Ecommerce SEO: Everything you need to know

Welcome to our huge, extensive, beginner-friendly guide that’s intended to help you create a flawless ecommerce SEO strategy. 

No matter if you’re in the website creation planning phase and want to execute a top notch digital strategy from the get-go, or if you already have an ecommerce site that’s in need of some SEO love and care, this guide is here to help you out on your journey to digital success. 

Maybe you read about improving SEO while trying to analyze how to send more organic traffic to your website. Perhaps you already have some solid experience working with this bountiful digital marketing channel, and want to up your game. 

For whichever reason, I’m happy you’re here! You’re making the right step towards building a more accessible, user-friendly, impactful online shop that’s really going to resonate with search engines and humans. 

I’ve worked with hundreds of ecommerce websites like yours around the world, helping them to build a solid SEO base, fix frustrating problems, and use this bountiful marketing channel for business success.

In this extensive guide, I’ll cover all the most important topics that will have an impact on your organic rankings and traffic. When a topic needs more explanation, we’ve linked out to a relevant resource so that you can keep digging and reach a comfortable expertise level before working on it.

If this is all new to you, I encourage you to bookmark this page and take notes, so that you can apply this new information to your own website. However, if you’re only struggling with one or a handful of topics, you can jump to each section below to directly get into the nitty gritty of that area. 

Oh and don’t miss our “bonus chapter” on ecommerce UX, which we’ve made into a handy PDF ebook for you! It covers all the best practices you need to delight users (and keep them coming back).

Ready to rock and roll? Let’s do it!

1. Technical SEO for ecommerce

First things first: is your online shop safe and secure? Is it fully encrypted with SSL, to protect your customers’ payment data? Don’t do anything else before checking this.

Next, is it being crawled and indexed correctly by search engines like Google? This is essential if you want to appear in the results for key search terms.

Finally, have you checked that you’re not making the six most common technical SEO problems for ecommerce? Even the biggest online shops make them!

Read our guide to technical SEO for ecommerce.

2. Keyword research

Next off, we’re going to take a firm look at our content strategies! Building up viable keyword research and creating quality content to target those keywords is a huge part of a successful ecommerce SEO strategy, and definitely shouldn’t be skipped! 

Keyword research is the process of learning what terms and language people use to search for products or services that are relevant to your business. 

It’s a very important step in the content creation process, as it will help you understand how people are finding your website and what opportunities you’re missing out on (so that you can therefore create content to capture that share of the traffic).

Read our guide to keyword research for ecommerce SEO.

3. Content strategy for ecommerce SEO

Now that you’ve identified your most important informational, navigational, and transactional keywords, it’s time to put them to work. How? By creating unique, structured, and engaging content for your online store! 

But before hitting the keyboard, you need to answer some fundamental questions. In this section, I’ve mapped out 5 clear tactics that will ensure you’re ready to start winning the eCommerce content game. 

Read our guide to content strategy for ecommerce SEO.

4. Internationalizing your online shop

When your online shop is bringing in decent conversions you may wish to expand your services to be available in different countries. 

Costs, shipping and manufacturing logistics probably need to be well considered, but creating a website that serves (and performs well!) in a different location and language is another challenge in itself. 

Read our guide to running an international online shop.

5. Rich results and featured snippets

By now, you should have started (or at least thought about how to start!) important processes that help your website look and feel beautiful to incoming visitors, and the bots that analyze your content. 

It’s all well and good to focus on our website’s internal development, but we have to consider how it appears in other websites too, mainly: search engines! 

You’re probably aware that search engines, especially Google, have content-rich result pages that display facts, images, videos, ratings, and many data types to help you find a solution to your query. In this section, I’ll dig deeper into how to leverage them to your advantage.

Read our guide to rich results and featured snippets for ecommerce.

6. Improving your user experience

Without a doubt, user experiences greatly contribute to better performances in search engines. Google wants to rank content that is relevant and engaging to their users. They don’t want to evaluate content as a machine would, but rather like a human would. 

That’s why their systems are constantly learning and incorporating feedback from human quality raters (and other sources) that let them know if they’re doing a good job or not. And rewarding the ones that do.

Read our guide to ecommerce UX.

Ecommerce SEO in 2022: Summary

While I’ve given you tons of best practices in this guide, there is never a one-size-fits-all approach. So I’d always encourage you to test and learn what works well for your online shop. 

A solid ecommerce SEO strategy that drives traffic growth and more conversions through technical, content, and UX improvements takes time to perfect. That’s why it only makes sense to start this process as soon as you can. 

Don’t worry if you still need time to wrap your head around some concepts – it’s a good idea to bookmark the guide, and revisit it whenever you can to tackle each point one step at a time.

Best of luck, and happy optimizing! Tweet me if you get stuck.