What is E-commerce SEO?: If you want to sell more on your online store, SEO for e-commerce is the answer. Read on to find out what it is, why it’s important, and how to do it.

Getting more traffic is top of mind for any e-commerce business owner, so the thought of mastering e-commerce SEO has probably crossed your mind once or twice.

But between search engine algorithm updates and excessive industry jargon, it can be pretty difficult to get the hang of this whole SEO thing.

This beginner’s guide will take you from a newbie to a novice as quickly and simply as possible. We’ll cover keyword research, site structure and organization, and on-page SEO.

What is E-commerce SEO?

E-commerce SEO is the process of optimizing an online store to improve visibility and rankings in search engines such as Google. The focus is on improving the performance of category and product pages because that’s good.

E-commerce SEO is the search engine optimization of an online store. Writing long descriptions with relevant keywords on every product page is an example of optimization. Obtaining backlinks from relevant websites can also improve your online store’s ranking position.
This is a cheaper way to reach your customers than asking for expensive advertising.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO may seem complicated, but it’s essential for business sites. This applies to included travel bags, but there are other considerations. Let’s go through them.

Secure your Site with HTTPS E-commerce SEO

HTTPS is a secure protocol for transferring data between websites and visitors. This prevents hackers from stealing sensitive information such as name, address, and credit card information provided by visitors to the online store. It has also been a minority of Google ever since.

You can tell if your store uses HTTPS by having the “padlock” icon in the address bar.
Most popular e-commerce platforms use HTTPS, so this shouldn’t be a problem for most people. But if so, it needs to be fixed.

Make your site Structure Easy to Navigate

Site layout is how your website’s pages are organized and related to each other.
There are two reasons for this arrangement:

Here are two reasons why this structure makes sense:

1. It’s easy to navigate – Visitors can find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks.
2. It helps Google find your pages – Google can “follow” internal links from page to page.

Getting your site structure right from the start also means you’ll avoid the headache of redesigning it later on.

When it comes to internal links, it’s best to keep it simple to start with. You can use the arrows in the illustration above as guidance on how to interlink your pages.

For example, your home page should include links to category pages, related subcategories, and related content.

Use an Indoor Trailer

This is not only beneficial for visitors, but also causes serious SEO problems for commercial websites, as the filter loads new URLs and extensions.
While there are only a few filters, there are thousands of combinations. This means thousands of new URLs for Google to crawl and index.

It’s not good because:

• Weaken important pages’ ability to rank – Filter combinations can often lead to the creation of multiple URLs with the same content. Unless Google realizes this (which doesn’t always happen), ranking signals will get split between the duplicate pages.
• Prevent Google from crawling important pages – Google will only devote finite resources to crawling your site. If it has to crawl a load of junk, it may not have the resources to crawl all important pages.

There are various solutions to these issues. For beginners and intermediates, a simple option is to canonicalize faceted URLs to their master category or subcategory.

Some e-commerce SEO platforms do this out of the box. Check if this is the case for your site by installing Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, visiting a few faceted URLs, and checking the “Indexability” tab. If the canonical URL is non-faceted, chances are this isn’t an issue on your site.

2. Keyword Research

Keyword research helps you understand how people search for your product. You can use this information to create subcategories and product pages that match your search needs. Let’s see how they can do it.

Find keywords for Subcategory Pages

Subcategory pages list the types of products you can buy within the category.

For example, the “Phone” category has subcategories such as “Phone” and “Wireless”.

You probably already know some subcategories that make sense for your store. But as people search in many ways, it’s useful for SEO to create subcategories that align with those terms.

Here’s how to find ideas for subcategories in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:

• Enter a few broad keywords related to your category
• Go to the Matching Terms report
• Look for the types of things you sell

Note that this isn’t all about search volumes. You should use common sense and choose terms that make sense as subcategories.

For example, “audio technica open ear headphones” won’t be a suitable subcategory because it’s too specific. The same is true for “bone conduction headphones” unless you sell more than a couple of pairs.

Find keywords for Product Pages

Branded keyword research doesn’t matter when selling branded products because people are searching for the products themselves.

For example, there are about 622,000 monthly searches in the US. From Airpods Pro.
If you sell headphones, your product page is already targeting that keyword.

However, if you sell unbranded products or products with unfamiliar names, you may want to find and target descriptive words that people are searching for.

For example, let’s say you sell cat headphones. Unless people are specifically looking for a brand or model, it may be better to choose a keyword that’s relevant to what people are looking for, such as B. “Cat headphones”.

3. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your page’s content. It involves optimizing visual content and code under the hood. Let’s go through some things to consider and optimize.

Save Time with the Title Tag, Meta Description, and H1 Templates

Using the template method makes sense because writing unique text for thousands of product pages and categories is nobody’s fun. Unfortunately, there can be outdated duplicate copies that don’t attract clicks.

You can solve this problem in a hybrid way, using multiple but unique page templates for those with a lot of search traffic.

To find the pages with the most search traffic in Google Search Console (GSC):

• Go to the search results report
• Select the Pages tab.
• If you don’t use GSC, you can get a free Ahrefs Site Audit
• assessment with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account.

Use Simple and Descriptive URLs For E-commerce SEO

Here’s a simple template that works for category and subcategory pages:

domain.com/category/subcategory/

For example, here are a few categories and subcategories for our audio store that follow this template:

domain.com/headphones/ domain.com/headphones/wireless domain.com/headphones/wired domain.com/headphones/over-ear domain.com/headphones/in-ear

Things are a little more complicated when it comes to products because the obvious structure will be this:

domain.com/category/subcategory/product

However, as products often fall into multiple categories, this can lead to duplicate content. In other words, the same product is available at various URLs.

For example, AirPods are both wireless and in-ear headphones, so they’ll end up with two URLs:

domain.com/headphones/in-ear/airpods domain.com/headphones/wireless/airpods

Add Unique Product and Category Descriptions

Product and category pages often have little to no content. That isn’t necessarily bad, but adding unique descriptions can help Google and visitors better understand the page.

Here are a few tips for doing this:

• Keep them short and sweet
• Make sure they’re descriptive and helpful
• Mention long-tail keywords

To find long-tail variations and synonyms, plug a competing product or category page for your main target keyword into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check the top 10 rankings in the Organic keywords report.

4. Link Building

Link building for e-commerce stores is difficult because linking to a product or category page usually has no value for others. However, there are some best practices. You can also use other methods to get links to your home page. Let’s go through a few tricks.

Use the Product Feedback Method to Participate.

If you only sell products that you sell, the Product Feedback method can help you rank among the best products in the category.

Here is the process:

• Find popular lists of the best products
• Offer the author your product in return for feedback
• Ask them to consider including it on their list (if they like the product)

Given that most authors will link to the products they feature, this is a straightforward way to build links directly to product pages.

Ask them to consider adding you to their list (if they like the product).
Since most writers link to the products they offer, this is an easy way to link directly to product pages.

Claim Unlinked Brand Mentions in Reviews

Unlinked mentions are online mentions of your products or brand without a link to your website.

They can occur for a variety of reasons. However, turning them into links is often difficult as there is rarely a clear or compelling point of view.

For example, here is the unlinked quote from Audio-Technica:

Use HARO to get High-Authority Links

Unfortunately, there is no mandatory pitch angle in this case. This is because the unlinked talk is in an article about a group that sells equipment to fund music education, and there are no links to other brands mentioned.

However, if someone has reviewed your product and isn’t linking to you, it makes sense, and at least persuasive, to ask them to link to the official product page so readers can learn more about the product.

You can find reviews offline with Ahrefs’ web explorer, which searches the index of billions of pages.

5. Content marketing

In internet marketing, it is important to capture the attention of your audience. By creating relevant, relevant, and engaging content, you can improve your online store’s visibility, build customer relationships, and increase conversions.

Find Commercial Investigation keywords E-commerce SEO

Find the market research keywords you want to target with blog posts
Commercial search terms are terms that people search for when looking for something to buy.

For example, if you search Google for “wireless headphones,” you’re probably ready to buy wireless headphones.

Identifying the “best” product search is an easy way to start researching keywords for marketing purposes.

The easiest way to do this is to:

• Enter your keyword into Keywords Explorer.
• Add an Include filter containing the word “best.”
• Apply the filter and hit Show Results.

Remember to look for keywords relating to problems that your products help to solve.

For example, keywords like “how to clean headphones” don’t work because the searcher isn’t in the market for new headphones. But keywords like “how to fix broken headphones” may work because most headphones aren’t easily fixable—so a new pair might be the best solution.

Once you understand the psychology behind commercial intent keywords, you’re ready to create product-led content.

E-commerce SEO mistakes to avoid

Here are some examples of frequent withdrawals that may impact e-commerce sites and climate change.

• Not including breadcrumbs – Visitors (and Google) find breadcrumbs on e-commerce websites useful.
• Forgetting to add schema markup – Adding schema can help you win rich snippets.
• Indexing low-quality pages – Indexing e-commerce filters or search pages that don’t add any value.
• Keyword stuffing – Repeatedly mentioning your keywords on your website.
• Blocking key pages of your website – Sometimes, noindex tags or “Disallow” directives in robots.txt can be added by mistake, meaning pages don’t show in Google.

The Future of E-commerce SEO

I don’t have a crystal ball to predict exactly what the future holds for e-commerce SEO, but here are some thoughts.

As Google begins to integrate more AI into its search experience, search, and e-commerce SEO will likely evolve into a different experience than what we have today.

Here’s an example of what the SERPs look like today when you search for “Bluetooth headphones.”

Google’s SERP for “Bluetooth headphones” via google.com
If we ignore the “people are asking” results, the other category pages are from e-commerce stores.

Now, the SERP you create under Google’s AI-powered search engine breaks down the same way:

Generative AI for Google Search, owned by google.com
With this result, Google has successfully generated a page for its category directly in the SERP.

If this change becomes a reality, the focus of the future of e-commerce SEO will likely shift to product page design.

Aleyda also spoke about these potential changes and her predictions for e-commerce SEO.

Final Thoughts For E-commerce SEO

E-commerce SEO isn’t easy. Getting the basics right is easy enough, but preparing for search demand while avoiding common technical problems is often harder than you think.

Here are some useful resources to learn more about these issues:

• Faceted Navigation: Definition, Examples, and SEO Best Practices
• E-commerce Blogging: 7 Steps to Boost Your Traffic and Sales
• E-commerce Marketing 101: How to Increase Sales
• How to Start an Ecommerce Business (9 Steps to Success)