What are the Fundamentals of E-Commerce SEO?

ecommerce seo fundamentals

We wrote this article for anyone interested in learning more about e-commerce SEO and how it can increase traffic to your website. Start with the basics of SEO and move on to optimizing your e-commerce product page to increase conversion rates. In the process, we’ll cover important details such as website maps and navigation features to help customers quickly find what they need.

Ranking at the top of search engines is a top priority for e-commerce websites. You can top SERP with paid search, but the long-term cost of staying there may not be sustainable. You need the first place, and e-commerce SEO can help you achieve that.

This step-by-step e-commerce SEO guide explains everything you need to know about e-commerce website SEO strategies and provides tips and strategies for effectively optimizing your website.

What is the Importance of SEO in Ecommerce?

Given that 44% of people started their online shopping journey on Google Search and the number one result on Google earned 31.7% of all clicks, you can very well understand how important it is to rank better on search engines.

The benefits of e-commerce SEO range from increased traffic and sales to increasing brand awareness and engaging with previous website visitors who didn’t buy (remarketing campaigns).

When we asked experts about the channels that gave the best results on e-commerce sites, 42%  said they were SEO. why? SEO requires upfront investment and long-term efforts, but when done properly, it promotes a sustainable flow of traffic.

In other words, you don’t have to keep spending money to see results like PPC and paid social media campaigns. SEO increases organic search traffic and helps e-commerce websites rank high in search engines. We need optimized websites and product pages because so many users use Google to investigate their purchase decisions both at home and on the go.

Keyword Research 

Head keywords (sometimes called ‘head terms’) are keywords that receive high levels of organic traffic from search engines (i.e., a high search volume). Your head keywords may include “black leggings,” “women’s leggings,” and “leggings,” for instance, if you sell women’s leggings.

You can identify the main keywords for your product using various keyword tools such as the Google keyword planner, the Moz keyword explorer, and the Ahrefs keyword generator. In addition, you can perform a search for common business-related terms. If you type in “leggings” in the search engine, you will see a great list of keywords. In the image below, you can see the results. 

Make your On-Page SEO Effective by using Keywords

First, you need to optimize your SEO on your website’s pages. Selecting the main keyword, along with two to four LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords, is a very important part of optimizing content. 

  • Use your target keyword logically every 100 words or so
  • Use the LSI keyword at least once every 500 words
  • Use  primary keywords in headings, subheadings, titles, meta descriptions, and URLs
  • Write at least 500 words of content on each web page
  • Write short paragraphs of no more than 75 words
  • Split content by images, charts, infographics, and videos

If you’re using WordPress, you can use free plugins like RankMath and YoastSEO to simplify the  SEO process on your page.

Competitors’ Analysis 

You can beat your competitors if you understand them. Find out who your closest competitors are and identify where your weaknesses lie. Here are five easy steps you can follow:

  • List all your competitors and their products
  • Reduce the list to 3-5 of the closest competitors (in terms of target audience and product/service delivery)
  • Check out their website using SEO tools
  • Indicate areas for improvement (i.e., slow loading times, poor images, no internal links)
  • Identify your competitor’s top keywords, top traffic sources, and top backlinks (that is, links from other sites to your competitor’s site).

Once you have this information, use it to focus your e-commerce SEO strategy on the weakest areas of your competitors.

Develop Buyer Personas

Start with the buyer’s persona. Audience data describes a customer through basic information such as age and gender, while the buyer persona outlines the ideal customer’s personality, values, and needs. Basically, the buyer’s persona answers the question, “What do  customers want and why?”

Creating a Buyer Persona helps you understand what motivates your audience on your website. This understanding will guide you to the keywords you choose for your e-commerce SEO strategy. To create a buyer persona, you need to collect customer data through market research, analyze that data, and create a persona.

Summary

The fundamentals of SEO for ecommerce stores are the same as for any other type of website. You have to find and target the most relevant keywords, use them wisely in your Metas and product descriptions, and earn quality backlinks for your store. Tools like the Magento 2 ultimate SEO optimize can help you reduce your SEO efforts by automatically generating Metas, sitemaps, alt & canonical tags, etc. for your Magento ecommerce store.