eCommerce SEO best practices — 14 tips to boost visibility and traffic

Did you know that by the end of 2025, US online shopping revenue is set to exceed 1.3 trillion dollars?

With this continued rise in eCommerce sales, businesses of all sizes need a website to function. Today, many retailers take their first steps into business with an eCommerce website, instead of a physical location.

But creating a website and uploading your stock is just the beginning. The next step is driving traffic and increasing visibility. Ultimately the success of a website depends on how well a site can attract consumers to buy products and services. Staying at the top of the search engines is a must. Without visibility and traffic, your website may as well not exist.

Improving visibility, traffic, and reach normally falls under the umbrella of SEO — Search Engine Optimization. SEO marketing encompasses many different techniques to improve rankings and drive traffic from search engines.

In this article, we’ve rounded up 14 eCommerce SEO best practices that you can apply to your website:

1. Share your knowledge.
2. Keep your content fresh.
3. Create and maintain a YouTube channel.
4. Find your audience with paid ads.
5. Use keywords everywhere.
6. Optimize your header tags.
7. Get your site in order.
8. Connect your website in internal linking.
9. Go mobile.
10. Avoid duplicate content.
11. Launch email marketing.
12. Reduce your bounce rate with long-form content.
13. Master your meta descriptions.
14. Use Schema Markup.

1. Share Your Knowledge

A great way to increase traffic and improve your eCommerce SEO rankings is to engage people from other sites. You can easily do this by contributing on high-traffic and high-authority sites such as Quora, Medium, or LinkedIn. The key to using these sites is posting engaging content that draws readers in, using your expertise.

2. Keep Your Content Fresh

The only sure-fire way to engage and keep your audience is with compelling content. Great content not only brings people to your site, it keeps them coming back.

To rework and update your content:

• Start with a site audit to ensure your entire site’s content is up to date. Check for outdated articles, inconsistent messaging, and irrelevant subject matter.
• Delete unnecessary pages.
• Following this cleanup, you can re-launch a lot of your updated content to all the platforms where it was originally posted.
• Link it back to the content on your site. This can help re-engage people who saw the previous post and bring in new traffic.

Another eCommerce SEO tip is to keep using great content by converting it to other formats. For example, if you have a great blog post that showed your expertise and engaged a lot of readers, consider converting that post to a YouTube video or podcast.

You can use the same content, narrated with images, or talk to your audience directly. This opens a new avenue of engagement and can also improve the SEO of your eCommerce website.

3. Create and Maintain a Youtube Channel

Second only to Google, YouTube is one of the most popular websites in the world. Being active on this platform can significantly boost your traffic and visibility.

However, getting views on YouTube is not easy. YouTube popularity is based more on shares from users than ranking on search engines. It will take a combination of effective keyword research, great content, and useful tags to be successful in Video SEO and get the views you want.

4. Find Your Audience with Paid Ads

With social media taking over all avenues of advertising, a great eCommerce SEO tip is to pay for ads on social media sites. Paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest can help get you on many people’s social media feed.

For example, on Facebook, you can target your ads to precise viewer demographics. These ads can be narrowed down to certain ages, location radiuses, and exposure times.

You can also test the waters with well-performing posts by paying for boosts in their visibility, to see how effective the ads will be.

Extensive research has been done into the best times one should post ads, and on which platforms. Research recently posted on CoSchedule revealed a strategy that best utilizes this information. Working with these tips can help you maximize the effectiveness of every post when you use social media platforms.

5. Use Keywords Everywhere

The backbone of any eCommerce SEO tip is the keyword. We are constantly in search of great keywords to increase traffic. The secret is plugging in keywords that will yield the most results.

A great tool in this quest is Keywords Everywhere. Connect this handy tool through Google Chrome or Firefox, and you can immediately see search volume, CPC (cost per click), and competition information whenever you pull up a keyword.

This helps determine the most useful keywords for your website without loads of research. You can even download lists of these keyword metrics.

While Keywords Everywhere is a great tool for analyzing your own website, the more detail you have on the market, the better.

Tools like Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs and Google Analytics are a great way to look deeper into the world of SEO. They allow you to analyze Google and other search engines to see what people are searching for. This means you can angle your content, and even your entire website, to your specific market.

What’s more, they’ll allow you to take a peek at what keywords your competitors’ pages are ranking for too. But remember, competitor keywords might not work for you. You’ll need an SEO strategy that works for your audience, products and ambitions.

If you sell on Amazon, you can also try the Amazon Keywords Tool. This gathers data from the site’s autofill suggestions to find keywords with high buyer intent.

Lastly, did you know images are searchable too. How? Through alt text. When you upload an image to your website, remember to add relevant, keyword-focused alt text.

This not only helps Google surface your content to the potential customers but improves your site accessibility and user experience — another SEO advantage.

6. Optimize your Header Tags

Making great use of header tags can help improve your eCommerce SEO in many ways.

• Headings help break up your content and provide structure. This makes your pages more readable and scannable.
• Writing strong headers can also help you capture featured snippets on Google. These put your content at ‘position 0’ on the Google SERP and are a great way to get clicks. It helps to frame your headings around common user queries, and provide a solid, concise, and user-focused answer underneath. Study Google’s People Also Ask questions or use tools like Answer the Public to find out what queries people want to know for your industry.
• Header tags are also a great way to utilize keywords more generally. Make sure your header tags are nicely worded and attention-grabbing.

7. Get Your Site in Order

SEO is all about putting the most relevant information in front of your customers.

Ensure that your site is intuitive, ordered and user friendly. If it isn’t, it can confuse your customers and send them elsewhere. What’s more, outdated, irrelevant pages on your site can slow download times, which affects SEO rankings.

On a basic level, your homepage should link to your category pages, as well as to promotions and other need to know info. From there, your category pages should link to product pages. Each of these should have good internal linking to related products.

Stuck on how to organize your site? Go back to basics with card sorting and user testing. Write down the main topics and pages of your website on individual pieces of paper, and then have volunteers organize them in a way that makes sense to them. It’s a quick, cheap way to get a feel for user intent on your website.

Don’t forget — SEO keywords should form the basis of your site. Look at what people are searching for and amend your product, category and homepage titles, meta titles and URLs accordingly.

8. Connect Your Website in Internal Linking

A simple SEO technique to utilize is internal linking.

Linking refers to hyperlinks that lead to another source, site, image, or document. Internal links go from a page on a domain to a different page on the same domain.

Using internal linking essentially keeps the user within your site. On other platforms, you can link old posts to newer posts so users can explore different content by the same author.

Internal linking can also show Google which pages are the most authoritative within your website. For example, if you have a product page that talks about motorcycle parts and a blog post that talks about a specific motorcycle part, perhaps a throttle, you can link that article back to your main product page to signal the hierarchy within your own website. This builds authority within your own content.

A well linked website will also help Google easily index your site, resulting in an improved search engine ranking.

9. Go Mobile

In recent years, Google updated their ranking system for search results, putting mobile sites before their desktop counterparts.

More than ever, it’s critical to make sure that your site is mobile friendly in terms of speed and responsiveness.

An easy way to check if your site is properly mobile optimized is to use a free tool that was created by Google.

• Visit the Google mobile friendly test siteto easily check if your website will translate well to a mobile device.
• After typing in your web address, Google will give you a detailed report in just minutes.
• The report lets you know if your site is mobile friendly and details any issues that may hurt your Google search ranking and recognition.

10. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when text appears identically across different pages on your website. This might be simply because you want to display the same information to a different page. Or you might have just written the same text inadvertently. Either way, avoiding duplicate content is an essential eCommerce SEO tip.

The main reason for this is the way Google indexes pages. Duplicate content confuses Google’s ‘crawlers’ (the programs that trawl the internet and rank web pages). When they come across the same content twice, Google crawlers don’t know which page to rank. Often, this means they won’t rank either page at all.

Though there isn’t a monetary penalty for duplicate content, a loss of rankings can be a penalty in itself. Customers who may have purchased from your website will go to the competition instead.

When it comes to duplicating content from other pages, this gets even more serious. You might not only suffer a loss of rankings but could face plagiarism charges.

Using Copyscape can help you identify duplicate content before you publish it.

11. Launch Email Marketing

Email marketing opens up the lines of communication between you and your customers.  You can keep people engaged by periodically sending out email blasts with updated content, upcoming sales, and promotional information. Email marketing and automation services like MailChimp can help you efficiently plan and execute your email campaigns.

Email marketing also serves another purpose: Traffic. Traffic is a ranking factor in the eyes of Google. When your keyword rankings fall, or you have a slow season; email marketing can help balance out the low periods. This will in turn boost visits and help you maintain keyword visibility.

12. Reduce Your Bounce Rate with Long-Form Content

Bounce rate shows how engaging your website content is. It measures if your audience is going to other parts of your website or just leaving after an initial glance. The bounce rate can affect your visibility on search engines.

In other words, make your site interesting. You want the people visiting your eCommerce website to stay a while.

A few eCommerce SEO tips can get you started on decreasing your bounce rate. Written content is a staple of most sites, and a few triggers can help entice readers to stay longer. Colons ( : ) or question marks ( ? ) keep people reading. Many readers suffer from short attention spans, so having shorter paragraphs and shorter intro paragraphs help maintain the attention of the reader. Make sure your site is easy to access and responsive to the actions of the viewer.

Recent research has shown that publishing long-form content (over 1000 words) has been more effective in shares and engagement.

Users are a lot more likely to share long articles when there is a lot of useful, well-written content even though it was a lot lengthier and more time-consuming to take in. And since readers have to spend more time getting through the content, they are spending more time on your page, reducing your bounce rate.

This all tells Google that you have great, engaging content, boosting your ranking in their search engine.

13. Master Your Meta Descriptions

Optimizing your meta descriptions is another good way to make sure traffic makes its way to your website.

Although Meta descriptions are not directly linked to your ranking in a search engine, it does help up your CTR (click through rate). Meta descriptions are the short summary below your header when your site appears in a search.

This description gives readers a quick overview of your site and content, helping them decide if this is the right link to click on.

A way to optimize your Meta description is to make sure it is written clearly. The wording should be written in the user’s point of view to best engage them and include an incentive. Usually, an offer of special services or products is a good way to attract traffic.

14. Use Schema Markup

Schema Markup is code that can be inserted into your website HTML to help Google read the content on your website.

Think of Schema as your new best friend when it comes to SEO. It helps search engines interpret what your content is rather than just regurgitating it to the user. This can be very helpful for search engines.

This is a relatively new technique within SEO, so not a lot of businesses know how beneficial it can be. Telling search engines exactly what your site is all about can help maximize your exposure and boost SEO ranking for your eCommerce website.

These 14 SEO tips for eCommerce are just a few options that can help drive traffic to your site and increase visibility. The tips given only briefly touch upon all the options you can take to boost your traffic and raise your search engine ranking.

Track your progress through your business analytics and allow 2–3 months to see the impact of your changes. There are numerous free sites and tools to help increase the traffic and visibility to your eCommerce website.
Through observations, experimentations, and alterations, anyone can create a great strategy to keep your site in great shape.

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