Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords for your online store forms the basis of any effective SEO campaign. 

“Right keywords,” in this case, depends on your site’s niche. If you’re a store owner or Amazon seller of coffee products, search for keywords about coffee brands, roasts, flavours, and more.

Exclusively targeting keywords in your niche allows search engines to see that you are an authority in your industry. As a result, they must rank you on top of search engines, provided that you provide helpful content to your audience (more on this later).

Also, consider keyword competitiveness in your research. The lower the search term’s competitiveness, the easiest your online store will rank for them. 

The goal is to target keywords with low difficulty but high monthly searches. But most keywords have either low or high difficulty and search volume.

In most cases, it’s best to target keywords people don’t search for often but are easier to rank on Google first. Also known as long-tail keywords, they allow you to provide your audience with informational content that will help aid them in the buying process.

Regardless, you need to find as many relevant keywords as possible. Use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush that show you these metrics to help you determine which terms to optimise on your e-commerce site first.

Technical SEO for Ecommerce Stores

Before optimising your website for the keywords you found, you must ensure that search spiders find crawling and indexing your pages easy.

This is the realm of technical SEO. Its goal is to maximise your crawl budget and get these pages to rank on top of search results. 

First, you want to review your online store’s structure. Organise the keywords and existing pages according to their respective categories. 

For vacuum cleaner retailers, all pages about carpet cleaners, steam cleaners, and vacuum cleaner parts must be confined according to their group.

To ensure this happens, determine what the group’s pillar page is. In most cases, the product page is the de facto pillar page. From here, all supporting articles must link back to the product page and each other.

Finally, make your pillar posts easy to find on the website. The best way to do this is by featuring them on your menu bar.

This lets you compress the site’s crawl depth and make all pages closer to the homepage. The fewer clicks search spiders take before getting to all your pages, the sooner they will crawl your pages and make them appear on SERPs.

Another aspect of technical SEO you must worry about is site speed.

Online stores that load slowly not only perform poorly on search engines; they also cause more than a quarter of your visitors to leave your site.

To help you improve its loading speed, enter your site on Google PageSpeed Insights and see its Core Web Viitals (CWV) score. You can refer to your Google Search Console to see the scores of other pages on your site.

From here, you can see recommendations for improving page speed performance. You can solve most of them by using a caching plugin like WP-Rocket (for WordPress online shops). 

If you’re unfamiliar with Ecommerce SEO, its may be a smart move to outsource the work to a trusted and experienced e-commerce SEO agency, they’ll be able to take care of all the work so you can focus on running the business.

On-Page Optimisation

After mapping out your website structure, it’s time to create optimised content!

Consider the content you publish as business assets–they help create added value to your online store.

That said, you should still make an effort to produce content your audience would want to read and search engines to rank.

Using your researched keywords, create new content for each or assign them to your store’s existing pages.

Ensure the keyword is included in the page’s URL, SEO title, and H1. Also, include it in the page’s meta description to help increase its click-through rate once the page appears on search results.

Next, use the target keyword and related terms in the content. You may use tools like Surfer SEO and Frase that show semantically relevant keywords you must include in your content.

For product pages, include an FAQ section, customer testimonials, and the appropriate structured data.

Just as important, present your content in an organised manner. 

Use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to help search engines understand the different sections in it. Use visual content like images to break the monotony of text. Also, use bullet points to make the content much easier to read.

Finally, make sure that it provides value to your audience. Google’s Helpful Content Update indicates that the search engine is partial towards websites created with its audience in mind.

Link Building

To help boost your e-commerce site’s traffic, you must build links to it.

Backlinks are the online equivalent of personal recommendations. A celebrity who has nothing but good things to say about you weighs more compared to an unknown person giving you negative feedback.

In this case, you want to collect good backlinks from authoritative sources, as they can nullify any toxic links your store may have. 

To start your e-commerce link building campaign, identify authoritative websites you want to get links from. Use tools like Ahrefs to measure a site’s Domain Rating (DR), which indicates how authoritative it is.

Next, you must contact site owners with a pitch asking for a link to your site.

Asking them for a link outright will cause site owners to ignore or flag your email as spam. So, you need to develop a creative way that allows you to provide value to them, which increases your chances of a response from them.

Some of the best and most effective examples include guest posting (submitting a well-written blog post to the site with a link on the content) and broken link building (replacing the broken link on the page with a similar page on your site).

Also, it’s best practice to link to informational content on your site, like blog posts. Getting a link from product pages is not impossible, but highly unlikely because they don’t provide as much value as other content types.

Conclusion

Whether you have a new or old e-commerce site, having a well-thought-out SEO strategy in place is beneficial for you.

Thanks to algorithm updates, SEO puts users at the forefront. That means Google only shows people the best pages for the queries they search.

This also means that the days of optimising exclusively for search engines are long gone. You need to create a user-friendly online store that provides your audience with a seamless online experience.

Also, just like any marketing strategy, SEO requires you to have a budget. But the money you’ll spend on this strategy can easily result in improved exposure on SERPs and higher sales. 

So, it’s in your best interest to follow the steps above and get the ball rolling with your SEO campaign.