Selling online in such competitive times of constant Google search algorithm updates, expensive advertising, and hustling customers can be extremely tough.
The days of synthetic keyword stuffing and PageRank manipulation are gone, leaving freeloaders with no shortcuts to success and making eCommerce business owners work as hard as ever to stay afloat.
According to Statista, retail eCommerce sales reached $5.2 trillion worldwide in 2021, and that amount is forecasted to reach over $8 trillion by 2026.
Additionally, the eCommerce business industry depends more on mobile traffic, as stats show that smartphones generate over 70% of retail site traffic, resulting in 63% of online shopping orders.
All these circumstances lead to one powerful competitive technique — search engine optimization for online stores or eCommerce SEO. Whereas paid advertising is about budget, SEO is about effort and strategy.
That's why decent ecommerce website advancements are the go-to solution for operating a thriving online store that outranks competitors and wins customers, even if you're a small business owner.
To help you build an online store that both users and Google love, in this eCommerce checklist, we'll go over:
- Fundamental tips
- On-page SEO techniques
- Technical SEO insights and strategies
- Off-page SEO knowledge and practices
SEO Checklist for eCommerce Site: Fundamentals to Consider
Before digging deeper into our extensive list of search engine optimization essentials to check and improve your eCommerce website, let's define the basics.
Gathering Data and Keeping Track of Your Progress
First, ensure there is a valid Google Analytics account integrated correctly with your website.
Google Analytics can help you grasp your online store website, its strengths and weaknesses, validate your new SEO strategy adjustments, understand user behavior, and more.
To connect Google Analytics properly, manage the property settings, and install the Google Tag manually by inserting the code into your site or automatically with a website builder or CMS.
Another essential is Google Search Console, a crucial tool that helps to check your website performance in search results, diagnose technical SEO issues, ensure accurate website crawling and indexing, etc.
Google Search Console also can assist you with tracking the most popular content on your eCommerce site and evaluating how improvements from the eCommerce SEO checklist impact your online performance in SERPs.
To connect your website to Search Console, select property type. If you enter a domain, verify your ownership via a DNS record by adding a TXT record into the DNS configuration.
And when you type the URL prefix, you can choose an HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics account, Google Tag Manager, or domain name provider for verification.
Optimizing Your Website Structure
Although holistic architecture is significant for any website, it is paramount for online store sites, as they usually contain hundreds of pages that should be accessible and visible to users and search engines.
1. Determine if you need to create new product or category pages
The following steps can help you find potential gaps that require dedicated content to satisfy your customers' searches:
- organizing your content themes and product lines
- grouping products into related categories and subcategories
- checking your existing site hierarchy
Ideally, opt for a straightforward eCommerce website architecture and keep every page no more than three clicks away from your store's homepage to provide a smooth user experience and prevent customer frustration.
For example, look at the Home Depot online store; the site is huge, yet everything looks clean and well-structured.
2. Strive for an SEO-friendly URL structure
Your primary mission is to create short yet descriptive page URLs, instantly clarifying what the pages are about.
Therefore, enhance each page URL with a target keyword and avoid using too many numbers, characters, or parameters in URL addresses.
On top of that, remember that page URLs should be readable, so consider utilizing hyphens for separating the words and keeping everything in lowercase for clarity. Below is a good example of a page URL.
3. Pay attention to internal linking
This is crucial for having convenient website navigation, a well-thought-out eCommerce website structure, and better SEO outcomes.
Your online store should have a keen menu, breadcrumbs, and similar product navigation fully linked for quick and easy access.
Optimize your menu to ensure it guides website visitors and helps them quickly reach any site section. Make your menu navigation intuitive, and consider using relevant keywords when naming labels to boost the SEO potential of your internal linking.
For example, see how Petland's website menu navigation is quite informative yet simple.
Also, focus on breadcrumb optimization as breadcrumbs showcase your site's entire ecosystem and page hierarchy, making them essential for website visitors and search engine crawlers.
The proper usage of breadcrumb navigation helps prospects discern their location on your site and switch between your store departments effortlessly. Moreover, breadcrumbs help search engines get to know your high-level pages, which improves overall website content perception.
You can improve internal linking by featuring related content or similar products on your eCommerce site.
It provides valuable supplemental information for potential customers and creates opportunities for your prospects to purchase.
Furthermore, compounding related products helps to increase the visibility of pages that are intertwined with linking throughout the store, improve the user experience, and boost users' time on your site.
You can interconnect product lines by showcasing other products customers have also considered, listing similar items visitors might like, highlighting items frequently purchased together, etc. For example, iHerb utilizes several practices at once.
4. Avoid duplicate content
The days of copying and pasting content from other sources are gone, as using duplicate content on your site pages directly interferes with its performance in search results.
On top of that, duplicate content may also occur due to handling parameters and pagination concerns.
To have a robust website presence with top rankings and organic traffic, you must address the duplicate content issue as soon as possible.
To do so:
- Ensure each page contains original human-written content serving up-to-date information;
- Keep your URLs clean and descriptive, as a proper structure will help avoid any duplication;
- Implement 301 redirects where applicable to eliminate problems related to pages with similar content by showing users and search engines the authentic content version;
- Enforce rel="prev" and rel="next" tags for better pagination to show the relationship between pages and imply the rel="canonical" tag on preferred pages to let search engines fetch the primary page version and avoid content duplicates.
Perform eCommerce Keyword Research
Keyword research can make or break your website's SEO strategy, impacting even technical SEO.
To conduct thorough keyword research and planning, you can take a look at your business niche to understand how your potential customers search for products and services in your industry and understand their pains and needs.
Pay Attention to Search Intent
Understanding search intent is essential.
It can help you boost user engagement, reduce bounce rate, drive sales, obtain more quality leads, and more. Search intent reflects the purpose behind users' queries and can be branched into the following types:
- Informational intent, guides, how-tos, listings, opinions, etc.
- Navigational search intent, pricing pages, about pages, and similar content.
- Transactional intent, product pages, category pages, and individual lead generation landings.
- Commercial investigation search intent, visual content, e-books, product reviews or roundups, etc.
Indeed, online store sites primarily focus on transactional search intent leading to transactions and purchasing.
Product and category pages on your eCommerce website are all about transactional search intent. Therefore, you should leverage keyword suggestions to find the most lucrative keywords for those pages.
In fact, specific signal words showcase transactional search intent. For instance, keywords containing "discount," "buy," "near me," "for sale," or words indicating specific product properties and names reflect transactional intent.
Another pivotal search intent to investigate when selecting keywords for your eCommerce SEO needs is informational. As an online store, you should try to capture your prospects' attention as much as possible.
Creating enlightening pages that will add value and encourage users to examine your product catalog with a range of products and product categories. An up-to-date blog on your website is an excellent tool to pique visitors' curiosity and fulfill their informational search intent.
Thus, consider searching for keywords that include question words like "how," "why," and "where," or resource-oriented works like "tips," "ideas," "examples," etc.
Writing detailed descriptions for your products and categories and creating exceptional blog posts with related keywords will help you fulfill customers' search intent and have better rankings and conversions.
Filter Your eCommerce SEO Keywords
When coming up with keyword ideas, you may acquire a bulky list of suggestions.
However, not all the keywords you find during research are relevant and worth using. Therefore, consider filtering your results by using critical metrics such as keyword search volume and difficulty.
The search volume indicates the number of searches for a particular keyword during a specific period, which is usually a month. Meanwhile, keyword difficulty evaluates the chances of your content obtaining a certain keyword's most advantageous ranking positions.
Only up-to-date data on keyword search volume and competition can help you leverage keywords properly.
Therefore, you should utilize a comprehensive keyword research tool like the one from SE Ranking. It will help you investigate these crucial parameters to stock up on keywords you can propitiously rank for.
For example, let's imagine you run a pet supply store.
Obviously, broad keywords like "pet supplies" or "dog food" have a high search volume and the same level of competition and ranking for these keywords with your blog, product, or category pages is like squeezing water from a stone.
So, you should look for suggestions with a high search volume and low keyword ranking difficulty. To find such ideas, consider omitting general options like the examples above and opting for long-tail keywords, which are more specific keyword ideas with a lower yet decent search volume, for example:
- Low protein dog food
- Dog food for senior dogs
- Organic raw dog food
- Healthy dog food for golden retriever
- Dry dog food for picky eaters, etc.
Such keywords are easier to target, and, on top of that, if you follow all the suggestions in this eCommerce SEO checklist, your online store website pages will become authoritative to Google, broadening your ranking opportunities and helping you rank for keyword variations related to the keywords you use on your pages.
For example, if your category page is sharpened for the "healthiest dog food for small dogs" keyword containing all the best SEO practices, you can also rank for "healthiest dog food," "dog food for small dogs," "healthiest food for dogs," "small breed dog food," and similar keywords. This example reveals the full potential of targeting long-tail keywords.
One more tactic is to try ranking for highly competitive keywords. However, this option only works if your eCommerce website has an accurate SEO score.
You need to investigate your competitors thoroughly and understand what kind of content they are creating to rank for the keywords with the increased competition. If you lack the resources to produce content that will overrun your organic traffic competition, stick to the first tactic.
Unearth Your Competitors’ Keywords
If you operate an eCommerce website, Amazon is your main competitor, so you can explore Amazon product categories and pages to get some valuable keyword ideas and hints on what content to produce to improve your rankings.
To illustrate, let's head to Amazon's pet supplies department.
It features food, treats, apparel, accessories, beds, furniture, carriers, health supplies, and many other categories of dog care products.
If you navigate further and select dog food products, the site will let you choose among three primary product categories such as dry, freeze-dried, and wet dog foods.
Moreover, you can also see the list of brands Amazon features by using their filters, glimpse dog food flavors like cheese or turkey, catch breed recommendations, dog life stage, food container type, check specific product uses, and more.
The Information on your competitor's website is a goldmine, allowing you to gain organic traffic by creating appropriate product categories and separate product pages targeting specific, long-tail keywords.
Another way to grow your website with the help of your competitors' efforts is to conduct competitive research or seek the assistance of ecommerce SEO companies to analyze which keywords and pages generate the most traffic on your niche opponents' websites.
This breakdown is handy for identifying top rivals' pages in SERPs and developing a more profound content plan that reveals the same topics, enabling you to overcome the competition and propel more traffic to your pages.
The main goal here is to use the obtained keywords wisely to optimize each specific page on your eCommerce website for one primary keyword. This will help you avoid keyword stuffing, which refers to spam policies for Google web search and dramatically hurts your rankings.
On-Page SEO Optimization
On-page optimization is your online store's SEO backbone and is crucial to improving and maintaining the organic performance of your product, category, and blog pages.
However, each page type has a particular purpose and content structure, so adopt a different optimization strategy depending on the page type you enhance.
For example, product pages require a more precise keyword selection, depending on the product features and properties. So you can't use the keyword "mascara" for the product page of a cosmetics store as it is too general. You need a keyword that is more specific, like "waterproof mascara for sensitive eyes".
When improving online store product pages, you should focus on customer reviews, high-quality product imagery with alternative text for image description, related products' internal linking, and a clear call-to-action.
Nutribullet has on-the-mark product pages with a feature list, testimonials, and product details, so check out the example below.
Product category pages require thorough categorization as they serve as a navigational hub allowing users to explore the desired product variety. The content for category pages can include images, brief category descriptions, and relevant linking to product pages.
To optimize category pages with eCommerce SEO, you need to pick keywords with a high to medium search volume and relatively low competition. For example, suppose your competitor ranks in the top 5 for the keyword "whey isolate protein", showing the store product category in SERPs.
In that case, you can optimize your site's related category page for the keyword, "best tasting whey isolate protein powder" which is less competitive yet even more effective. Write more content for this page than your competitor, refine the structure, implement relevant product links, and you are good to go.
The primary keyword should be used within the meta title, page headings, and content.
Moreover, incorporate a neat page structure to provide users with seamless page navigation. Below is an example of an SEO-friendly product category page.
Meanwhile, blog page optimization should be centered around evergreen, long-form content.
Blog pages need thorough keyword research, as articles and posts have incredible ranking opportunities yet high competition.
Therefore, keyword selection requires wise decision-making and careful exploration of competitors' content. Store blog pages should have a coherent structure featuring clear headings, subheadings, paragraphs, imagery, social sharing buttons, and internal linking.
Consider using primary and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords within the page body text, like in the example below, and pay precise attention to structured data so search engines can comprehensively inspect the blog page content.
Additionally, there is an ultimate SEO checklist with essential on-page practices that should be implemented on your eCommerce site regardless of the page type. Let's mark them below.
Polish Page Structure and SEO Content
Whether it is your store's About page, product page, a specific product category, or any other page on your eCommerce website, a clear and holistic page structure is a must-have for distinct online performance.
You shouldn't just add plain text to your pages, as it will confuse users and crawling bots, and cause an increased bounce rate and poor rankings.
Thus, employ relevant keywords to create engaging and informative content to help users understand your product variety. To keep it all clear and concise, break your content into logical parts featuring page header tags like H1, H2, H3, etc., and stick to a neat paragraph size with no more than five sentences in a row.
In addition to headers, consider creating unique and clear page titles and meta descriptions. This data is essential as it represents your pages in search results and influences your CTR and ranking efficiency.
Try to keep the page title under 60 characters and ensure your page meta description is no longer than 150 characters so that both can fully appear in Google SERPs.
Refine Product Images
Proper image optimization is on this eCommerce SEO checklist due to its crucial impact on the entire online store's performance in search. Images can help boost organic traffic as users search by imagery for products online.
Therefore, by implementing image SEO practices, you make your visual content speak out and give search engines additional sources of information when scanning your website content.
First and foremost, ensure you use superior-quality images with high resolution and proper dimensions. At the same time, monitor image size, as heavy content can dramatically slow down your website.
It is better to compress your images via tools like TinyPNG before uploading them and enrich your pages with Lazyload to prevent eager loading by delaying image loading depending on user scrolling.
Also, it is necessary to enhance each image with relevant ALT tags to showcase how the image is intertwined with the page content. Alternative text for images improves accessibility, allowing users to understand the content if they cannot see the image, and improves overall SEO, providing search engines with a better perception of the content.
Implement Structured Data for Rich Snippets
Structured data is necessary if you want your eCommerce website pages to stand out in the search results with rich snippets, which means fetching search results with additional page data. Schema.org is the most authoritative resource for understanding structured data and generating a proper schema markup for each of your pages.
Schema markup transforms your content into a structured chain of information, clarifying the context to search engines and making the indexing process far-reaching and sweeping. For example, see how product page content looks for search engines when a proper schema is used.
Source: Schema.org
Once your schema markup is generated, add it to your website pages and validate your efforts via the Google Rich Results Test. Remember to monitor your structured data performance and update it in case of a website or content adjustment.
Technical SEO Optimization
Although the entire eCommerce SEO checklist is a vast knowledge base, technical SEO is the most cutting-edge part as it impacts online store website ranking.
Regarding technical site optimization, you should go above and beyond to tackle website security, fast loading speed, responsiveness, and seamless crawlability.
Take Care of Store Website Sitemap and Robots.txt
Sometimes online store websites experience indexing and crawling issues due to gaps in structuring pages and files. So, if your website is cluttered and all your pages chaotically busk the webspace, it could crucially affect your website optimization.
To eliminate site indexing and crawling issues, you should generate a consistent XML website sitemap, including a list of important site pages. The current functionality of content management systems (CMSs) allows you to build a sitemap directly in your site admin panel.
However, you can also create a sitemap via third-party tools like XML-Sitemaps. Once your sitemap is ready, you need to notify the search engines, so use Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console to submit your sitemap for indexing.
Another essential that can interfere with regular website crawling is the robots.txt file, which provides explicit instructions for web robots on which pages to access or evade. Restrictions in the robots.txt file are often subject to page indexing problems.
Therefore, set up your robots.txt properly by opening relevant pages for crawling and blocking access to duplicate or sensitive content with a noindex tag or password protection. The following screenshot depicts a simple version of the robots.txt file.
After optimizing your robots.txt file, test it via Google Search Console robots.txt Tester. The tool will help you check if the file rules block the Googlebot from crawling particular pages.
Opt for HTTPS Secure Domain
Search engines prioritize website security to deliver users reliable resources for fulfilling their search intent. Therefore, ignoring the secure version of HTTP reduces the odds of showing your online store in corresponding search results.
Moreover, HTTPS has become a ranking signal, so it is crucial to put it on the to-do list. Take a look at the chart from the Google Transparency Report on HTTPS encryption on the web showcasing the percentage of encrypted traffic to Google to fully evaluate the matter of HTTPS.
To secure your website and your prospects' experience on your site, consider implementing an SSL certificate to increase data transfer security. Many popular web hosting providers offer SSL certificates for free for the first year when purchasing a suitable hosting plan.
Ensure Your Website is Fast and Mobile-Ready
Responsiveness and fast loading speed should be your top priorities when building an eCommerce website, as online shopping and shopping from mobile devices have become routine.
As more online users prefer eCommerce to accomplish their daily needs, you should optimize your website speed and ensure it is accessible from different devices.
A responsive website layout, in combination with a mobile-friendly design, will help you to provide a dedicated user experience across a diversity of screen sizes.
Pay precise attention to fonts and font sizes, keep the site menu concise, improve call-to-action buttons for mobile, and let users see product image closeups.
Regarding your eCommerce website speed optimization, monitoring page speed and promptly addressing any issues is pivotal. The Google ranking algorithm is sharpened to inspect if your website corresponds to Core Web Vitals requirements.
Core Web Vitals are critical metrics that measure a website's loading (Largest Contentful Paint or LCP), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint or INP), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS) parameters.
You can analyze your page speed using PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, or Chrome UX Report. These tools can help you obtain an exhaustive report on your page performance.
For example, look at the PageSpeed Insights report for the FashionNova store.
The eCommerce website shown in the example above has failed the Core Web Vitals assessment, which will certainly affect its ranking.
To avoid making the same mistakes, consider the following:
- Optimize and compress images, videos, and other media and minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by eliminating excessive characters, comments, and whitespace.
- Adjust browser caching settings in your server configuration to eliminate the need to load the same static elements with each user visit.
- Implement a content delivery network (CDN) to allocate your website content across multiple servers and distribute data from the most suitable server, depending on the user location.
- Enhance page rendering by minimizing render-blocking JavaScript and CSS and decrease HTTP requests by grouping CSS and JavaScript into a single file.
Remember that maintaining a fast and responsive online store is a hard job, as even a minor shortcoming can cause a domino effect on website performance, user experience, and SEO efforts.
As online stores usually contain dozens of pages, and new pages appear on an ongoing basis when broadening and stoking up on the inventory, consider reviewing these essential technical SEO elements and monitoring search algorithm updates.
Off-Page SEO Optimization
Off-page site optimization refers to building a relevant and versatile website backlink profile in order to strengthen the domain and boost its credibility.
There are three very effective strategies you can use to acquire quality backlinks featuring your online store website:
- Guest blogging and product reviews,
- Developing influencer collaborations and social proof,
- Listing your stores on local directories and review platforms.
Guest blogging and product reviews allow you to obtain links by contributing informative and creative content like tutorials, in-depth product roundups, and infographics to other reputable websites in your niche.
This approach enables you to grow your backlink profile naturally and helps you reach new audiences that can become your customers.
Performing a guest blogging or product review campaign is as simple as sending out personalized cold emails to other reputable companies in your niche.
Collaborations with industry experts and influencers represent a faster way of gaining backlinks and authority, as it usually involves producing sponsored content and creating financed social media campaigns.
Nevertheless, you can reach a new pool of customers easily and get social proof. In fact, social proof can also be achieved by encouraging users to leave ratings and reviews for your store on social media or Google My Business. The whole process can be facilitated with the support of link management tools for better organization, monitoring, and optimization of backlinks.
Also, don't forget the power of aesthetically appealing visual platforms, like Instagram. Customizing your IG feed by using Instagram post templates can significantly enhance your online presence and encourage more engagement from users.
Another way to collect backlinks is to list your store information across multiple directories. You should provide consistent business information to get links from local citations and review platforms like Yelp.
For example, specify your store name, phone number, social media profiles, website link, etc., and make sure the information is up-to-date to prevent misinterpretation.
Remember to choose quality over quantity, as poor backlinks from irrelevant resources can seriously affect your SEO performance. Although these link-building strategies achieve the desired outcomes, consider focusing on delivering unforgettable shopping experiences and sharing helpful content with your audience.
Doing so is your best commitment to organic traffic, brand reputation, loyal customers, and valuable search engine rankings.
Final Word
Online stores are an essential means of shopping these days. However, not all eCommerce websites have customers and sales for several reasons, the primary of which is insufficient search engine optimization.
SEO covers different aspects of website performance and therefore requires a comprehensive and timely approach, as clarified in this eCommerce SEO checklist. So, ensure every visit counts by implementing the most pertinent search engine optimization practices and enjoy a steady flow of organic traffic.
