SEO Essentials for Ecommerce
The ecommerce space is as crowded as it is competitive. Amazon, Temu, Alibaba, Wish, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify sites all vie for the same rankings and clicks as every other ecommerce brand. Indeed, ecommerce merchants even often find themselves competing with their own affiliates and suppliers.
But the ecommerce space is also as diverse as it is competitive and overcrowded. From premium brands and wholesalers to specialty product vendors with niche audiences, every ecommerce merchant has their own unique set of value-props and USPs. What they all share in common, however, is a need to increase conversions without driving up their CPA.
When ecommerce brands target users through SEO, they’re targeting users who are actively searching for their products and closer to making a purchasing decision. In other words, they’re targeting users who are one step down the conversion funnel — and that means lower CPAs and shorter conversion cycles. And to rank competitively in the organic search results and reach those targeted users, ecommerce merchants must invest in 5 areas of SEO.
1. Keyword Research
We all know our respective products inside out. We know their value-props and their USPs, and we can describe all that with the utmost eloquence and accuracy. But the average consumer isn’t always as sophisticated as we are, and when they go looking for the products that we offer, they often use different language and terminology than we do.
Keyword Research lets us see the forest from the trees. Before investing in SEO, you have to ask yourself, how much do you really know about the search behaviour of your target users?
Through keyword data, we can learn how our target market actually searches for the solutions that our products offer them. We can uncover keywords with high intent and search volumes, and optimize our messaging around those search terms so we’re front and center in the rankings when those users go looking for what we have to offer them. So before you invest in SEO in any other way, make sure you’ve done your keyword research and know what terms you’ll be targeting and optimizing for.
2. Technical SEO for Ecommerce
Every ecommerce offering starts with a site or an app — or both. And from page speeds and load times to navigation and search filters, every ecommerce experience begins at a technical level. It naturally follows, then, that SEO for ecommerce also starts at a technical level.
A slick UX, an extensive inventory, the most competitive pricing, and amazing user ratings all won’t help you rank if Google (and other search engines) can’t crawl your site and index all that content.
Indexable content
Believe it or not, search engines can’t always read the pages on a website. And if they can’t read them, those pages are never going to rank.
Basically, there’s many ways to serve up content from a database to a web page, and some of the ways that look the coolest or load the fastest aren’t always crawlable + indexable by GoogleBot and other search crawlers. And sometimes some parts of a page are indexable, and other parts are not.
So it’s critical that all the content on all your important pages (e.g. PDPs, PLPs, etc.) are crawlable and indexable.
A free and easy way to check if your content is indexable is via Google Search Console >> URL Inspection >> View Crawled Page. From there you can search for key content assets (e.g. title tags, meta descriptions, product descriptions, etc.), and if they’re appearing in Google’s version of the Page Source, then search crawlers can read it.
Duplicate content
If indexation were one side of a coin, Duplicate Content would be the other. Essentially, just as you can have a problem with GoogleBot not being able to index content, you can also have a problem with GoogleBot indexing that content in multiple places. And when that happens, your ecommerce site can get penalized because the algorithm might determine that you’re trying to spam the same keyword content in many places — i.e. a duplicate content penalty.
But how + why does content get duplicated on an ecommerce site?
Well, depending on your inventory, the same content can be found through multiple navigation paths — e.g. product categories, UTM links, and colour, size, and pricing filters. And while it makes perfect sense to let users navigate to those products or product listings through multiple navigation paths, you don’t want Google to think you’re trying to exaggerate your inventory or keyword relevance by spamming that content throughout your site.
This is where noindex and canonical tags come in. Basically, you want to establish your primary navigation paths via product categories, and then either use noindex tags to tell Google to ignore the duplicate PLPs, or the canonical tag to acknowledge the duplicate and refer to Google back to the primary source.
How you go about this, of course, depends on your unique site architecture, product filters, and inventory. But it’s nonetheless a basic technical SEO feature your ecommerce platform should be using.
Page speeds
The value of a fast loading site extends beyond user-experience. It also helps a site rank more competitively.
Essentially, Google (and other search engines) want to provide their users with not only the most relevant content, but also the best user-experience possible. Consequently, Page Speeds are a search ranking factor.
And ever since Google implemented mobile-first indexing, it’s not enough that your site is fast on Desktop, it also has to be fast on Mobile. In fact, mobile rankings influence desktop rankings, rather than vice versa.
Of course, how fast your site needs to be depends on the context. While you should strive to make your site as fast as possible, there are real-world constraints, such as resource limitations and cost-benefit considerations. So suffice to say as far as ranking competitively goes, you don’t have to have the fastest site, you just have to have a faster site than the competition.
3. SEO for PLPs – Product Listing Pages
If your ecommerce site features a range of products, then it probably features them on Product Listing Pages (PLPs). And if you offer different kinds of products, then those PLPs are likely categorized into collections — e.g. pants, shirts, shoes, accessories, etc.
And these PLPs don’t just serve an important navigation function to funnel users through to the products they’re looking for. They also represent some of your most important SEO assets. Specifically, PLPs are content silos that feature dozens (or more) of keyword relevant products results. And if they’re optimized properly, they can be significant ranking assets and major points of entry for highly targeted search traffic.
Beyond ensuring that searchbots can crawl + index the content on your PLPs, there’s a lot that can be done to optimize that content, including:
- making Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and Headers keyword targeted
- adding keyword targeted value-added Content to the page
- implementing Structured Data Markup on product results
The point is that PLPs cannot be overlooked as SEO assets. They not only feature extensive keyword relevant content, but help position your site as relevant for a given product category, and also help searchbots find, crawl, and index all the products listed on them.
4. SEO for PDPs – Product Detail Pages
For ecommerce merchants, of course, all conversions start at the Product Details Page (PDP) — i.e. where the checkout button is. It’s no surprise, then, that PDPs are extremely important SEO assets.
Not only do they offer multiple opportunities to bolster keyword relevance, each and every PDP on your site is another page that search engines can index and rank. These include:
- making Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and Product Descriptions keyword targeted
- optimizing Product Images for size and keyword relevance
- featuring keyword targeted Product FAQs
- amassing User Reviews from verified buyers
- and implementing Product Schema Markup on any relevant fields
And for ecommerce brands that carry an extensive inventory of SKUs, the SEO potential of that many PDPs is significant — to put it mildly.
5. Ecommerce Content that Converts
All this being said, Product Listings and Product Pages are often not enough to compete in the rankings with the likes of Amazon, Wish, or Temu who offer similar or alternate products. Ecommerce merchants must also establish E-E-A-T with their audience and search engines — meaning Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. And the best way to do that is through keyword relevant, value-added content.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that if you write it, traffic will come. Rather, your ecommerce content strategy needs to be aligned with your SEO goals, it needs to be based on search data and search intent, and it needs to speak directly to your audience in a way that generates demand for (and click-throughs to) your products.
Specifically, you should be mining product keyword data for user intent and topic ideas. From there, you need to weight those topics against search volumes and product inventories, and prioritize topics that are going to bring in the most amount of targeted traffic over the longest period of time. And then you need to ensure you’re producing content along those lines at the top-, middle-, and bottom-of-funnel.
And it’s important to remember that value-added content doesn’t always drive conversions directly through PDPs to checkouts. Rather, the value in keyword targeted, value-added content lies in how it (1) elevates the PLPs and PDPs it interlinks in the SERPs, and (2) establishes and builds E-E-A-T with search engines and the users they refer.
Conclusive Ecommerce
As much as ecommerce merchants share many of the same goals and challenges, the space is also as diverse as it is competitive, so the SEO strategy that’s right for one ecommerce merchant, is not necessarily gonna be a good fit for another. Indeed, it’s important that your ecommerce SEO strategy is built around the unique needs of your target audience and mapped against your specific business goals.
Fortunately, insofar that all SEO strategy begins with keyword research, there’s no shortage of data to tailor your approach to SEO and really speak to the search intent of your target users. And the ecommerce merchants who do that will not only be able to entrench whatever rankings they already have, but aggressively disrupt the competition in the SERPs, whether big or small.
