E-commerce is a new growing business trend. People are opting more to buy online rather than purchasing physically from the market and that’s what is attracting entrepreneurs to dive in this industry. There are a hell lot of e-commerce businesses emerging but how many of them really taste the success? Very few that you can count them in your fingers. The reason is obvious, Business and marketing strategies. The business strategy needs to be built only by entrepreneurs for marketing, one can build the team or outsource them to the best SEO Company.

Why SEO for Ecommerce business?

SEO is the process of making the business website visible online and to potential customers. Customers who are searching for some product or service are more likely to get converted if their query matches with your service or product.

But, to appear before your competitors are not easy. Here SEO comes in the picture, which enables your website to rank before your competitors or in the first page of Google for a relevant query.

Paid search can also make your website rank in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and fetch traffic to your website but SEO costs nothing. Also, ad blockers and ad blindness reduce the effectiveness of paid search so nothing beats SEO and of course not paid ads.

Here’s the example as if we search for “Men’s shoes online”, we get 10 organic results with few paid ads.

 

SEO for an ecommerce website is to ensure that your particular webpage rank on the first page of Google for a relevant query. Of course, there are more pages, But webpage appear in the first page draws more traffic and more likely to get converted. And higher pages you rank lower traffic you generate.

We go step by step to understand the SEO for ecommerce

• Keyword Research:

No doubt that before we proceed for SEO, Keyword research is the most important step. We must know the potential search terms which users might be using. Keyword Research in case of SEO for Ecommerce is different from general keyword research.

There are different kinds of the result if you are looking for certain information or certain products like

Below is an example of an information search.

 

And here is the example if you search for any product or commercial keywords.

The difference you can see here is obvious. For information content, Google shows blogs and content-rich sites where for product search or commercial keywords, It lists e-commerce sites, taking buying intent of users into consideration.

Google Suggest:

You might have noticed autocomplete feature of Google that when you start typing some word, Google suggest similar queries at the drop down.

Similarly, you also might have seen relevant keywords at the bottom of the Google SERP.

These can be taken into consideration since these keywords are relevant keywords used by the users so must collect all golden keywords from this goldmine if you have a primary keyword.

Similarly, we can look for keywords in Amazon. The best thing about Amazon is that they are product focused, unlike Google. So if we are focusing on e-commerce, we can definitely take the help of Amazon also.

Here it shows the related keywords and categories too.

Long tail keywords that are a combination of 3-4 words are better to target as they are specific and more likely to get converted and with low competition.

Apart from these basic keyword findings, you can also use SEMRUSH, it’s the paid tool and perfect for finding the keywords for which the competitors are getting ranked.

What you can find with SEMRUSH and other useful tools

1. 1. Volume:

      Relevant and high search volume keywords drive more relevant traffic to your website. Moreover, you can also use several other tools to get high search volume keywords like Google keyword planner, Keywordseverywhere, KWfinder, etc. But high search volume keywords mean high competition too.

   2. Competitions: With lower competition keywords, you are more likely to rank better. SEMRUSH can be used to see the competition or keyword difficulty. Where you can also check the competition of keywords with Tools like keywords everywhere, Moz, KWfinder, etc.

So, we must check for high search volume and low competition keywords.

• Relevant keywords:  

Choose the keywords relevant to your product page and service page. You cannot fool Google bot. You got to stick to your relevant keywords/search term and work towards ranking them better.

• Intent:

You must target the keywords which show the intent like

“USPA t-shirts extra large”

Or

“Trending t-shirts of 2019”

We can obviously see that the former one has more buying intent than later. So choosing these kinds of keywords are more likely to get converted.

• Site Structure of E-commerce:

Better site structure is also vital for an E-commerce site. It’s important for user experience as well. It makes a difference if your pages are well placed and have user-friendly navigation. Basic and advanced filter settings according to user’s requirement are one of the major things that users look for.

As products and categories are added and removed, site structure gets complicated. So make it simple and organized right from the beginning to avoid the complication.

• Site structure must be simple and easy to scale as it grows.
• Every product and page is easily navigated from the home page.

No user would want to go back home page every time they would like to look for a new product. So every page should be well structured and accessible all other pages to make it user-friendly. We don’t want our user to get frustrated while navigation or searching for any product. We must give the best to the user to make them involved with us.

We must look for demand and supply principle to identify which product, category, the webpage is more in demand and need to be indexed and optimized to satisfy the actual user demand.

Indexing is the process where the search engine adds the category and webpage according to its keyword in its database and fetch it to the user when searched with a similar query in search engine.

Not everyone is necessary to be indexed and optimized but it’s important to figure out which webpage needs indexing.

• On Page SEO for Ecommerce

After Keyword research and good site structure, we are going to optimize the high-value webpages

• Category webpages
• Product Pages

SEO features that need to be optimized for pages you want to get indexed are:

• Stuff your primary keyword in the title.
• Include Primary keyword in Meta description.
• Every Image alt text must be present.
• URLs must have primary or secondary keywords too
• Robots.txt and sitemap.xml must be present.
• Social media must be connected.
• Canonical tags- use a canonical tag to prevent duplicate or identical content through multiple URLs. Canonical tags are the way of telling the search engine which version of URL to be showed or ranked by the search engine or appear on SERP.

e.g: <link rel= “canonical” href= https://storename.com/women-accessories-watches>

Optimizing Title and Meta description serves 2 purposes like one are for ranking in search engine and next to tell or attract the user about the webpage, what it is about.

Words like “Sale”, X%Off”, “season sale”, “free shipping” can attract users and boost traffic the page.  High traffic is definitely a major factor for boosting the rank in SERP.

Choose Right URLs for your webpages:

• According to Moz, there are few URLs guidelines need to be followed to make it SEO friendly and fetch the traffic.
• URLs must be easy to read and interpret by users as Google value easy accessibility to the users.
• Use keywords in URLs to help it in the ranking.
• Short URLs are better than the long one.
• Page Title, Meta description, and URLs must have some or similar keywords.
• Too much keyword stuffing and repetition look spammy for Google. Better to avoid these kinds of trick.
• Must not include “and”, “of”, “the” and “a”.

Above guidelines must be followed while doing SEO for Ecommerce site.

1. Must avoid thin content with a long product description.

Search engines value only rich content, the Search engine goes through the entire content of the webpage and decides for which keyword the webpage must be indexed. So if your webpage has thin content, the search engine has no way to go through the page.

So you usually see a detail description for every product in the product pages and multiple added reviews also add to that.

So the extra info and long content in the form of product description or reviews benefit you in both the ways, search engine crawling and more information for the user and user will get more involved about the product.

• LSI Keywords:

LSI Keywords, Latent Semantic Indexing keywords that can be found in Google SERP, Google keyword planner or Amazon. Those can be similar to your main primary keyword. Use them and take advantage of them while writing the content of the product description and Title of the product. That makes the product page more visible for multiple similar keywords.

You can use those LSI as secondary keywords and use them whenever it makes sense.

Conclusion:

There are definitely more than this while you do SEO for Ecommerce site, Like technical SEO, link building, content writing, blog writing and many more.

But above information can definitely give you the confidence to start your SEO for Ecommerce business on the right path.