Spring Cleaning Your Ecommerce SEO Campaign

As if the task of spring cleaning your house isn’t daunting enough, it’s time for spring cleaning your ecommerce SEO campaign.  Ecommerce sites simply can’t afford to ignore their SEO given that 44% of people start their online shopping journey with a Google search (nChannel), 37.5% of all traffic to ecommerce sites comes from search engines (SEMrush), and 23.6% of ecommerce orders are directly tied to organic traffic (Business Insider). Keep reading to check our biggest tips for cleaning up your SEO campaign. 

Ecommerce Keyword Research

Keyword research is where every SEO campaign starts, ecommerce or otherwise. We use keyword research to determine what keywords to target your products and pages for. Agencies have paid tools at their disposal (we like the Keyword Magic Tool at SEMRush) but Google has a great free keyword research tool as well. We plug in relevant keywords to find the keywords that have the highest search volume and lowest competition to target in the campaign. This is where most campaigns start, but it’s important to conduct keyword research on a regular, seasonal or annual, to keep up with changing trends. Word usage shifts naturally over time and keyword research can yield wildly different results one year to the next.

Ecommerce Website Architecture

Site structure is an important SEO factor for any site but especially for ecommerce sites because customers and search engines have to be able to find all your products. If you’re consistently adding products, it’s a good idea to regularly revue your site structure to make sure things aren’t getting too wild and crazy. Keep things simple and scalable. Keep every page three or fewer clicks from your homepage. Pages that are “deep” in a website are often not shown in search engines so try and keep the website as simple and flat as possible. 

On-Page Ecommerce SEO

Having your category and product pages optimized is going to make a big difference because category keyword and product keywords are what people are actually Googling and that’s what’s driving traffic and sales to your site. You have to make sure they’re optimized to the correct keywords to take advantage of all that relevent search traffic. Optimize your title tag, description tag, and content to reflect the keywords you got in your keyword research. In your page content, be sure to use 1000+ words and use your keyword 3-5 times. Longer content tends to rank best in Google. Use short, keyword-rich URLs because long URLs confuse Google. Make sure you’re using internal links liberally and external links where it makes sense.

Technical E-Commerce SEO

Ecommerce sites tend to have a lot of pages, which makes technical SEO even more important. Technical SEO is often what Google uses to rank direct competitors so regular technical SEO audits are key. We use SEMRush for our clients but Ahrefs, Raven Tools, and Screaming Frog are all great tools. They all have site audit features that crawl your site, find technical errors, and issue a report so you can go through and fix them. This will help you find issues that would be difficult to detect otherwise such as duplicate content, thin content, broken links, site speed, etc. 

Ecommerce sites can be unwieldy behemoths when regular maintenance isn’t being taken care of and this can be disastrous to your bottom line. Whether you’re investing in SEO with your time by doing it yourself or with money by hiring an SEO firm like us, it pays off in droves. Ecommerce is wildly competitive and you can’t afford to ignore SEO. If this guide made you panic, take a deep breath and contact us. We stay constantly up to date on ecommerce SEO best practices and can help you with spring cleaning your ecommerce SEO campaign any time of year.