Ecommerce SEO in 6 Steps: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of practices for increasing your website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of ecommerce SEO is to improve your site’s visibility and gain more clicks while boosting conversions—ultimately leading to greater revenue.

Ecommerce SEO typically involves targeting specific keywords that qualified shoppers search for, optimizing the front-end and back-end components of your site, perfecting user experience, and getting links from other online sources.

Most of these tasks can be done without a technical background, but many store owners outsource them to an SEO specialist through sites like Upwork.

Expand if you need more details on how ecommerce SEO works.

1. Keyword Research

The first step to ecommerce SEO is identifying the search terms that your potential customers are using. This practice is called keyword research, and most of your SEO hinges on it.

The goal of this step is to target an effective keyword for every category and product page of your website, as well as your homepage.

The more relevant your keywords are to what qualified shoppers are searching for, the better their chances of landing on your site. This means that keywords are just as much about your audience as they are about your product or business.

Start by getting a complete inventory of the pages on your site. Your ecommerce hosting platform may be able to export a list of these pages directly from your backend, or you can add “/sitemap.xml” to the end of your site’s URL, like the example shown below.

Once you have a list of pages, consider the following info to increase ranking and drive traffic to them through well-chosen keywords:

What Makes a Good Keyword?

Ecommerce SEO isn’t just about ranking and generating traffic—it’s about ranking on the right SERPS to generate qualified traffic that will earn you money.

If you target the wrong keywords, one of two things is likely to happen:

• You’ll end up buried on a rarely seen page of search results (such as the second or third page, or worse) for impossible keywords, or
• You’ll rank highly for keywords that are rarely used or attract visitors who never convert

Targeting the right keywords to support your online store depends on these factors:

To keep track of these values as you conduct your keyword research, you can make a keyword matrix. A matrix is an organized spreadsheet of keyword data that can be used to zero-in on the best keywords to use. Check out this guide to creating your own.

A sample keyword matrix
(Source: SpyFu)

How to Find the Right Keywords

The objective of keyword research is to identify search terms with the right combination of volume, difficulty, specificity, and transactional intent to optimize your search engine performance.

So where do you find these values, and which keywords should you look into? Start by taking a comprehensive look at your ecommerce business and its customers. Then jot down broad terms that apply to your offerings as well as what your customers may be looking for.

These ideas don’t need to be well-formulated, high-intent keywords; they just need to provide a foundation for your research. Many of the resources mentioned below will help you to find and assess specific, long-tail keywords based around general buckets or seed terms—so this step lays the groundwork.

With those base terms in mind, click below to learn about various tools and methods you can use to identify winning keywords for your store’s webpages.

Search Suggestions

A good jump-off point for your research is using suggested searches, which appear based on relevant and trending keywords.

By entering your seed terms into the Google search bar, you can see what people are looking for with more in-depth specifics and useful synonyms—which leads to successful keywords to pursue.

A search for “silk face mask” yields suggestions for keywords involving the words “covid” and “best” as well as attributes like color, filter usage, organic materials, and washability —plus the useful long-tail keyword “mulberry silk face mask with filter”

Amazon is another fantastic resource for this because virtually all Amazon searches are made with strong purchase intent. Yes, it’s probably one of your competitors, but that provides all the more reason to use it for your own research.

To find keyword ideas for a product page, try searching Amazon for a basic term that describes it. Then reference the site’s search suggestions to home in on specific, long-tail keywords that Amazon’s massive customer base is actively searching.

Entering the short-tail term “silk face mask” into Amazon’s search box provides nine useful suggestions for long-tail keywords

Keyword Generators

Conveniently, there are a number of tools available that streamline the process of scouring the web for suggested searches. These free resources scrape data from engines including Google, Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, and return hundreds of results (along with useful metrics).

Many of these tools also allow you to save potential keywords then export your list as a CSV file.

Here are some of the best free keyword generator tools:

• Keyword Tool Dominator
• Ubersuggest
• Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator
• Google Keyword Planner
• Keyword Sheeter
• SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

Generator tools show you related search terms along with metrics like keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume.

Competitor Research

If your competitors are ranking highly for valuable keywords, they must be doing something right in terms of SEO—so use their sites as resources for your research.

You can significantly streamline this process by using the “freemium” tools Ahrefs and SEMrush (both featured in our guide to the best keyword research tools) for your competitor research—which are explained later in this section. But businesses seeking an unlimited free method can follow these steps:

Begin by Googling keywords that pertain to your store and checking the results to see who ranks. The SERP may be populated by a range of ads, paid shopping suggestions, and/or local business listings—but focus on the organic webpage results.

Organic Results – Search results that are calculated algorithmically and not affected by advertiser payments.

Organic Traffic – Traffic from visitors that come to your website as the result of unpaid search results (rather than paid advertising).

A search for “buy cookies online” yields a large amount of paid ads as well as many buyer’s guide listicles. But the highlighted organic results are perfect for competitor keyword research.

Then look at the competitor’s sites—specifically their homepage, category pages, and product pages (depending on how they’re structured).

This competing store serves as a useful resource for category and product keywords.

As you find promising keywords, record them and move on to the next competitor.

While researching your competitors, keep in mind that they likely rank for reasons other than keywords alone. They could have a high Domain Authority (DA) that bolsters their search engine performance, among other things—so look further unto the viability of the keywords they target before using them on your own site.

Domain Authority (DA) – An aggregate metric that describes a website’s relevance for a specific subject area or industry, which contributes heavily to search engine rankings. DA is calculated differently depending on the tool you use to measure it, so values may vary.

Google Keyword Planner

As mentioned above, Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool for generating keyword ideas based on seed terms. But it has a variety of additional features you can use to assess the potential keywords you’ve already chosen.

Google Keyword Planner features a keyword analysis and forecasting tool that’s good for determining the search volume, difficulty, and commercial intent of potential terms.

Google Keyword Planner allows you to search for and manage multiple keywords at a time.

The “Top of page bid” values represent the keyword’s Cost Per Click, or CPC. This range is an approximation of the amount needed to be paid for an ad to appear at the top of the first page of search results for the term.

Regardless of your intent to purchase ads, this metric is helpful because it has a direct correlation with commercial intent. The higher the CPC, the more companies are willing to pay for visibility from the keyword—which means it is used by searchers who convert. So look for phrases with considerable CPC.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an industry-favorite tool that’s available for free (with limited functionality). Its premium versions start at $99.95/month, but the free plan delivers helpful features that may suffice—although some tools are limited to 10 uses per day.

SEMrush provides the following features for your keyword research:

• Keyword Discovery/Generator Tool
• Position Tracking
• Traffic Insights
• Keyword Gap Identification

Its Organic Research tool allows you to see which keywords other sites are ranking for by entering their URLs—which can be immensely helpful for competitor research. Or check out the current performance of your own site to see which keywords you’re already claiming.

Running DavidsCookies.com through SEMrush’s Organic Research engine shows that it ranks highly for some valuable keywords—including “individually wrapped cookies,” “cookies store,” and “frozen cookie dough.”

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another gold-standard SEO tool that’s billed on a subscription basis, but its free features are more limited than that of SEMrush.

Without subscribing, you can access keyword suggestions, pull useful metrics, and check your site’s ranking position in any country—among other features.

The paid version starts at $99, but you can start with a $7 one-week trial. This upgrade unlocks incredibly practical features to help you explore keywords, assess their potential, and research your competition.

Ahref’s Keyword Explorer shows important metrics as well as a wide variety of related keywords.

The tool can also be used to view SERP data and track rankings.

Now that you have a built-out keyword matrix or list, identify the best keywords to use. For each page of your site, aim to target one core “head” keyword as well as a variety of related keywords—including specific, long-tail terms.

The best keywords will be high-volume, low-difficulty keywords with strong transactional intent. Of course, they can’t all be perfect, but aim to prioritize these attributes.

2. Site Structure

Before making use of your hard-earned keywords, you’ll need to check in on the way your website’s pages are organized and arranged.

Site structure or architecture is a big contributor to search engine rankings—especially for ecommerce sites. This is because online stores tend to have far more pages than other websites, and they all must be indexed properly.

Structure also impacts user experience; it’s important for Googlebots and customers alike to be able to easily navigate your store and find all of your pages. This lead to two golden rules of ecommerce site architecture:

• Your site structure needs to be simple and scalable
• It should take no more than three clicks to get to and from any page of your site

By achieving both of these things, you create a site that is easy to maintain, adjust, and grow—and easy for visitors to use. Plus, by ensuring that every page is as few clicks away from your homepage as possible, you effectively distribute link equity.

Most of the links from other websites to ecommerce stores point to their homepages. This gives your homepage a boost of link juice that trickles down to your other associated pages. If your site structure isn’t flat enough, that authority will be diluted by the time it reaches your product pages—like in the diagram below.

“Deep” and disorganized structure like this not only hinders authority from links but is very difficult to modify and scale. Plus, it’s a headache for your customers and Googlebots to navigate, so it’s unlikely to perform well.

Simple, flat, and easy-to-navigate structure looks more like this:

Certain ecommerce hosting platforms, namely BigCommerce, automatically structure your webpages like this as you build your store.

3. On-page Optimizations

Now that your site structure is dialed-in, you can optimize different on-page elements to contain your keywords as well as appeal to web crawlers and potential visitors.

Most of these elements can be populated and edited through your ecommerce hosting platform or CMS. Shopify is our top recommended option—it provides simple, straightforward fields with instructions, as shown below.

(Source: Increasily)

Here are the on-page elements of your site to optimize for better search engine rankings:

Title Tags

The title tag (also called H1) of each web page should contain the page’s main keyword, as well as other terms to extend its reach.

Homepage title tags should include your store’s name as well as a few of the most targeted keywords that apply to your offerings.

For category and product pages, keep it clear and straightforward as you target the best longtail keywords you identified. Try adding in some commonly searched terms that people use in conjunctions with your keyword, such as:

• Cheap
• Buy
• Shop
• Best
• Review
• Gift
• Online
• Free shipping
• Affordable
• Deal

This category page title tag targets commonly used search terms and include the store name.

Description Tags

Description tags (also called meta descriptions) no longer affect rankings directly, but they have a big impact on your click-through rate (CTR). This makes them important to sales as well as SEO.

When writing a winning description tag, include your primary keyword but make sure it flows naturally in the tone of your brand. It’s important that this tag matches the content on the page accurately.

It’s also crucial to have a unique meta description for each page, so don’t re-use the same tag for multiple products in a category.

To attract clicks, you can include a call to action as well as more enticing language such as:

• Get the best prices
• Save X% off
• On sale right now
• Get FREE shipping
• Lowest price guaranteed
• Exclusive deals
• Best selection

This meta description draws in visitors with attractive language

Body Content

Images

Your store’s photos need to be optimized for three purposes: load time, indexing, and user experience. Here are the elements of an image to work on:

• File size and resolution: Page load speed has become a hefty factor in search engine rankings, and images account for 55%–65% of the total transfer size of most ecommerce sites. At the same time, image quality has a big impact on user experience as well as visibility in image searches.

This means you need to strike a balance between image size and resolution. Your photo editing software can allow you to toggle image quality to achieve different file sizes, but a good rule of thumb is to keep image files under 70Kb. If you’re struggling with larger images, try compressing them with tools such as WeCompress and Optimizilla.

• File names: Give your image files keyword-rich names to help crawlers find and index them, using dashes to separate words.

(Image source: Rock Paradise)

As with other elements, keep file names readable and make sure each name is unique—but avoid unnecessary numbers. If you have multiple photos of the same product, add words like “front” or “detail” to differentiate shots.

• Image titles, descriptions, and alt attributes: Similarly to file names, optimizing these elements helps your images (and site as a whole) be discovered and indexed properly.

For effective titles and descriptions, simply describe the image in clear, plain language that contains your primary keyword.

Alt attributes lend to accessibility by providing a description of an image in case it can’t be shown or viewed—so populate them carefully. Make sure they remain clear and straightforward by not overstuffing them with keywords, and don’t use alt attributes for decorative images. Both of these things can be penalized by Google for over-optimization and hindering accessibility.

URLs

Google recently announced that including keywords in your URLs does not affect ranking—but it’s still a best practice of site optimization because it provides clarity for the visitor.

In addition to focusing on keywords, you’ll also want to refine for length. Ecommerce URLs tend to be longer than other sites since they often contain categories, subcategories, and products. But Google has been known to rank sites with short URLs higher on its SERPs.

It’s still possible to keep product page URLs short and sweet by cutting out any unnecessary terms or characters, such as words like “and,” “the,” “of,” or “a” (unless they’re part of a keyword). Try to keep each URL below 50-60 characters, if you can.

It’s also important to make your URLs easy to read and accessible for humans. Separate words with dashes and leave out any backend info (like SKU numbers).

This poorly-optimized URL contains unclear acronyms and the product’s SKU number.

This URL is short, easy to read, targets an effective keyword, and contains only necessary numbers and words.

Add Like/Tweet/+1/Pin it buttons (as shown below) to product pages to make it easy for visitors to share. Social proof is a valuable marketing tool, and backlinks contribute to your search engine rankings.

4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the part of the process that ensures your site meets the technical requirements of search engines with the goal of optimized rankings.

It focuses on backend factors that impact Google’s ability to find, crawl, render, and index your site, as well as things that affect user experience—like site speed, security, usability, mobile-friendliness, and working links.

Technical SEO delves into complex practices, and would take an entire article of its own to cover. But here’s a rundown of the basics, along with resources to help you hone your ecommerce SEO:

Loading Speed

Duplicate Content

Thin Content

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing can help generate a significant amount of traffic and conversions as well as boost your search engine rankings.

Useful, sharable content can benefit your site in multiple ways:

• It generates value for your brand and interest in your products.
• It can rank on unique SERPS that your store alone may not be able to (such as those for informational keywords).
• It builds domain authority for your website.
• It can accrue backlinks from other sites that lead to higher rankings.

Pet Supplies Plus hosts a range of resources, including new pet checklists and training guides. Content like this is highly applicable to the store’s target audience—which earns them backlinks and new customer interest.

Here are the steps to creating high-quality content that appeals to your target customer and generates results:

Learn About Your Target Audience

The best content caters to the consumer directly—and to do that you need to know who your potential customers are.

This factors in detailed information such as demographics, personality traits, motivations, pain points, and stage of the sales funnel. Creating a customer profile is an effective way to dial in these variables; it’s a tool that allows you to pinpoint who you’re creating content for.

The next step is to research your target audience by diving deep into their world. Find out where they hang out online, how they prefer to consume content, what they talk about, what they want, and what kind of language they use.

Community forums such as reddit are valuable tools for this task, but also check out the comments section on applicable blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts. Alternatively, you can use the tool AnswerThePublic to find ideas for content based on search engine data.

As you uncover relevant topics that appear in your customer’s world, jot them down and use them to center high-quality, sharable content around.

Create Shareable Content

Once you know what your audience would like to see, turn it into traffic-boosting assets. Depending on your customers and subject matter, this can take the form of:

• Written articles
• Periodic blog posts
• Tutorial videos
• Guides
• Lists
• Interviews
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Tools and widgets

But creating content for your site is only part of the equation—it usually takes some effort to get traction. Brian Dean, founder of the successful SEO resource Backlinko, has a method for generating effective content and backlinks that he calls the Skyscraper method.

It begins by identifying the top-ranking piece of content for a competitive keyword, then creating something significantly better by making it more thorough or up-to-date.

Then it’s a matter of reaching out to the sites that host links to the content you originally referenced, using an email like this:

(Source: Brian Dean)

Getting links to your site like this is a big part of ecommerce SEO. To learn more ways to achieve backlinks, check out the following section.

6. Link Building

Link building is one of the biggest practices involved in off-page SEO, which aims to increase search rankings through actions taken outside of your own website.

By getting other websites to mention and link to your store, you improve the relevance, trustworthiness, discoverability, and authority of your site. This passes along the “link juice” we covered earlier, which boosts your search engine rankings.

Backlinks like these from a best-of-the-year listicle do wonders for your search engine rankings.

Aside from content marketing, you can get backlinks to your store through features in:

• Buyer’s Guides
• Affiliate Partnerships
• Manufacturers’ “Where To Buy” Pages
• Influencer Tutorials or Reviews
• News articles
• Listicles

Achieving backlinks usually requires reaching out to the creator, editor, or manufacturer—or carrying out PR campaigns that create virality. To learn how to start getting backlinks to your ecommerce store, check out this guide.

Your Ecommerce SEO Strategy

Ecommerce SEO is a complex task that requires time and commitment. Because of this, it may seem intimidating—especially if you already have a built-out website with tons of products.

Despite its labor-intensive nature, SEO is a must-do to drive sales and stay competitive. Here are some tips to devise an SEO strategy that generates results without derailing your operation:

• Prioritize Pages: Start with the pages and products on your site that get the most attention, and work outwards from there.
• Keep the Competition in Mind: Your SEO practices should be centered around getting the upper hand against your competitors. Consistently refer to their placements and optimizations to ensure you get the best results for your time.
• Stick To a Workflow: With so many moving parts, SEO is most effective when done methodically. Create a workflow as you optimize your first few pages, and aim to follow it as you proceed through your site.
• Follow Up With CRO: SEO can generate fantastic traffic, but it’s equally important to make sure that visitors are purchasing through Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO).
• Consider Outsourcing or Consulting: Hiring an experienced specialist is a surefire way to get SEO results fast. You can consult with someone to create an effective plan, or outsource the time-intensive tasks altogether while you focus on running your business. Upwork has a robust catalog of SEO professionals available by the project or hour.

Bottom Line

Search engines are the biggest drivers of organic traffic, so performing well on SERPs is crucial to a successful ecommerce business. Furthermore, you can be assured that your competitors already have SEO practices in place.

This makes it important to carve out the time to work on your own SEO strategy—or hire a reputable specialist to do it for you. Chances are, the increase in traffic and revenue will make the time, effort, and cost more than worthwhile.

If you’re planning ahead to start a new online business, look to Shopify as a hosting platform. It provides a simple SEO portal that makes on-page optimizations incredibly easy—saving you time and generating sales.

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