site’s mobile responsiveness and layout will improve the user experience and boost your SERP rankings.
• Utilise image optimisation techniques – image optimisation techniques, such as adding alt-text on product images, can support Google’s crawlability and enhance your site’s performance on SERPs. Since Google can’t “see” images like we do, tagging your product photos with text will allow Google to find your images more easily and rank your content higher.

Technical optimisation techniques are highly important for SEO and SERP performance, but many eCommerce sites fail to implement them properly or neglect them entirely. Optimising your site for mobile devices, adding alt-text to your images, and implementing schema markups are all productive methods of enhancing eCommerce SEO.

Final Thoughts

Your eCommerce site needs SEO to be successful. Optimisation techniques regarding content, on-page and off-page elements, and technical aspects are vital for increasing your outreach, online visibility, and SERP rankings. SEO best practices like adding relevant keywords, improving user experience, and building backlinks will drive traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately boost your revenue.