E-commerce SEO is far from simple because getting an online shop into a high position organically requires great real skill. All e-commerce businesses want to rank as high as possible in organic search, therefore the level of competition is often fierce. Businesses, no matter their size, have limits on what they can spend on Google AdWords; therefore, the goal is to rank as high as possible in organic search to attract as many shoppers as possible. Unlike optimising a brochure website, an online retailer often carries hundreds if not thousands of different product lines which again compounds the amount of work required. All these pages need to be correctly optimised, written with Google EEAT in mind, and continuously monitored to improve engagement signals such as dwell time and to work on actively lowering bounce rates.

On-page and Technical Optimisation

There is a lot of technical optimisation work to do; for example, the e-commerce website must bef lightning fast (Good Google Core Web Vitals times) Googlebot must be able to crawl each page, and broken links must be fixed. A comprehensive keyword strategy is needed, including which keywords to optimise each page for. Then there’s a whole lot of work to start creating pillar pages and content clusters, which basically means improving the website’s relevance for a set of keywords. A lot of consultants refer to this as improving the topical authority of the page. This isn’t work you can complete overnight; it requires a lot of research first, with your head buried in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a paid premium tool like Ahrefs or another high-quality tool in order to gain the data you need to make correct on-page optimisation decisions.

To put it as succinctly and as neatly as possible, good e-commerce SEO is essential to online businesses. There’s a whole heap of work to do to get hundreds or thousands of product lines optimised and ranking well inf and the subcategory pages. Plus, this doesn’t even factor in changing product lines, because sometimes when you get a product to the top of Google, it becomes obsolete and is replaced by a brand-new shiny product that the manufacturer is now producing. Because inventory is constantly changing, a good marketing company needs to manage 301 redirects and out-of-stock pages and make sure no broken links occur.

Massive amount of competition (and the need to be realistic)

First things first, before you get on the phone with a marketing company to get a quote, do some basic research yourself on who your main competitors will be. For example, what are your main product lines? Then when you run a search on Google for those keywords, are the large online retailers coming up top in the organic results? For example, Amazon and eBay results? Or do you see many price comparison sites? Well, if so, these companies have immensely strong e-commerce SEO which they do, you will as you expect, have a huge amount of work to do in order to compete. From user experience teams to link builders to content marketing experts these major powerhouse companies will have vast marketing teams that will all be working hard to ensure they maintain top rankings.
Therefore, you have to understand that if these businesses occupy the top organic results, it’s hard to compete. It’s not impossible to rank higher on Google, but you will have one battle on your hands in terms of improving your own organic search engine optimisation to the point where it’s deemed worthy of ranking higher on Google.

In a nutshell, be realistic, be clear-headed about where you are taking your business. Don’t let a greedy marketing agency owner grab your hard-earned bucks if, in reality, there’s no clear marketing strategy in place from the outset on where your heading and whether you can realistically rank on page one for the keywords that you would like your e-commerce store to appear for.

Organic SEO vs Paid results

When the bar is set so incredibly high for achieving e-commerce success, it’s natural for businesses to turn to Google AdWords. These are generally referred to as the paid results, and they work, well, more or less straightaway once you have correctly set up your Google AdWords account. You may be thinking, well, there’s the solution right there: get your coat, we are off down the pub! Who needs organic SEO? However, hold your horses, because 71% of clicks go to organic results rather than paid results. So, as a business, you have to think: can you afford to throw away all that organic traffic and those potential sales/leads?

66% of shoppers never scroll past page one

It has been said that 66% of shoppers don’t get past page one on Google. Now, we all know this to be true, because the first page of Google is stuffed to the rafters with Google Business results, organic results, paid results and AI-generated answers- so why would you need to look at page 2 results?

Plus, since vast improvements have been made to Google’s results, since significant updates such as the Google Hummingbird update was rolled out, the results are now ultra precise. Meaning that even when you ask a complicated search string such as “who produces the best EV car with the longest range for under £70k” well Google now fully understands such a complex question and presents the best results.

 

75% Mobile share of UK ecommerce traffic

We have all done it: put our pyjamas on, jumped on the sofa, and thought I haven’t ordered something you need for the week ahead or to use the next day at work. So, yes, e-commerce sales often happen on mobile phones. We might look like we’ve crash-landed across the sofa and are unwinding; however, this is actually a time when a lot of people visit e-commerce businesses on their smartphones.

This means the e-commerce web designers need to make the website work perfectly on your smartphone or, if you are a bit posh, on your tablet device as well. This again is where good web design is important, especially on mobile phones. Therefore, the best and top e-commerce businesses carefully consider Google Core Web Vitals and how they can make the website faster. Then there’s using tools such as G

 

68% of carts are abandoned after a slow-loading page

It’s like having a driver in the middle lane slowing the flow of traffic down on the motorway; it’s annoying. In this case, we often overtake; well, in the world of e-commerce SEO, we “bounce off”, and we go elsewhere to a website that’s faster. However, a sustained high bounce rate for online retailers is not good news. It screams that your online shop isn’t keeping the average shopper interested, so much so that after just visiting one page, they want to return to Google’s SERP’s and select another business. Therefore, you have to keep shoppers engaged, interested, and wanting to spend more time on your website. This means improving the dwell time as well as lowering that bounce rate.

53% of buyers read business reviews before making a purchase

Make sure you maintain your website’s online reputation on Trustpilot, Google Business, and even on Glassdoor. Okay, on Glassdoor it could be from a disgruntled past employee writing hurtful statements; however, you still have to manage the business’s reputation.

Think the way a shopper would, especially when making a considered purchase. So, you could for your e-commerce store, pull out all the stops so the technical, on-page, off-page as well as content marketing is the very best it could possibly be. However, a bunch of negative business reviews could be all it takes to mean website sales drop far below what’s expected. Therefore, part of e-commerce SEO is to manage reviews, to respond to customers, seek solutions and where possible to get negative reviews removed.

Organic rankings and visitors are free!

Okay, although this sounds fantastic, and it is, that you can get heaps of free visitor numbers from Google’s organic results, these are still super hard to obtain. For example, whichever form of e-commerce business that you run, let’s say you sell running trainers, well it’s super hard to get your business ranked right at the top of the organic results for such a keyword. But when you do climb that mountain, meet that goal, and high-five every single one of the marketing team that put you there, that’s when the free visitors can come in by the bucket load!

The point being made here is that organic SEO is mighty hard! Its also a slow process, so if you do plan to get your business to the top of

Google, well you have to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. However, the reward is free visitors, you could then if you so wish, start to reduce how much your spending on Google Adwords. However, most e-commerce businesses want to be as visible as possible. Therefore often you do have to place some marketing budget towards AdWords, as otherwise, just like chess, you competitors will take that position and gain a solid advantage in the “top of the fold” advertising space.

How do we improve our E-commerce SEO?

Okay, so you have your e-commerce idea sorted, the web designers have been busy beavers and the design is ready to go.
Now’s the time to get the E-commerce sorted, but it’s a long road. Don’t expect any results for brand new websites in the first 6 months. If you’re in a hyper-competitive business niche, it can take much longer. Now, let’s look at why e-commerce SEO is a slow process.

 

Technical foundations

If the technical foundations aren’t in place and configured correctly, the e-commerce work will not work.

The reason is mighty simple: if Google can’t read a page (crawl and index it), it can’t report back to Google’s algorithm what that page is about. So, whether the page gets indexed is part of getting the technical SEO right for an e-commerce business.

 

Crawl budget

Google and other search engines can only spend so much time reading a website to find changes. This is described as the website’s “crawl budget,” and it’s important to use it correctly. This means you want your crawl budget to be preserved, so only the important pages you want to appear in Google’s SERP’s are getting crawled and indexed. You don’t want your e-commerce store crawl budget wasted on continuously crawling terms and conditions pages or, say, the CMS login page for your Drupal login.

 

Structured data

Structured data helps draw a shopper’s attention and highlight a “rich snippet result”. In a sea of bland organic results, you could therefore be shining like a bright diamond, because your business has been selected as a rich snippet. Use “structured data” to highlight product reviews and, for example, price information. A rich snippet can attract more organic traffic, resulting in more sales.

 

Core Web Vitals

Okay, improving your Google Core Web Vitals score can get confusing and technical. However, when you’re at your web designer’s office next time, ask them to focus on improving this. It basically means making your website faster. It means making your website load faster on mobile devices, and the overriding aim is to improve the user experience by creating a design that’s super-sonic fast and doesn’t take an eternity to load.

 

On-page & content marketing

We do live in a world where AI is being mentioned every second of the day. However, a word to the wise: don’t use AI to write your website text, including product descriptions or anything else. The reason is that no AI can replace a real human with real product knowledge when writing and crafting a unique product description. This page will then most likely have a much higher Google EEAT score.

Now compare this with AI-written copy: the text will not have as high a Google EEAT score, so it will not rank as high organically.

 

Category page

Product pages and main category pages need to be well optimised. This means the on-page SEO needs to be spot on, and you need to offer bucketloads of helpful, well-written advice. So, for instance, if the page is “content thin,” that won’t cut the mustard; instead, the page needs really good, helpful advice. Will that take a lot of time to complete?

Yes, sometimes hundreds of hours are spent crafting and writing content marketing, but that is sometimes what is needed to compete with the large e-commerce stores.

 

Duplication issues

Duplication issues are a major problem in e-commerce SEO. In matter of fact it’s a massive problem, one which businesses often don’t recognise an issue, until there websites quality score is close to zero.

As small business owners, there’s so much to do and only so many hours in the day; often, basic on-page SEO, such as adding product descriptions, gets left to someone back at the office. However, if they have been copying and pasting product descriptions from, say, the manufacturer, this can be a big issue. It causes duplication issues, which means that Google doesn’t recognise the work as original, which means a low Google EEAT score, which means that the business will often be nowhere near page one; it may not even be indexed currently!

 

Internal linking

An e-commerce website is a maze, a maze of products which are all sorted through some main menu. However, Google needs to understand which pages are more important, where to direct link equity, and how pages connect. For example, if you sell, let’s say, high-end e-bikes, you may also sell replacement motor parts; by linking to the motors, you show how these two products are interconnected.

 

Title tags & meta descriptions

A good meta title and meta description help attract shoppers. For example, if a shopper sees the exact brand they want in the meta description, plus something enticing like free next-day delivery, it can help your business attract more clicks, more customers, and ultimately more sales.

 

Buying-guide & blog content

Buying a considered purchase, such as something expensive, often means the shopper will do a lot of research on Google before they buy. So, if your business writes helpful guides, you can answer those queries and sometimes convert some of those visitors to product pages, driving more sales.

 

Authority & off-page

You often can’t get an e-commerce store on page one for competitive keywords unless your business has a really strong, well-built backlink profile. Backlinks are links from other businesses; however, some are good links, and some are spam links. This is a bit like playing Snakes and Ladders: powerful, quality links move you up, while spam links move you down.

Therefore, to improve authority and off-page SEO, a top SEO team will build quality links. Plus, it’s not just about links anymore; it’s also about getting brand mentions. When your business gets mentioned on a respected website, let’s say Bloomberg News, it can help improve your SEO.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile needs to be well optimised. For example, you might not do local SEO; you might want to sell your goods nationally.

However, it’s important to highlight for your customers and Google where the business premises, such as the distribution warehouse, are based. This is a trust signal: it shows where the business is located, in case a customer wants to check that you’re based in the U.K. and where items are returned to.

Where do we even begin improving our e-commerce SEO?

Technical audit

First, check whether the main pages and posts can be indexed. Are the tools flagging any indexation issues? Is Googlebot being prevented from crawling and indexing the page? There could be many reasons; for example, the robots.txt file could be set up incorrectly. However, it could also be because of orphan pages, and the pages never being submitted for manual indexing via Google Search Console.

 

Keyword Research and on-page optimisation

It’s important, well super important, to get yourself a quality keyword research tool. So, there are tons out there; our particular favourites are a mix of Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Moz Pro. This will allow you to see “keyword search volumes”, in essence, what people are typing to find that product. Google also offers Keyword Planner, so use that too while you are at it.

These tools let you unlock a detailed understanding of what keywords shoppers use to find your products. Then it’s time to be a busy beaver, get the espresso machine on, and start adding those keywords in a white-hat way to the main pages so they’re optimised for higher-volume searches.

 

Category pages and main page optimisation

Category pages, as well as main product pages, are your main “money pages”. In essence, this is where shoppers go to purchase products.

Therefore, you need to pay particular attention to optimising these pages as much as you can. For example, fix duplication issues, improve low-quality pages, and add helpful advice. These are the pages where you particularly want to improve the Google EEAT score. Consider how you’ll add internal links, and improve pages that could be considered content-thin and therefore don’t offer much helpful advice.

 

Further technical SEO improvements

SEO is like mowing the lawn; the task never really ends because more work is always needed. The same goes for technical SEO improvements: you always need to improve Core Web Vitals, and you need to make sure page Breadcrumbs are in place. Then there’s adding review structured data to each new product page; there’s often a lot of work to do.

 

Content marketing and buying guides

Leading brands and businesses publish so much content marketing because it helps capture upper-funnel research queries. In layperson’s terms, this can draw in more relevant visitors; these visitors are already interested in the products you offer. So, get your internal links and products mentioned in the article; you can sometimes ramp up sales for those products exponentially.

For example, someone might not have a clue what engagement ring to buy. However, after reading “best engagement rings for under £3k,” they may feel enlightened and delighted by your wordy, comprehensive piece of content marketing. The engagement might be so high for your engagement ring article (see what we did there) that the dwell time is then through the roof. Your bounce rate might be so low, and you might funnel customers through internal links across your website to various product pages, selling more lovely engagement rings than you ever have before. That’s how powerful content marketing can be when you get the Google EEAT spot on, combined with super strong on-page

 

SEO that’s really blooming good.

Digital PR

Is your boss skydiving from a plane for charity? Digital PR can take many forms, including a boss’s flabby face pictured coming out of a plane at 10,000 feet. Digital PR takes many forms: a helpful infographic, a podcast, or anything else people find engaging enough to mention, reuse, and share. This can help generate links. Plus, brand mentions get picked up by Googlebot and signal that your business is a hot topic of conversation.

More links = more authority

More authority means higher-ranking pages, which means an improved Google EEAT score, which means higher-ranking product pages, ultimately more goods flying out of the warehouse.

 

What further areas should we look at improving?

XML Sitemap

Your e-commerce store is one giant maze; Google needs to know which pages to crawl and index. Therefore, have an XML sitemap in place, which makes your e-commerce store less like a maze more like a well-organised collection of product pages, which Google knows exactly where to regularly check for page improvements and updates. So get your XML sitemap in place, and make sure it keeps itself updated.

Log file analysis

Look at your companies log file analysis, then see which pages Googlebot is crawling and indexing. Is through this analysis, you spot that your main product pages are not being crawled and indexed enough. Therefore, the marketing agency you employ, then then have to better manage your businesses crawl budget. As otherwise, you could making on-page improvements, yet Googlebot might not be picking up on these more months!

Core Web Vitals
This sounds like a mouthful, but work on improving your Largest Contentful Paint, your Interaction to Next Paint and your Cumulative Layout Shift. Now if you don’t have a jar of glue what this means, do not worry, hire a web developer that does.

Having a HTTPS and a valid certificate in place is important, as this is actually a Google Ranking Factor. This means that the website has improved security, and of course, this is important for e-commerce stores. It doesn’t mean that the website is totally and 100% secure, however, it does mean there’s some level of security in place.

Website architecture

This is again super important, take major retailers, such as John Lewis, they make the main navigation super simple to use. They make it so with just a few clicks, you can go from Google’s SERP’s, directly to say a homepage, to the page you wanted in seconds.

Unique product descriptions

Its really important that the product descriptions on your website are unique. You might retail thousands of products, however, if you have duplicated text, this will mean that the quality score for the page is low. Therefore, do make sure that across all pages, that you fix any duplication issues.

Title tags and meta descriptions
Again, this is basic on-page SEO, however make sure that through your keyword research that you incorporate this into the on-page SEO.

Internal links

Link from your blog posts and guides, to your main product pages. This helps to reduce bounce rates, as well as guiding shoppers towards pages where they may make a transaction. For example, writing a comprehensive guide, regarding best selling items, you can then direct the shopper to the correct product pages.

Out of stock or discontinued lines

Its important when a product line, on your e-commerce store is no longer available that offer alternatives. Again this helps to reduce the bounce rate, it also means that through using 301 page redirects you can pass through page authority to the new linked page.

Robot.txt

Make sure that your business has a robot.txt document in place, and this allows then a great opportunity to block crawl waste. For example, your staff may have login page, there is also often a main CMS login page. Do make sure, as these are pages you don’t want shoppers to use, or appear in Google’s SERP’s that you add them to be blocked from being crawled and indexed by Googlebot. This will help to better manage your crawl budget, that’s super important, especially if your e-commerce store is new, as you may have a low Google crawl budget on you e-commerce store.

Backlink profile and disavowing toxic links

An incredibly important part of e-commerce SEO is managing and building new links. Backlinks are a ranking factor that Google has used since its inception using Google PageRank. However, you might have noticed in the article we described links as like playing “snakes and ladders” now what we mean by that is simple, some links move you up, some move you down. If you therefore have too many spam links, these mean sometimes the backlink profile can turn toxic. This is when specialist backlink agency is sometimes needed, to disavow poor quality links.

Frequently asked questions:

How is e-commerce SEO different from regular SEO?

The differences between e-commerce SEO and say local SEO are vast. Firstly when optimising a brochure website, its often to optimise it for one city, where the company is based. With e-commerce websites and businesses your optimising for the whole country or even internationally. Then there’s the number of keywords that your optimising the website for, with a local business there might be say 10 keywords which the company would like optimise the website for. In regards to e-commerce optimisation, you could be optimising the website for over 1000 different product lines.

How long does ecommerce SEO take to show results?

This does depend on how competitive the business landscape is. If you are only facing low to medium competition, expect some wins in the first 6 months. For highly competitive business sectors, lets say selling clothing online, then it will often take far longer and need much more input from a marketing company.

How much does ecommerce SEO cost in the UK?

This does depend on which agency you hire ofcousse, the next factor to consider is the level of competition that your business faces. In our experience, and its vast as we have over 10 years experience in this space, is that e-commerce SEO costs anywhere from £1k a month to £75k a month. The difference is monthly costs, because the level of competition between different business sectors in also just as vast.

What is the single highest-return improvement for most online shops?

We would say removing duplicated or AI written text, then replacing this with text which will mean that the page has a much higher Google E-E-A-T score. This means writing helpful content. This could be gradual process, done page by page, yet overtime as the pages get re-indexed the quality score will improve. This means that the organic rankings can start to improve.

How do I optimise product pages for SEO?

This advice is universal, whether you’re optimising a page on a brochure website or an e-commerce store. That is what you need to have is well optimised alt text, H1-H6 tags, you need to have unique and well written text. You need to add structured text. There’s also so much more but get the on-page SEO right, and you are on the road to success.