Improved e-Commerce SEO

How to improve your e-commerce SEO - without link-building

Link building is an obvious aspect of SEO, but it is particularly challenging for e-commerce stores, who have to attempt to compete with big retail brands who have large budgets at their disposal. However, there are other strategies to follow which can bring real benefits, particularly when you invest real time and effort into this activity.

Of course, every SEO guide says that content and links are key to ranking - and this is true, certainly for beginners. But for more advanced online marketers who are looking at the commercials, better opportunities with a more attractive ROI can exist.

Before you do anything though, make sure your website has an SSL certificate and is delivered via HTTPS. This is a key ranking signal for Google and yet many website owners still overlook it.

Look at page speed too, using PageSpeed insights on Google and Pingdom, to see whether any easy tweaks could be made to speed up your content load times. From this point, try these approaches.

1. Optimise meta descriptions and tags for human readers - Google isn't daft and over-optimisation will not help you. So optimise your metas and tags for people, rather than web crawlers.

2. Look for ways to make use of category level keywords. Learn about searchers and your competitors in order to give them a better experience. Extra keywords at category level will help you to entice customers with meaningful terms - and the algorithms that rank you against competitors.

3. Use rich snippets - these are great for SEO and can dramatically affect how your website is displayed on each SERP.

4. Review pages of thin content and de-index them. Most e-commerce sites will make use of filters to help customers to sort by attributes such as colour and price. This helps with UX, but can mean creating a standalone page with its own URL for certain filter returns. Category pagination also creates these pages. They aren't problematic per se, but you need to know that they are there and have a plan for them. If you forget and leave them empty, your SEO will suffer.

Additionally, you can leave your website open to keyword cannibalisation. If you find that you have lots of these pages - and some e-commerce sites will literally have thousands - then categorise them against the correct parent category or use the robots.txt file to de-index them entirely.

5. Develop user guides for your best product categories This is a quick win that’s worth investigating - develop 'best of' product guides for everything that tops your retail categories. For example, if you sell natural cleaning products, you could have a guide for 'the top 5 natural cleaning products to clean your bathroom'. This helps your customers to make decisions as they work through their product research process and helps to build your online visibility too. Just make sure the guide is in-depth and meaningful - it should be around 2,000 words in order for it to be ranked favourably and to make your efforts worthwhile.

Implement these measures and spend time getting them right. You'll notice a difference in your traffic, conversions and other online benchmark data for your e-commerce site, as the changes start to take effect.