If you have created an online store for the first time, then you must be wondering how you can drive more traffic to your eCommerce website to boost sales. Most people don’t understand the importance of optimizing their ecommerce site before they can get real sales. Getting eCommerce SEO right is the foremost goal for your search engine optimization team. Due to changing SEO trends in 2021 and Google’s algorithms, eCommerce platforms are becoming more competitive.

Are you getting your eCommerce SEO wrong? Or are you still not implementing the right strategy and hoping for miraculous traffic on your online shop? Do you have appropriate eCommerce SEO knowledge? If not, then this post will serve as a guiding light to help you rank your new online store higher on search engines to get the most out of your SEO efforts.

Let us get started!

Getting Traffic to your eCommerce/Woocommerce Store

The first thing to get started with your eCommerce SEO is to understand that so many eCommerce sites fail due to bad SEO or not SEO at all. This is why eCommerce SEO is super important to make a difference in the vast ocean of online sources. Here are a few things you need to do to leverage your SEO in 2021.

Keywords Research

For your ecommerce sites, the first thing you need is to do your keywords research. Similar to all other eCommerce campaigns, your specific SEO strategy will also start with comprehensive keywords research. Don’t ignore the importance of keywords research in SEO; every SEO endeavor starts with the keyword search to know the intent of the customers.

As you know that you will be sailing blind in the SEO Ocean by solely relying on your guts. Of course you need gut feeling to make your campaign effective; however, keywords research cannot help you if you don’t apply some rules to make it successful for your specific site.

The process is not so complicated; however, it requires your attention and brainstorming. First, list all the pages of your eCommerce website. In the next step, find and map appropriate keywords to each page on your site. If you don’t have a running eCommerce store or already setup your new store, then read ahead. This post is for you.

The fact is that keywords research will only be effective if you do it page-by-page. This strategy is recommended by experts at Ahrefs to successfully complete the keywords research for any website. However, eCommerce sites are a bit different from ordinary blogs or informational websites. They have two types of pages that need super optimization:

• Category pages
• Product pages

For each of these pages, your eCommerce SEO needs to be implemented differently.

Get a Complete List of your Website Pages

Luckily by using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush, you can easily make a list of all your pages on an eCommerce website. The tool can show you which domain gets the most traffic from the search terms you are using. So what if you have ten thousand pages on your website? How can you assign keywords to each page and optimize them all individually?

This may take forever to optimize your whole site. So here is a trick if you use Ahrefs. If you have ecommerce tracking setup in Google Analytics, then you can go to Behavior->Site Content->Landing Pages->sort by revenue. Do this for the complete site and try the Top Pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Now the next step is to find and mapping the keywords to each page. Now that you have list of prioritized pages, you can start finding and mapping keywords to each of them.

Find a head keyword and check what type of pages is ranking currently? Are they product pages or category pages? Or are they blog posts?

So if say your category pages are ranking in the top 10 results, then do not try to rank any other page type over there.

On-Page SEO Plan for your eCommerce Site

Now that you have successfully identified your keywords using robust tools and created a strategy, you must know which keyword can optimize your individual page (whether you have million pages). It is time you should start implementing that strategy in terms of on-page SEO optimization.

The first step is to optimize your Meta titles and descriptions. You should also optimize your headings like H1 and H2 etc.

Since many eCommerce sites have thousands of products and pages, most of them succeed by writing unique titles and meta-descriptions. Use the hybrid approach because there is no single way of optimizing all those pages successfully.

The hybrid approach requires you to put a comprehensive effort in creating well-optimized tags for the most important website pages. For example, if you sell 88 different types of ladies handbags and stockings, then the best acceptable meta-description can be as follows:

“Shop 88 stylish high-quality ladies handbags at Unique Store. Free Shipping available. All of our bags are made from high-quality leather and animal wool. Next day delivery on all standard orders!”

However, you need to change this description for all of the other products. You need to identify which products and pages are most important. Chances are these pages will rank top 10 for at least one keyword you searched. So here are some important points to ensure better results:

• Do not forget to use your primary keyword
• Include some long-tail keywords with variants
• Use action words and strong phrases
• Write your unique selling proposition (USP) like free shipping, discounts and deals on specific days/events, and free product returns).
• Optimize for CTR by making them more compelling.

Time to Optimize your URLs

As you know URL optimization is vital for any website. However, for your eCommerce site, URL optimization can be tricky due to complicated slugs. For example, here is one example:

www.topshop.com/en/tsuk/category/clothing-427/t-shirts/N-82zZqz6Zdgl

If you make a URL like the above, then you need to avoid that strategy and need to make better slugs that make more sense to your customers. Here are a few considerations you can follow:

• Use yourdomain.com/category-name

Or use

• yourdomain.com/category-name/subcategory-name

That looks pretty straightforward and customers won’t consider it messy. Therefore, writing effective eCommerce URL permalinks is vital. Here are a few more suggestions:

• always use short URLs on your eCommerce site for a better impact
• always include your primary or focus keyword
• always make a clear hierarchy of each page inside the URL
• Use hyphens (-) to separate different phrases in the URL.
• Avoid using underscore or spaces

Write Effective Product Descriptions

The most important element of eCommerce SEO success is writing the best product descriptions to allow users convert into customers. Many products on Amazon or Alibaba use unique product descriptions. There are strong reasons for doing this because:

1. It tells your potential customers that the category page they are viewing give proper information.
2. It also allows Google and search engines to know what your page is saying in the content. Therefore, Google will rank your page better if its algorithm can understand the content well.

We hope this essential guide will boost your eCommerce SEO if implemented right in 2021.

www.xpertsol.co.uk offers best SEO for Ecommerce service in the UK for worldwide businesses. We have dedicated SEO experts who tailor your website according to all modern search engine requirements. We are also trusted Shopify Experts UK service providers offerings SEO optimized stores and sites for all business. Get in touch now to find out more.