Complete SEO guide for e-commerce – get to the top for commercial queries!

If you’re selling products and want to reach the widest audience possible, you need a well-optimized e-commerce website.

Why do we focus on this at Lux Site? The most obvious reason is the rapid growth of the e-commerce market worldwide, which, according to Statista, will reach $8 trillion by 2027.

retail ecommerce sales worldwide

Optimizing for e-commerce will help you appear in front of an audience that’s ready to spend money on your products, making this the best market for your goods in the 21st century.

But first, you need to achieve good visibility for your website, and this can be done through SEO for e-commerce.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to implement SEO for your e-commerce site and attract customers.

Additionally, SEO works well alongside other traffic sources, but you can’t rely on it to fully cover your site’s user needs.

What is SEO for e-commerce?

SEO for e-commerce is the process of improving the organic rankings and visibility of an online store in search engines like Google and Bing.

Key tasks related to SEO for e-commerce include:

  • Keyword researchImproving site structure
  • On-page optimization (enhancing page content)
  • Creating quality content
  • Building backlinks (links from other sites to your resource)
  • And much more.

Importance of SEO for online stores

SEO is a key traffic source for commercial websites, as it helps attract an audience and boost sales. When your store ranks higher in search results, more people see your products, which ultimately leads to consistent sales growth. It’s really that simple in theory, but not entirely so in practice. This is what we’ll dive into next.

Advantages of SEO for e-commerce:

  • Cost-effectiveness: SEO allows you to reach your target audience without ad spend. Even after completing the promotion, you get long-term results, unlike paid ads.
  • Increased brand trust: Users tend to trust organic results more than ads. Also, frequent appearances at the top increase brand recognition. Even if you don’t get a customer this time, they’ll definitely remember you.
  • Competitive advantage: Optimizing your site for SEO gives you an edge over other stores that haven’t done so.

Now let’s go over some specific tips to help you succeed with SEO for e-commerce.

7 Tips for e-commerce site success

  1. First, you need to choose your semantics. Identify which keywords will generate sales and which ones you’ll use for informational or brand-building purposes. Keyword research involves identifying the words or phrases (keywords) people use to search for your products online.

You need to use the same keywords to optimize product and category pages. This will help improve their positions in search engines for these queries and drive more traffic to your site. You can do this using tools like Ahrefs, Serpstat, Google’s Keyword Planner, and Google’s suggestions. For example, here’s how the keyword planning tool from Ahrefs looks.

keyword planning dashboard

We immediately see all the information about the keyword. It’s a commercial query, it has decent search volume (33 thousand searches per month), it’s not too difficult (this plays a role as such a keyword converts less than, for example, “buy iPhone”), so the competition here is relatively low.

keyword overview dashboard

For the keyword “buy iPhone,” the competition is higher, but it’s still manageable. We can see that it’s an easy keyword to work with. The keyword “how to choose a phone” is informational. It’s not suitable for our landing pages but could be used for writing a blog post.

information keyword review

Search volume (Volume) shows the average number of searches for the keyword each month.

Keyword difficulty (KD) shows how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword.

Thus, we choose the maximum number of relevant keywords for our topic and distribute them across the pages where we’ll promote them. You need to understand the user intent when they search for specific keywords (search intent), and based on that understanding, create appropriate landing pages.

The main types of search intent are:

  1. Navigational: Users want to find a specific website or page. For example, “Rozetka login” or “Rozetka promotional offers.”
  2. Informational: Users want to learn more about something. For example, “what’s the best phone this year.”
  3. Commercial: Users want to compare different products before making a purchasing decision. For example, “top 10 phones under 20 thousand UAH.”
  4. Transactional: Users want to buy something online. For example, “buy phone.”

To make sure we correctly understand intent, we should search for our keyword and see what Google shows in the top 10 results. If we see an article from a news portal that doesn’t sell these phones, it means that for this keyword, a blog page would be appropriate. It’s a great opportunity to redirect the buyer to our commercial pages by adding internal links to specific phone models on our site.

Google search by keyword

For article ideas on the website, you can also use Google’s suggestions:

google search hints

Additionally, you can use the “people also ask” section for finding additional keywords:

people also ask

People also search:

People also search

Google Trends is also useful to understand which keywords are currently trending and to gauge the seasonality of your queries.

keywords in Google Trend

2) Site Structure.

After conducting keyword research and gathering the semantic core, you need to use this information to design a correct and, most importantly, user-friendly site structure that allows both users and search engine crawlers to quickly find the relevant pages.

An example of a clear site structure that’s easy to navigate:

broad site structure

We can see a good example of a site structure here: https://allo.ua/ — dividing the site by clusters, product types, and brands. It’s easy to find what we’re looking for.

3) Product Page Design.

Equally important as the right structure and well-chosen keywords is how you design the product page. This is where customers make their purchasing decision, and their satisfaction impacts not only your revenue but also your rankings in search engines. If a customer leaves your page and continues searching for the same keywords, the search engine will realize that the page didn’t satisfy the user and will lower its ranking. So, pay close attention to the design of this page.

Create a good description, clear specifications, and don’t forget to add the price and purchase terms. Include several high-quality images of the product, as this is also very important, so don’t neglect it.

Product card design

The purchase terms, return policy, and delivery information are all critical. Allow customers to leave reviews and product ratings. If you can, create a video showing the product.

product reviews and ratings

4) Meta Tags for Pages and Products.

Meta tags for pages

Let’s assume you’ve done everything right: designed product pages well, created a good structure, and written engaging and useful content. However, without meta tags like Title and Description, all your work may be in vain. So, don’t neglect this step. The semantic core you’ve already gathered will help you with the meta tags. Make sure to describe the page clearly and concisely, using primary keywords (place them towards the beginning). Remember that the recommended length for Title and Description tags is limited:

Title meta tag: ideally up to 50-60 characters. This length ensures the full title is displayed in Google search results without being cut off.

Description meta tag: ideally up to 150-160 characters for desktops and up to 120 characters for mobile devices. This way, the description won’t get cut off and will fully display in the search results.

5) Schema Markup.

Schema markup is HTML tags that provide additional information to search engine bots about the content on web pages. By using these tags, you can enhance the SEO for your e-commerce site.

When you apply schema markup, it can result in rich snippets, which allow search engines to show more detailed information about specific queries at the top of the search results.

This also helps users find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily by displaying different types of information.

For e-commerce sites, the most commonly used schema markup formats are:

Product Schema:

This type of markup helps new products and services be found through web search queries by providing additional information such as images, prices, and availability. It also helps display product ads in search results.

Review Schema:

This allows online reviews to be published. Authors and title filters help users find reviews about your products or services, and search engines can find reviews from your site or blog.

Price schema:

This microdata is used to define the price of products or a price range.

Price schema

6) Technical SEO.

All of these elements won’t work if your website is technically flawed. Your site could have numerous errors (some of the most detrimental being 404 errors), heavy pages that prevent users from quickly loading the page, and unwanted 301 redirects. Therefore, it’s crucial to regularly audit your site, check for errors, loading speed, and other factors. To do this, you can use tools like Netpeak’s Spider.

Technical SEO using Netpick Spider

7) Link Building.

Once you’ve ensured your site meets all the requirements, it’s time to build trust, and external links are essential for that. To understand how many and which links your site needs, let’s return to our well-known tool—Ahrefs, which we previously used for semantic research.

Ahrefs also has a feature for analyzing competitors’ backlinks. It’s important to assess both the total number of backlinks for a competitor’s site and the specific number pointing to the page you want to outrank in organic search.

Overall Site Profile.

ahrefs website overview

Seeing such metrics might demotivate you, as we can see that the site has nearly 6,000 incoming domains and 151,000 backlinks. However, it’s important to understand that each specific page receives its own backlinks, and not all of the backlinks the site acquires impact the query that interests you. While the total trustworthiness of a competitor is affected by this, it’s still entirely possible to surpass 1-2 pages of even such a giant. We then focus on analyzing the specific category that interests us:

website page analysis in ahrefs

Here, we see that the number of backlinks is much lower—only 343 domains across the entire category. So, we can conclude that there will be even fewer backlinks for specific phone brands, which means we will focus on pages where we can surpass the competitor in terms of backlinks. But quantity is not everything; quality matters too, so we also review the quality of backlinks the competitor is creating.

competitor inbound links

After analysis, we select natural backlinks and those that are clearly paid, for example, on news portals like Liga.net, NV. We also have the opportunity to build our own links here, so we try to replicate the competitor’s best links on our pages.

competitor inbound links

Conclusion: As we can see, SEO for e-commerce websites is a complex task that requires constant attention and resources, including the purchase of services and links. Therefore, it’s better to leave this task to professional SEO specialists who have successfully brought several commercial websites to the top of Google search results. Good luck and top rankings to all!