E-commerce SEO Checklist To Elevate Your Online Store
August 12, 2019
Rudra Kumar
The purchasing journey for 81% of all users begins with online research (Source: Invoca.com), and if you’re running an e-commerce store without capitalizing on this, you could be losing out on a lot of prospective customers.
Directing these prospective customers to your website can start with getting higher rankings on search results: and to do that, you need to focus on e-commerce SEO.
A relatively straightforward way to do this is by sticking to a comprehensive e-commerce SEO checklist. This blog will arm you with all the essentials you need to get started and direct potential customers to your website.
Ecommerce SEO Checklist – Technical
Having an optimized website is the foundation for getting promising returns through e-commerce SEO, so ensure all its technical elements are in top condition. For that, here’s what you need to do:
URL Configuration
The URL configuration needs to be consistent across the website, so that it helps search engines easily locate and retrieve pages.
As best explained by Google, the URL structure for your e-commerce site matters because content can be missed and retrieved multiple times, including the fact that crawlers think that your site contains an infinite number of pages.
Therefore, please ensure the URL structure is uniform across your website. For that, it’s advisable to use hyphens (e.g. www.example.com/product-name); instead of adding underscores; spaces; or special characters.
HTTPs
Install an SSL certificate on your e-commerce site to ensure it uses HTTPS to encrypt user data and provide a secure shopping experience to customers.
Customers will be using your website to make transactions by adding their credit card and contact information. Having your SSL certificate configured properly means third parties aren’t able to access any crucial information.
Canonical URLs
Simply put, Canonical URLs are HTML elements directing search engines to a main version of a web page.
For e-commerce websites, there’ll be identical or even duplicate pages. Having Canonical URLs ensures that a wrong page isn’t being indexed, affecting your rankings on search engines.
Ensure Your Website can be Crawled and Indexed
Any hindrance a search bot encounters while crawling and indexing your website means they’ll leave it altogether, negatively affecting your rankings because the pages will not appear on search results.
There’s an easy fix for that – use Google’s Crawl Report. This report will highlight all the issues that are preventing search bots from crawling or indexing your web pages.
Double-Check All the Excluded Pages
You can use the “Excluded” report in Google Search Console to check if there aren’t any important pages excluded from being indexed.
Pay equal attention to the robots.txt files and ensure it’s not blocking the important pages.
Create a Dynamic Sitemap and Submit it to Google and Bing
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages on your website and their relationship, like hierarchy.
Basically, it informs search engines about URLs available for crawling: so create and submit your dynamic sitemap to Google and Bing for views and rankings.
Also Read: How Can ecommerce Startups Increase their Sales Exponentially?
Use a Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Website Design
Did you know 77% shoppers use mobile phones to search for products (source)? It’s evident that a huge chunk of organic traffic e-commerce websites get comes from mobile devices.
It is also important to know that search engines like Google use the mobile-first indexing approach, so develop a responsive web design for mobile devices.
The idea is that the navigation should be easy for users, pages should not look vastly different on different devices, font size is legible, and more. You’ll have to loop in developers and designers to make this possible, but it is pertinent for success.
Resolve 4XX Errors, 301 Redirects, and Duplicated Content
4XX errors occur when a web page has restricted access or does not exist. These errors could be present on your website due to a misspelling in the URL, or if a page has been deleted.
The good thing is that these errors are easily identifiable. You can use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to identify and fix 4XX errors.
Based on the findings, you can see that some pages have been deliberately blocked. For such pages, implement 301 redirects to new pages. It’ll pass all the requests for the old URL to the new one.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a crucial SEO ranking factor to assess whether your e-commerce website is fast, stable, and responsive.
The easiest way to do this is by dropping your URL into Page Speed Insights, and immediately, you’ll get a Pass/Fail overview for each Core Web Vital.
By following these e-commerce technical SEO checklist items, you’ll be able to ensure that your website is optimized for search engine crawling and indexing, while providing a great user experience for your customers.
Also Read: Best Ecommerce SEO Tips
Ecommerce SEO Checklist – Keywords
Conduct Keyword Research
Targeting the right keywords begins with selecting terms/phrases/queries that cover your products and services as well as what your e-commerce site is about. More importantly, what your targeted customers are searching for on the internet.
Based on the findings from keyword research, you will be able to understand how user interest is spread over the internet and capitalize on the findings to optimize your e-commerce SEO strategy.
Target Specific Sales-Driving Keywords
Surely, you need to use broad terms like “mobile phones” in your strategy, but using highly specific, long-tail keywords will drive sales.
It’s also important to note broad terms will have significant keyword difficulty, and market leaders like Amazon will be dominating these keywords.
This is why you need highly-specific keywords related to broad terms. For example, here’s a breakdown of the keyword “mobile phones”:
| Broad Term |
Specific Terms |
Intent |
Target Page |
Search Volume |
| Mobile Phones |
advantages and disadvantages of mobile phones |
Informational |
Blog Post |
14,800 |
| Mobile Phones |
new mobile phones with price |
Navigational |
Listing Page or Post |
12,100 |
| Mobile Phones |
mobile phone under 10000 |
Commercial |
Product Page with Pricing Filter |
40,100 |
| Mobile Phones |
oppo mobile phone |
Transactional |
Product Page with Oppo Mobile Phones |
18,100 |
Optimize As Per Search Intent
You need to optimize your e-commerce SEO strategy by mapping the right keyword for the right page as per the search intent.
Accordingly, you can optimize your e-commerce content strategy for keywords with informational, commercial, transnational, and navigational intent.
For instance, if the keyword is “mobile purchasing guide”, the intent is informational. Users want information related to purchasing mobile phones.
For this, the content form and the intent should be informational. You can use blog posts or videos to share information on “buying mobile phones”.
Ensure You Don’t Compete With Yourself
If you’re targeting the same keyword on multiple pages, the chances of keyword cannibalization, i.e., competing with yourself, increase significantly.
If two or three pages are competing with each other, search engines will not be able to discern which one they should prioritize.
You can use Google Search Console or tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to determine if your web pages are competing for the same keywords.
E-commerce SEO Checklist – On-page
Automate Creating Meta Descriptions Through Programmatic SEO
A meta description is 155 characters of text within the HTML code that summarizes a page’s contents and allows search engines to understand what the page is about.
But when it comes to creating meta descriptions for e-commerce websites, you deal with a large number of pages. Here, Programmatic SEO can help you improve this exercise with much more efficiency.
Programmatic SEO tools can analyze the content of your web pages and create meta descriptions optimized for search engines and within the recommended character limit.
Create Internal Links
As your e-commerce SEO strategy progresses, the content will increase. As the volume of content starts to increase, make sure you connect them through a silo structure of internal links – these help the users move through your website effectively and search engine crawlers to understand your website.
Typically, there’ll be two types of internal linking opportunities. The first one is through in-content, where you’ll be able to add links within your content, ideally, blog posts.
The second is through navigational internal links that’ll be done through breadcrumbs, site navigation, and other opportunities like that.
The one thing you need to ensure while creating internal links is giving it a proper hierarchical structure that should complement the user journey and navigation.
Add Schema Markup to Each Page
A Schema Markup is a code added to your website that can help search engines show more informative results.
This results in rich snippets in the SERPs with additional information such as photos, reviews, and pricing.
Schema markup helps Google Merchant Center understand your product data, allowing Google to retrieve updated information from your product pages.
Additional Read: Latest Semantic Markup Tips
Implement Breadcrumb
Breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of their location on a website. They help users retrace their steps, and find more interesting content.
For SEO purposes, they improve a website’s internal linking structure and reduce the overall bounce rate.
Here’s an example of an optimized breadcrumb for an e-commerce website:
Image Credit: Utsavfashion.com
Image Optimization
Optimizing images for your e-commerce website vastly improves the website’s load time, user experience, and search engine visibility.
Here are some elements of image optimization for e-commerce websites:
- Next-gen image formats: Next-gen image formats, such as WebP and AVIF, can improve website load times by reducing the file size of images without sacrificing quality.
- Alt tag optimization: Adding alt tags {an HTML attribute} to your images helps search engines understand what an image is about: in order to show it in image search results. Alt tags should accurately describe the image and be kept to around 125 characters.
- Image name: Naming images with relevant keywords can help search engines understand the content of the image and improve the website’s search engine rankings. It’s important to avoid using generic names such as “image001.jpg” and instead use names such as “red-sneakers.jpg”.
E-commerce SEO Checklist – Content
E-commerce websites have limited space to add content. But if you leverage it properly by utilizing the following areas, the results for your website are going to be great, not just with SEO but also with the user experience.
Reviews
Customer perception isn’t influenced by what you say your brand is – it’s what your existing customers say it is.
Thus, reviews aren’t just helpful with analyzing the user sentiment around a product, it also holds great value in e-commerce SEO.
Begin by encouraging your customers to leave reviews on your product pages to talk about their experience with the product or your brand.
Also, use Schema Markup to display star ratings, it creates a great impression. Furthermore, monitor and address all the negative reviews to improve customer experience.
CTAs
If you want to convert potential prospects into paying customers, use proper call-to-action (CTA) buttons. These CTAs need to be clear and compelling on product pages and wherever you seem they are relevant.
We advise e-commerce websites to use CTAs such as “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart”, as these are action-oriented and compel visitors to click. However, you should test different CTAs to see which ones drive the most conversions.
Product pages – Product Descriptions
Your product pages need to have a description highlighting things like features, benefits, specifications, etc.
It is equally important to optimize the product pages for relevant keywords and phrases, so the chances of them appearing in search results can increase significantly.
Add Content to Category Pages
Category pages are the arteries of your website – they provide a great opportunity to drive traffic. Well-written banner copy and SEO-optimized content are useful to users and search engines alike.
FAQs
Prospective customers who are visiting your product pages will have a few queries, and you need to address them. So, create a comprehensive FAQ section that addresses common customer queries and concerns.
It’s crucial because these prospective customers will go somewhere else where their queries are being answered.
Apart from unique questions exclusive to your products, you can add questions related to shipping or return policies to get started.
Blog Posts
Through keyword research, find informative keywords related to your brand and products and services.
Create engaging blog posts based on those keywords to improve the website’s visibility on search engines. It’s important to use internal linking and connect your blog posts with the relevant product pages.
Ecommerce SEO Checklist – Off-Page
Ecommerce off-page SEO refers to all the optimization or marketing activities that you perform outside your website. The aim is to improve your website’s authority, increase keyword rankings, and drive relevant traffic.
Build Your Website Authority on Search Engines (DA/PA)
You should start with developing a natural link building strategy that focuses on acquiring high-quality links from relevant and authoritative sources.
The aim should be to acquire these links from websites with a high domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) by following Google’s suggested guidelines.
Content Marketing – Off-Page
Creating quality content is an amazing way to increase the volume of inbound traffic to your website, but often, it doesn’t yield the expected results because people do not know about your website.
The same can be said about your products – they may be the best in the industry, but if people don’t know about it, it does little to boost your sales. Here Content Marketing – Off-page plays a pivotal role.
Write Guest Posts
Create high-quality guest posts on authoritative websites in your industry to reach a wider audience and establish yourself as a trusted source on the internet.
Apart from focusing on partnering with reputed guest blogging websites, ensuring your content provides value to readers is pivotal, along with adding contextually relevant links to your website.
Partner with online media outlets willing to publish a Digital PR related to your products and services.
You can also purchase sponsored posts on authoritative websites, but please ensure that search engines’ link building guidelines are being followed.
Backlink Monitoring
Minor mistakes can turn your search-engine-friendly White Hat SEO techniques into Black Hat ones, so it’s crucial to know the difference between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
Follow guidelines suggested by search engines and monitor all the backlink activities, including the ones that were generated automatically:
Link Relevancy
- Focus on link relevancy when acquiring backlinks
- Ensure that the links are from relevant websites related to your industry or niche.
Anchor Cloud (Keywords That Match the Intent)
- Create an anchor cloud that reflects your targeted keywords and their intent
- Avoid overusing exact match keywords as this could lead to a penalty for over-optimization
Backlink Audit & Correction
- Avoid using automated link-building techniques that generate low-quality links quickly.
- Monitor your backlink profile regularly to identify any spammy or low-quality links
- Use tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs to disavow spammy links from affecting your rankings negatively
Additional Read: What is SEO & How it Works?
Conclusion
This Ecommerce SEO Checklist has more or less covered everything you need to transform your website, making it friendly for potential customers and search engines.
Remember, Ecommerce SEO is ever-evolving and requires continuous effort, so you’ll need to optimize your strategy regularly and capitalize on new opportunities and trends.
Book a consultation with our Ecommerce SEO Experts and start building a robust presence on search engines to reach, engage, and convert prospective customers.
FAQs
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What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO is the science and art of optimizing your shopping site around specific keywords in order to rank higher in search results on search engines like Google.
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Is SEO important for eCommerce?
eCommerce SEO is extremely important since it drives organic traffic to your website – highly interested traffic that has high potential to convert into sales and customers.
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How can SEO improve sales?
With the right keyword research, stellar content, and the use of social media – you can reach new customers and prospects, propelling your growth. Great SEO improves your rankings and visibility, while also ensuring that only highly motivated individuals looking for what you are selling engage with you. Improving your local SEO and mobile-friendliness will also help audiences around you discover you, resulting in more footfall and sales.
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Why SEO for ecommerce Website is important?
SEO for eCommerce is important since it drives organic traffic to your website. With the costs of paid advertising rising, ad fatigue, and a general mistrust in paid advertising forms growing among millennials – SEO is a great way to spell long-term success for your brand.
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How do I choose a good eCommerce SEO agency?
Make sure that your SEO Company is qualified to offer Conversion Rate Optimization & Pay Per Click advertising services and specifically, SEO for eCommerce websites services. A company offering a full suite of Ecommerce Solutions can help with 360° strategizing, planning and implementation for designing, developing, hosting and analytics of your eStore. Experience, certifications and authenticity are the key criteria on the basis of which you should be making your decision.