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<\/p>\nWhat sets your eCommerce store apart from countless others? Of course, your customer service and valuable products are important distinguishers, but how does a shopper who hasn\u2019t yet tried your service find you online in the first place? Referrals? Sure. But without that, you must rely on online visibility, aka SEO.<\/p>\n
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You might already be well-versed in general SEO<\/a> practices \u2014 backlinks<\/a>, keywords, HTML headings<\/a>, etc. are a part of your SEO strategy<\/a>. But eCommerce SEO has more specific principles and best practices to optimize your online store\u2019s visibility.<\/p>\n In this guide, we\u2019ll explain how to do SEO for eCommerce websites<\/a> and help you find ways to set your eCommerce SEO strategy apart from the rest.<\/p>\n Simply put, eCommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible on Google\u2019s search engine results.<\/p>\n When a potential buyer searches for your product online, eCommerce SEO ensures your online store ranks as a top result, enhancing your chance of more site visits and sales.<\/p>\n Of course, you can pay for Google ads to ensure your store shows up in your audience\u2019s top results \u2014 but that comes with a high cost. It\u2019s crucial to optimize your eCommerce SEO even if you have great ad campaigns running, or else you\u2019re simply losing out on bringing tons of quality users to your site.<\/strong><\/p>\n As opposed to regular SEO, which usually focuses on optimizing static web pages, such as your homepage, main offerings pages, and blog posts, eCommerce SEO mostly focuses on optimizing your product and category pages<\/strong>, including:<\/p>\n The importance of eCommerce SEO starts with your audience. Their first step to finding a product often starts with a Google search \u2014 in fact, 37.5% of eCommerce web traffic<\/a> comes directly from searches.<\/p>\n The audience making these searches may vary in their intent. User search intent<\/a> in SEO describes various intentions behind a search: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional.<\/p>\n Transactional intent means a user intends to buy something after searching for a term \u2014 this is an audience that you want to capture and lead to your website. Without eCommerce SEO, you miss out on opportunities to reach those users.<\/p>\n The bottom line is, eCommerce SEO leads potential buyers to your online store. And that\u2019s pretty important for any eCommerce business hoping to grow.<\/p>\n Now that you know about all the buyers you could attract to your site with eCommerce SEO, let\u2019s develop a strategy.<\/p>\n Every aspect of business requires strategy, from cost savings to customer service. eCommerce SEO is no different. For instance, if you have certain products that are more important to your business on a strategic level, you should prioritize them in your eCommerce SEO efforts.<\/p>\n eCommerce search engine optimization isn\u2019t one linear path. It encompasses different aspects and strategies with various workflows and measures of success, which is why a solid strategy is so important. The different aspects include general umbrellas of regular SEO – such as link building, keyword research, optimization, and technical SEO<\/a> \u2014 except with a focused approach tailored to eCommerce.<\/p>\n Your strategy should have clear goals and measures of success for each aspect, but we\u2019ll get more into those specifics later. Begin brainstorming your strategy with the following starting points:<\/p>\n Products:<\/strong> Which products do you want your audience to find first? If there\u2019s one in particular, focus your strategy on that specific product page.<\/p>\n Competition:<\/strong> Browse your competitor\u2019s offerings online. Look at online stores similar to yours and write down what they do well or not so well when it comes to SEO. Come out of your research with ways to improve your competitors\u2019 SEO and offerings with your eCommerce store.<\/p>\n Now it\u2019s time to get into the nitty-gritty of how to do eCommerce SEO the right way.<\/p>\n Check out the following eCommerce SEO best practices and implement them into your strategy. Over time, you should see some healthy growth in the SERPs.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no need to reinvent the wheel. Chances are, you have at least a few competitors that have similar eCommerce shops to your own. If their products are ranking higher than yours, a great first step is to take a look into why that is.<\/p>\n Investigate their web pages and see what keywords they\u2019re targeting. Gain inspiration from their copy. Perhaps their design is much better than yours, and you can get some pointers on how to improve your UX.<\/p>\n Make a list of all the things they\u2019re doing better than you, and come up with a strategy on how you can improve your site and hopefully outperform them.<\/p>\n In a blog article, it\u2019s easier to space out keywords to make them sound natural within a text. Keywords are still necessary for eCommerce SEO, but you need to be selective in their placement.<\/p>\n Product titles and copy are much shorter than entire web pages and blog articles, for example, so keywords should be present in a way that doesn\u2019t look awkward in the text.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll want to include your primary keyword in the following places on your product page:<\/p>\n Next, you should identify latent semantic index (LSI<\/a>) keywords throughout your product page as well. These are related secondary keywords that are important for ensuring Google knows what topic your page is about.<\/p>\n When conducting keyword research<\/a>, you should find words with transactional intent behind them. Transactional intent plus high search volume are two keyword ingredients to make your site visible to the ideal user.<\/p>\n For example, let\u2019s say you have an eCommerce shop that sells lovely teas, and you\u2019d like to optimize your Matcha green tea product page. After doing some keyword research, you decide the primary keyword to target is \u201cMatcha green tea,<\/strong>\u201d and discover some long-tail keywords<\/a> that many people are searching for when they want to buy Matcha green tea online, such as the ones Similarweb recommends.<\/p>\n Now you know exactly what words to include in your web copy to help interested tea lovers locate your shop online.<\/p>\n Product pages are individual web pages for your offerings. They must be \u201cperfect\u201d in the way that anything that feels \u201coff\u201d will encourage a user to abandon a potential transaction. \u201cPerfect\u201d for product page SEO means a seamless user experience.<\/p>\n The product page should have all the necessary information to describe a product while also including:<\/p>\n You can also use competitor keyword research<\/a> to your advantage here by analyzing the keywords each competitor uses on the pages for their best-selling products.<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/strong> Check out Top Pages on Similarweb to see your competition\u2019s best-performing pages.<\/em><\/p>\n Your product pages should also have structured data \u2014 also known as schema markup<\/a> \u2014 to encourage more click-throughs. These little descriptions include information like product manufacturer, dimensions, price, and brand \u2013 you know, all the important stuff. With structured data, Google can better recognize the page and display valuable information to users right on the SERPs.<\/p>\n Product pages face immense competition in the online world because other companies will likely offer similar products to your online store. One way to combat that is through an eCommerce SEO-optimized category page. Think \u201cWomen\u2019s tops\u201d or \u201cMen\u2019s socks\u201d on a clothing website.<\/p>\n Category pages organize your online store offerings into sections to provide better web navigation and give users more options that they may be interested in. Category pages also offer a great opportunity for Google search rankings.<\/p>\n Optimizing category pages may even help you increase sales for a specific category of products. Experts recommend optimizing category pages with internal linking<\/a>, images, and short copy that includes keywords (without keyword stuffing<\/a>).<\/p>\n One way to encourage people to buy your products is to position yourself as an authority in your industry. To do that, many companies create blog articles with content related to their niche. The best way to do this is in content clusters, which are groups of content that are all related to the same general keyword.<\/p>\n For example, a vitamin and supplement eCommerce store may create and publish SEO-driven content about:<\/p>\n Be sure to include relevant internal links to other related blog posts, product pages, and category pages within each new blog article. On top of providing further useful info for your audience (and keeping them engaged on your site), this will also help increase the linked pages\u2019 authority as well. Win-win-win.<\/p>\n With supporting eCommerce content marketing<\/a>, you\u2019ll likely attract users with informational intent behind their Google searches, but that\u2019s okay. Even if they don\u2019t purchase a product right away, they will come to know you as an authority and trusted source in the industry.<\/p>\n Over time, by consistently publishing useful content on your site, you\u2019ll begin to rank for more targeted keywords, increase organic traffic<\/a>, and gain backlinks and social media shares.<\/p>\n All of these factors combined will cause your product pages to rank better as your brand becomes an authority in its industry.<\/p>\n There are so many factors that eCommerce businesses should consider when optimizing their website \u2014 some more obvious than others.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a checklist of other things to look into as you continually improve your eCommerce SEO:<\/p>\n Read More: How eCommerce UI Can Make or Break a Conversion<\/a><\/p>\nWhat is eCommerce SEO?<\/h2>\n
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What\u2019s the importance of SEO to eCommerce websites?<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nHow do you develop an effective eCommerce SEO strategy?<\/h2>\n
What are eCommerce SEO best practices?<\/h2>\n
See what your competitors are doing<\/h3>\n
![\"Similarweb](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/ecomm-seo-keywords.png\")
<\/p>\nKeyword research<\/h3>\n
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![\"Similarweb](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/ecomm-seo-example-keywords.png\")
<\/p>\nProduct page SEO optimization<\/h3>\n
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Category page SEO<\/h3>\n
Supporting content<\/h3>\n
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Other important tips to consider<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\neCommerce SEO Checklist<\/h2>\n