Amazon’s dominance in the market need not prevent scrappy startups in the ecommerce industry from finding their place and thriving in it, but a fundamental question on everybody’s mind is where those visitors are going to come from.
The top answer for most will be Google. Facebook is a major provider for media outlets, but consumers with commercial interests overwhelmingly turn to search engines, with Amazon itself being the only other major source.
How do SEO for ecommerce sites pull traffic from search engines? Use the following guide to find out for yourself. What follows is intended as a reference and we expect you to refer back to it often. We recommend bookmarking it for your personal use.
Your choice of ecommerce platform will have a tremendous impact on your marketing and SEO strategies. In this section, we'll discuss the most widely-used platforms and which businesses they are a good fit for. In the next section, we'll discuss the ecommerce SEO tips you will need to take into account, as well as provide a useful table to help you understand the SEO features for each.
This open source platform first hit the market in 2008. This is highly configurable, customizable solution scales well, and comes in both “community” and “Enterprise” editions. Being open source, the community version is entirely free, and both free and paid templates and plugins are available, from Magento and from other sources.
Ultimately, Magento is one of the best solutions for Enterprise businesses, but small businesses shouldn't get the wrong impression from the free price tag, and should generally avoid using it, unless you have access to web developers with programming skills.
This Canadian-based shopping cart platform has been in business since 2004, is built for small businesses, and focuses on keeping up with changes in the ecommerce industry. Shopify was one of the first platforms to allow social shoppers to make a purchase directly from social media platforms.
Shopify is, on the whole, one of the best platforms available for small businesses and those who do not have extensive technical experience. It offers far more customizability than most user-friendly platforms, and great social and mobile integration.
This open source platform is a WordPress plugin that includes a secure payment gateway and a shopping cart. The platform is heavily customizable, and an additional plugin allows you to create a multi-vendor store.
WooCommerce is a good choice if you are running a WordPress site, can't spend a lot of money, and don't expect your site to scale rapidly.
OpenCart is a free tool that lets you create professional-looking shopping carts that will scale well, and accepts more than 20 different payment types. OpenCart is stylish and easy to use.
Launched in 2007, PrestaShop is based in Miami and Paris, and employs a team of 100s of developers. Roughly, 250,000 customers currently use the platform, which is regularly updated and improved.
Overall, PrestaShop is a good choice if you are a small business looking for an open-source platform that is easy to setup and works great out-of-the-box.
Started in 2003 as an offshoot of osCommerce, this open-source platform boasts roughly 100,000 users.
ZenCart is best suited for medium and large businesses who expect to continue scaling, and who have access to web development resources.
This open-source platform is widely used, with approximately 260,000 users, and is free to use. The self-hosted platform is fully modifiable and, as a result, offers an involved online community of people who are willing to help and offer solutions.
The platform is, on the whole, a good choice for those who have access to some web development resources but whose business is relatively small and is not expected to scale quickly.
With 55,000 stores on the platform, including top brands like Toyota and Martha Stewart, this platform is easy-to-use and does not require coding experience.
Entrepreneurs looking for a scalable ecommerce platform that works well out-of-the-box without needing to do any coding should be satisfied with BigCommerce.
Volusion has been in the ecommerce business for a very long time, first hitting the market in 1999. They have adapted to the shifting marketplace well, and currently serve about 40,000 stores.
Volusion is an affordable paid ecommerce platform with a reputation for stability that scales well with your business.
SuiteCommerce was released in 2013 as an omnichannel ecommerce platform, integrating email, social, web, and store campaigns.
SuiteCommerce is a choice worth considering for larger businesses that are using NetSuite or need omnichannel integration. Most other businesses will probably be happier with a different choice.
Offering over 500 features, CS-Cart is a powerful user-friendly platform capable of meeting the needs of a wide variety of businesses at an affordable cost.
CS-Cart stands out as one of few shopping cart options within the price range of small businesses that offer a combination of extensive functionality, a growing feature set, easy customization, user-friendliness, and scalability.
Seamlessly integrated into the Drupal platform, Drupal Commerce is a highly customizable ecommerce solution that is very powerful, ideally suited for the technically inclined or businesses with web development resources.
Drupal Commerce is a good choice for brands using the Drupal CMS, and is worth considering because of the extensive customization and functionality. It is not a good choice for businesses without access to web developers.
Selz is one of the best web-based platforms for selling digital products and services. It allows you to create online stores and sell from existing websites or through social networks such as Facebook. You can also use the Selz Store Pro app to create and customize a fully functional e-commerce website in WordPress.
If you want to sell digital products on a great looking online store, Selz is the right option for you. With a built-in payment system and the ability to sell products virtually anywhere, Selz seems like an attractive option for small vendors. But, scale-up isn't possible with this platform. Do weigh the pros and cons of Selz before deciding whether or not it suits your business’s needs.
The following table details, which SEO features are available for each of the platforms discussed above.
Magento | Shopify | WooCommerce | OpenCart | PrestaShop | ZenCart | osCommerce | BigCommerce | Volusion | SuiteCommerce | CS Cart | Drupal | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Navigation Links | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Custom | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | ✔ | ✔ |
Page Titles | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Custom | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Page URLs | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Add-on | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Add-on | ✔ |
Meta Descriptions | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | ✔ | ✔ |
Image Alt Tags | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Add-on | Custom | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
H1 Headings | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Extensions | Custom | Custom | Add-on | Custom | ✔ | Custom | Add-on | ✔ |
Canonical URLs | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Extensions | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | ✔ | Extensions |
Blogging Platform | ✔ | ✔ | WordPress | Extensions | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | ✔ | Add-on | Custom | Add-on | ✔ |
Social Buttons | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Extensions | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Add-on | Extensions |
Auto XML Sitemap | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Extensions | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | Add-on | Add-on | Extensions |
Domain Name Ownership | ✔ | Custom | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
IP Ownership | Self-Hosted | ✕ | Self-Hosted | Self-Hosted | Self-Hosted | Self-Hosted | Self-Hosted | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ | Self-Hosted | Self-Hosted |
301 Redirects | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Add-on | Custom | Custom | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Extensions |
Robots Noindex | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Custom | Add-on | ✔ | Add-on | ✔ | ✔ | Custom | Custom | Extensions |
✔ = Available as a standard feature
✕ = Not available even at extra cost
Custom = Requires additional coding or customisation
Add-on = Feature available with Add-on or Module only
Premium = Available in subscription tiers above basic only
Self-hosted only = Only available if hosted on your own server
Extensions = Feature available with Extensions or Add-on or Module only
The table was inspired by Danny Richman's work, but the ecommerce platforms are different. A green check mark indicates that the feature is available as part of the user interface, and a red check mark means that the feature is not available at all. “Custom” indicates that you will need to edit code in order to implement the feature, and “Add-On” means that a plugin, extension, or a module is available to implement the feature without code. “Self-hosted” indicates that you can retain control of the IP address for the self-hosted version of the platform.
For clarification, the features are only marked as available if you have full control over them. For example, if the page URL is automatically set to the product name, and can't be edited without changing the product name, we do not consider the “Page URLs” feature to be available.
Drupal Commerce is a unique case in which the features are actually for Drupal, not Drupal Commerce specifically.
Having control over these elements is an important part of on-site SEO, which we will elaborate more on later in the post. Be sure to consider the SEO implications of the platform you decide to work with.
SEO is fundamentally about using a detailed understanding of the search engines and an application of marketing techniques to place yourself where people will be able to find you in search engine results for search queries relevant to your business, and then to assist in converting those leads.
This leads to a lot of professionals to wonder “how to search keywords for an ecommerce website?”
We sometimes feel it’s necessary to add that SEO is not about placing yourself at the top of the search results for any arbitrary ecommerce keyword.
If somebody decides which keywords to chase based entirely on which ones would be most profitable to rank in position #1 for, this is, in my opinion, one of the most clear-cut signs of somebody new to the SEO skill set.
Applying SEO skills using ecommerce website best practices can certainly improve your rankings for essentially any random keyword, but an enormous part of successful SEO application comes down to nuanced keyword research for ecommerce, the kind that helps you discover new markets and opportunities where competition is more viable.
Here we’ll discuss several methods you can use to find more successful keywords for your ecommerce website. And that’s before we get into the big secret of our research: how to properly capitalize on the long-tail?
For all of the strategies that follow, your process should step through a cycle similar to the following:
With that in mind, let's talk about some powerful methods for ecommerce keyword research.
To identify a strong keyword for your landing page, zero-in on the ones that are relatively unique, a good fit for the page with good traffic potential and reasonable competition.
Here is a method of accomplishing the feat.
Go to https://keywordtool.io:
This tool uses various search engines’ autocompletes to generate a long list of related keywords. To get the most ecommerce-centric keywords, use the “Amazon” tab, type in a keyword, and click the search button:
Now click the “Copy All” button to capture the results:
Head over to the Google Keyword Planner and click “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords.”
Paste your keywords here:
If you want a more comprehensive list of keywords for the content on your ecommerce website, return to keywordtool.io and use the “Google” tab, and repeat the process. You may also want to use Sonar tool and repeat the process for a more comprehensive list of keywords to work with:
After pasting your keywords into the Google Keyword Planner, push the “Get Started” button. Google will show you an estimate of what you will be able to achieve with an AdWords campaign based off of these keywords:
Look at the “Impressions” column for an estimate of the amount of traffic searching for each keyword on a monthly basis. The “Avg. CPC” column is a decent proxy for how likely the searchers are to convert, since advertisers are willing to pay more for higher converting keywords.
Click “Download Plan” to get a spreadsheet of the keyword data:
To prioritize your keywords by potential value, create a new column in your spreadsheet that multiplies together the number of impressions and the average CPC for each keyword. The rupees amount that is returned is in itself meaningless, but you can use it to prioritize your keywords. The higher the value, the better will be the combination of traffic and conversion potential.
How to identify which of these keywords you are most likely to be able to rank for?
This is almost a cakewalk.
All you’ve to do is take your keywords to Google and perform a search for the most promising keywords. Use the Ahrefs browser plugin or Mozbar to evaluate the competition. Look for search result pages that have similar domain and page authority metrics to your own, or at least the ones you are confident you will ultimately be able to beat.
Don't obey the SEO metrics blindly, however.
Factors such as domain and page authority have limited correlation with Google's rankings, and you should be basing your decision on other factors as well, such as:
Keywords for category pages on an ecommerce website need to be broad enough to encompass everything that is linked underneath them in your site architecture. That means they will need to be considerably broader than the keywords for your product pages. Good category keywords are heavily searched and frankly more difficult to rank for, but they offer contextualization in your URL structure that will make the pages below them more likely to rank well.
The best place to find category keywords for ecommerce sites is to start by looking at your competitors.
Amazon with its mammoth selection of products, and decisions about navigation based on an enormous behavioral dataset, is a great place to begin.
Start by performing a search for a product keyword:
Amazon will often list the category for you in autosuggest. You can then take the category to the keyword tools discussed above to look at your options.
To get a more comprehensive list of category keywords to consider, go to Amazon's “Departments” section of the menu, hover over a category that is a good match for your site, and take a look at the subcategories that show up.
Run these through the keyword process discussed in the previous section to find some ideas for the top-level categories.
You can also scope out Amazon's “Full Store Directory” from the “Departments” section:
Clicking here will take you to a full list of all of the categories and subcategories on the site, which you can then take over to your keyword tools of choice and use as a jumping off point.
For example, suppose that your ecommerce site sells biking products. To identify some promising category keywords, you would choose “Cycling” from the “Sports and Outdoors” section, which would then take you here:
This would allow you to see some category keyword ideas having to do with cycling, including subcategories for, in this case, cycling accessories.
You can likewise visit your competitor's sites to take a look at the category pages they are using, and again run those keywords through the process discussed above.
Some additional thoughts on choosing category level ecommerce keywords:
SEO professionals and inbound marketers use “brand mention” tools to identify when a brand gets mentioned on the web, usually for the purposes of PR, customer service, and networking. However, brand mention tools can also be used to find keywords that you might not otherwise have thought of.
Here is the basic premise of this method:
Here are a few tools you can use to monitor brand and keyword mentions to get started:
No matter which tool you use, the brand mention alone isn't going to tell you which ecommerce keywords to use. In some cases, the keyword in question will be obvious, because:
Even so, it's a good idea to run these keywords through your keyword tool as discussed above to identify any opportunities or versions of the keyword worth targeting. If the keyword doesn't turn up in the keyword tool, don't take this as a sign that you shouldn't target it.
As We mentioned above, if the keyword is being used in association with the brand's you are targeting, people are searching for it.
The fact that it doesn't show up in keyword tools is often a blessing in disguise, because it allows you to target keywords that your competitors will not.
In addition to this, you can analyze the page for keyword recommendations using Google's Keyword Planner. Just copy the URL and paste it into the Keyword Planner:
The keyword planner will show you a list of keywords, sorted by relevance, which you can also use the methods discussed above on to identify even more specific niche keywords.
It's important that you don't simply borrow these keywords and wedge them into existing content where they will clearly stick out like a sore thumb.
In most cases, you will need to produce a new piece of content specifically targeting the keyword and topic in question.
This is because, if you have found a truly unique query, it requires a truly unique piece of content designed specifically to suit the needs of the type of person searching for that query.
Start by narrowing down what type of query it is:
Design your target to serve the needs of the searcher first, and to naturally link the searcher to your product second.
Trying to take the other route by forcing the keyword onto a product or landing page will only result in the searcher leaving before they can discover how the product is related to their query. This, in turn, through direct and indirect effects, will ultimately lead to your page not ranking for that query anyway.
One definition of marketing is simply the task of identifying what problems your product solves, reaching the people who have those problems, and persuading them of your product’s efficacy in solving that problem.
So one of the most common mistakes a beginner to SEO can make is actually a departure from the practice of marketing. Focusing on ranking for products instead of problems.
Of course, ideally you do want your product pages to rank for keywords like the product’s brand name, model name, and generic unbranded product nouns, but you also want to be able to reach people who are trying to solve the problem.
What’s more, including product names, model names, and generic product nouns in your title tags is an obvious step. (Hint: if you aren’t doing this, do it.)
Plugging these keywords into the Google Keyword Planner or a tool like Ahrefs isn’t likely to get you much further. It may provide you with a few keyword variations, and it’s a good idea to expand your title tags so that you can incorporate a few of these, but you should not spam your title tags with these keyword variations. Furthermore, you should be aware that modern search engines are very good at interpreting keyword variations with the same meaning as the same query.
To find phrases with more diverse meanings you need to put the focus on the problems solved by your product.
Going through those steps will help you uncover problems that have a natural connection to your product and that you have a reasonable chance of ranking well for in the search results.
It’s only after getting this far that you should start asking which keywords you should be using.
Start by looking for the language people are using on Q&A sites, in forums, and in social media discussions when they are trying to get their problems solved.
Notice the jargon they are using and what phrases are showing up in their questions? How does their phrasing change depending on what industry or corner of the market they are from?
Make a list of these phrases, questions, and jargon, and only then should you take those words and phrases to your keyword tool of choice.
Don’t make the mistake of placing too much emphasis on keyword volume.
The problem with keyword volume is that it is a poor indication of what you will be able to bring in from long-tail. It’s not uncommon for me to produce a piece of content that brings in 5 or more times as much traffic as even searches for the root keywords I’m targeting.
I’m not arguing that you should ignore traffic figures altogether.
Obviously, if two keywords seem to show equal promise in terms of your ability to rank for them, you should choose the one with more traffic (as long as it’s relevant). And it’s a good idea to use a tool like Ahrefs to select keywords based on competitive difficulty.
We do want to stress, however, the importance of experimenting with topics that show a fairly broad range of promise. Some should have limited traffic potential and look like a sure bet for ranking. Others should be long shots. Scattershot approaches like this have the best long-term potential as well as the potential for discovering new markets and learning what works for your brand.
The problem-solution approach typically can be utilized if you’ve a blog section on your ecommerce website. The blog posts help searchers solve the problem, and then offer them an on-topic call-to-action that will either lead them to a product page or to joining your mailing list, usually with an incentive such as an eBook, free trial, or coupon.
Blogs are the best sources for informational keywords like these, the kind that helps searchers get their problems solved.
In identifying problems as we discussed above, you will also come across the blogs that help searchers solve these kinds of problems. Most successful blogs have honed their topics down to a specific audience, and if that audience is related to the products you are selling, the topics those blogs are covering are often a good fit for your brand as well.
By mining the topics covered by these blogs, you can uncover additional topics that you may not have otherwise thought of.
Using a keyword tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can copy the URL from one of these blogs and see what other keywords they are ranking for, both on that very page, and on their domain as a whole.
You can also paste a competitor's URL into the Google Keyword Planner to get keyword recommendations based on that URL:
This keyword mining approach isn’t limited to blogs, of course. If you come across forums and URLs on Q&A sites, you can also run these URLs through these tools to uncover keyword possibilities, and you should.
Another thing to keep in mind. It might sound paradoxical, but some of the best keywords you can find won’t come from top blogs. Blogs and sites that are doing relatively well in terms of traffic but that aren’t ranking well for the most competitive keywords are a smart place to look.
If a site with limited search engine authority is ranking well for a term, it means that you have a better chance of ranking well for that term yourself. So don’t neglect the smaller blogs and sites just because they are small.
A low-hanging fruit keyword is a phrase or a series of phrases you are already ranking fairly well for even though you haven’t actually made the effort to target that specific keyword. This means that it shouldn’t take a great deal of effort for you to rank well for these keywords.
To identify your low-hanging fruit, plug your own site into a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush as discussed above, and take a look at the keywords you are already ranking for.
If you are ranking at the bottom of the top 10 for anything you didn’t actually set out to target, take a look at which pages are ranking and make some adjustments to your title tag and content to more explicitly target those phrases and hopefully push you closer to the top of the search results pages.
Do not spam these keywords. Make sure they fit naturally, and don’t be concerned about using them exactly as stated. Including plurals and filler words is fine and less likely to backfire as “over-optimization.”
Pay special attention to any keywords that show up on the second page of the search results that you are not already explicitly targeting.
You can also experiment with adding these into your title tags and content. Since these are on the second page, it may take a bit more effort to produce meaningful motion and get you to the front page.
Generally, if the keyword is a good fit, it’s better to expand the existing page than to add a new one.
New pages can dilute relevance and make it more difficult for search engines to select which page to place higher, sometimes backfiring and resulting in fewer impressions. Since the original page is the one that is already ranking, it’s the one that has the SEO authority.
We would advise against merely making a small edit to the page title and content in order to target these phrases, and We have actually seen that approach backfire.
Instead, We would recommend actually expanding the content to include the keyword in a more meaningful fashion, including definitions, applications, and other useful information. The goal should be to improve the page by adding the word, not simply adding the word exclusively because it’s low-hanging fruit.
What really makes keyword research work in 2018, and in the post-RankBrain era in general, is an approach that fully encapsulates the long-tail.
If you aren’t familiar, the long-tail is the long-end of Google’s Pareto distribution, the sum total of unpopular phrases, each of them with less than 10 monthly searches, all of them together making up the vast majority of Google’s searches.
As We mentioned above, you can target a core keyword phrase and end up with far more traffic than estimates would suggest. The long-tail is the reason for that, and you need to be able to rank well for those phrases if your goal is actually search engine optimization, as opposed to vanity rankings.
Long-tail keywords are also becoming increasingly important as the number of voice searches increase.
Voice search is exploding, with half of the searches expected to be voice search by 2020, and 40 percent of adults already using voice search at least once per day. Since voice search tends to be more conversational, the queries are naturally much longer, making it more important than ever to employ a keyword strategy that addresses the long-tail.
The good news is that ranking for those long-tail phrases is frankly easier post-RankBrain, due to the fact that Google tends to produce results for long-tail queries that more closely resemble the results of short-tail queries than in the past. In other words, if you rank well for the core keyword, you’re more likely to rank well for the long-tail keyword.
Don’t count on that happening on its own, though.
This is the approach that I’ve seen work many times:
The effectiveness of this strategy can vary, but I’ve never seen it outright fail to bring in search traffic, and it nearly always works better than if these steps aren’t taken.
Since ecommerce sites, especially those based on the marketplace model, often feature so many pages, they also encounter a great deal of on-page SEO issues.
That may sound like a bad thing, but ultimately it means that ecommerce sites present the professional SEO with a large number of opportunities for growth, and a few small tweaks can often make a big difference.
Let’s talk about a few of the ways you can capitalize on this relatively unique feature of ecommerce websites.
Site architecture is about the information in your ecommerce website design structure, how it is connected by links, and how it is navigated.
Your ecommerce site structure should aim to achieve four things:
How to organize an ecommerce website structure?
The basic site structure diagram of an ideal ecommerce site should look like this:
For larger sites, sub-categories can be placed in between the categories and the products.
Aim for categories that are mutually exclusive:
Avoid including “sub-sub-categories.” This is too many levels deep. PageRank is lost to Google's damping factor with each link, so if it takes too many links to reach a product page from the homepage, the product pages will have limited ability to rank in the search results.
Your ecommerce site's link structure and URL structure should line up. That is, categories should act as folders in your URL, as well as locations where all subpages can be reached via links.
While we are recommending a relatively flat architecture, we are not suggesting that it should be completely flat. Even if your site is relatively small and it's possible to fit all of your products into the main navigation, this is an approach that will not scale well.
Furthermore, a completely flat architecture fails to differentiate the different parts of your site into different informational categories. Without this context, it can be more difficult for Google to determine when your product page is a relevant search result.
As we mentioned above, the URL structure for ecommerce website should mirror the site structure. Category pages should act as folders in your URL. But most importantly, you need to aim for an SEO-friendly URL.
How do you create an SEO-Optimized URL structure for an ecommerce website?
These pointers will lead the way:
Internal links allow the PageRank of authoritative pages to be shared with pages that have few or no external backlinks of their own. The more interlinked your site is, the better your weaker pages are able to rank.
Navigational links, in line with your information architecture as discussed above, look like this:
But a link architecture based purely on navigational links is limited in its ability to spread search engine authority to more obscure pages, and doesn't give the search engines the full context to check your website’s relevancy. For that reason, your overall link architecture should look more like this:
This may look messy, but that is the point. In addition to a structured navigational link architecture, your site should have organic internal links that cross categories and point users to relevant pages in different parts of the site.
Internal links should, however, be constructed naturally. A good example is a list of suggestions, along the lines of “customers who bought this also bought” and “customers also viewed.”
If a recommendation engine isn't implemented, you can still do this by linking to other promising or bestselling products in the same category, and manually including other relevant products. You should also be taking advantage of your blog to link to relevant products when they come up contextually in your content.
Here are a few ways to implement these kinds of internal links within your ecommerce site.
“Related” or “Customers Also Bought”
Everybody knows about Amazon's product recommendations:
Product recommendations based on what people are buying together or in close proximity to one another are obviously very natural to mention on a product page. The resulting links are some of the most organic internal links you can create, since they are driven by shared product interest.
Here are two examples of product recommendation engines you can use to produce something similar on your site:
For internal linking SEO purposes, it's important to ensure that the recommendation engine you are using generates “a href” links in HTML that can be crawled on a search engine. If the recommendation engine is personalized to each individual visitor, you will need to make sure that a “canonical” version of the recommendation engine is listed on the canonical version of the page. This should display the product recommendations that a new user would see, and needs to be based on aggregate data. We will talk more about canonicalization later on in this guide.
Product Comparison Tables
Consider how Amazon markets their Fire tablets:
By listing all of the products in one place and linking to them, you create natural internal links that interconnect these pages.
Intra-Category Links
Intra-category links are links to pages within the same category. Interlinking the pages within the same category helps tighten the cluster of pages within that category so that it is clear how semantically related they are from the search engine's perspective. These links are also natural for users, since if the pages are listed under the same category they ought to be related to one another. Doing this takes things a step beyond simply linking back to the category page with your breadcrumb links and main navigation.
This is similar to a product recommendation engine, and in fact, many product recommendation engines have features that allow you to limit recommendations to a specific category.
One of the smartest ways to do this, where relevant, is with associated accessories, like how Home Depot does it:
You can apply a similar mindset to:
Or you can simply list the bestselling products from the same category as the product the user is currently looking at.
Tips for All Internal Links As a Part of Ecommerce SEO Best Practices
Keep the following points in mind irrespective of the method used for your internal links:
On a poorly optimized ecommerce site, the category pages are often some of the worst performing. This is because they often include a great deal of content that has been duplicated from the product pages that exist under them, and because they tend to target generic, high-traffic keywords that are difficult to rank for.
It’s those generic, high-traffic ecommerce keywords that can also make category pages some of the most promising on your site, especially when you factor in that these are often the pages on your sites with the most internal links pointing in their direction, both from the navigation and in the breadcrumb links from your product pages. Those internal links can provide your category pages with quite an SEO boost as long as they are properly optimized.
So how do you optimize your category pages?
SearchWP
Relevanssi
Product pages may not have the potential for raw traffic numbers that many category pages do (although some products certainly can), but ecommerce product pages do bring in highly targeted traffic with highly specific intent, and as long as what you are offering is competitive on price, your conversion rates on this traffic should do very well.
Getting your product pages to rank well can be a different story entirely, however. Here’s what you need to do in order to optimize those pages for better search engine performance.
Here are some changes we recommend making in order to optimize your images for SEO:
Use Google’s structured data tool to verify that your product information is understood by Google. Google claims that markup doesn’t directly impact search results, but properly implemented schema does produce rich snippets that can help standout in the search results. This typically leads to better click-through rates, which is good for obvious reasons, but the click-through rates can also create a virtuous cycle leading to better rankings in the search results.
Ecommerce sites are like magnets for technical SEO issues. As with on-page SEO, this is both a blessing and a curse. While it can make it more difficult for an ecommerce site to perform well, it also means that relatively small fixes can have wide-reaching positive implications. Let’s talk about a few ecommerce SEO tips to improve your site’s technical SEO.
Canonicalization is the method that you use in order to tell the search engines which pages should be seen as the “canonical” version of a page, and which should be seen as the versions of the same page, which should be ignored.
The canonical tag looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/canonical-url-goes-here/">
It should be placed inside the <head> section of your page’s HTML, and the URL
http://example.com/canonical-url-goes-here/ would be replaced with the version of the page that you want the search engines to index.
The canonical tag should be placed on both the canonical and non-canonical versions of the page.
Canonical tags are important for ecommerce sites because they often use several variations of the same page, such as color variations, variations that have different prices because of coupons, variations where the products are sorted differently, variations where URL parameters are added for campaign tracking or for other reasons, and so on.
Use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify any pages that feature the same title tag:
These are typically page duplicates, and there is almost never a situation in which you would want both duplicates to be indexable by the search engines. This leads to duplicate content issues which, even if they don’t cause your site to get penalized, dilute the SEO authority of your pages and create confusion about which page versions should rank.
A crawling tool like this will only catch pages that you have linked to from within your own site, however, so you should take care to implement canonicalization in a way that will always cause a page to canonicalize to the correct one. To verify that only one version of a page is indexed, do a “site:” search for your URL in Google, without any URL parameters. If you get multiple results, then it indicates that Google is indexing all versions of the page.
Canonicalization transfers the SEO authority of all versions of the page to a single page, increasing your ability to rank for the terms associated with the page.
After implementing canonicalization, you should use a tool like Screaming Frog to scan for pages that canonicalize to other pages:
If a crawler like Screaming Frog discovers these pages, it means that you are linking to them instead of the canonical page from at least one other page on your site. This should be avoided if possible, since every time a link passes through a canonical tag or a redirect it causes authority to be lost through Google’s damping factor. Links should be updated so that they only point to the canonical page.
In addition to using the canonical tag, you should configure your URL parameters in the Google Search Console. Google does not always obey the canonical tag and often ignores it, so this double implementation assures that there are no duplicate content issues remaining.
Google explains how to configure your URL parameters here, and the link to the URL parameters tool is here.
The tool looks like this:
If you click “Edit” for any given parameter, you will get a popup like this:
This allows you to tell Google whether the URL parameter has any impact on the page content. This doesn’t imply that Google will no longer view these pages as separate, reducing duplicate content issues.
Unfortunately, as with implementing canonicalization, the step doesn’t necessarily remove duplicate content from the Google index, which is why you should also consider using the “noindex, follow” tag, as discussed below.
The “noindex, follow” tag explicitly tells the search engines not to index a page in the search results, while also telling the search engines to count the links on the page, so that any authority the page has can be transferred through those links to the other pages.
This, incidentally, is why you should never use the “noindex, nofollow” tag on your own pages. The nofollow tag tells the search engines to throw away all of the search engine authority on the page and not let it pass on to your other pages. You should essentially never do this. If you are going to noindex a page, always use “noindex, follow.”
The correct way to implement this is:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
This should be listed in the <head> section of your HTML.
Be meticulous in verifying that this tag is only applied to your non-canonical pages, never to your canonical pages. It will remove the page from the search results.
Use Screaming Frog to identify any pages that are noindexed in order to verify that there are no mistakes:
You should also monitor your search engine traffic after making any use of canonicalization or noindex tags to verify that there are no dips in traffic.
Links from external sites play a central role in the way that modern search engines rank sites, and no SEO strategy is complete without a strategy for earning, attracting, and building links.
Nevertheless, link building strategies for ecommerce sites must take a diverse approach that complies with search engine guidelines, creates self-reinforcing positive effects, and that makes an impact that supersedes pure SEO benefit.
Here are a few ecommerce website best practices that you can leverage.
Before we talk about specific strategies and tactics, it’s important to take a few lessons to heart when it comes to outreach, because the majority of these strategies will rely on you contacting influential parties with the ultimate goal of getting them to take an action of some kind. For this to be effective, we recommend:
Ecommerce sites based on a marketplace model have a unique opportunity to earn links due to the larger number of product suppliers that they work with. Earning even a relatively small percentage of links from your product manufacturers can be a powerful way to earn links from reputable sites.
Start by visiting your brand sites to see if they have a section on their site that lists retailers who sell the product. These are the first sites you should contact. Simply send them a message saying that you noticed they have a list of retailers on their site, and since you are currently one of their sellers, you are interested in getting your name added to the list.
Sites that don't have a section like this can be more difficult to earn links from, but since you already have a working business relationship, reaching out to them is relatively natural. Since it is not a cold email, inquiring about how you might get featured on their site is a worthwhile endeavor. You can offer to write a guest post for them or collaborate on any other project that might result in inbound links for ecommerce website.
Earning press on product review sites is an essential part of any ecommerce marketing strategy, and doing so with some top ecommerce SEO tips can be beneficial, but it’s important to be careful in your approach.
Exchanging a free product for a review that includes a link is explicitly named as a “link scheme” in Google’s webmaster guidelines. That means if you explicitly offer a product in exchange for a link, and possibly even if you do so without explicitly asking for the link, you could be violating Google’s guidelines and find yourself in a situation where your site gets penalized.
How can you earn links from product reviews for your ecommerce website?
The most obvious answer is to make a big enough splash in the press so that reviewers will want to review your product. This, of course, relies on broader marketing strategies that we won’t discuss here, but here are some other steps you can take to earn product reviews and the links that come with them. Of course, in applying any of these ecommerce website best practices, to comply with regulations, make sure it is always disclosed that you provided the reviewer with a free version of the product.
The gist of the comprehensive guest blogging is as follows:
Assuming you are offering coupon codes to your customers, promo codes can be a great way to earn links as well as capture the attention of leads who wouldn't otherwise come across your site.
You can start by taking advantage of the major couponing sites. Submit your promo codes to these sites:
You can submit to as many coupon sites as you want, provided you verify that the coupon sites exist primarily for users who actually shop with coupons. Watch out for sites that seem to exist primarily for retailers.
Additionally, you can create custom coupon codes as part of a collaboration with bloggers and influential social media personalities. Contact influencers in your niche to find out if they would be interested in including links to your site with coupon codes. The coupon codes allow the bloggers to collect a percentage of the sales in exchange for promoting your products.
You can use Buzzsumo and similar tools to identify people who are popular in your niche, but We would recommend starting by searching for your brand name to see who has already mentioned you, especially if they have done so more than once. Bloggers who have already talked about your product in the past will be more open to the idea of receiving compensation for it if they do so in the future.
Bear in mind that any influencer you work with must disclose that they are receiving compensation for the promotion. To be in line with Google guidelines, these links should also be nofollowed.
A linkable asset is a resource you place on your site that others can’t help but link to. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t perform any outreach to earn links, but the asset should be so valuable that anybody you contact about it will be happy you did.
What does it take to make a linkable asset work? There are quite a few different ways to approach linkable assets. Let’s talk about them.
We said that ecommerce SEO relies on earning links in a wide variety of ways, because diversity is the surest sign of reliability and redundancy, and because the more things you try, the more likely you are to find something that works well for your brand.
Here are some alternative approaches you can use to build and attract links:
As the search engine landscape continues to evolve, marketers need to be constantly on their toes. This guide is a handy resource, which will arm you with the basics of optimizing your Ecommerce site in the best possible manner. Put the pointers mentioned into practice and there’ll be no looking back for your brand or business.
Do bookmark this for your reference as we’ll continue to update this resource regularly.
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