Ecommerce SEO Guide – Rank Higher In Google Search Results

So you have a website, want to learn eCommerce SEO, then rank in Google search results for highly profitable keywords, get traffic, drive more sales, become a millionaire and retire.

I thought so when I started a few years back.

Little did I knew what is eCommerce SEO, how to make my little eCommerce site rank in Google search, and make pennies first, millions later.

My thoughts back then was,

Well, let me get the site up first, SEO and other things can be outsourced. Let me start a dropshipping thing on the side as well and see how it does. I don’t know what I am doing, so I might as well try every trick in the book!

I still haven’t retired (for the curious) and no, my eCommerce site didn’t quite pick up (for some other reasons). However, I did learn a great deal about optimizing eCommerce websites for SEO and make them rank on Google search results for highly targeted, low competition keywords with rising demand.

According to reports, around 23.6 percent of all eCommerce sales come from organic searches. Just think of the times you’ve typed ‘best mobile phone in 2019’ into Google, hoping to find the best deal. That’s exactly how a fourth of all eCommerce buyers begin their hunt for a product. As an eCommerce store owner, your job is to draw as many of these potential buyers as you possibly can, to your eCommerce store. To get there, you need to focus on your eCommerce SEO strategy and doing that requires a great deal of research and effort.

In this eCommerce SEO guide, I have tried to share my learnings and adventures on eCommerce search engine optimization, driving traffic, targeting low competition keywords and generating sales for a new eCommerce site.

Keyword Research For eCommerce SEO

Let’s say, you are selling hair re-growth oil, then, you don’t want to reach out to those with lustrous shiny hair. No, not because you hate them for their lustrous shiny hair, but simply because they won’t convert.

The big difference between eCommerce SEO and regular SEO is the traffic that you target. In case of regular SEO, volume matters and you simply want to reach out to as many people as you possibly can, but in case of eCommerce SEO, you only want to drive in qualified traffic that is targeted enough — those who need your product and can afford to buy it. You need to pick revenue-generating keywords for your eCommerce store and we will show you exactly how to do that.

SEO Keyword vs. eCommerce SEO Keywords

Let’s take a look at the below-listed examples to figure out the difference between an SEO keyword and eCommerce SEO keyword.

The keyword ‘best hair products’ is too generic and people who actually have enough hair could be using it to look up for something that makes their hair softer. So, such generic keywords are not going to drive the right sort of traffic for your eCommerce website.

However, the following keyword is not a generic one but has a “specific intent” associated with it.

Each product page on your website has to be mapped with a very specific keyword, while the category pages can target generic, broad keywords e.g Men’s Clothing, Hair Care, Electronics, Women’s accessories and so on.

Let’s see how this is done for a product page first. Let’s say you are selling “hair regrowth oil” in your eCommerce store. So “hair regrowth oil” becomes your “Seed Keyword” or “Head Keyword” or “Root Keyword”.

Type this Root keyword in Google and see what keywords Google is suggesting in Google autosuggest, related keywords at the bottom of the search results page and also in the “People Also Ask” section.

These keywords are the most important, so put them into a spreadsheet like this. What you want to do is pick one root keyword and accumulate all the relevant keywords from different sources into one excel spreadsheet for later review.

Delete irrelevant keywords and generic keywords and keep your list clean. For example, I would not consider “hair care” as a keyword since it is too generic. I would also not consider “Indus valley big tree oil for hair growth” because I do not have that product in my store to sell. So it is not relevant to me.

Only consider relevant keywords that are specific and put them into a spreadsheet, as shown below.

Don’t stop with Google search alone, it is just the beginning. Google search is just the tip of the iceberg, what lies beneath is a combination of other tools, sources and how to curate the final list of keywords you would be targeting on your product and category pages.

Next would be extracting keyword ideas from Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which is accessible for free. The main purpose of Google Adword keyword planner is to plan PPC Adwords campaigns but it is still a “good enough” tool for keyword research.

Download all the keywords in a CSV file and import it in the spreadsheet. For now, only keep the columns – “Keywords” and “Average Monthly searches”. You don’t need other data for now, keep things simple.

Next up is Amazon,

Don’t ignore local eCommerce leaders. The more sources you consult for the root keyword, the better and diversified range of keywords you will have to work with.

This process is a bit tedious but if you religiously do it, you will see the results in time.

Use an Advanced Keyword Research Tool

Once you have the SEMrush subscription, go to the keyword magic tool, enter your seed keyword and then you would see keyword suggestions like this

Once you have compiled your list, you should do the following

• Remove irrelevant and Junk keywords
• Remove duplicate keywords (use this excel add-on to remove duplicates)
• Remove irrelevant data and keep only Keywords, Monthly search volume, Keyword difficulty.

Here is how your keyword research spreadsheet will look like

This is the list of all the keywords that you need to work on, in order to reach out to potential hair re-growth oil product buyers.

You need to use these keywords intelligently in the following areas

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Main content copy of the page
• Anchor text linking to the page
• URL slug
• Headings and Subheadings
• Use synonyms and related search phrases around a keyword in the copy of the page
• Create content around the keywords which satisfies user’s intent and questions

Uncover your Competitors Strategy – See which Keywords they are targeting

Keyword research was the first step. But wait, anyone and everyone is doing keyword research for their own sites, aren’t they?

How would you beat the competition, considering the fact that they are doing keyword research for their sites as well?

Unless you know how somebody made it to Google’s number one page, you are never going to get there. Especially if you run a small eCommerce store, that’s feeling bullied by the biggies in the industry. So, the only way to get into the game is by discovering your competitor’s strategy and that only gets easier with tools like Semrush.

Semrush lets you uncover device-specific statistics of the ad spend, paid traffic, organic traffic, and much more. You can also look up for keywords that your competitor is ranking for and sort out your competitor’s high-traffic pages.

Let’s see how it is done.

Go to SEMrush’s “Organic research” and enter the URL of one of your competitors. You can enter the root domain to see for which keywords this website is ranking on the 1st page in Google

You can also enter a specific URL to see for which keywords that specific page is ranking on 1st page in Google. This includes both broad match and long-tail keywords.

Don’t feel complacent with one page alone. Go further and see which other pages of the same competitor have high visibility in Google search results. See how much traffic each page is getting from Google on a monthly basis, what is the CPC of the main keywords for every page and so on and so forth.

Here are the advantages of using Semrush for competitive research

• Discover competitors’ best keywords
• Explore your rivals’ keyword rankings on desktop and mobile
• View their landing pages displayed in the SERPs for a given keyword
• See how much traffic a search term is bringing organically
• Find new organic competitors, keep close tabs on the dynamic organic competitive landscape
• Get a visual representation of where your site stands amongst other organic search players
• See a list of domains you are battling against for the top positions in Google and Bing. Observe domains’ position changes
• Keep abreast of how your rivals’ domain positions are changing in organic results
• Find out which new keywords helped your competitors enter Google or Bing top 20
• Understand where your own tactics are winning and if there’s room for improvement

Repeat this process for at least 10 competitors and you will have enough data to work with. However, don’t overkill by analyzing hundreds of thousands of competitors. That’s not scalable and that’s not actionable.

Do it for a few competitors which are head to head and relevant in your geographical location, if that matters. Competitor research is important but it should not be done on a universal scale, it should be done on a minimal scale that is manageable and actionable.

Optimize Product Pages with Long Tail Keywords, Synonyms And Related keywords

The product pages on an eCommerce website usually drive the highest amount of traffic. The key to successful eCommerce SEO is to use long-tail keywords, related keywords, synonyms and other close variations of the main keyword phrase in the right places.

Now how do you find long-tail keywords for your eCommerce Product pages? Start with Google Auto Suggest (type in your product keyword and see what long-tail keywords Google is suggesting)

In the above example, our product is “hair growth oil” and one of the long tail keyword suggestion from Google is “hair growth oil for men”, or “hair growth oil preparation”.

Google’s Auto suggest suggestions are limited and so are the suggestions from other free keyword research tools, so you should not just stop here. Pick one long-tail keyword and use it in Semrush Keyword overview and Keyword Magic tool to see more suggestions

In the above example, Semrush shows a whopping list of 9000 long-tail keywords for your seed keyword. Export the list as a CSV file and then import it in an Excel Spreadsheet, so you can sort by search volume, keyword difficulty, competitive density, and other useful metrics.

Best Practices With Long Tail Keywords

Focus on solving the pain point first. Ensure that your product page has content which solves a very specific problem that the reader’s been facing. If Joe’s been looking up for ‘How to set up Amazon Echo Dot’ then he probably has no clue about how to set it up, and that could be holding him back from buying your product.

Think, what pain the user is facing and what he is asking for. For example, look at Quora questions and answers to get an idea about the pain points

 

If you provide Joe with a step by step solution on the product page, then that solves the problem for Joe and he may even feel confident enough to buy one. Joe wouldn’t be looking up for ‘How to set up Amazon Echo Dot’, if he wasn’t interested in that product, so voila! You’ve reached out to the right prospect with a correct and relevant content strategy.

Leverage transactional and educational keywords and optimize your Product Pages with long-tail keywords, which are easier to rank for. Usually, these are very specific terms like ‘best hair regrowth oil for bald people’ or ‘best Attorney in Dallas for personal injury cases’ and so on. Include related keywords, synonyms and other commonly used variations around your seed keyword.

Examples of educational long-tail keywords

• Reviews of best hair growth oil for men
• How to grow thick black hair naturally for women
• Best coconut oil for hair growth

Examples of transactional long-tail keywords

• Beardo hair growth oil
• Cheap hair growth oil with discounts
• Buy hair growth oil for kids

Don’t shy away from using very specific “Customer-centric” Long tail keywords. You don’t want to drive traffic that’s not going to convert. Ecommerce SEO is all about reaching out to prospects who are looking up for your product and can afford to buy it.

So be specific and see what they are already saying about a product online. Do not add every other keyword which “Looks good”.

A very good way is to look at customer reviews and see how  the end-user is reviewing the product on Amazon and other popular eCommerce sites (competitors included)

Try To Rank your Product Page for synonyms. If John is looking up for ‘best products to prevent hair fall’ then to get him to your website, you need to rank for it. This won’t happen if you only focus on ranking ‘best hair regrowth oil’. So optimize your content for synonyms and related phrases as well and not just on the root keyword you are targeting.

Check the search volume of Longtail keywords. You don’t want to waste your efforts ranking for a term that does not have enough demand or is not being searched by a good enough audience. You can ensure this by using Semrush to look up for the right long-tail keywords which has high monthly search volume.

Repeat the keywords at right places  – Make sure to use them at least 3 to 4 times in your article to maintain the right keyword density.

Use longer content. It’s no longer a secret that longer content ranks better in the long haul, so if possible – focus on long form of content. There is no strict word count for ecommerce product pages but if you see an opportunity to increase the textual content on your ecommerce product pages, do it.

Have a clear and obvious call-to-action and build pressure on the prospective buyer, by offering limited period offers, such as steep discounts.

Recommended Tool – We recommend using Semrush for getting long-tail keyword ideas, related keywords, and synonyms. If you do not have an account yet, you can use this link for a 7 day free trial of Semrush.

Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions For eCommerce SEO

The title tags and meta description are two very important SEO elements that you just cannot ignore. The first thing a user notices on Google search result page is the title of a webpage, which is followed by the meta description about what the page is all about.

The Title tag, meta description and the first paragraph of your product page must be optimized with the right keywords and search phrases to ensure they rank in search results and receive clicks from users.

So how do you actually craft a Killer Title and meta description tag for your eCommerce product page, so that it not only appears on Google search results for relevant searches but it also receives click-throughs from a prospective buyer?

1. Start by defining the root keyword. In this case, it is “Hair regrowth oil”.

2. Define the Intent of your page. If you are selling Hair Regrowth Oil, the first version of your page title could be “Buy Hair Regrowth Oil Online”

3. Make a List of High volume keywords around your seed keyword. These are the words which are in demand, so make sure you use them in your title tag and meta description.

4. Define Demographic/audience and segment the Title tag to a specific audience if needed. If your page is selling the product for Men, rework on the title and change it to “Buy Hair Regrowth Oil Online For Men”.

5. Include long-tail keywords, synonyms and related keywords in meta description tag and diversify your targeting as much as possible.

6. Use SEMrush’s topic research tool to research ideas and suggestions and Craft an attractive, useful headline

Best Practices With Titles and Meta Descriptions

Write accurate Page titles and descriptions. Don’t write deceptive titles or descriptions which does not match the product or the buyer’s intent. Your page title and description should clearly state what the page is all about and not promise something that it does not deliver.

Have Clear Call to Actions. The meta description and the title should encourage the user to do something, there should be some call to action associated with the title tag and meta description tag. For example, “Get free shipping on orders above $50” is a strong call to action. Here is an example meta description used on a Fashion eCommerce portal, notice how carefully they have included the call to action for higher CTR’s.

 

Target specific words and phrases. Don’t try to achieve everything in one title and description, that’s simply impossible. Be specific and narrow your focus as much as possible. Finalize a set of keywords, use the most relevant ones in the title and meta description.

Show The Tangible Benefit. Are you selling gym pants? Tell the reader that this product is ideally suited for long hours in the gym. Are you selling leather jackets for women? Tell them they will look so stylish and trendy in that blue jacket which will turn heads, even in Summer.

Here is an example which shows the tangible benefit to the shopper through a meta description

 

Once the reader sees the tangible benefit and how your product makes their life better, they are slightly more convinced to check it out and if they are convinced, they may want to give it a go!

Use Verbs. It is often a good idea to make use of verbs such as “Buy”, “Try”, “Watch” “Get Free Shipping” etc.

Use Synergy. Make it a point to use appropriate Heading and subheading tags and include the primary keywords which you used in the Title and meta description tags. This creates synergy and helps the page rank higher in search results, sometimes.

Write Unique, Detailed and Compelling Product Descriptions

What is a “Product description” in eCommerce?

A product description is nothing but that content or copy which explains what the product is, what benefits it has and why it should be purchased by the end-user. The goal of a product description is to provide all the necessary information to an interested buyer so that they are compelled to buy it.

To Increase sales of your products, you must write exceptional product descriptions that instantly connects with the reader and compel him to convert to a sale.

Let’s look at some examples of good product descriptions and bad product descriptions.

Now consider this one.

Length is Strength. Sweat it Out and Add As Much Value as You Can

Add more value to your product descriptions.This is the only secret to writing good compelling product descriptions for eCommerce product pages or landing pages. There is no other secret and there is no other trick.

Add as much details as possible, add pictures and elaborate your product as much as possible to help the user satisfy his needs and questions. Let’s look at another example page with a superb product description

Now who do you think ranks in Google for the search term “Staunton chess set ebony boxwood”

Amazon? Nope

eBay? Nope

Other gigantic eCommerce Stores with millions of Products? Nope.

This guy ranks. And they deserve the #1 spot because their product description is so detailed and useful.

Best Practices For Writing eCommerce Product Descriptions

Bigger is generally better. Write long-form of content and add as much value as possible in your product descriptions. If Needed, hire high-quality writers and ensure the product descriptions are of the highest quality possible and satisfies every other question the casual shopper may have.

Build Curiosity with compelling product descriptions, by starting off with ‘Make your surroundings safer in less than a month’, just in case you are selling a DIY lint cleaning kit.

Don’t shy away from using the good old magnet words such as discounts and limited period offers. Building a wee bit of pressure on your prospective buyers is absolutely fine.

Optimize your product descriptions, with very specific long-tail keywords. So if your keyword is ‘mobile tripod’, then try using something like ‘cheap mobile tripods’ or ‘Best deal on mobile tripods’. We recommend Semrush Keyword Magic Tool for generating long-tail keywords

Plan the right upsell. Sell bundled products or services, to make your product page stand out. Let’s say, you are selling a bedside table, then you could probably sell them in pairs, at a discounted price because every bed has two sides and most people would be looking at buying two identical bedside tables. You can then write a description of this combined offer and how it would benefit the buyer.

 

Optimize Headings And Subheadings

Headings and subheadings add better structure to your product and category pages and help the reader navigate. They also help search engines understand what the content of the page is all about, which sections contain what type of content and they are also an important signal to search engines on topic relevance, versatility, and other things.

When a reader browses through the product page, he should be able to navigate to that section which offers the most relevant information to him. It could be product description, product specifications, refund policy, customer reviews, related products and so on.

While there is no hard and fast rule with heading tags and subheading tags, their order and how many times can you use a particular heading tag on your eCommerce store, there are certainly some best practices to consider.

The rule of the thumb is

• H1 is the most important heading tag which should describe the intent and objective of the page. It should ideally not repeat more than once per page.
• H2 is the second most important header tag, followed by H3, H4, H5 and H6
• There is no specific order with which a heading or subheading tag must appear on a page, but for semantic correctness, the H1 tag should appear first, followed by H2, then H3 and H4.
• Hierarchical Nesting of header tags is a good practice. If you have a main heading “Product specification” as H3, and there are three subheadings under it, it makes complete sense to use the H4 header tag for subheadings and not the H2.

Let’s now see the anatomy of how header tags are used in eCommerce product pages, so we all understand the practical usage of header tags.

Similarly, for category pages or home page, you can use the following hierarchy

• H1 – Category name (e.g “Men’s Footwear” or “Women’s Clothing”)
• H2 – Title and Name of All Listed Products for that Category
• H3 – Widget headers or “Special deals”
• Don’t wrap product excerpts or entire product descriptions under Heading tags or subheading tags. That’s not a good practice.

Fix Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content is the worst nightmare for any website and not just for an eCommerce website.

Duplicate content generally refers to that content which is accessible through two different URLs. The URL’s can be within a domain or spread across multiple domains, it does not matter. If you have content on your website that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar, you are up for some big trouble!

How do you find Duplicate Content on your eCommerce Website?

Do you check for each page manually or use a plagiarism checker tool? Do you Outsource this job to India or freelancers in Fiverr? Well, it totally depends on you. I would certainly not recommend going the manual way (it’s laborious, time-consuming, frustrating and above all – there is always the possibility of “human error”).

Next, you can use plagiarism checker tools or free tools to look for duplicate content issues but I would again strongly recommend against it. Free tools come with their own limitations and are often not completely accurate. I use Semrush’s Site audit to find duplicate content in all of my websites and I fix them as soon as they are discovered.

Simply go to Site Audit, run a complete audit for your domain and the tool will scan your entire website and show you the pages which have duplicate content issues.

What Scenarios Can Give Rise to Duplicate Content Issues?

There could be so many scenarios and technical glitches which can cause duplicate content issues on your eCommerce website. A simple configuration change and bam! Suddenly, you have 5378 pages with duplicate content, titles and meta descriptions.

Internal Duplicate Content – Let’s assume that your eCommerce website lists 7 models of the same mobile phone. So you used the same content, images, design, and call for action (with minor modifications) simply because you felt your readers would know the difference. In assuming that, you were right and wrong, because, humans aren’t the only ones reading through your content — you forgot to analyze how the search engine bots look at your content and for the bots, its point-blank duplicate content. Let’s call this type of duplicate content, as ‘Internal Duplicate content’.

External Duplicate Content – Let us now look at another scenario where you have an eCommerce website and have listed a product with the exact info that the supplier provided you with, legitimately. So you simply paste that info onto the product page as several other eCommerce site owners did. Now all the websites that did that are marked for duplicate content, except for the first one (probably the supplier) who posted that content publicly onto their official website. Now, this is called ‘External Duplicate content’. Besides content, the SERPS also take into account several other factors like header, footer, title, image, description and more. So before you get caught flat-footed by the search engine robots, ensure that all those elements are unique.

This is the reason why we do not recommend free tools and manual audits for keeping a tab on duplicate content. Let’s look at some other scenarios when duplicate content issues may occur on your eCommerce website

• Schoolboy Mistake. You have manually copied product descriptions, title tags, descriptions and used it on your website’s pages. In this case, it’s like running towards a well and jumping straight to it.
• Shopping Cart. Your Shopping cart page is not configured properly. For example, maybe when people add items to their cart, the URL changes to a query parameter and this new page has the same content as the product page. If search engines are able to get to this new page with query parameters and if you have not explicitly set a canonical tag, then there could be duplicate content issues.
• Hired Cheap, Low-Quality Writers. You have hired cheap, low-quality writers or Freelancers from Fiverr who have stolen content from other sites and have used it on your website. You have no idea when and how that happened, or you don’t remember at all.
• Search Results Page. Your website’s search result pages are not configured properly. Similar to the checkout page, the search result page in an eCommerce website can cause duplicate content issues
• Software, CMS or Scripts. Your eCommerce software or scripts used for sorting products may cause different URL’s with the same content and it can cause duplicate content issues
• Product reviews, if not used intelligently can cause duplicate content issues. Sometimes, there would be a dedicated page for product reviews and the same reviews will also be displayed in product and category pages – which will, of course, cause big problems with respect to duplicate content if you don’t handle it properly.
• Category pages which houses the same products and are slight aberrations of each other can cause duplicate content issues.

The above list is endless and there are hundreds of thousands of scenarios which can occur, depending on how your website’s URL structure and everything else is configured. I recommend you to read this article to learn more about Fixing Duplicate content issues in eCommerce websites.

Regularly Audit Your Website and Fix Important Issues

It’s not just duplicate content, meta title, description or backlinks – there are so many technical SEO jobs which you need to take care of on a regular basis. It helps to create a Google-friendly site which can be easily crawled, indexed and shown in search results, so the overall health of your website should be a top priority.

Semrush has this amazing Site Audit feature, which tells you about the health of a website, on an ongoing basis and makes suggestions as to how you can fix these errors. It helps you detect duplicate content, broken links, broken external images, certificate expiration, DNS related issues and much more. If you don’t have a SemRush account, use this link to get a free trial. Of course, you can do site audits with other alternative tools like Ahrefs, Spyfu etc but I strongly recommend Semrush because it’s much more detailed and a complete solution.

The following issues should be audited at least once a month

• Pages with Duplicate Title tags
• Pages with Duplicate Meta descriptions
• Pages with Duplicate Content
• Incorrect Hreflang values
• Broken Internal Links
• Broken External Links
• Missing Title Tags
• Incorrect URL’s in Sitemap.xml
• Incorrect HTTP Status code returned by some pages
• Mixed content errors
• AMP related issues
• Images with missing Alt attributes
• Unminified Javascript and CSS Files
• Broken External links
• Pages with low word count or thin content
• Pages which do not have an H1 tag
• Pages with Blocked Internal Resources
• Too many URL parameters
• Crawling and Indexing issues (Check Google search console reports as well).
• Nofollow links and links to broken external sites.

And many more issues are there on this list, it goes on and on.

Choose the Right eCommerce Website Architecture

Website architecture is the way your website’s pages are structured, linked and how easily accessible it is to both users and search engines. Think of website architecture as highways, roads, pavements, and overhead bridge so that no matter how busy the traffic is, pedestrians can easily navigate to their destination.

Website architecture is very important for good user experience as well as search engine optimization of your website.

• A good website architecture allows search spiders to crawl all the content of your website with the least possible effort. Good crawling improves website SEO to a great extent.
• A good website architecture makes it easy to let the “Google juice” flow across the site. Think of it as your heart, pumping blood to all corners of your body. A good website architecture ensures that your website’s authority is evenly distributed across your site and is not concentrated on a few pages with backlinks.
• A good website architecture allows users to find what they are looking for. Imagine you are a casual shopper and want to pinpoint a specific shop in a busy marketplace. If there are no pavements to reach that shop, no overhead bridge to cross the highway, you will never get to that shop. A good website architecture ensures that any pedestrian can reach any shop they want to, no matter how busy the marketplace is and how many cars are running on the highway.

Let’s look at some examples to understand a good eCommerce website architecture and a bad eCommerce website architecture.

The above one maintains all the principles stated above. It is hierarchical in nature and you can clearly see the pattern in which pages are organized. Every page on the site is accessible within 3 clicks from the homepage. No page on the website is “orphaned”, every page is linked to at least one page through a link.

Now let’s see an example of a bad eCommerce website architecture.

Let’s now take a look at a real example of an eCommerce Site with too many categories and see how product categories are maintained and neatly arranged in sub-categories and sub-sub categories.

Here is how Flipkart’s Site Architecture looks like

Flipkart sells a lot of products and they have many categories. Of course, they cannot have a separate category for each product vertical, so they have neatly arranged all of their products under three levels of categories

• Level 1 – Main Category. Electronics, Apparel, Appliances, Home and Furniture.
• Level 2 – Sub Category. So if the main category is Electronics, the subcategory will be “Television”, “Washing Machine”, “Home Appliances”, “Kitchen Appliances” and so on.
• Level 3 – Sub Sub Category. So if the main category is Electronics, and the subcategory is “Air conditioner”, the sub sub category would be “Split AC”.

Note that Flipkart has not linked Product pages directly from the Root of their site and neither do they show products in the navigation menu. Why do you think they have done that?

This is because Flipkart has too many products and too many customers. They just cannot list every other product in the website navigation menu and link the product pages from the Root page. That’s not logical and that’s not scalable. That’s not how a good eCommerce website architecture is supposed to be.

Hence, Flipkart has arranged the first three levels of their site architecture into categories, subcategories and then subcategories.

Once the user has decided what category he is interested in, he is shown different subcategories as choices. Once he chooses one sub-category, he is shown sub-sub categories. Once he chooses the sub-sub category, only then he is taken to a product page.

Let’s now look at one of the product pages of Flipkart to understand the hierarchy even further.

Choose the Right URL Structure

The right URL structure for any website can make a big difference in SEO. Often times, website owners don’t pay attention to URL slugs and choose one randomly, I have done it myself until I learned the importance of URL slugs in SEO and why it should be chosen carefully.

Let’s say you are looking to buy a shirt which is blue in color. Which of the following URL’s will you click?

www.example.com/clothes/men/shirts/blue.html

www.example.com/product/category-134/~dp/nuQncOP&param=Xq26.html

Any sane person will prefer the first one because the first URL slug has keywords in it which hints the user on what content, products or services he can expect if he chooses to visit that page. A URL slug is like a business card which gives a glimpse of who this person his, what is his designation, his phone number, office address, and other things. Also, the URL’s slugs are shown in search results which affects click-through rates

An optimized URL structure receives more click-throughs and also results in good user experience, so you should choose a logical URL structure for your eCommerce website which helps both users and search engines.

How you choose a URL structure? Mostly, this depends on the CMS you are using and how URL’s are dealt by that CMS for category pages, product pages and other sections of your website. You have to know your CMS in and out and if necessary, make use of plugins to modify the URL structure according to your requirements.

I suggest you choose the following URL structure for your eCommerce website

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you have an eCommerce website on apparel, garments, dresses, and fashion.

Do you see how the URL of each category page, subcategory page, sub subcategory page, and the Product page is logically organized and gives a clear meaning to the user on what the page could be all about?

Add Schema Markup To Product and Category Pages

Google tries hard to understand what your page is all about, what purpose it solves and how relevant it is to the user’s query. Schema markup adds an additional description to a page’s content which helps search engines understand the content of the page even better.

In Google’s own words

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Does adding Schema markup or Structured data to a page guarantee improvement in search rankings? No, they don’t guarantee a boost in the rankings. But for sure, schema markup gives more clues, hints, and guidelines to search engines and it does help them understand whether your page offers a product, service, a cooking recipe, flight tickets, contains booking options for appointments and so on.

When search engines have this critical information with them, it is easier for them to rank your page in search results to that user who is searching for a specific product with specific intent.

Look at the following two search snippets.

The first and third result is a Rich snippet with Schema markup enabled while the second and 4th one is a regular snippet. We can clearly note a few observations

• The first and the third result immediately catch our attention because of the Ratings, reviews, stars
• The results with schema markup tell me that it has customer reviews and I also get to know the average customer rating.
• Since I am aware of these two things, it’s only natural for me to expect more information regarding pricing, nutrition, deals, coupons and offers in the results which contains schema markup.

According to a report by search engine journal, adding Schema markup to your pages can improve click-through rates, sales, and conversions by as much as 30% (depends from one site to another). It is certainly better to have some markup than having no markup but don’t take our word for it. Add Schema markup to your website and test it out – see for yourself if it increases click-through rates from Google search and if the conversion rate increases.

Here are some useful tutorials related to Schema markup and Structured data for eCommerce websites

• 5 eCommerce Rich Snippets That Will Help you Rank higher and get more sales
• Using Rich Results to Improve the eCommerce Search Experience
• How to Use Schema.org for eCommerce Websites

Implement Breadcrumb Navigation On Your eCommerce Website

Breadcrumb navigation is secondary navigation that tells the user his location in a website, web application, eCommerce store, blog or any other website with content or product listings.

Breadcrumbs help a user navigate quickly to important sections of the website, thus resulting in good user experience with improved click-through rates, higher retention, and engagement. Most eCommerce websites have way too many pages, which results in clumsy navigation and makes it difficult for the user to explore. Including breadcrumbs make things easier for your users to jump to different category pages, pages with related products, and it also helps search engines discover content on deeper pages and crawl it effectively.

Here is how Breadcrumb navigation looks in an eCommerce website (almost every other eCommerce website has Breadcrumb navigation these days)

So if your casual shopper is not satisfied with one shoe, he can quickly use the breadcrumb navigation and jump to the “Shoes and Handbags” category page or choose to Check out shoes from only the WS9 brand, as seen in the above example.

That said, not every eCommerce website uses Breadcrumb navigation. Some consider breadcrumbs as “Distractions” and conclude that it results in fewer sales since the user is easily distracted. There are different schools of thought but we prefer breadcrumbs for the simple reason that it results in good user experience.

For example, Nordstrom does not use any breadcrumb navigation on their eCommerce website (see example)

To me, this is a little difficult to navigate since I am used to breadcrumbs while browsing an eCommerce Store. I “expect” traditional hierarchical navigation and the absence of it “erks me off”.

Broadly, breadcrumb navigations are of three types

• Traditional Hierarchical breadcrumb navigation. This structure follows a hierarchical path based structure. First, the homepage, then the category page, then the brand page and then the product page – this is how traditional hierarchical breadcrumb navigation is implemented. Most eCommerce websites follow this structure and this is the simplest one.
• Attribution based Breadcrumb navigation. This structure works on filters and user’s chosen criteria. So if the user is interested in Men’s shirts with Blue color and has refined his selection by “Slim Fit”, then the breadcrumb will be “Home > Men’s > Shirts > Blue > Slim Fit”. The user can navigate to other pages and broaden his results by “de-selecting” the filter he has chosen.
• Path-based. This structure shows the user the path they have taken to reach a particular page on the eCommerce store. This one does not follow a logical hierarchy and simply shoes the audit trail to the user so he can “Go back” to the previous pages easily.

Depending on your preferences, you can select either or use both. What I would recommend is to start small and start simple with traditional breadcrumb navigation and then experiment with attribution based navigation or history-based navigation to see if it brings positive results.

Breadcrumb navigation is also shown in Google search results and allows the user to jump to a category page or other sections from Google search results. So this makes Breadcrumbs a very important navigational element for eCommerce sites

Build Quality BackLinks to Your eCommerce Store

Good content is not enough to get to the first page of Google. Great content does help you get your foot into the door, but there’s a lot more that you need to do.

There are three ingredients, necessary for success with backlinks  –

• Good, old fashioned hard work.
• Correct Strategy.
• A lot of Patience.

After great content, comes Links. Without backlinks from authority sites that are contextually related to your website’s landing page, it’s almost impossible to beat your competitors and appear on the first page of Google for most search queries, if not all.

And why is that so? Because most of the sites who appear in the first page of Google for keywords which are in high demand, already have a good number of links pointing to their pages. Google considers them more authoritative and useful than yours if you do not have enough links to your website’s product and category pages.

So what do you do to build quality backlinks to your eCommerce website? What are the principles you follow for eCommerce link building?

That said, let me explain some link building strategies for eCommerce sites. I will consider palamsilk.com in our examples below and discuss how I would do backlink research if I was the owner of that website.

The first step is to figure out who are you are competing against. You cannot win a war if you don’t know who your enemy is and what is their strength and weaknesses. In short, you need Competitive Intelligence.

So go to Semrush organic search tool, enter your domain name and get a list of all the competing sites

Now that I know who I am competing with, I will look into each competitors backlink profile and see the sources from where they are getting contextually relevant backlinks.

Backlink Strategy Example #1

Let’s take the first competitor site – sundarisilks.com

Enter this domain in Semrush’s backlink analytics tool and go through each link one by one. If needed export all of this in an Excel spreadsheet for future reference.

What you have to look for is a contextually relevant link from an editorial site, which is dofollow and which has a good enough domain authority. Disregard spam links or nofollow links obtained from directory sites or other less credible sources for now, only consider the good links for your research.

The two link sources are as follows

• Travel and Leisure – Passage to Chennai
• Nomadic decorator – Where to Shop in Chennai?

Only when I looked into my competitor’s websites backlink profile, I was able to uncover a link building strategy and have an action plan around it to implement it. The above is just one way of doing it, if you keep looking at backlinks and try to discover a pattern, you will surely come up with new ideas to build quality backlinks to your eCommerce website’s product pages and category pages.

Backlink Strategy Example #2

Let’s try one more strategy.

Go to Google, type in a generic seed keyword and include one of your competitors brand name in “double quotations” e.g “best silk sarees [brand name] ”

The first link in this example has not linked to me ever, so it is my target blog or source from which I can try to win a solid backlink. The second website has linked to me in the same article they have linked to my competitor, so I will ignore the second one for now. My goal is to win quality backlinks from as many referring domains as possible, so winning 2 links from one website is inferior to winning 2 links from 2 websites.

The target page on the first source website talks about Bridal costume and links to a few competing sites. I do sell Bridal costumes myself and there is a clear opportunity in their site to submit a blog post.

Now there are two things I can do

1. Submit a blog post which talks about bridal costumes in Southern India and win a link to my category or product pages.
2. Send a cold email to the Website owner, develop a relationship and then position my pitch.

I will try both.

Here is how my email pitch looks like (you should experiment your own pitch and see what works and not copy what others suggest. Be creative!)

If you apply the above backlink strategy for 50 websites, I am sure you will be able to collect anywhere between 10-20 solid backlinks to your product and category pages. This technique works most of the times because the person giving you the backlink is also getting something in return.

Likewise, you can create more strategies to win backlinks – just keep looking at your competitor websites and industry leaders and try to discover a pattern in pages with the most number of dofollow backlinks.

Use Semrush’s backlink analytics tool to discover what type of content gets the most number of links. Do this for your own website, your competitors and also for industry leaders.

Figure out what type of content attracts links naturally and once you have that data, you can create more Link worthy content on your site to attract links naturally and implement the above mentioned link building strategies.

Optimize PPC Campaigns

Tired of thinking about your next PPC ad campaign? Not sure whether it’ll work despite all the efforts and money that you are going to put into it? Well, here’s an easier and more realistic way of doing things, to optimize your chances of getting the most out of your efforts.

Start using your competitor’s data for search ads — leverage what is already working out for your competitors. If it worked for them, it is most likely going to work out for you.

Semrush’s Advertising Dashboard has all the answers to your troubles. You can get the most profitable keywords for paid search used by your competitors, and even explore your competitors’ ads. You don’t have to copy them entirely, but using it as reference material makes life so much easier.

Here are some more reasons why we recommend Semrush for paid campaign research

• Know your main paid search competitors, see the keywords they are bidding on and discover examples of their live ads.
• Gain insights into the audience targeted by your rivals in Google display network
• Know which keywords trigger their products to show up in Google shopping results
• Analyze historical data – see what worked in the past and is not working now. This helps you connect the dots and change your strategies accordingly.
• Uncover the product pricing strategy of your competitors

Just enter your competitors’ domain name in Semrush advertising dashboard

You can also lookout for more ideas for search ads, see the differences in your ad copies and your competitors ad copies.

And more ideas for the Display Ads

Over 64 percent of the people who look up on Google for something, end up clicking on a paid ad. While Google helps you connect with possible prospects, here’s what you need to do to get the most out of your PPC ad campaign.

Optimize Your eCommerce SEO for Local Search results

Ever found yourself looking up for the closest cafeteria on Google or Bing? Well, so you did run a local search like everyone else who relies on search engines to get the best value for their dollar. The most interesting part here is that you had already made your decision to visit a cafeteria, even before looking out for options that matched your preferences. That means, there’s very little persuading that needs to be done.

Let’s see how local search works for eCommerce stores with niche products, tailor-made for a location-specific audience.

This is a general product-specific search query on Google which does not include any location-specific keywords. In this example, we see all the big players ranking – the bigger eCommerce websites with lots of products, content, links, and reviews usually show up for these queries.

However, when we add a location-specific query to it, the search results change to accommodate local search results.

We change the search query from “Buy Silk sarees online” to “Buy Silk sarees in Chennai” (Chennai is a city in southern India and Saree is an Indian garment for women). Now the search results contain those websites which are optimized for local search results and have a lot of local content, local products, very popular among the niche audience who only want sarees from a custom city or shop, local customer reviews, and other signals.

Let’s dig deeper. Let’s see the local presence of one of these websites and see what they are doing to ensure their site shows up for local searches. (I will consider Palamsilk.com for my example)

Here is their Google My Business Listing

They have more than 500 4 Star reviews from Local Shoppers! That’s a Lot, a lot for a new eCommerce website which is just a few years in operation.

All these customer comments contain genuine reviews, content with local keywords which helps Google understand that this business is a star candidate for local search queries. So whenever a user is searching for Silk sarees and is interested in South Indian garments or apparel, the probability of this site showing over Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart and other bigger players is higher.

Now let’s look at the backlink profile of this website in Semrush

This site has tons of dofollow backlinks with Local keywords and product names as anchor text. Most of the anchor texts contain keywords related to the product and the location, which helps Google rank this website higher in local search results or on Google Maps when someone is searching for a local boutique store to buy a genuine south Indian product (and not a generic product manufactured in Northen India and sold with a Gimmick)

The Backlink analytics report of Semrush tells us that this website has tons of links from more than 500 referring domains and IP’s across the globe, with a thick density around Southern India. This is again a strong signal to search engines that this website is a leader in South Indian garments and hence it ranks it higher in search results for location-specific search queries.

Let us now look at their organic positions and the keywords for which this website shows up in local search results. Again, I will be using SEMrush’s organic positions report to quickly see for which local keywords this website is ranking, their organic positions, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and other things.

Now you may wonder –

Wait, I don’t have all day to optimize my website for local searches, this looks like a lot of work. I just Can’t afford to hire someone to check the consistency of all my business listings in local search results, directories, maps, local apps and a plethora of other sources.

Well, you don’t have to! Here’s how you can optimize your local search results with Semrush Listing Management Tool.

The Listing management tool from Semrush helps you get your business data correctly distributed to dozens of authoritative directories. It helps you manage all your NAP related issues (Name, Address, Phone Number) on your website and local search listings. With the listing management tool, you can

• Easily edit information across a range of local search directories all at once.
• Check if all of your business listings are correct and consistent
• Distribute your business data to the most authoritative directories

You can see data about location listings, when a location listing stops linking to you, fix those issues and also keep tabs on your competitor’s local listings and see what they are doing. Learn more about Semrush’s Listing management tool and how it helps you manage your business listings across the web.

Manage Social media and Online reputation

The amount of damage that negative online reputation can do to your business or profession, is unimaginable. You need to find ways to keep a tab on how you come across to customers on social media.

You need to ask yourself these questions

• Which pages of my website receive the most traffic from Social media sites?
• Which pages receive the most engagement from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest?
• Which pages drive the most conversions or sales from social media?
• Is my social presence improving or is it in a downward spiral?
• What are the recent negative comments or raging remarks about my brand on each social channel? What am I doing to track them and address them as soon as they are posted online?

This isn’t that easy because social media is a two-way street and the only thing within your control is your own communication. But with Semrush’s social media toolkit, you can manage all your social media channels from one place and also keep a close eye on your brand’s reputation.

Once you have set up Social media poster and social media tracker on Semrush’s social media toolkit, you can see engagement across all your social channels. For example, how many interactions you have had on Instagram and Facebook in the last 30 days? Has the interaction rate increased in the last 6 months or has it decreased compared to the last year?

You can also look into the demographic data to understand audience types, ages, regional influence, and so many other important metrics.

The Mentions tracker is extremely useful to track online mentions of your brand across the web. You can find out who are the power users or loyal followers who are constantly talking about your brand,  which sites mention you frequently and track individual sites using the Brand monitoring tool.

This is so useful when you want to manage your website’s online reputation from one place

Semrush has a very useful tutorial on how to set up your social profiles for posting and constant monitoring for every platform here

Avoid the most common eCommerce Mistakes

Now that we are through with some of the most amazing eCommerce SEO strategies, let’s conclude by understanding the most common eCommerce mistakes.