11 Ecommerce SEO Tips for Your Store

In a world where PLA's (Product Listing Ads) are becoming more expensive by the day, SEO is one of the best opportunities for combatting the rising prices in your paid acquisition efforts.

Generating organic traffic to your product and category pages is critical because it allows you to rely less on paid channels. Let's dive into 11 ecommerce SEO best practices and tips that will help you grow your traffic and sales.

1. Website structure is key

Having a properly structured website can be the difference between not only you ranking on the SERPs (search engine results pages), but also increase the chance of a purchase. There are a lot of opportunities to improve your website structure, but let's start with breadcrumb navigation and clean URLs.

There are two parts to website structure that can impact your ecommerce store immediately. The first being breadcrumb navigation.Breadcrumb navigation is a form of site navigation that shows users where they are within the hierarchy of a site without having to check the URL. Shopify has a quick guide on how to do this on your store.  Breadcrumb navigation helps with site mapping and the organization of your site structure, as well as onsite click through rates for shoppers visiting your store. Here's an example of breadcrumb navigation is shown below by Dormify: 

Second website structure optimization would be clean URLs. What is a clean URL? Simply put, it's a readable URL slug for visitors. Clean URLs are intended for both your visitors and Google to improve usability and accessibility by being intuitive and meaningful. 

Here is what a messy URL looks like:

https://www.privy.com/index.php?page=blog

Here is what a clean URL looks like:

https://www.privy.com/blog

2. Research ecommerce keywords

Now your technical website structuring is complete. Congrats! Let's dive into another less “technical” process that is equally important. In-depth keyword research.

Starting with a strong keyword foundation can make or break your SEO efforts, and could save you a lot of time if done properly from the start. This phase of your ecommerce SEO is critical because it will impact all optimizations moving forward. So with that, lets take a breath and move into it. 

A tool like Google Keyword Planner will allow you to find your base keyword information. You can collect average monthly search volume, average CPC's, and the competition of that keyword in the world of SEM. This is a great tool to kickstart your keyword research efforts.

Now let's discuss what to look for. We want keywords that have a high volume of search per month but are also high intent keywords. Keywords that can lead to customers. When checking through keywords, be sure to actually Google them. See if you have an opportunity to rank for them. If you are competing against big name companies, it is worth looking for longer-tail keywords to compete for.  

3. Optimize product pages

Simply copying and pasting product descriptions from competitors or manufacturers isn't enough. Product descriptions and product pages are truly a vital part to your success. Take advantage of and optimize every area, including H1's, Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions.

Make your product descriptions stand out in a creative and unique ways by

4. Avoid duplicate content

When running an ecommerce store it can be difficult not to duplicate content. When you have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of products it can become increasingly difficult to differentiate product descriptions and variations. Which can potentially be detrimental to your search rankings. 

So what can you do? To minimize this content having a negative effect on ranking, either add a canonical tag or a 301 redirect for pages to ensure search engines understand which pages may have identical or similar content.

Image Source; Shopify

5. Consider the mobile experience

Adobe Analysts reported that just over a third of Black Friday sales were made on mobile devices, proving that mobile first isn't just for Google and SEO. Optimizing your site for mobile first is a must now. 

As ecommerce store owners we need to be looking at:

Pro tip: When creating your mobile first ecommerce site, ensure you are also utilizing Privy for mobile and desktop. Read up on Google's mobile pop up penalty.

6. Add sitemap.xml to search console

Even though many popular ecommerce platforms automatically generate your sitemap.xml it's still important to add your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console. Why do you need to do this? Your sitemap.xml is a list of all the important pages of your ecommerce site making sure Google can find and crawl them all.

This sounds complicated, how do I do this? (Trust us, it's not.) Shopify has a thorough walk through on how to do this.

7. Optimize category pages

Category pages are equally as important as product pages and follow a lot of the same principles—unique and creative content focused around onsite SEO best practices. Here are a few quick wins that you can take away for your category pages:

8. Avoid broken links

This may seem like an easy one, but it's important. We have all experienced the dreaded “Page 404 Not Found.” It's a bad user experience for everyone, including Google.  As you grow, checking your site for 404's should become routine maintenance. There are a plethora of tools available to find and fix them quickly on your site. Remember, if an internal page is 404 you can always 301 redirect the original URL to the new page. Bottom line, fix 404's and everyone wins.

9. Maximize website speed

This is a massively popular topic that can create an immediate impact on your ecommerce store and visitor experience. I would recommend utilizing tools like, Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to uncover your page speed followed by what could be slowing down your website. 

The best part about both of these tools is that they provide insightful action items that can be fixed immediately. Keep in mind, some issues will be more difficult to solve than others (and will require a whole other blog post on how to fix each of them).

10. Keep your store secure with HTTPS

It's shocking to still see stores without HTTPS in 2019. However, it isn't too late to get your store secure. Here's why it is extremely important. 

As a store owner you are collecting personal details from customers. It's best practice to ensure that all information collected is encrypted. All information.

In case you needed another reason to do this, Google declared HTTPS as a ranking factor for sites. So Google will reward you as well. 

Luckily most ecommerce platforms offer SSL standard on their platform or, make it easily available to purchase.

11. Write more content

Every ecommerce store should start creating content. Whether that be written, video, or, audio—content is king. The frequency of your content is up to you. However, Hubspot did release a study showcasing some quantitative research on the matter.

Below are a few best practices when starting to think about written content.

Overall content can become your best friend in ecommerce, so treat it as such. Even when developing the highest quality content be sure to follow best practices for onsite SEO.   

Ecommerce SEO tips conclusion

Organic traffic has never been easy. And it is especially difficult for ecommerce.

Does that mean it's impossible? No. 

With these eleven ecommerce SEO tips you can take action now and get on your way to improving your marketing funnel and starting your organic growth.

One thing to keep in mind when thinking about SEO is that it takes time. Unlike your PPC campaigns, SEO may take months before you see any results. Be patient. PPC and SEO will be a constant balance for your business as you move forward.