Ecommerce SEO Guide: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic in 2022

Ecommerce SEO Guide: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic in 2022

If you want to get more traffic and sales to your ecommerce website, then on-page SEO is a critical first step.

There’s a multitude of how-to articles and tutorials on the web offering general SEO advice, but far fewer that specifically address the needs of ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Today, we’d like to give you a basic understanding of on-site search engine optimization for ecommerce. It will be enough to get you started, make sure you’re sending all the right signals to Google, and set you up for SEO success.

Let’s dive in.

What is Ecommerce SEO? Definition

Ecommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When people search for products that you sell, you want to rank as highly as possible so you get more traffic.

You can get traffic from paid search, but SEO costs much less. Plus, ad blockers and ad blindness can reduce the effectiveness of paid search, so you’ll want to optimize for search regardless.

Ecommerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, meta data, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience. Each product you sell should have a dedicated page designed to draw traffic from search engines.

However, you don’t want to forget about static, non-product-oriented pages on your site, such as the following:

Homepage
About page
F.A.Q. page
Blog articles
Help center answers
Contact page

If you only optimize your website for people, you do your company a disservice. SEO for ecommerce addresses the first hurdle to acquiring new customers: getting people to your site.

How to Develop an Ecommerce SEO Strategy
Ecommerce SEO might seem like a huge task, especially if you already have a website populated with tons of products. Yes, it might take time, but you can speed up the process with a solid strategy.

Analyze the Keyword Search Volume, CPC, and User Intent

Before you use a keyword, do some research on it. Know how often people search for it (keyword search volume), how competitive it is in the paid advertising space (cost-per-click, or CPC), and what people are looking for when they use that keyword.

Key Tactics to Include in Your Ecommerce SEO Strategy
Since this is a 9,000-word beast, you’ll probably want to take it one section at a time. To help you navigate, here are the topics we’ll be covering.

The best ecommerce SEO strategy includes:

Keyword research to find the types of keywords customers are searching.
Site architecture based on your keyword research.
On-Page SEO through strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content.
Technical SEO to help ensure search engines can crawl your site efficiently.
Local SEO to help drive local organic traffic (if you have a brick and mortar).
Content marketing to drive additional organic visitors.
Link Building to help improve the authority of your website.
Measuring SEO Success with tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.
Let’s get started!

What is SEO and Why Should You Care?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the scientific art of optimizing your website around specific keywords in order to rank higher in search results, such as Google.

I say scientific art because, while a lot is known about the technical aspects of SEO, there is a creative user-experience and design side to it as well.

Internal links serve two main purposes:

Boosting ecommerce SEO by showing how pages are related to one another
Increasing time on site by encouraging visitors to further explore your site

Linking to related products or to information-rich blog articles can help improve ecommerce SEO and make your site more tempting for deep dives.

Optimize Product Pages
Product pages are the lifeblood of your business, so you will want to focus a lot of your energy on optimizing them. Many ecommerce store owners simply write a few lines of text about each product and throw up an image or video.

You need more information on your product pages so Google can find them. Here are the specific things you want to work on.

Product Name
The name of your product is important. In most cases, it’s also used in the SEO title and URL of your product page. This is why you may want to consider adding a common search term or keyword phrase to your products.

For example, if you are selling T-shirts, be sure to include “T-shirt” or “tee” in the product name. That way, the keyword also ends up in the SEO title and URL.