5 eCommerce SEO Best Practices to Be an Organic Traffic Magnet

For any eCommerce business, nothing matches the joy of drawing traffic to their websites without risking money on paid advertising.

Growing traffic on an eCommerce website organically is a scalable and cost-effective way to get the word out about your brand and skyrocket sales.

That said, boosting organic traffic hinges on a site's ability to rank higher on search results. The likelihood of drawing customers to an eCommerce website is slim to none if it cannot make it on SERP.

So what gets an eCommerce business discovered in search? It’s eCommerce search engine optimization.

In this article, we’ll take you through five eCommerce SEO best practices that you must implement immediately to get more traffic (and sales) from a search.

What Is eCommerce SEO?

eCommerce SEO is an umbrella term for various optimizations performed on an eCommerce website so that it pops up more often and higher on the SERP.

The goal of ranking better is to help Google show your products whenever the shoppers search for the keywords relevant to you.

Unlike PPC ads, you can begin SEO with upfront efforts and no monetary investment. But, scaling a SEO strategy to a meaningful level is going to take some investment in SEO tools and SEO companies. But once you rank, you no longer have to spend on making your target audience see it.

Of course, to ensure that your ranking remains intact, you’ll have to optimize your website regularly to keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithms.

But remember this — SEO does help to attract high-buying intent traffic, but to improve conversions, creating an amazing shopping experience requires as much attention, if not more.

On that note, let’s now check out five key best practices to improve eCommerce SEO.

eCommerce SEO Best Practices Checklist

Keyword-Optimize Your Product and Category Pages

Strategic keywords are deemed the primary SEO strategy for 71% of the marketers. Keywords are like the backbone of SEO. Planting them right helps search engine spiders understand product pages and guides shoppers to what they are looking for, which is why it needs a strategy of its own.
Conduct keyword research and find the keywords your target audience uses to search for products.
It’s essential to target relevant long-tail keywords tailored around product searches. You want to make sure to target keywords that are:

• Easy to rank
• More specific
• Less competitive
• Decent search volume
• High-purchase-intent

Some effective tactics to dig through the best possible keywords to use on each of your pages:

• Deploy Keyword research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Google keyword planner, etc.
• Head to Amazon for high-buyer intent keywords - enter one of your keywords, and find the list of suggestions around those keywords.
• Competitor research- type your keywords in Google, go through competitor’s sites, and scan their product and category pages for potential keywords.

Include target keywords in product and category pages

The next thing to do is to optimize pages to rank higher by putting researched keywords in the following locations:

• URL
• Page title tag (H1)
• Product description
• Image alt text
• Meta description

Set up an SEO and User-Friendly Ecommerce Website Architecture

Website architecture is about erecting the product, category, and navigation pages hierarchy for search crawlers and users to navigate the pages smoothly.

Here's what a good website architecture for eCommerce looks like:

• All major category pages and some best product pages are internally linked to the home page so that they receive concentrated home page link authority and have a better chance of getting searched by search engines.
• Simple and flat architecture that enhances search engines’ understanding of site structure. It helps crawlers find the most number of web pages on a website and delivers a frictionless navigating experience to shoppers as they find the products they want.

Scalable for adding new categories like a breeze without reorganizing the existing categories and subcategories.

Every page is four or fewer clicks away from the homepage.

Consistently Publish Content That Adds Value to Consumers

Many of your potential buyers are looking for information to bolster their buying decisions about which specific product to buy. Riding on this wave, blog posts and videos with meaty content have emerged as powerful traffic-boosting methods.

If you want to add value to online shoppers and draw and engage readers to your eCommerce store, then it’s high time to have a well-rounded content strategy with the following types of content.

• Product usage guides & reviews
• How-to & Comparison posts
• Explainer videos
• Best-of listicles
• Essential guides
• Live Q&A broadcasts
• Mission-driven content

You can also leverage content to inform and educate customers about the more salient aspects of your service. For instance, if you utilize air freight express service to deliver products to customers within 1-2 days, have content promoting this on your website.

Run Audits and Fix the Technical SEO Issues

The role of technical SEO in building a successful online store is non-negotiable.

An eCommerce website's sheer number of pages creates ample room for inefficient crawling and indexing, ultimately impacting its search ranking. Technical SEO techniques enhance eCommerce pages' crawl ability and user experience, leading to more traffic and revenue.

Below is the checklist of common technical SEO issues to address with the given fixes and prevent considerable organic traffic loss.

Abundant pages

A typical eCommerce store houses lots of products and their variations. It gives rise to unique URLs for all of them, leading to congestion on your website.

How to mend it:

First, using Google analytics, identify the “deadweight product pages” that aren’t bringing any traffic and contributing to the bottom line. Then, clean them by deleting, non-indexing or combining them into a super page.

Duplicate content

Oftentimes, eCommerce stores use boilerplate product descriptions to build their pages. In such cases, even if the retailers, meta descriptions are different, much of the content copy looks quite similar.

Duplicate content makes it challenging for search engines to determine which version to index. In an attempt to filter duplicate content, it chooses the page with fewer duplicates, causing the other site owner huge traffic losses.

How to mend it:

• Be creative(even while recycling!) and create individualized copy for each unique product page.
• Use canonical tags to signal search engines that certain pages are copies of the same page and shouldn’t be treated as unique.

Site speed

Bloated codes, large-sized images, and slow hosting servers are the most common culprits behind slow eCommerce website performance.


How to mend it:

• Upgrade your web hosting plan.
• Consider investing in content delivery network (CDN) services.
• Compress image file size

Start Building High-Quality Backlinks

The more organic backlinks you have from high-domain authority websites, the better your odds are of boosting rankings in the search results.

A few legitimate link-building opportunities you must seize for greater traffic are:

• Write guest posts
• Use social media ads
• Create and publish infographics
• Write comments on blogs
• Share content on social media

Final Words

eCommerce SEO has long proven its prowess in garnering significant search traffic, improving rankings, and building a loyal audience base.

No doubt optimizing your eCommerce website using the above-mentioned SEO best practices will deliver exponential results. But you will also need consistent focus and ongoing strategy as the two fundamental practices to receive the traffic you expect.

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