Better E-Commerce SEO

When we talk about E-Commerce SEO, there are a few different types, the first being how to take us internal SEO on websites such as Amazon to your advantage and sell more products on their platform, the seconding being the promotion of your own e-commerce site. In this article we will discuss the later.

In a previous article we mentioned that globally, around 252,000 websites are created every day, with an estimated 12 – 24 million e-commerce websites¹ or more already running. If the market size by global e-commerce buyers sits at around 2 billion, that’s only 50 customers per website. Only about 1 million or 4% of these sites make over $1000/year. Of course, with all this competition, most companies will look for their very own USP but few will work on increasing organic traffic through SEO.

• Only 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold².
• The average business drives 53% of its traffic through organic search³.
• 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc.) is their highest quality source of leads⁴.

With so much traffic driven through organic search but so few websites passing Googles core web vitals threshold, there is a lot of opportunity to be gained for your business. Lets dive in.

What are the Basics of SEO and What Applies to E-Commerce

As we all know, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a process of optimizing your website and its content to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can be roughly broken down into 2 categories as we will list below.

1. On-Page Optimization:
   • Title Tags: Ensure each page has a unique and descriptive title tag that includes relevant keywords.
   • Meta Descriptions: Write compelling meta descriptions that summarize the content of each page.
   • Heading Tags: Use headings (H1, H2, etc.) to structure your content logically and include keywords where relevant.
   • URL Structure: Create SEO-friendly URLs that are descriptive and include keywords.
   • Content Optimization: Write high-quality, relevant content that addresses the needs of your audience and incorporates target keywords naturally.
   • Image Optimization: Optimize image file names and use descriptive alt text to improve accessibility and provide context to search engines.
2. Off-Page Optimization:
   • Backlinks: Acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve your site’s authority and credibility.
   • Social Media: Build a presence on social media platforms to increase brand visibility and attract traffic to your website.
3. Technical:
   • Site Speed: Optimize your website’s loading speed to improve user experience and search engine rankings.
   • Mobile-Friendliness: Ensure your website is responsive and performs well on mobile devices.
   • Site Structure: Create a clear site structure with intuitive navigation to help users and search engines find content easily.
   • XML Sitemap: Generate and submit an XML sitemap to search engines to help them crawl and index your site effectively.

All of these will apply to your website, whether it be e-commerce or otherwise. This being said, there are a few areas e-commerce site struggle with more than most other websites.

E-Commerce SEO Struggles

There are a few areas e-commerce site struggle with more than most other websites. Here are some of the most common and how to fix them.

• Thin Content: Some e-commerce websites may have product pages with minimal content, such as short descriptions or only images.
  • Solution: Provide comprehensive and unique content for each product, including detailed descriptions, specifications, and user reviews. For example, you can create engaging product descriptions that highlight features, benefits, and use cases. Additionally, encourage customers to leave reviews and ratings to enrich the content.
• Faceted Navigation: E-commerce sites frequently use faceted navigation to allow users to filter products based on various attributes like size, color, and price. However, faceted navigation can generate multiple URLs with similar content, leading to duplicate content issues and crawl budget wastage.
  • Solution: Properly manage faceted navigation by implementing URL parameters correctly and using rel=”canonical” tags. Set up URL parameters in Google Search Console to instruct search engines on how to handle them. For example, you can specify which parameters should be ignored or which should be treated as representative.

• Product Availability: Products on e-commerce websites may go in and out of stock frequently. When a product becomes unavailable, its page may return a 404 error or remain indexed without the option to purchase.
  • Solution: Implement proper handling of out-of-stock products to prevent negative SEO impacts. For example, you can redirect out-of-stock product pages to similar items or display related products instead. Ensure that the HTTP status code returned for out-of-stock products is appropriate (e.g., 301 redirect for permanent redirection). When redirecting a single URL, all you have to do is add the following redirect rule under the “RewriteEngine On” line:

• Product Reviews and Ratings: User-generated content like product reviews and ratings can provide valuable information to both customers and search engines. However, if not managed correctly, reviews and ratings may lead to issues like thin content, spam, or duplicate content.
  • Solution: Implement structured data markup such as Schema.org for product reviews and ratings. This helps search engines understand and display this user-generated content in search results. Regularly monitor user-generated content to ensure quality and relevance, and implement measures to prevent spam or duplicate reviews. If you’re using a platform such as WIX, or Squarespace, you should be able to find a product review block built in. If you have WordPress, there are a number of different plugins you can choose from; we recommend Customer Reviews by WooCommerce if you are already using their products. https://wordpress.org/plugins/customer-reviews-woocommerce/
• Pagination: E-commerce websites often use pagination to display multiple pages of products. However, pagination can lead to duplicate content issues, especially if URLs for paginated pages aren’t properly handled.
  • Solution: Implement rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags to indicate the relationship between paginated pages. Use canonicalization to consolidate indexing signals for paginated content. Ensure that each paginated page has unique titles and meta descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues. Here’s an example of rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags in HTML:

• Product Variations: E-commerce websites often sell products with multiple variations, such as size, color, and style. Managing product variations effectively can be challenging, as each variation may have its own URL and content.
  • Solution: Implement structured data markup for product variations to provide search engines with detailed information about each variation. Use canonical tags to consolidate indexing signals for similar product variations. Ensure each variation has unique content, such as different descriptions or specifications.

Website Structure

Google provides a lot of information on page structure and their algorithm prioritizes pages to be crawled. If you are unfamiliar with this, crawling is the process in which search engine bots (also known as web crawlers or spiders) systematically discover content on a website that search engines like Google use for indexing. Indexing is how search engines organize and catalog your content so that it can be found in search.

Google tries to find the best content on your site by analyzing the relationship between pages based on their linkages. This means navigation structures on your site (such as menus and cross page links) can impact Google’s understanding of your site structure.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/help-google-understand-your-ecommerce-site-structure

How does this related to e-commerce SEO?

Consider your product focus and your company’s target market. For example, if your company sells mainly denim but also has a line of socks that don’t really make you much money but offer a small additional revenue stream, you should consider having less links to these minor products. As a general rule, if you have a best selling product, consider linking to it from the home page or in other content, such as blog posts or newsletters. This will help Google understand how important the product is in relation to your site.

You should also consider how these products are listed in your menu. These navigation structures on your site send clues to crawler as to what the most important content is. Going back to the example of our denim company, if you main product is jeans, followed by jackets, but you also have a line of accessories, you’ll want to order them as such in your menu. The addition of subcategories can also be a useful tool to further deprioritize and structure content.

Finally, we can maintain a more focused approach to E-Commerce SEO by using noindex or nofollow tags. Nofollow tags tell search engines to ignore a link, while noindex tags tell them to not index a page. Noindex tags can be particularly useful for e-commerce websites if your product offerings grow so broad that the keywords for many of your less lucrative products start to obscure or dilute the impact of SEO keywords you do want to focus on. In this case you might want to consider performing an SEO keyword audit to identify these pages and start to integrate tags on the pages that don’t have keyword you’d like to prioritize. If you’re looking for a low budget option to help you with SEO keywords, we recommend using Google Search Console.

HTML Metatags

Noindex: <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

Nofollow: <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”nofollow”>

Noindex and Nofollow: <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex,nofollow”>

Final Thoughts

Take advantage of social media to boost your traffic. Even if you don’t end up selling much on these platforms, they can also be valuable to traffic generation and backlinking for better SEO, not to mention a great way to promote your brand.

Here are the percentages of shoppers that start their product search on platforms outside of Google Search,

• 20% start on YouTube.
• 19% start on Facebook.
• 15% start on Instagram.
• 11% start on TikTok.

By strategically utilizing social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, e-commerce businesses can tap into a vast audience of potential customers, drive traffic to their websites, and ultimately increase sales and revenue. Experiment with different content formats, engage with your audience authentically, and track metrics to refine your social media strategy and maximize its effectiveness.

Looking for more?

 If you want some help improving your e-commerce performance or are just interested in ready some of our other blogs, click the links below.

Sources:

1. https://wpforms.com/ecommerce-statistics/ ↩︎ ↩︎
2. https://ahrefs.com/blog/core-web-vitals/ ↩︎
3. https://videos.brightedge.com/research-report/BrightEdge_ChannelReport2019_FINAL.pdf ↩︎
4. https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/3476323/State%20of%20Inbound%202018%20Global%20Results.pdf ↩︎