SEO Best Practices for Your Ecommerce Site

A key ecommerce SEO best practice is to carry out keyword research. This helps you target phrases and terms that customers are actually searching for, increasing your chances of making a sale and growing your traffic.

It’s an important first step to take. You’ll want to identify high-value and relevant keywords related to your industry, products, and customers. In this section, I’ll explain the keywords that small businesses should target and how you can find them.

Types of Keywords

There are two main types of keywords: primary and secondary. Your primary keyword is the main phrase you want to target, while secondary keywords are words or variations closely related to the primary keyword. You use both to populate your content and site, creating more opportunities to reach your target audience.

You can also break down keywords by user intent. I’ve shared some examples below:

• Informational – The searcher wants more information
  • Examples: “How long does it take to build a website?” or “How to sell online?”
• Navigational – The searcher is looking for a specific page
  • Examples: “Website Builder Expert” or “Wix help center”
• Commercial – The searcher is researching products before making a decision
  • Examples: “Wix vs Shopify” or “Cheap website builders”
• Transactional – The searcher is ready to buy
  • Examples: “Website builder deals” or “Squarespace plans”

For ecommerce sites, commercial and transactional keywords should be your focus since these indicate the phrases people are searching for when they intend to buy. That said, informational and navigational keywords are still important and can help shape your content strategy.

How Can You Find Keywords?

So, how can you find the right keywords for your online store? There are various methods to consider:

• Use keyword tools and free SEO tools – Platforms like Google Search Console, Semrush, and Keyword Tool will help you identify keyword opportunities for your site
• Check suggested searches from Google & Amazon – While this won’t provide detailed information like keyword tools, seeing related queries can give you a good starting point
• Review competitor sites – See what keywords your competitors are ranking for and identify how difficult it will be to position your site ahead of them in search results
• Browse forums and social media – Visit platforms where your target audience is already lurking and see what phrases come up naturally in discussion

At this stage, you can also search for local SEO keywords if your store is looking to target a specific location. With these methods, you’ll be able to build a substantial library of keywords to help optimize your storefront.

After completing your keyword research, the logical next step is to optimize your pages. This helps customers and search engines, like Google, understand what’s on your pages – and, for ecommerce sites, this is particularly important for product pages.

On-page SEO optimization techniques, such as adding keywords to title tags and meta descriptions, can improve your page’s ranking and boost your site’s visibility.

I recommend providing as much information about your products as possible. Not only can this reassure customers and nudge them toward converting, but Google will recognize the high-quality and unique content on your product pages. Here are some key areas to focus on:

• Product descriptions – Write detailed descriptions to help customers make an informed decision. Lots of website builders, such as Shopify and Hostinger, provide AI-powered SEO tools to help generate unique copy for products
• Product imagery – Give people a clear picture of what your product looks like from every angle, and showcase the product in its target setting if possible (such as running shoes pictured in action). But, remember to make your product photos accessible for all and scannable for search engines by adding alt text!
• Product reviews – Build brand trust and encourage customers to shop with you by showing positive reviews on your product pages

Can shoppers find what they’re looking for when they visit your ecommerce site? Can Google crawl your site with ease? You need to consider how you organize your pages and content when building your online store – this impacts the overall user experience, as well as your rankings.

To get started, here are a few ecommerce SEO best practices:

• Think about the customer journey – Identify customer touchpoints and map out how you want the customer to get from point A to point B. Is it easy for a visitor to jump around your site? Have you clearly signposted your top pages? Could you add a clear CTA (call-to-action) to guide the customer? How will you keep them engaged at all stages of their journey?
• Make it easy to navigate – You need to create natural connections between pages to make navigating your site easy for customers and search engines. Website navigation best practices include keeping the number of pages in your menu limited to avoid overwhelming customers, and adding a search bar so people can search for something specific on your site.
• Improve your site’s architecture – This is how your pages are structured and linked. I’ll discuss internal linking in more detail later on, but it’s important to consider the hierarchy of your content and where each page sits. This helps search engines find and index your content to show relevant results to customers.
• Optimize your URLs – The URL of your page should reflect the featured content. Make sure to include your primary keyword and keep it brief. For example, websitebuilderexpert.com/website-builders/cheap is an SEO-friendly URL, providing information about the category (website builders) and the page’s content (cheap website builder options).
• Consider your site’s accessibility – Your store needs to be accessible for all users, which is why it’s so important to structure your pages properly with headings, avoid unreadable fonts or color schemes, and add alt text to imagery.

These steps align with the other ecommerce SEO best practices mentioned in this list. For example, a solid linking strategy will help improve your site’s navigation since users can find their way around your online store quickly and easily.

Google prioritizes the mobile version of a website when indexing content, so you must optimize your store for all devices. This also ties in with my previous point about creating a user-friendly and positive experience for customers to encourage sales and repeat visits.

So, what can you do to make your site mobile-friendly? Here are some do’s and don’t’s:

If you don’t optimize your store for mobiles, you risk losing visibility and traffic since Google won’t show your site in the top results for a query.

With more people than ever using their phones to get online, I highly recommend using an ecommerce website builder for your store. Builders, like Shopify, can automatically optimize your site for mobile users, offering mobile-responsive templates.

➡️ Did you know you can sell online for free? We’ve tested the best free ecommerce platforms to help you save money.

Another important ecommerce SEO best practice is building links – between your pages and returning from other third-party sites. It’s important to keep potential visitors engaged and active on your site for as long as possible, increasing your chances of converting the browser into a customer. But, how can you build a successful network of links?

Internal Linking

Internal links – links that direct readers to other pages on your site – help to improve the overall user experience. Not only do they direct people to relevant and discoverable content, but internal links also help Google recognize related content.

A good internal linking strategy goes hand-in-hand with a good content marketing strategy. If you create core category pages, links can trickle down to related secondary pages – and back up again. You’re essentially building a web of connected pages.

Just remember to use appropriate anchor text when linking to your store’s pages. For example, “find out more” provides the customer with zero information about where you’re sending them. A link directing readers to holiday deals should be labeled as such in the copy.

Sourcing Quality Backlinks

Besides internal links, it’s also important your ecommerce store gathers quality backlinks from other sources. This provides a clear signal to Google that others view your site as an authority in your niche, especially if the links come from well-respected sites. Backlinks provide a nod of approval and Google takes this into account when assessing your site’s quality and relevancy.

It can be hard for very new or small businesses to generate backlinks right away, but there are a few avenues to pursue:

• Connect with people – Create a network of contacts in your industry and see what type of valuable content you can create (e.g. infographics or videos) that people will want to share
• Build partnerships with high-authority sites – Getting backlinks from established websites can really help with brand recognition
• Guest posting – Lend your services to another website to generate backlinks to your website
• Press – Links to your ecommerce site in press releases can be a huge win, whether you’ve contributed a useful quote or your work has been cited

Ultimately, you need to provide worthy content to link to and reference, but I’ll discuss this more closely in the next section.

Proving that your ecommerce site is a credible and trustworthy brand puts customers at ease when shopping with you. And, showing off that you’re an expert in your industry can encourage Google to rank your pages highly.

The best thing I can recommend for your ecommerce site is to add a blog if you don’t already have one. Starting a blog can help you build authority in your niche and increase your chances of appearing in search results. Plus, it’s a valuable resource for many website visitors to turn to.

Some potential blog post ideas for ecommerce sites include product reviews, how-to guides or tutorials, and customer testimonials.

Promoting Your Store

Another ecommerce SEO best practice is to share and promote your ecommerce site online. Of course, this can be done via word-of-mouth, but you’ll reap more benefits when you share content, deals, and product news across other platforms, such as social media.

Social media SEO increases brand awareness and gets your products seen by more people. It’s a great way to engage with your community on channels that they’re already familiar with, and you can drive that attention back to your website. This will increase traffic and visibility for your business.

➡️ Check your site’s SEO visibility score to see if your store is likely to be found by customers.

Once you understand the SEO basics, it’s time to knuckle down with your site’s technical SEO. This is behind-the-scenes work that your customers won’t even know about, but it helps you optimize your site for search engines.

There are plenty of benefits to getting your technical SEO right, including more organic traffic and improved engagement from customers. By actioning the following steps, your site will run smoothly and be easier for search engines to crawl:

• HTTPS – Your site’s HTTPS is the secure version of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), which means information is encrypted when it’s exchanged between the web browser and server. This includes credit card details when a customer is making a purchase.

• Creating a sitemap – A sitemap of your ecommerce store provides a visual map to search engines to help them understand the structure and content of your pages in detail. It can also be used by website visitors to navigate your site.
• Schema markups – Structured data, such as product markup, can provide Google with important information and context about the page in question. This helps your store pages appear under relevant search queries, because Google can recognize the relevancy and produce rich snippets (detailed search results).
• Page speed – If your ecommerce site is struggling to load, you risk customers abandoning their carts or bouncing to a competitor. To improve your website’s load times, you can carry out simple actions, such as reducing file sizes, limiting page elements, and adding white space.

➡️ Confused by all of this SEO terminology? Check out our SEO glossary page so you can understand what’s what.

Audit Your Site

A good way to start carrying out technical SEO on your site is to run a site audit. This helps you uncover issues, errors, and areas to improve. For example, this could be anything from broken internal links to slow-loading pages.

Together, these issues can create a negative user experience, impacting the image of your business in the eyes of both customers and search engines.

It’s best to audit your site fairly regularly to avoid letting any issues slip by, especially for ecommerce sites where you rely on sales and engagement. I recommend starting with every quarter – you can see how this works for your business and adjust if needed.

Whether you’re publishing blog content consistently or sourcing quality backlinks to your site, your store should now be in a good position to thrive online. These seven ecommerce SEO tips are a low-cost, high-reward way to encourage more customers to shop with you.

That said, the search landscape is constantly evolving – with regular Google algorithm updates to monitor – so it’s important to stay on top of the latest developments and guidelines.