What Is Ecommerce SEO: Best Strategies & Guides [2023]

SEO Marketing For E-commerce Businesses

Even if you know all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it doesn’t mean every SEO strategy you used for your corporate website works the same way for e-commerce websites. 

The most common type of online marketing for E-commerce websites would be social media advertising – Facebook ads, Instagram Ads, etc. 

What most e-commerce business owners don’t realize is that SEO brings in more ROI compared to paid ads. To be frank, it’ll be best for e-commerce businesses to invest in all three, SEO, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and SMM (Social Media Marketing). However, the majority of e-commerce websites nowadays have been investing heavily in SEO ever since the rise of organic traffic that eventually converts into sales. 

If have no clue on how SEO works, we wrote a beginner’s guide to SEO which you could check out for a better understanding. 

What is SEO Marketing in E-commerce?

In short, SEO Marketing for E-commerce is about getting organic traffic (free traffic) from search engines. For every visitor that clicks into your website, you will not get charged, unlike Google ads where you’ll have to spend a certain amount of money for every click. This is why SEO is about getting natural, free, organic traffic to your website, without having to pay for every visitor or click. 

Let’s say you type in ‘leather watches’ on Google, and you’ll see a list of top 10 results. 

As you can see, most of the first few results on Google are specific product pages. When you appear on the first page, most visitors that typed in ‘leather watches’ would want to purchase a watch. Hence, naturally, visitors will click on the first few results. If you optimize your website well with SEO, you’ll be able to appear on the first page as well. 

Why Is SEO Marketing Important For E-commerce?

Let’s take the first e-commerce website as an example. When we searched for ‘leather watches’, Fossil appeared on the first page and holds the Top 2 positions. Now, we will observe why Fossil is able to appear on the first page. 

Fossil – Men’s Watches 

#1: Page Title & Meta Description

The keyword that we searched for is ‘leather watches’. First and foremost, their title and meta description has the word ‘leather watches’ in them.

#2: Page URL

Aside from that, their URL has the word ‘leather watches’ as well.

#3: Targeted Keyword Appearing Multiple Times, H1 & H2 Tags

You’ll see they have ‘leather watches’ appearing on the top of the page, including an H1 Tag. 

Upon entering the website, when you scroll all the way down, you’ll notice they’ve included a short content, with the keyword ‘leather watches’ found repeatedly in their content. H2 Tags are also included with the keyword in them. 

With this example, you can see why SEO is important for e-commerce websites. If you optimize your website well, your product pages will appear for various keywords. To learn more about SEO Marketing For E-commerce check out Neil Patel’s SEO Marketing amazing tutorial.

How Can I Do SEO Marketing For My E-commerce Website?

1. Keyword Research 

Choosing the right keywords for each of your product pages are important. There are two types of keywords to look for: primary, or short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. 

For example, ‘leather watches’ is the primary keyword. Long-tail keywords are derived from the primary keywords. The long-tail keywords could be ‘best leather watches for men’, ‘best leather watches for women’, ‘leather strap watches’, and so on.

There are various keyword research tools you can use to come up with a list of keywords for your e-commerce website. A few examples are SEMrush, Ahrefs, Keywordtool.io, and Google Keyword Planner. 

2. Technical SEO

You have to make sure your website has a robots.txt installed, and a sitemap. Aside from that, you have to also decrease your website loading time. This helps users to stay longer on your site as well. Most users would not wait for the website to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds. You could use a tool like SeoSiteCheckUp to check the technical SEO parts of your website. 

The site structure and navigation of your website plays a part as well as your HTML and CSS codes of your website design. That’s right – your website design contributes to your website’s SEO too! You can have a really pretty web design, but if your website takes ages to load and your categories are all over the place, you won’t be able to see your website on the first page.

3. On-page Optimization 

There are a few key on-page optimization that you’ll have to do for your website. Just like Fossil, make sure the targeted keywords are included around your website. Most importantly, the keyword should appear in your H1 and H2 tags. 

On-page Optimization Checklist:

• Page Title & Meta Description
• Page URL
• H1, H2, H3 tags
• Alt Text for Images
• Page Content 

4. Off-page Optimization 

Here comes the difficult part. In order to increase your e-commerce website rankings, you’ll need backlinks. This would be time-consuming since you’ll have to reach out to various websites, bloggers, and publications. However, naturally, the more popular your e-commerce website gets, the more backlinks you’ll get naturally. 

Ways to get backlinks for your e-commerce websites:

• Reach out to fashion bloggers to do product reviews
• Email publications for affiliate marketing or product reviews
• Learn about off-page optimization in our Ultimate SEO Resources for beginners.

Should I Do SEO In-house Or Outsource SEO My E-commerce Website? 

Though this is different for every e-commerce business, running an e-commerce website is already very time-consuming. If you are an e-commerce business owner, you already have a huge pile of tasks to do. 

Why not lessen your burden and cost by outsourcing your SEO to an SEO agency? How this is cost-effective is because e-commerce websites have so many pages. Hiring an SEO specialist in-house could cost more than hiring an SEO agency since you’ll need to hire a team instead of just one person handling your entire e-commerce website. An SEO agency already has a team of experts with their own specialization to help with your SEO. 

Not convinced? Check out our article explaining the difference between SEO in-house VS SEO Agency. 

Once you’re ready to get started on improving your e-commerce SEO, get a free consultation from leading SEO Agency Malaysia and let us help you grow your organic traffic!