Key Tips For Mastering eCommerce SEO in 2024

An eCommerce SEO is one of the most efficient ways for businesses to attract more people interested in their products or services. While SEO might seem complex and quite difficult to grasp, even beginners can figure out its basics and start using simple techniques to improve their websites' visibility in search results.

Read further to discover what is eCommerce SEO and how to use it efficiently.

What exactly is eCommerce SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's visibility and rankings in Google or other search engines. This process has its own specifics, depending on the industry it's used in.

That's why SEO for eCommerce focuses on things that could benefit your online store the most, such as the performance of your product and category pages. When used efficiently, this technology can help you reach your customers more efficiently than paid ads.

Step 1. Mastering the technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical elements of your website. Doing so can help a site perform better and, therefore, rank higher in search results.

Here are several simple yet efficient technical SEO tactics that can help you achieve that.

Use HTTPS protocol

HTTPS protocol allows exchanging data between a website and its visitors in a more secure way. This is especially important for eCommerce site SEO, as your customers commonly share various sensitive information with online stores — their name, address, and payment details.

This protocol is used by default by many popular eCommerce platforms, but you should still double-check if your website has it. You can do this by looking at the address bar — if it has a "padlock" icon, then it uses HTTPS.

Improve your website's navigation

You can do this by optimizing the site structure. This is the way your existing web pages are organized and interlinked.

One of the eCommerce SEO best practices is to ensure that the navigation is simple and familiar to users. For instance, your homepage links to category pages. The category pages link to subcategory pages, which, in turn, link to relevant products.

Ensure that your faceted navigation is correct

Faceted navigation is a tool that allows visitors to filter their product searches on category and subcategory pages. It might feel beneficial for users, but this isn't necessarily the case for website owners. In some cases, filter combinations often create new URLs that can look like this:

/smartphones/?color=pink&brand=apple

Google, in turn, can crawl and index such URLs and split ranking signals between similar pages. To prevent this, canonicalize faceted URLs.

Step 2. Utilizing keyword research

Keyword research is one of the most important instruments of SEO for eCommerce sites. By discovering relevant keywords and placing them in a strategy, you can figure out how people search for your products or services, as well as explain to Google what exactly you're offering.

Here's how to do this.

Discover subcategory page keywords

Subcategory pages allow customers to discover the product types within a broader category. For instance, a category "men's clothing" can have subcategories named "shirts," "sweaters," "pants," and so on.

Most likely, you already have some subcategories in mind that intuitively suit your store. However, if you want to improve your SEO for an eCommerce site, you need to align these subcategories with different keywords that people use to search for them.

Our keyword research guide for beginners can help you with that.

Discover product category page keywords

The same approach can be applied to discovering and using relevant keywords for your product category page descriptions and texts. The important thing is to choose such keywords wisely.

When you're selling branded products, your product pages target the relevant keywords automatically. However, if you're working with unknown or less familiar brands, you might look for more descriptive yet efficient keywords — such as "e-ink reader."

Step 3. Checking your on-page SEO

On-page SEO for eCommerce websites requires you to optimize the content located on your pages to spot and fix errors and help the site rank higher. This process might sound challenging to beginners, but in fact, it's quite easy when you use a free tool like Netpeak Spider.

How to check on-page SEO with Netpeak Spider

You only need a few clicks to analyze your website with Netpeak Spider and improve your eCommerce SEO strategy. Here's how to do that.

1. Add links that you want to check. To do this, open the 'Add URLs' tab or manually add the desired links. On the right-hand side, under 'Parameters,' select all the essential metrics for the site's ranking.

2. Start your analysis. You can do this by clicking 'Start' within the Parameters tab. Head to 'All Results' and examine the checkup of each webpage. This will display results based on the chosen parameters.

3. Export the report. Click on 'Export.' Then, choose 'Current table results' in the drop-down menu.

4. Analyze found issues. They are listed in the 'Reports' table on the right. Check all the errors and warnings, along with tips on how to improve your content.

5. Download the result. To do this, go to the 'Export' tab and select 'All issue reports.'

Use templates to save time

Most of the eCommerce stores use templates for H1 titles, meta titles, and descriptions. Doing so saves lots of time but can cause page duplicates.

To avoid this and still optimize resources, stick with the template approach for most of your pages but create unique descriptions for the most searched ones.

To find them:

1. Open your Google Search Console.
2. Go to the "Search results".
3. Click on the "Pages" tab.

Choose SEO-friendly URLs

These can be the URLs that look like this:

domain.com/product/

And like this:

domain.com/product/subcategory

In this case, you'll be able to avoid URL duplicates for the products that fall into multiple categories.

Step 4. Using link building

Not all strategies for SEO eCommerce sites include link building. Despite the overall efficiency of this technology, it can be difficult for this niche because people are rarely motivated to link to products or categories.

However, you can still build links by:

1. Offering products that only you sell and asking them to recommend them in their articles.
2. Looking for unlinked mentions of your product, service, or brand, and ask the authors to add links to them.

To get a grasp of link building, read our beginner guide.

Step 5. Investing in content creation

Content is an important part of SEO for eCommerce websites as it helps capture the attention of your audience, build better relationships with customers, and even generate more conversions.

These tips will help you create content that is engaging and relevant to your target audience.

1. Conduct commercial investigation keyword research. Such keywords are basically terms that people google when trying to decide what to buy. Look for those keywords that relate to problems solved by your products or services, and use them in blog post writing.
2. Optimize your product images for web search. You can do this by coming up with descriptive file names and adding relevant alt texts.

Advanced tips to improve your eCommerce SEO

If you've taken all the steps listed above, most likely, your e-commerce search engine optimization already works and shows some notable results. To top it up and maximize the impact, consider using the following eCommerce SEO tips.

1. Add schema markups to your product pages. Schema markup is the code that helps search engines understand what your pages are about and showcase them correctly in SERPs. By adding this code to your product pages, you can help them win rich snippets.
2. Monitor and prevent technical SEO issues. Unfortunately, even if your technical SEO looks well now, this doesn't mean that it will remain stable for ages. Conduct regular SEO audits to spot technical mistakes and fix them before they affect your website's ranking.
3. Add links to important subcategories. If you think that category visitors will be interested in particular subcategories (such as "Apple smartphones" or "Nike trousers"), link to them on category pages. This will make it easier for customers to navigate your store.

The most common eCommerce SEO mistakes you should avoid

To ensure that your SEO strategy for eCommerce sites is successful, don't forget to learn from others' marketing mistakes to avoid them. The most common issues that can hurt your ranking are the following:

• Keyword stuffing — overused keywords that are mentioned too often.
• Slow website loading speed — if your website loads slowly across different devices, visitors will most likely leave for a better-performing site
• No breadcrumbs — both visitors and Google find them useful.
• Blocked key pages — this happens when "Disallow" directives or noindex tags are mistakenly added to the robots.txt file, and your page doesn't show in search results.
• Low-quality pages indexing — if your eCommerce filters or search pages index, this doesn't bring any value to your website.

Conclusion

It's not easy to master eCommerce SEO fast. However, if you're wondering if this process is worth your time and effort, the answer is definitely "yes." Follow the tips listed in this article and use smart tools like Netpeak Spider to help your online store increase visibility in search results.