Understanding how customers search for the products you provide can help you create and optimize pages that will rank higher for those phrases (keywords) and thus, increase the number of high-intent visitors to the website of your business. In this article, we will discuss 3 SEO factors that must be looked at while optimizing an e-commerce website.

1. Technical SEO

Although it may appear slightly difficult to begin with, technical SEO is an absolute essential for e-commerce websites.

HTTPS

A reliable approach called HTTPS is used to transmit data between websites and users. It stops hackers from collecting private data that customers frequently give to internet retailers, information about their identity, address, & credit card. Since 2014, it has furthermore had a small Google ranking component.

If your business uses HTTPS, you’ll be able to tell since the URL bar will display a “lock” icon:

The majority of well-known e-commerce systems come standard with HTTPS, therefore most users shouldn’t have any concerns. If it is, though, be careful to correct it.

Site Architecture

The organization and linking of the pages of your website are referred to as site structure.

Most online shops arrange their websites approximately along these lines:

These two factors explain why this arrangement makes sense:

It’s simple to use – Visitors can quickly locate what they’re looking for.

It makes it easier for Google to locate your pages since internal connections can be “followed” between sites. Creating your primary category pages is generally not that difficult. Simply make them your major selling items.

For instance, turntables, headphones, and speakers can be among the audio equipment you offer. You may target keywords that customers are looking for on your subcategory sites, such as “wired headphones” &”wireless headphones.” In the next section, you’ll discover how to locate these terms. It may be helpful for visitors, but in light of filter pairings frequently resulting in new URLs with parameters, it may seriously harm SEO.

There are hundreds of possible combinations even if you only have a few filters. This implies that Google may wind up crawling and maybe indexing thousands of new URLs. That’s not ideal since it could:

Reduce the ability of crucial pages to rank well – Filter combinations frequently result in the formation of several of the same-content URLs. The duplicate pages will each receive a portion of the ranking signals until Google detects this (which doesn’t always happen).

Stop the crawling of Google’s crucial pages – Google can only spend a certain amount of time indexing your website. It might lack the resources necessary to crawl all important pages if it needs to crawl a lot of garbage.

These problems can be resolved in several ways. The best method is often Jump to search faceted URLs for beginners to their parent category or subcategory and intermediates. Some SEO tools for e-commerce already accomplish this. Install the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar, explore a few diversified URLs, and look at the “Indexability” tab to see if this is the case for your website. Likely, this is not a problem on your site if the canonical URL is not faceted.

2. On-page SEO

The practice of optimizing the content on your website is known as on-page SEO. It contains improvements to the programming behind the scenes and the material you see. Let’s go through some improvements and factors to think about for e-commerce websites.

H1s, meta descriptions and title tags

For their meta tags and title tags, the majority of e-commerce sites employ templates. Writing original material for hundreds of goods and category pages is hardly anyone’s idea of fun, so using a functionalized approach makes sense. Sadly, it could result in stale, redundant material that doesn’t encourage clicks. A hybrid strategy that uses templates for the majority of pages and unique content for the ones that receive the greatest search traffic can help you handle this problem.

Here’s how to locate the Google Search Console (GSC) sites that receive the greatest search activity:

Access the Report on Search Results.

Choose the “Pages” tab.

If you don’t utilize GSC, you may use your Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account to get a free estimate in Ahrefs’ Site Audit.

Choose your project from the Site Audit

Access Page Explorer.

Lookup Internal Pages

Arrange the results from most organic traffic to least organic traffic.

Keyword exploration

You can better understand how consumers search for your products by doing keyword research. This information may be used to develop product pages and subcategories that satisfy searcher demand. Let’s examine how to carry this through.

Finding keywords for subcategories

The sorts of goods you offer in a category are displayed on subcategory pages. For instance, there could be wired and wireless headphones within the category of headphones. Many of the divisions that make sense for your shop are probably already known to you. However, since there are several methods that people might search, it is advantageous for SEO to make subcategories that correspond to those phrases.

Just keep in mind that this isn’t only about search volumes. Use logical terminology and common sense while selecting subcategories. For instance, “audio Technica open ear headphones” is too specialized to constitute a useful subcategory. Unless you sell several sets of “bone conduction headphones,” the same is true. Listed below is a brief guide to selecting a category for SEO:

Keywords for product pages

If you offer branded goods, you don’t need to do product keyword research because customers will look for the goods themselves. For instance, there are an estimated 857K searches for “AirPods pro” per month in the United States: If you offer these headphones, the term is already targeted on the merchandise page.

However, if you’re selling unbranded goods or goods with obscure brand names, you could wish to strive for more detailed search phrases.
Let’s imagine, for illustration, that you offer a set of headphones with cat ears. It could be preferable to target a relevant phrase that people search for, such as “cat ear headphones,” unless they are expressly looking for the brand or type.

Conclusion

SEO for e-commerce is an elaborate process and we only scratched a small part of the surface in this blog. For effective results on your e-commerce SEO, contact us now.