Essential SEO Techniques to Boost Your eCommerce Business

Imagine you and some competitors are trying to sell products to a group. The ones on the front will naturally get more attention. The goal of SEO for eCommerce business is to get you to that front. If you’re looking for actionable strategies, you’re in the right place.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing your pages’ content and structure to suit the search engine’s policies. This practice helps your pages appear at the top of the search results.

You have to target specific keywords to get more leads and bring conversions. Moreover, your site’s content must be helpful and informative, which promotes Google bots to rank you higher on SERP (search engine ranking page).

This blog contains some essential SEO practices that can help you gain high leads and conversion and boost your eCommerce business.

Importance of SEO for eCommerce Business

SEO is technically a type of marketing or promotional campaign since the goal is to get your site more attention. These SEO techniques also change slightly over time.

Remember those search engine policies I mentioned before? They are pretty significant since you must follow those as your guidelines and implement them in your SEO practices.

The importance of specific SEO practices becomes higher or lower based on these search engine standards.

For example, some SEO experts and Google themselves claim that links are falling behind in importance, and content quality is taking over that spot.

John Mueller on Link Building for SEO

Building links is still a crucial factor for SEO, though.

SEO best practices for e-commerce businesses will help you with-

• More traffic to your website
• Your pages will appear higher in search engines when people search with your target keywords
• Potential more sales and revenues (usually work better with long tail keywords)
• Improving your content’s quality (a step of SEO) may attract a loyal community that trusts you.

SEO Best Practices You Must Try for Your eCommerce Business

You probably have already heard of top SEO elements like content quality, link-building, smooth user interface, responsiveness, etc. However, if you want to boost an eCommerce website, you should make strategies specific to it. Here are some techniques you should try-

Content Intent over Volume

In 2023, Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update, emphasizing content intent over volume. So, what do the terms mean?

• Content volume can mean both quality and quantity. A page full of helpful content has a higher volume.
• ‘Content search intent’ indicates content on a page that actually includes what the user was looking for.

An example of matched intent is when someone searches for ‘men’s winter boots’ and finds winter boots as products on an eCommerce site.

Meanwhile, a mismatched intent is when someone searches for ‘men’s winter boots’ and finds a helpful article on ‘how to choose the best winter boots.’

It goes without saying that the user was looking for products when they searched with that keyword, not a blog, despite it being helpful.

Focusing on content intent is one of the top SEO tips for E-commerce websites to ensure visitors find exactly what they expect.

Product Page and Category Page Optimization

Product and category pages are two mandatory parts of an eCommerce website. They mostly serve as the primary landing pages and the biggest catalyst for lead conversion.

Optimizing these pages is a core element of SEO for e-commerce business.

Attracting traffic to appear on these pages is the goal of product and category page SEO. You can do so using the following tactics-

Targeting the Proper Keywords

Go for long-tail specific keywords as they usually convert more than short-tail ones (the latter gather more leads, though). In fact, you can target both in your category pages.

For example, you may break the product types down into-

Category > subcategory> sub-subcategory

This way, the primary categories will include short-tail keywords (like ‘home furniture’), and the sub-subcategories can have long-tail ones (like ‘best work desks for home’).

Having a Uniform Design

When arranging the products, keep the category layouts uniform. The design should include the same structure and color combination for each product type and category. It should also enable better navigation (user experience).

No-follow Links

Category pages often contain lots of links that lead to the same pages. It can confuse Google crawlers about the context of a link. It is better to no-follow the links on the product categories.

You can use the no-follow attribute for this on the sitemap.

Mobile Responsiveness

You may have heard expert suggestions to make eCommerce landing pages mobile-friendly. Its significance will be clear when you check the latest stats regarding mobile vs desktop usage.

Latest statistics (2024) suggest that-

• Desktops have a higher conversion rate of 3.9% compared to smartphones, which is 1.8%.
• Most of the eCommerce traffic is from smartphones (75%). It was 60.66% in 2022.

It seems that most people like to browse for products on their mobiles but make the final purchases on their desktops after adding products to their carts.

That is your cue to make your site’s pages mobile responsive. Mobile responsiveness refers to how well the pages work on a smartphone screen size.

A well-made eCommerce site must be suitable for all screen sizes, whether they are desktops, tablets, or smartphones. Additionally, consider developing an app version of your site, which can trigger almost twice the conversion compared to the website. This strategy is an essential SEO tip for E-commerce website.

Well-made mobile-friendly sites include-

• A hamburger icon to show the site’s menu
• A theme that works well with both mobile and desktop

Many WordPress plugins help make a site’s codes (Javascript or CSS) to be suitable for mobiles.

When not using WordPress, consider hiring a professional web developer for the task. You should also seek out a reliable web hosting provider that guarantees faster loading on mobile.

Getting Backlinks

Backlinks are vital to link-building. While I previously said that link-building is somewhat less necessary now, it is still one of the SEO best practices for e-commerce. 

For effective SEO, it's essential to collaborate with a quality link-building service that can provide reliable backlinks, ensuring your site is seen as trustworthy by Google.

There are various ways to get backlinks to your eCommerce sites. Some standard ones are-

1. The Skyscraper Technique: The Skyscraper technique goes as follows-

• You check which websites sent backlinks to your competitors.
• You make better content than your rivals.
• You reach out to the websites and tell them to send backlinks to your content instead
• The websites respond and send you backlinks

2. Guest Posts: You can request to post guest blogs on high-profile websites and add a link to your site on that blog.

3. Making Informative Content: Content that includes information like case studies, helpful blogs, contexts, statistics, scientific research, etc., tends to get natural backlinks.

You must research each of these techniques thoroughly before you proceed with them.

Schema Markups

A schema markup is additional information you can provide to search engines and let them understand your site’s content more accurately. When Google knows your site better, it can rank it higher than the ones it (Google) doesn’t understand.

Schema markups appear on the search engine results underneath a page (if the page added one). Lucky for you, not many sites use them, even though it is an excellent SEO technique.

There are many types of schema markups, like-

• Product Markups: Can display product details, like price, stock, ratings, etc.
• FAQ Markups: Let you add frequently asked questions about your products or services and answer them.
• Image Markups: Add an additional section under your page on the SERP that showcases all the images on that page.

The image part is a schema markup of the page above.

Of course, there are so many other markups to try. You can explore them and use various plugins to add to your eCommerce site.

E-E-A-T Practices

Google introduced the E-E-A-T concept, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The aim is to rank only sites that meet these criteria high on SERP.

Aside from gaining customer trust by adding reviews, FAQs, and testimonials, offering them an excellent user experience is key to a proper E-E-A-T strategy. You may try-

• Increasing the loading speed for pages and search bar.
• Removing any pop-up ads if you added them previously.
• Structuring the site well with a proper navigation bar, category pages, and footer.

E-E-A-T includes on-site, off-site, and technical SEO together. You can’t overlook any of the aspects.

Final Note

When improving the SEO of your eCommerce site, you will find many different strategies, ideas, and techniques. The search engine policies will change, too. SEO isn’t a one-time factor. Your competitors will also try to get to the top.

That is why I recommend you regularly keep your site’s SEO in check and gain new backlinks, and stay current with the latest SEO best practices for e-commerce. Don’t forget to scale your website’s SEO with your business’s growth.