eCommerce SEO Strategies, Actionable Insights, and Tips 

Actionable eCommerce SEO Strategies, Tactics, and Insights

Below, we’ve compiled our own exhaustive list of eCommerce SEO strategies you can employ. Just be sure to be strategic about which strategies you use. Some sites might get far more value from focusing on technical SEO for eCommerce while others may simply want to research and understand their customers more.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to try all of these at once, so consider which will contribute most to your strategic goals.

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing and understanding your prospective customers is the foundation for successful eCommerce SEO strategies. This extends to everything from basic demographic information like their age and gender to the types of content they watch, influencers they trust, and their behavior patterns.

How to uncover this information can vary. You can commission research studies, survey your customers, or even interview them. Things like customer comments, complaints, and reviews can also be used. But in most cases, the analytics gathered from your website and social media accounts will serve as the basis for this knowledge. AI tools can be very useful for analyzing the data you gather to generate personas.

But aside from just gathering data, knowing your audience should be built around a customer-centric mindset. Instead of relying on customer profiles produced years ago, your team should be regularly asking questions, running experiments, and striving to gain a better understanding of your audience. That audience is never going to stop evolving, so you can never stop striving to understand that evolution.

Map your Customer Journey from Search to Checkout

Just because eCommerce SEO strategies generally focus on the bottom of the funnel doesn’t mean they can ignore the broader customer journey. Understanding how your customers are educating themselves and making buying decisions is crucial if you’re going to be strategic about optimizing your eCommerce SEO.

Mapping out your customer’s journey helps you understand what problems your products help them address, what factors influence their buying decision, and even the impact subsequent customer support can have. Understanding this process helps you identify where you can add value. Perhaps improving the CX on your website might help frustrated customers. Improving the quality of your support or partnering with an influencer in your category all might help drive the sales you’re looking for.

But don’t forget to validate and update your customer journey regularly as it may evolve and change with time. It shouldn’t be something you create once and use as is for the next 5 years.

Conduct In-Depth Competitor Analysis

In today’s world, no eCommerce businesses operate in a vacuum. In nearly all cases, your competition is just a click away, so understanding that competition is more crucial than ever. This analysis can consist of basic information like domain authority, traffic size and source, backlinks, and top keywords. 

But going beyond that to understand the unique advantages your competitors have is crucial. Do they have a more trustworthy brand because they focus on quality? Are they excelling at driving traffic by ranking for long-tail keywords with informative content? Or are they employing dynamic pricing, loyalty programs, etc.?

AI can be useful here as well. You can try taking things like product descriptions from your various competitors and asking an AI bot to analyze them and find differences. This can save a lot of time and enable you to uncover unique insights you can use to stand out.

Focus on Commercial and Transactional Keywords

While eCommerce SEO strategies can target other kinds of keywords, your main focus should be on those that are commercial and transactional. These are searches like “discount Nike running shoes” or “Nike shoes free shipping” that indicate a person is past the consideration phase and ready to make a purchase immediately.

The main benefit of focusing on these keywords is the quick return on investment. They tend to earn you fast sales because all the long steps of education and consideration are already complete. That said, this can make commercial and transactional keywords extremely competitive, so it’s worth getting creative and looking for long-form examples like “Nike shoes free shipping Canada.”

Ensure a Strong Technical SEO Foundation 

While technical SEO for eCommerce often doesn’t get as much attention, it’s essential for success. Even if every other element of your broader eCommerce website SEO strategy is excellent, poor technical SEO will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of that strategy.

Technical SEO issues make it difficult for search engines to crawl your site, something they will punish you for. They may also lead to slow page loading times, resulting in more customers giving up instead of making a purchase. This is why identifying and fixing technical SEO issues should be a top priority for all eCommerce SEO strategies. Only once those problems have been addressed should you execute other elements of your strategy.

Fortunately there are many tools out there that will simulate search engine crawlers to analyze your site and identify technical issues. SemRush, Hubspot, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs are just a few out there, but it’s best to first check whether the CRM you’re already using has this functionality.

Optimize for a Mobile Shopping Experience

Today, 59% of eCommerce sales happen on mobile phones. That number has been increasing for years and only looks likely to continue its rise into the future. Neglecting a mobile-optimized shopping experience is therefore a fatal flaw for eCommerce SEO strategies. Even if most of your sales happen on desktop devices, search engines will not promote sites with poor mobile optimization.

This begins with basics like having a mobile version of your site, ensuring it loads quickly, etc. But beyond these basics, it’s crucial to look at your analytics to understand differences between mobile and desktop shoppers on your site. If mobile shoppers are dropping off at one specific stage of the buying process, for example, there may be a mobile-specific issue there you want to address.

If you’re willing to invest in creating one, 78% of consumers prefer shopping from mobile apps compared to mobile versions of websites. Building an app gives you far more granular control over the customer experience and enables you to gather more data. But you’ll need to weigh the app development costs against these benefits.

Implement Faceted Navigation

If your site has more than a few dozen products, faceted navigation becomes an essential eCommerce SEO strategy. Faceted navigation enables users to filter products based on things like price, brand, color, size, etc. When navigating through hundreds of products, these filters make it far easier for users to find what they want and purchase it.

But implementing faceted navigation effectively requires understanding your customers. For example, is it important to sort products by rating? Are there features they want to be able to sort for like soft-close drawers on bedside tables or braided vs non-braided cables on phone chargers. However, too many filtering options can also create issues with duplicate content, index bloat, and overly complex URLs. The key is striking the right balance.

Finding that balance begins with keeping your strategic goals in mind. Adding an additional filter may increase conversion rates once people are on your page but decrease the number of people who come in the first place. To avoid getting distracted by metrics that don’t really move the needle for you, structure tests with different forms of faceted navigation and focus on how they impact specific metrics.

Align Product Category Pages with Purchase-Intent Keywords

Much like faceted navigation, product category pages are essential tools for helping customers find what they’re looking for. But what you call those pages can have a major impact on your sales. For example, do you have a broad category of “sports shoes” or break it down by specific sports like tennis or golf?

The answer lies in the prevalent purchase-intent keywords your customers use. Category pages should correspond to terms people search for. So, for example, “sports shoes” might make logical sense as a category, but if few people search for it then you’ll want to find another approach. 

Your best performance will come when users arrive at your site with a specific intent, like buying a pair of men’s golf shoes, and they are quickly and easily able to find a corresponding category and the right pair for their needs. Forcing customers to ask themselves questions like “would golf shoes be under the sports shoes or specialty shoes categories?” will result in confused customers and fewer sales.

Capture BOF Shoppers with Product Pages

The main reason you want your product pages aligned with purchase-intent keywords is to capture users when they reach the Bottom Of the Funnel (BOF). While presenting helpful guides and information to aid shoppers in making decisions is great for other parts of your website, your product pages should be laser focused on conversions.

Converting shoppers with your product pages begins with understanding their wants and needs. That can come from surveying, interviewing, or simply analyzing your own site data. Remember that AI can be extremely useful in analyzing data or even customer generated content like reviews. You can feed a bot this information and ask questions about what causes people to ultimately convert.

The goal is to capture people with a buying intent and enable them to fulfill that intent as efficiently as possible. That may come from something as simple as a “buy now” button or restructuring your product pages to make searching and finding the right product easier.

Prioritize Your Most Valuable Products

For eCommerce SEO strategies, “valuable” products are those which help drive your strategic goals. That might mean products with greater margins to drive revenue or those that tend to create return customers. The point is that you need to identify which products produce the most value for your business and prioritize them rather than simply assuming higher-price items, for example, are automatically more valuable.

That prioritization might mean ensuring the default way you list your products places them at the top. It also could simply mean putting images of them on your homepage, promoting them with ads, or running promotions around them. The ways you can make that prioritization happen are nearly infinite, but knowing what to prioritize is the first and most important step.

Use High-Quality Imagery and Video  

With the modern eCommerce landscape full of untrustworthy brands, it’s never been more important to build confidence through small touches. Using high-quality images and video is one major example. When customers can clearly see your products they feel more confident in their buying decisions, get a good first impression, and improve conversion rates.

Aside from including multiple images, customers also prefer when 360-degree product views are offered. In short, the more visual information you can provide about your products the more likely people are to buy them. That said, you’ll want to follow image and video file best practices to ensure you’re minimizing file sizes hosted on your site to improve page load speeds and general site performance. 

Use eCommerce Schema to Improve Discovery

If your eCommerce website SEO strategy doesn’t include implementing schema markup, that needs to change. Adding structured data to your site helps search engines better understand your products.

That sounds simple but the implications are enormous, as this enables search engines to display rich snippets that show prospective customers more useful information like ratings, availability, prices, and even discounts. Schemas also makes it easier for AI tools and voice search to understand your product offerings and serve customers information about them.

To begin using schemas, identify the types that are appropriate for your site. For example product schemas for products, review and rating ones for reviews, etc. Then, you can select the best schema format for your needs, though JSON-LD is usually preferred. Fortunately, many CRMs have schema plugins that can automate this process, so check whether that’s an option for you.

Leverage Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center (GMC) is an essential component of modern eCommerce SEO strategies for the simple reason that it provides excellent value. The free tool enables you to manage how your products appear across Google tools like search, YouTube, Maps, and more.

Using GMC allows your products to appear in Google Shopping, makes them more likely to appear in organic searches, integrates with Google ads, and provides you with excellent analytics. Considering the importance and reach of Google’s products, using GMC to improve how they interact with your listings is a no brainer.

Feature Reviews and Social Proof to Build Trust

With the proliferation of low-quality drop shipping and outright scam products on the internet, social proof has never been more important for eCommerce. It’s no wonder 74% of consumers check at least 2 review sites before making a purchase decision.

For merchants, it’s important to allow customers to leave reviews, respond to all reviews (positive and negative), and to display review information along with your products. You also may want to consider encouraging customers to leave reviews via email or even promo offers. In other cases, sending products to influencers can help generate more high-quality, trusted third party video reviews that customers love. Lastly, don’t forget to mark reviews on your site with the appropriate schema so search engines can display them.

Provide a Seamless UX and Checkout Process

Today, a shocking 70.19% of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned, a number that’s been trending upwards for nearly two decades. Too often, customers want to buy your products but get frustrated with bad UX and checkout processes. This can lead them to abandon their order and go elsewhere with their business. 

To address this problem, you need to rigorously test your site and its checkout process with different browsers, operating systems, and devices to uncover potential issues. You can also use analytics to spot where and when customers drop off to identify problems. Ultimately, you should seek to minimize the number of clicks and other actions required to get from a shopping cart to a completed purchase.

For example, working with systems like Apple Pay or Google Pay can help boost consumer confidence and enable them to check out more quickly. Also consider minimizing the amount of information customers need to provide to create an account or make a purchase.