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Like it or not, SEO is now a fundamental part of the business realm. It is a gold standard in improving your search engine rankings, increasing your ROI, and boosting online recognizability. As the bread and butter of every business, it shouldn’t be overlooked. Since conversion optimization and SEO require a give and take relationship, they are complementary forces that depend on each other to function and yield maximum results.

So, to help you with your efforts in scaling your e-Commerce SEO strategy to the next level and understand its inner workings, we put together a step-by-step guide on how to skyrocket your organic search rankings and implement your SEO plan for the long haul.

If you are looking for targeted leads and customer sales from organic search, you will enjoy this guide. So, are you ready to take the leap and uncover a whole new world of strategic e-Commerce SEO? 

Let’s dive right in!

Optimize your website for SEO and conversions 💰💰💰

🎯 Search and target high-value keywords for your business: While NOT pivotal to the search engine optimization process, finding keywords that drive traffic and increase revenue. Believe it or not, keyword research is a big deal for your e-Commerce store and is considered the central part of your eCommerce SEO. 

Broadly speaking, here’s how to find untapped terms that your customers are searching for to get your keyword strategy moving in the right direction. Let us help you choose the essential keywords for your e-Commerce store and incorporate them into your SEO strategy to maximize your ROI.

• Get to know your audience - this is the key to a better understanding of the user’s intentions and keeps your ears to the ground.
  

• Understand your niche - studying your niche and going even more in-depth help you know the viability of your products or services in the marketplace, define your starting point and discover what your potential customers are looking for and struggling with. 
  

• Know the keywords you already ranked for - as a rule of thumb, before performing the keyword research, get an idea about what keywords your site is already seeing a high rank and traffic for.

         Pro tip: To save time, don’t compete for the exact keywords your e-Commerce business is already performing well for, and then narrow           the rest of your strategy.

• Perform competitive keyword analysis - this step involves rank-ordering the keywords you found earlier. ‍

          Refine your list: first, rank them according to search volumes and then by keyword difficulties. Mastery of this step will set you up for           SEO success!

Aside from identifying the search volume and keyword difficulty, here are some other metrics that will help you filter out your search, sort wheat from the chaff, and find the best keyword opportunities for your e-Commerce business.

• Number of clicks
• Traffic potential
• Cost per clicks
• Keyword trends
• Parent topic
• Search intent
• Buyer’s buying behavior/process
  

Set up a user and SEO-friendly website architecture

After determining the most profitable keywords, it’s time to put them into action by adding potential keywords to your website. At this point, we will talk about how to incorporate these keywords starting in your website structure.

Keep in mind: Planning your website hierarchy takes time - don’t rush it. It is important to understand what website structure works for your business before burning your midnight oil in optimizing pages and building backlinks.

This step hampers your ranking potential; thus, it’s critical to define your website hierarchy before building your website. A good website structure makes it easier to crawl, index, organize and prioritize your content on the search engine. 

Here are the golden rules in building an optimal website structure that will enhance SEO for e-Commerce and get the most authority to your best pages:

• Keep your URL simple - Google is a lover of simplicity. Therefore, keep your URLs relevant and compelling, so it is easy for Google to understand them, and users can freely move across different pages within your site.
  

• Develop a hierarchy that follows your website’s navigation structure - avoid having many clicks before users can browse within different web pages efficiently.
  

• Use your target keywords in creating highly relevant pages with an easy-to-follow navigation bar.The thing is, SEO and user experience go hand in hand. Breaking the above rules means your e-Commerce store has poor navigation results, significantly impacting your rankings on the search engines down the line. 
  

Here’s a free bit of advice: aim for a clean and simple website that is internally structured and linked together, following a logical path for the visitors. Trust me; it makes all the difference!

Optimize for on-page SEO

Stay in the loop: Even if you have a small or huge e-commerce business, taking time to optimize your website is vital to solid e-Commerce SEO performance and makes your business stand out, more competitive, and difficult to beat.

Here are several factors affecting your on-page optimization performance:

• URL optimization 
• Title tags
• Meta description
• Heading tags
• Alt tags
• Keywords
• Content
• Speed 
• Internal linkings
• Images
• Mobile responsiveness
  

Now that you know the factors that influence your on-page SEO performance,  you can now start spending countless hours optimizing your site. Following the best practices of these factors will give you an edge over your competitors, giving you the upper hand.

Produce a high-quality content

As we all know, content is king and considered the best strategy to reach your target customers. Great quality content will serve your business well and open doors for backlink opportunities from other high-quality external sites. 

💪💪 Get off with a strong start: here are a few steps to get you started on how to write compelling, impactful, and value-rich SEO content for your site:

• Google your main keyword and check the top-performing article results on SERPs.
• Check the content length - if your competitor’s pages have more than 2000 words, then yours should be too.
• Organize your content in an objective and logical way - a top-level content strategy that is not only good for SEO but helps your readers find other relevant content.
• Get the word out there - don’t overlook the power of word-of-mouth advertising through the use of social media platforms that spread awareness about your brand.
• Stay relevant - if the content is NOT directly related to your topic, it will fall on deaf ears and is unlikely to grab eyeballs. There’s no point creating content if it is not getting any traffic.
  

Note: length is not everything - it’s the quality of information you gave to your audience which signals Google that you are adding value to your readers. The more information you provide, the longer you keep the users’ attention on your website. The longer the user’s average time spent on your content - reading until the very end - the more likely you will get some real return on your rankings.

Perform SEO technical audits

The big takeaway: The way to measure your implementation success is through an in-depth audit of your website. If you are not showing on SERPs and not getting any traffic, this could be due to an internal website issue that needs fixing.

Recommendation: Strive to get a website check-up once every quarter. A complete site analysis of your e-Commerce store will definitely show what is lacking for your website’s ability to be visible online in terms of SEO, design, usability, content, and audience engagement.  

A good rule of thumb: audit your website before investing time and effort into a large-scale e-Commerce SEO or site redesign.

Leverage your website’s technical SEO

There are many factors of a website’s technical performance affecting your online visibility. So let’s shed some light on the technical SEO elements that impact your online presence. Here are a few of them:

• Use a mobile responsive website - a mobile-friendly website will look good on any mobile device.
• The page load speed of your website - aim to make your website pages fast across all devices.
• Links should be visible to your visitors, and they should be clicked and redirected to the right website page.
• Avoid duplicating your content - more URLs with similar content appearing on multiple pages online will confuse Google on what URL to show on the result page.
• Schemas - shows your data mapping techniques and helps search engines understand your content better by giving Google detailed information about what your website or company is all about.
• Crawling errors - happen when your server takes longer to respond; thus, search engines fail to reach your page.
• Image issues - this happens when uploaded photos on your website are not loading or displaying incorrectly.
• Site security - your website should be protected and secured from cybercriminals and other threats looking to exploit the vulnerabilities of your site.
• Some other factors to look into are URL structure, 404 pages, 301 redirects, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, and site architecture.

Build off a strong off-page strategy

Look beyond your own website: if you want to boost your brand’s visibility and organic search, you need to learn to network with other platforms. In general, off-page SEO is about establishing e-Commerce SEO tactics that take place outside of your website. 

Backlinking is the most well-known SEO off-page technique, and it is carried out away from your website. However, off-page optimization is not just about the links generated; it’s more than that. For example, every brand mention signals search engines and users on your site’s authority gaining the key trust and relevance factors.

Here are a few strategies to build backlinks to your website:

• Increase search engine ranking by building powerful links
• Build your brand and apply it across your business
• Market through adding content
• Use press releases to spread the word about your company
• Increase searchability of your business by using Local SEOs (GMB and citations included)
• Build your social media presence
• Grow traffic through forum marketing
• Add value to other website’s audience through guest posting
• Add regular podcasts and gain new listeners
• Ramp up your online reputation by asking for reviews
• Republish and syndicate your content to the third-party websites

Conclusion

Of course, ranking in Google is not an easy task, but if you keep these BIG SEO pitfalls and strategies in mind while working on your marketing strategy, you are on your way to success! And don’t forget the last step - measure your SEO success, so you will know what is working, what isn’t, and if there’s any room for improvement.

In case you need the help of e-Commerce SEO experts:  Finding an e-commerce SEO agency is not easy by any means - you need to make sure that you hired the right people for the job.

If you are looking for an e-commerce digital marketing agency to help you take advantage of your business opportunity and take it to the next level, then you come to the right place. Get in touch with a reliable e-Commerce marketing agency today to discuss how to leverage your e-Commerce SEO strategies and improve your ROI!