Ecommerce SEO Best Practices: 9 SEO Tips To Drive More Sales

Being an ecommerce business owner, you need to take some SEO steps on your ecommerce site to get more clicks and sales. 

Of course, what’s the point of having a well-designed website and exclusive products if your customers would not be able to find them?

The math is simple here! The higher you rank, the better conversions you can make! 

The primary challenge, however, begins when a consumer accesses your eCommerce website; convincing the visitor to take action and purchase your goods will truly lead to significant sales.

In this blog, you are going to learn about how to rank your ecommerce website and get higher visibility in SERPs to make sure your website gets more clicks. 

So, let’s get started with eCommerce SEO best practices:

Ecommerce SEO Best Practices To Drive More Sales

The first step to getting more sales on your eCommerce site is to rank it higher. It may seem very difficult to do this, but trust me, with the right SEO strategies for eCommerce websites, you can rank your website in just a few months. 

So let’s check out these strategies:

Find Out The Best Keywords

Mean it! Keywords are the foundation of any website. Without targeting keywords, you just cannot think about ranking your site. Right?

The whole game revolves around finding the best keywords for your website. 

Your ultimate focus is to tell Google which page is about what topic you have to rank for. For that, you necessarily don’t need to target many keywords all at once, but you can target 2 or maybe 3 keywords through a page, product, or category. 

Then comes an important question, “How to choose the right keyword as per your niche?”

Below are a few steps that would help you identify the right keywords. They are:

1. Make a list of keywords you already know: Make a list of keywords you think your buyers could search for while looking for your products or services. 

2. Check out your data: Use free SEO tools like Google Search Console to get relevant keywords as per your product, category, or niche.  

3. Get specific with your keywords: You need to get specific with your keywords. Even if you have the best website or the best products anyone could have offered, you cannot simply beat online e-commerce websites like Amazon and rank higher than that. 

That’s not going to happen if you wish to rank for a non-specific keyword such as “dog food.” Therefore, you need to get specific and gather such terms in order to get those users to your site. 

4. Have a balance of search volume and keyword difficulty: If you are targeting a short-tail keyword that has search volume of 3K and KD (keyword difficulty)of 98. Do you think your website would rank for such a competitive keyword? 

On the other hand, if you have a long tail and a specific keyword with a search volume of 200 and KD 20, won’t this keyword give you conversions? Of course it will!

5. Determine your user’s search intent: Search intent is the user’s desire to find a satisfying answer to his queries. 

As an eCommerce user, you can target keywords with purchase intent for your eCommerce website.

Read More: A Complete Guide To Search Intent SEO

Optimize The Product Pages

i. Write Actionable Product Descriptions 

Having an actionable product description is one of the best practices for eCommerce SEO. Your each product pages should have more content than just images, text, price, and title. You must have added a description — and that’s appealing to the audience and search engines as well. 

Start by finding useful information for your user. 

First of all, add attributes that describe customers for your product. List things like:

• Product Features
• Technical specifications
• Visual attributes (height, weight, age ranges, or instructions)

Follow the guidelines below to make sure Google can crawl and understand the data you submit:

If you fail to fulfill the requirements below, Google will disapprove your product page and let you know through your merchant center account.  

1. Describe the product only: In the product description, describe the aspects and elements of the product only. Don’t add anything related to your business history and policies. 

2. Use grammatically correct English: Having correct grammatical English will have an impact on your click-through rate. Avoid using caps, symbols, and other promotional text in your product description to gain the attention of the users. 

3. Don’t use foreign words or characters: Don’t use foreign words because they are difficult to understand by the locals. For instance, you cannot target the word “sashimi” in the United States. 

Some of the foreign characters also lower the rating. You cannot add characters to your description, like, 

4. Avoid using comparison details in your product description: Don’t add anything like “better than the product XYZ.” You better let the consumer do their own research. 

5. Don’t add links to your store or any other websites: You are only supposed to add links to your product landing page with link attributes. 

6. Avoid capitalizing the texts: Capitalization of texts comes under spammy product listings. Google can get you penalized for it. However, you can use capitalization where appropriate like USA, UK, UNICEF, etc.

7. Have a product description for each page: Product pages without product descriptions can get you a warning and experience downtime. Prioritize the other pages with similar products and descriptions. 

8. Be specific & accurate: If you are specific and accurate with your product description, it becomes easier for the customer to find the product he is looking for. 

9. Include the relevant features of the product you are selling: This may include information like, 

• Size
• Material
• Intended age range
• Special features
• Technical specifications
• Shape
• Pattern
• Texture
• Design
• Variants

ii. Optimize Your Images 

We just cannot ignore one of the most important elements of eCommerce SEO best practices, that is,  images. You must understand that, for an eCommerce website, images are what make the users purchase your product.

Of course, the user cannot try the product, he makes a purchase decision on the basis of the image that he sees. Make sure it is an appealing one. 

1. Choose a better quality image in fewer pixels: I would not say, “Choose a high-definition, high-quality image and then slow your website down.” That would ultimately enhance your bounce rate. Choose a fine, good quality image with fewer pixels so it will not slow down your website. 

2. Use descriptive titles, captions, and filenames: Google extracts the information of the images and videos’ subject matters from the captions and alt text. Make sure the images are descriptive and relevant to the title.

The file name also gives clues about the subject matter. Like, an image with the name “image000023.JPG” is more confusing for Google than “an image-of-a-black-shirt.” 

3. Write descriptive alt text: As I have mentioned above, description and alt text help Google and other search engines understand what the subject matter is all about. Not only this, but it also helps in improving accessibility for people who can’t access or see the images on web pages.  

While writing alt text, make it descriptive and SEO-optimized, with keywords used appropriately. Avoid including lots of keywords. 

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Image Optimization

iii. Feature Reviews & Ratings 

As part of eCommerce SEO best practices, images, reviews, and ratings are also purchasing factors. Reviews and ratings help the user get an insight into whether they should with a particular product or not. 

Your eCommerce success relies on reviews and ratings. You can make your customers leave reviews for your product by sending them an automated and personalized message just after they make a purchase. Also, you can set up an email marketing campaign to remind your customers to leave a review of your product. 

But, above all, display the reviews or rating stars on your site to encourage them to do the same. 

These highlighted rating stars will help the user decide whether to go with the product or not. So, make sure it is highlighted and people leave reviews after making a purchase.

Keep URLs SEO Optimized And Simple

Do you know URLs play a fairly big role in eCommerce SEO optimization? It contains more information than you can imagine. They will contain a category name, product name, or file type. Having an SEO-optimized URL is the most important element for eCommerce SEO best practices. 

A good URL helps Google easily crawl and index your website, while a bad URL structure can lead to lots of issues that may confuse Google and cause your site to not be indexed or ranked properly.  

i. Follow The Search Engine Standard 

1. Avoid using alternative URLs: You better not use alternative URLs for the same page. The search engines may not realize the two URLs land on the same page until and unless both pages are retrieved. 

2. Keep all the text of the URL in the same case: If the web server takes the upper case and lower case of the site as the same, you better convert them all to the same case. It is recommended, it is even better if you keep the URL in lowercase. 

3. Each page must have a unique URL: Make sure each page of your site has a unique URL in paginated results. 

4. Have a descriptive URL path: a descriptive URL helps search engines better understand what the page is all about. 

Recommended: www.example.com/product/green-shirt-with-white-collar/

Not recommended: www.example.com/product/3243/

5. Query parameter recommendation: Use ?key=value rather, ?value wherever possible.  

Recommended: www.example.com/photo-frames?page=2 

Not recommended: www.example.com/photo-frames?2

ii. Use Breadcrumb

Breadcrumbs act as a navigation tool in an eCommerce website. It assists the user in determining his starting point. It not only helps the user navigate buhttps://www.incrementors.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-best-practices/t also has an SEO benefit. 

You must use a breadcrumb when the actual product has more than 3 levels to cross. 

See the image below:

You can easily add them through markup tags or javascript.  

iii. Eliminate The Use Of Stop Words

It is not recommended to use stop words in the URL as it makes the URL difficult to be read by search engines. 

Some of the most common stop words are: a, an, the, and, it, for, or, but, in, my, yours, ours, and theirs. 

Eliminating these words from the URL can give your URL high readability and give more space to some relevant words in the URL. 

Be Careful With Duplicate Content

When working on an eCommerce website, here is a fact that you should understand, Google hates duplicate content, whether it is on your site or somebody else’s. Duplicate content is similar content present on your site or somebody else’s site.

Duplicate content confuses Google about which content is original and accurate and which content should be ranked higher. 

Even URL duplication can occur on your site as well. In simple words, two different URLs can lead the user to the same page. 

For example, a page with the URL, www.example.com/blog/green-shirt/ can be a duplicate of the page, www.example.com/green-shirt/ . Google is going to flag these two different pages as having duplicate content. 

Also, if you copy-paste a large amount of content from another website to yours, that also creates duplicate content.

Here are some tips to avoid duplicate content on your eCommerce site. 

1. Write a unique description for each product: Here is one thing you should keep in mind is, the same product descriptions can cause ranking drops for both product pages. So, spend some time thinking about the product description. 

2. Check your URL structure: Make sure the URL structures of your product pages are different. Look out for things like session IDs, tracking links, and pagination issues. 

3. Use 301 redirects or canonical tags: You must use 301 redirects or canonical tags on the page you may think has duplicate content. Here, “duplicate” means pages with similar titles, URLs, or any other element. 

Use Schema Markup To Make Content Understandable

You can apply schema markup to your eCommerce website to help algorithms and users understand your content and intent, which is also a part of e-commerce SEO best practices. It is a machine-readable format to provide information about a particular page. 

Basically, it improves the accuracy of the search engines’ understanding of your web page content and gets you rankings in SERP. 

Just like in the image below, you can see there is an image of the product appearing in SERP. It is because of the product schema. 

There are a lot more schemas that you can apply to your site to make your content more accurately readable. 

Check out the following structured data that you can apply to your eCommerce website. 

1. Product Schema: This is the schema for products and services. It helps to discover the products and services in SERP by providing rich product information, such as images of the product. 

2. Review and Rating Schema: This schema enables the user to find out the specific person who has left a review on your site. At the same time, it helps Google understand the product reviews on your site. 

3. Video Schema: Video schema is metadata used to show video content in SERPs. It may include audio language, video resolution, and more. 

4. Price Schema: A price schema is used to show the price of a product in SERP, just like in the image shown below. 

Don’t Underestimate The Page Speed

The page load speed is the time taken by the website to load completely when a user clicks on it. And the reason why I said not to underestimate page speed is that it is one of the ranking factors.   

People just don’t like websites that keep loading… loading… and loading. Experts say the ideal website load speed is 2 seconds. You can test your site speed on Google if you are not sure about the page speed of your site. 

The reason for your slow page speed could be any of these:

• Your website has a lot of content for the servers to handle 

• Having too many javascript 

• Images are taking too much time to load 

• There’s an issue with your hosting service provider

Here are the remedies given to improve your page load speed:

• Reduce unused javascript 

• Defer offscreen images

• Reduce unused CSS

• Have a proper image size

• Reduce initial server response time

• Limit redirects and HTTP requests 

Also, you must upgrade your web hosting package if it is due to any issue with the hosting service provider. 

Read More: The Ultimate Guide To Website Speed Optimization

Look Out For Your Content For E-commerce

Above, we have discussed how important images and URLs are for an eCommerce website. But eCommerce SEO is not only about that. Here are some other things as well that are equally important, and one of them is the content.

Posting regular content helps you build trust and organic traffic to your site and establishes your image as an expert in the niche. 

Types of content you can create for your e-commerce site:

• Create how-to and FAQ content 
• Blogs post regarding the new launches of any product. 
• Clients’ testimonials
• webinars 

These are the only types of content that you can share on your eCommerce site. 

But to create a content strategy, you must understand the pain points and desires of your target audience. 

Here’s how we can divide the whole process of content strategy. 

1. Understand your buyer persona 

2. Find out what type of content your audience likes. Read the surveys or data to find out. 

3. Create a content calendar and work accordingly. 

4. Publish content as per the buyer’s journey.

5. Use A/B testing in a different segment of your content. 

6. Measure the results

Add A Sitemap

If you ask me to describe a sitemap, in simple words, it is a map for your eCommerce site.  

The sitemaps are important for your eCommerce site because:

• It provides an organized structure to your site.
• Customers can easily find what they are looking for.
• Google can deliver the relevant product in searches. 

Your sitemap is a detailed and structured way of your site for bots and users, from category pages to product pages. It includes sub-categories, products, and other web pages.  

You can create a sitemap for your website with Google Webmaster Tools. There are mainly two types of sitemaps: XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. You can use both sitemaps; however, an HTML sitemap is always helpful for a user. 

You can also use tools like Lucid Sitemap Generator and Powermapper to create sitemaps. 

Make Your Site User-friendly

UX is directly proportional to SEO. To get better visibility, it is important to have a user-friendly interface for your website. However, a user-friendly website is not only about making your website visually appealing. 

It is about improving the experience of the users visiting your site, from easy navigation to making sure the user finds what he is looking for and giving the best experience possible. 

Also, if Google feels, we are failing to provide a good user experience, it will start ranking our website lower. 

There are many things that influence the UX of the site:

• Your website must have a good load speed.
• The website must be mobile-friendly.
• Your website must be easy to navigate.
• CTAs should be there.

Conclusion

E-commerce SEO helps you boost visibility and generate more leads. There are lots of things to work on for the SEO of your site, but the eCommerce SEO best practices provided above would help you for sure. 

The tips given above may seem a little critical and technical, but they are not as critical as they seem. Anybody can work on them easily. 

It is an ongoing strategy, you need to work continuously in order to make your eCommerce SEO successful. 

FAQs 

1. How to find the right keyword for an E-commerce website?

There are some free tools available on the internet like Google Keyword Planner. And there are some paid tools as well like, SEMrush or Ahrefs.

However, along with the tool, you must also analyze your competitors to find out which keywords are they ranking on. 

2. What is SEO for eCommerce?

SEO for eCommerce is the practice of optimizing your site for better rankings in SERP. however, there are several other factors that determine the rankings of your website such as user experience on your site, backlinks, or no. shares, etc. 

3. How is eCommerce SEO different from regular SEO?

E-commerce SEO is different because it focuses on the optimization of elements that regular SEO doesn’t.

• Optimization of product description 
• Images optimization
• Optimization of your homepage