SEO For Ecommerce Websites

SEO for Ecommerce Sites

Table of Contents

The digital landscape is so vast, with so many websites, social media platforms, games, streaming platforms, marketplaces, and search engines there are so many places you can find your ideal customers and promote your products. The thing with E-commerce, you have other digital platforms like Amazon, eBay, Vinted, Depop, Tik Tok Shop, Not on The High Street, Etsy, and all the rest that you can use to promote and sell your products, which is great. More opportunities to place your products in front of potential customers. But, you came here wondering how to get more customers from search engines like Google through SEO techniques, so let me help you.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation, is the process of optimising your website to perform well on search engines. When I explain SEO to clients, I like to explain it in the most simplistic terms possible, I have worked with clients who cannot even work with a smartphone, let alone understand all the underlying factors of SEO. So this is how I usually explain it: When creating a website, you have your homepage: example.com – this page explains your business, what you do, your products, your product categories, and any other information you want to include. But it doesn’t allow you to go into specific areas, products, keywords, etc. so you need landing pages, collection pages, or product pages. For example: example.com/white-t-shirts-for-sale – this would be a landing page on my website example.com that is about white t-shirts for sale. I could also have example.com/workwear-hats-wholesale – this page would be where I talk about my workwear hats wholesale. With creating and optimising landing pages on your website we begin to tell Google and other search engines what the website is about, Google can then start to index your website for relevant search terms, in this example, white t-shirts for sale and workwear hats wholesale.

I always say there are 2 sides to SEO, firstly, telling Google and other search engines what your website is about and what you offer, you do this by building and optimising landing pages, product pages, and collection pages. And then secondly, telling search engines they can trust your website over the other 1 million other websites that have landing pages optimised for white t-shirts for sale. And to do the second part, it’s link building, building authority, trust, and reputation within the industry, gaining quality, niche relevant, high authority backlinks to tell search engines they can trust your page over the competitors and therefore serve it in search results to their users. In technical terms, ON-PAGE SEO and OFF-PAGE SEO are the processes that you need to do to start ranking your e-commerce website and gain traffic and ultimately sales for your store.

What is E-commerce?

E-commerce is an online shop, the real definition is electronic commerce, meaning having your products or services available to buy online. E-commerce platforms tend to be used for simplicity, you can now manage a full store, add products, manage orders, change stock levels, and other features all using your mobile phone. Platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, Squarespace, and Wix among many others allow store owners to easily manage and create an online shop and start selling products to customers online, creating their own e-commerce store.

I use WordPress and Woocommerce, but Shopify seems to be a hugely popular option as they have many built-in features to help store owners increase the visibility of their stores. I use WordPress as I have been using it for over 12 years and it’s hard to change when you know something so well, however, in recent months I have contemplated the thought of trying Shopify for one of my next e-commerce sites, just so I can learn more about what it has to offer. Some business owners opt for a fully custom HTML website, with a custom PHP content management system if they are trying to enter the market against market-leading sites, however, these business owners also probably have the funds available to hire a full digital marketing team to lead their strategies, so this article wouldn’t be for them anyway.

With that being said, I have worked with large businesses, turning over millions of pounds a year through WordPress, and Woocommerce-built websites.

How To Do SEO on E-commerce Site

Firstly, as mentioned above, you need landing pages, product pages, and collection pages even and you need lots of them, relevant to what you sell, it starts by adding all your products to your site, optimise the product pages, and over time, as your authority grows, your product listings will increase in search and you will gain more sales. But to get more specific, and grow your E-commerce site, to bring more eyes to your products, you need SEO optimised landing pages which I will go into in more detail on the process the takes. This is the process, keyword research, landing page creation, on-page optimisation, off page SEO.

Keyword Research

Firstly, you need to identify keywords relevant to the products you sell. There are several tools you can use for this, ideally, you need software like SEM Rush, or Ubersuggest to track your SEO projects and keyword ranking positions. They do have free versions, but the paid versions allow you to do this much better. For example, I will use Mama Makes personalised gifts e-commerce store. Using Ubersuggest, I identified keywords I would like to rank for. You can input a competitor’s website and start by building a list of keywords they rank for.

The volume tab shows how many times this keyword gets searched per month, the CPC tab shows the cost per click on Google Ads, the PD is the paid difficulty score and how competitive the keyword is in pad search and SD shows the SEO score and how difficult and competitive the keyword is for organic search. A tip would be to look for keywords with a high volume and a low SD, the lower the SD, the quicker you will be able to get it ranking.

Your task is to build a list of keywords that you can compete for, on Ubersuggest platform if you click on a keyword it will give you a more detailed breakdown of that specific keyword. See the image:

Once you have identified all of the keywords you want to rank for, you then need to start building landing pages accordingly. If you are struggling to find keywords with a high search volume and low SD, you can aim for words with a smaller volume and low SD, and build more of these pages as they will be easier to rank. SEO and marketing consultants define these as long-tail keywords.

Landing Page Creation

Next is building landing pages. As I use WordPress and Woocommerce, this article explains how to do it on WordPress, if using a different site builder you may need to refer to a different article on how to optimise and create landing pages on the site builder you use, as I am sure they all have different plug-ins and built-in attachments to help. Using WordPress, the first thing I do is go to ‘add new page’, I also use Elementor page builder for design purposes so I load up my Elementor page builder and start creating my page. The landing page I am building is for Mama Makes, and is for the keyword ‘personalised newborn clothes‘. You can follow the link to see the page created. I will just do 1 for this example, but you will want to create pages for all the keywords you want to rank for. Some keywords can be grouped to single pages, for example, I wouldn’t need separate pages for ‘newborn clothes’ and ‘personalised newborn clothes’. I could just optimise the one page for both keywords.

Once you have created the pages, you want to link to them internally on your site where possible, for the page I have created I have included a link in the footer of Mama Makes website as its an important page of the site and I want to pass ‘link juice’ from my homepage to the landing page I have created. Internal link building is a good SEO strategy to pass authority between pages on your website.

Once landing pages have been built, and you have linked to them internally, Google will start to understand what your website is about and what you offer, but to make sure your page is optimised 100% for Google, you need to follow some ON-PAGE SEO tactics.

ON-PAGE SEO

When doing ON-PAGE SEO, I use two tools, Yoast and Wincher. Yoast is a WordPress plugin that tells you what to do when optimising your landing page, and Wincher is a cool tool that allows you to see how optimised your landing page is for your chosen keyword. When using Yoast plugin, your WordPress editing page will look like the image below:

What you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page to where it says Yoast SEO, and here you can input your focus keyphrase. In this instance, it is ‘personalised newborn clothes’

After inputting your focus keyphrase, you need to click the tab that says ‘schema’ to apply schema markup. You can select what type of page it is, this will tell Google it is a page you want to add to search results, or you can select a different type of schema if this is not your goal.

Once you have selected the page type, click back on the SEO tab and scroll to the bottom. Yoast will give you an analysis of what you need to do, it will tell you to add more keywords in your alt tags, add keyword variations to headings, add keywords to body content, and also other tips to help optimise the page, you want to follow them all. You then should also click on the readability tab and ensure you have checked all the readability tasks. This will ensure your landing page is fully optimised for the keyword.

You can then also head over to Wincher, and run it through their on-page grader to check the on-page optimisation score. Wincher will grade you on a score out of 100.

Wincher will analyse the URL for the chosen keyword and give you a score out of 100, it will also give you optimisation tips at the bottom on how to improve your score. Wincher is not a WordPress plugin and can be used for any website regardless of the platform it was built on. Once you have perfect readability and SEO scores on Yoast and a great score of 90+ on Wincher, your landing page is fully optimised on-page for your chosen keyword.

There are some technical factors you need to consider, how fast does your page take to load? Using Google page speed insights you can optimise your images and other on-page factors to increase your load times. This will help your SEO, and conversion rates further down the link. You need to make sure you have a sitemap file for search engines to discover, add a page caching plugin to increase load times, and add expiry dates to headers. All of the technical SEO factors can be solved using the following plugins, free or paid versions. Smush, Asset Clean Up, and WP Rocket or Hummingbird.

OFF-PAGE SEO

You have performed keyword research, you have created landing pages, and you have optimised them on-page, now, you need to get them ranked. Firstly, you should ensure you have Google search console set up and connected. If you haven’t read our article about setting up search console on WordPress. Head over to your Google search console and log in, then at the top where it says URL inspection, copy and paste the URL/s to the new landing page/s you just created, and hit enter. Google will then begin to fetch data on the new URL submitted, it will display a page that looks like this:

Mine has a tick and says URL is on Google, meaning Google has indexed the page to their search engines, if you get the message saying ‘URL is not on Google’ you can press the button labeled ‘REQUEST INDEXING’ and Google will add it to their list of sites to be crawled. Once you have indexed all of your URLs they will eventually be added to Google search results, and, if you did your on-page optimisation, they will rank somewhere in the search results. Now the SERP (Search engine ranking position) will depend on several factors, such as the engagement rate when users are on site and your page load times. Bounce rate used to be a measurable factor but is no longer included as Google looks more at engagement rate instead. Your social media presence and engagement is a big ranking factor on today’s search engines, your reviews of your Google business profile and other sites like Trustpilot are also considering factors from Google’s algorithm.

However, from my experience, utilising all these methods is essential, but the biggest factor in my opinion would be your backlink profile. How trustworthy is the website and the landing page. Google search engine looks at the number of trustworthy, niche-relevant websites pointing to your website and it determines its trustworthiness and increases the ranking position of the page on its search engines. Take for example the keyword ‘white t-shirts’, there will be over 100,000 websites all selling white t-shirts. 50,000 of these websites have done amazing on-page SEO, they have followed the best practices and have optimised on-page effectively. How does Google decide which 3 of these white t-shirt websites to serve to their users first? They look at over 200 factors, reviews, page speed, social presence, sitemaps, internal linking, etc etc. For a full list of ranking factors, visit the article ‘Top ranking factors of Google’. Most importantly, they look at the backlink profile of the domain and page in question.

You can see the backlink profile of a website by using tools such as AHrefs, SEM Rush, Moz, Majestic SEO. I have found large differences between authority scoring on the likes of Moz compared to AHrefs, however, they are all good tools to get an indication of the backlink profile of a website. The more, niche-relevant, trustworthy sites you have pointing to your website, the better your backlink profile and your chances of ranking on Google. Sounds easy? it is, however, a long process that can sometimes feel like it’s getting nowhere, however, if you put in the work on your SEO for your E-commerce store, you will see the benefits down the road.

Methods to increase your backlink profile include guest posting (writing articles and posting them on other sites with links back to your site), directories (business directories like Yell and Thompson local linking to your website), profile links (creating profiles on sites like Soundcloud, Amazon, Medium and linking them back to your website), blog comments (commenting on other blogs, with a link back to your website), a good content strategy – if you create good content on your website, people will find it and naturally link to it. A well-written, niche-relevant article can go a long way to gaining you natural backlinks. This would be the ideal method, but as SEOs, we can’t be experts in every industry, so using some of the other link-building techniques is a good way to gain links.

Using tools like Moz and AHrefs, you can identify competitor backlinks and copy them, if you build the same links as your competitors, plus more, better ones, as Google discovers these backlinks, your website’s authority will surpass your competitors and the landing pages you created will increase on search engines. You can build links to the individual landing pages to increase the page authority, or you can build links to the homepage to build your domain authority and domain rating, internal links will pass juice from one page to another. A good link-building strategy, using your competitors as benchmarks will help you gain good rankings.

Other Methods To Gain Search Traffic

On Google, you have multiple methods to gain traffic, Google ads, Google shopping using merchant center, SEO as discussed above, display advertising, and video advertising. Utilising all methods is the most effective way of growing your traffic from search engines like Google. And of course, for the best results from your e-commerce store, you need an omnichannel approach to your digital strategy. You need to be promoting, entertaining, and educating on all platforms where your audience hangs out. Google tends to be people searching and is more qualified to buy, however, utilise all platforms for the best results from your marketing.

Other Ways To Sell E-commerce Products

There are multiple platforms to use, and if you read our articles we discuss the best ways to sell your products online. Utilising all channels where your ideal target audience might be is the best way. This is called an omni-channel strategy. SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, Email Marketing, SMS Marketing, WhatsApp Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Push Notifications, and Display Advertising to name just a few. SEO is the longest process, but you can learn and do it yourself with little to no funds. Social media is the same, you can grow with little to no funds but you’ll need to get creative with your content, the others require some budget to play with and will cost you upfront to get going. If you need any more guidance, visit our blog for all our articles or get in touch with our team of experts here at 3D Data.

Picture of Author: Paul Gray
Author: Paul Gray

Digital Marketer specialising in SEO, with over 12 years of industry experience, both agency and in-house.

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