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SEO and E-commerce- How can we improve sales and rank higher on Google?

SEO and E-commerce- How can we improve sales and rank higher on Google?

September 4, 2026

 

Date: 04/09/2026

Subject SEO and E-commerce sales- we explain how businesses can rank higher on Google and gain more sales

Table of contents:

 

Introduction

First things first, it’s important to have in place a strong and well thought out search engine optimisation strategy. If you don’t have this your flying blind. You need to think about how you can create an upward trajectory in regards to organic traffic.

However, it’s not just about how to rank higher in the search results on Google. The reason being, is it is possible to bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors but make no sales. Therefore, you need to have an SEO strategy where you’re optimising the website for the right keywords. This article will offer helpful advice on how to do just that.

Understanding the basics- what exactly is E-commerce SEO?

For any online retailer, its important for them to rank as high as possible in what we call the “SERPs”/.

SERP’s simply stands for search engine results pages, and its all about driving the right customers to your website. This is achieved through a complex process of improving what are called ranking factors. Once these ranking factors improve, you can then start to rank higher for certain keywords. Then with that traffic, you can then convert that traffic into more sales.

 

Why does organic SEO matter so much for online stores?

For online businesses, often the large number of competitors means that you are constantly battling for visibility. This means that you need to improve the visibility of the website, now there are two main ways of doing that, that is paying paid advertising or organic SEO. We are specialists in the latter process, which a lot of e-commerce businesses find that SEO is a very cost-effective way of attracting new shoppers to the website.

 

Why a detailed and robust SEO strategy is needed:

Improve organic traffic

When the e-commerce business is ranking high on Google, across a range of keywords this can help to draw in a lot of visitors. These visitors will be visiting the website through the organic SERP’s, which basically means the organic visitors are free. This can help to reduce your reliance on ad budgets, or it can complement this work.

 

Motivated buyers

A lot of types of marketing, meaning spending huge quantities of marketing expenditure, even when the customer might not be ready to make a purchase. This is what makes search engine optimisation so effective when completed right. You can appear right front and centre

Infront of the customer, when they are looking to purchase an item.

This is what makes organic search engine optimisation so effective. That is if you rank high for the right keywords your business can obtain a lot more sales. For example, “A-class energy-efficient dishwashers” infers that the customer knows exactly what they want and is more likely to make a purchase.

 

What are the main differences between e-commerce and traditional SEO?

Product pages

Where brochure websites still need optimising, there’s a huge amount of more work that’s normally required on e-commerce websites. For example, you might need to optimise hundreds of pages. This should involve writing unique product descriptions, and high-quality pictures and also adding for example schema mark-up to the right pages.

 

Optimising category pages

The large e-commerce websites normally have a lot of category pages. These pages for example are for your broader keywords, such as “dishwashers”. Its then up to the company to optimise the particular product pages for more exact keywords, such as Bosch dishwashers.

 

Transactional intent

Many customers know exactly what they want, such as a specific bike brand. Therefore, it’s about optimising often hundreds of pages where the customer knows exactly what they want.

 

Technical SEO work will be more complex

With brochure websites, say websites with 10 main pages, the technical SEO work will be less to manage. However, then compare this with a huge e-commerce store with thousands of pages. You will often have deleted pages, which need 301 redirects. You will often have to add schema mark-up, as well as fixing indexation issues. Then there’s the issue of off-page and on-page duplication issues. Then the e-commerce website needs to be super sonic fast.

 

What are the main goals of e-commerce SEO?

Increase organic traffic

The most common goal of e-commerce search engine optimisation is to improve the amount of organic traffic. This means optimising the website for what for what is often hundreds different keywords.

Improve conversion rates

The large e-commerce shops are always looking to improve their user experience.

This means looking to maximise sales, via reducing the bounce rate.

 

What is keyword research?

It’s important to optimise the website for a range of keywords.

For example, a good consultant will spend a lot of time using tools such as Ahrefs or Google Search Console.

Then, they will need to optimise the website for different keywords, some keywords will have “purchase intent”. For example, some searching for “Sony 50-inch TV” – knows exactly what they want, so they strong buying intent.

Contrast this with a different type of long-tail keyword such as “what’s the best brand to buy for large TV screen”. In SEO, we would refer to this as research keyword, where the customer is thinking of buying an item, but is only researching the idea right now. Therefore, through well written content marketing, it is possible to optimise for this keyword, then send the customer to product pages, which again can help the business maximise sales.

 

Why optimise for long-tail keywords?

Long tail keywords, typically have a much lower search volume. This means less people are asking that question to Google. Therefore, you

might ask, well why optimise for this? If it’s going to bring in less organic traffic, and less visitor numbers.

Therefore, businesses may wonder why it’s worth optimising for long-tail keywords.

Here are the benefits of optimising for long-tail keywords:

– Bring in more organic visitors
– Often easier to optimise for
– Can see results in a shorter period of time

Which tools do you use for e-commerce keyword research?

 

Google Keyword Planner

This is a free tool; that’s within Google AdWords. It can be used to gain valuable insight into which keywords you should be optimising your e-commerce store for.

Google Search Console

You can use this tool to show actual queries that your e-commerce store ranks for. For example, after conducting some analysis work, you might see that you are ranked 37th for a valuable keyword. You may therefore want to place your effort and concentration on moving that onto the first page.

Marketing tools

There are a massive amount of marketing tools that you could use. For example, there’s Ahrefs which our agency uses. We also like Moz Pro, which includes the Moz Keyword Explorer.

 

Competitor keyword analysis

We would also recommend checking your direct competitors on-page SEO to see how they have optimised those pages. This can give your marketing team a good idea and suggestions of what you may wish to optimise your own website for.

 

Writing the product titles

Getting this right is important for optimising the page, particularly for product pages. The text needs to be written in a white hat way.
For example, you should:

 

Add primary keyword for the product

Describe the product in a way where you’re likely to obtain more organic visitors. For example, including the brand name and the main description of the item.

 

Well written product description

We appreciate fully that it can take a huge amount of time to write detailed product descriptions. However, this is exactly what is needed in order for those pages to rank high organically on Google.

 

Unique text

This is a massive issue when it comes to e-commerce search engine optimisation. That is, businesses often use duplicated text. This will be that the page is deemed as “low value” by Google. It would much prefer to place a business in number 1 position on Google that has a well written product description that’s written by someone who truly understand the benefits of owning that product.

Alt text

Alt text is still an important part of optimising an e-commerce website. It helps the search engines and the LLM’s to understand what the page is about.

For example, if the alt text or “alternative text” is all saying that the pictures are of diamond wedding rings, then this helps the large language models (LLM’s) as well as Googlebot to understand what the page is selling.

It’s important to add product schema (Structured Data)

Product schema, and applying this to your e-commerce website is very important. The reason being is schema, or “structured data” greatly increases the chances of the page, being used as a featured snippet. Now what this can do is improve the CTR. Therefore, it’s important to markup key information, such as the products reviews, using schema mark-up.
You may wish to use structured data to mark-up the following:

 

Category Page Optimisation

You have to think of category page, as a main landing page for a set of products. Often e-commerce marketing consultants refer to these as main broader keywords. Now, this helps to draw in organic traffic, for people searching for say “luxury watches”- its then you can start on that page to add all different brands. This way you can send the organic visitors to the different product pages.

Dwell times and customer reviews

Let’s think of a really large online retailer, such as Amazon, who are fantastic at what they do. Now consider that on most product pages, they have user generated content, or “UGC”. Now the customer reviews, this helps shoppers, but it also helps the search engines as well.

Because, if a shopper is busy and engaged, reading say many product reviews, the dwell time is higher. The higher the dwell time, the more engaged the shopper is with the website, this can mean over the long term higher organic rankings. Then it’s the search engines, like Google, if they see a strong selling item, let’s say an LED camping light, with 480 positive reviews, then Google is going to want to have that product mentioned in its organic rankings. Add schema mark-up, and then that product could become a “featured snippet” or a “rich snippet” and this can improve the CTR.

Google EEAT, product reviews, and trustworthiness

A key part of Google EEAT is satisfying the “trustworthiness” aspect. Now one way to achieve higher Google E-E-A-T and trustworthiness score, is to gain more positive business reviews. This can then mean that Google’s algorithms spot that the business is accumulating a vast number of positive reviews.

This means that when you gain positive reviews, this then improves the trustworthiness of the business, which helps improve the Google E-E-A-T score.

Dwell times and U.X

The common mistake that so many agencies fall into, is thinking that E-commerce SEO is all about on-page SEO and links. It’s not, it’s also about using marketing tools, such as Google Analytics to monitor on key pages the bounce rate and also the dwell times.

Basically, shoppers won’t wait around for long if they can’t find the products they want. If they can’t get to the items that they want to purchase, in just a few clicks, they often leave. This means that the dwell time will be low.

Now compare this with a well-designed e-commerce store.
What can happen here is, that the main menu, that’s the navigation is better to use. Directing customers to the right product pages with minimal number of clicks. The customer lands on the product pages, where they can find the items that they want. This means, that because you have made it easier for the customer, to find what they want, they are then more likely to spend longer reading say the product descriptions, and the product reviews. This then means that the page receives a higher dwell time.

Also, it can help to reduce the bounce rate, which is something that your SEO consultants should also be keeping an eye on and monitoring.

Site architecture

It’s important that the search engines, such as Google understand your websites “site architecture”. For this to occur, make sure the e-commerce website has a sitemap, and that this is updated. Then you may also wish to use your robot.txt to better manage your “crawl budget” as well. Now ideally, no matter how complex the e-commerce store is, you don’t want the customer clicking too many times in order to get to the final product that they wanted to purchase. Otherwise, the customer can get frustrated, if they can’t locate the right product quickly, leading to a high bounce rate.

Google’s Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID/INP, CLS)

Use like Google’s Page Speed Insights its free, it can help your e-commerce store to improve your Google’s Core Web Vitals score. This is important for improving the U.X of the website. For example, you should look to make your e-commerce website as fast as possible. This improves the user experience.

Indexation

In order for the website to be indexed, you must allow the crawlers, such as Googlebot to be able to crawl the website. If you waste your “crawl budget” on a load of duplicate, or “content thin pages” this will mean that Googlebot is constantly “crawling and indexing” pages which are low quality. This means it may miss crawling and indexing important new product pages, or may only notice them weeks after they went live.

Off-page SEO- Why it’s important to build authority and trust

Off-page search engine optimisation is all about forming link building strategies. Backlinks are still an incredibly important aspect to consider; they can actually make or break an online business. That’s whether or not the business has strong backlink profile or not.

This is why consultants often refer to backlinks of “links” for short as a critical ranking factor. The old saying in SEO is that backlinks act as “votes of confidence” in your business. Plus, it’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity. You need backlinks high authority websites, but they need to be relevant to your business. So, for example, if you are a share broker, a single backlink from Bloomberg News would be really good.

 

How do you measure success when it comes to e-commerce SEO?

CTR this is an important metric, that is how many actual shoppers are clicking on your SERP.
Bounce rate

Monitoring the websites bounce is important, to improve the user experience of the website.

 

What would you say is the signal most important factor when improving a e-commerce websites SEO?

All of the various ranking factors, such as page title, alt text, use of internal links all need to be strong in order for your e-commerce website to rank high on Google.

However, if you were to come to our agency, say “what is the make or break” Google ranking factor, which is the one that’s the most important? We would have to say the businesses backlink profile. Its so important to have a long list of high DA do-follow and no-follow backlinks, which are coming from well respected websites, such as say FT.com that’s the Financial Times for example.

If you basically have a backlink profile, with incredibly strong backlinks, this can make a massive difference in terms of where the business ranks organically. The biggest companies in the world, which rank, say, 1st position on Google for important keywords, normally have an incredibly vast amount of very high-quality backlinks.

 

How long does E-commerce SEO take to see results?

It does depend on your business sector.

Some business sectors are much more saturated with competition than others. For example, if your e-commerce business faces more competition, then this means that often the amount of SEO work would need to be increased.

For low competition industries, let’s say a newly launched product, then normally less SEO work is required.

 

Is it important to have a fast e-commerce website?

It’s very important that the e-commerce website is fast. The reason is, fast websites, help customers to find the products that they want faster.

If they are waiting on a slow loading page, often this just serves to increase their level of frustration. They often then leave, then going directly to a competitor’s website. This is why the e-commerce companies often see within their Google Analytics account that the bounce rate is high. That is the e-commerce is losing customers, simply because the website is slow, and customers today wont wait around for a slow loading website.

 

Is it important to have high Google E-E-A-T score?

Yes, most definitely.

Google’s algorithms now use E-E-A-T in order to decipher how high quality that advice is. If the page is therefore written by an expert on that subject, someone where its clear on LinkedIn they are one of the leading experts in the world writing that piece, that work will often rank higher on Google.

Therefore “content thin” pages, pages which are sometimes referred to as “shallow content” that actually can damage your businesses organic rankings. Therefore, in all of the written work across the website, it needs to convey that you’re an expert and have experience on that subject.

 

Is it important to have strong social media presence?

Yes, but we wouldn’t say that it could make or break the success of an e-commerce business, but having said that a strong social media presence definitely helps. What we mean by that is, if your generating conversation about a new product you’ve launched, this can mean that people hear about your product on social media. You then direct them to a product page to purchase an item from you.

But also, it helps with Google’s Knowledge Graph, in that Google better understands the products you’re selling. It also notes, and acknowledges that your business is being widely discussed and mentioned on social media for example.

Therefore, this helps Google’s algorithms to understand your business as an “entity”.

This is part of the semantic SEO process.

Basically, if your social media presence is strong, you’re always talking about say Land Rover cars and you have a massive following. This helps Google to understand that you retail those products, you are likely to be an expert regarding those products, because you have said hundreds of thousands of followers on say Facebook or Instagram.

 

Is it important to have high-ranking blog posts?

In order to improve an e-commerce websites sale, the business needs to publish a lot of helpful blog posts.

This content marketing needs to answer commonly asked questions. For example, in regards to the products you sell, often the sales team will be asked the same questions on a frequent basis. Therefore, if you write helpful advice, which gains potentially thousands of visitors to that work per month, what that can do is, give you the opportunity to convert those organic visitors into customers.

For example, a customer might be researching what’s the electric car with best range. Then you could have a product page, which explains that you have a model which offers the best electric car range in that price category.

 

How can we get our business mentioned on ChatGPT?

The LLMs, this includes ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, they want to cite the best answer.

In order to improve your businesses chances of being cited, we would recommend improving the organic search engine optimisation first.

This means improving the e-commerce stores on-page and also off-page ranking factors. Then by doing this, you are making your company website likely to appear in the LLMs simply because, the LLM’s, that is large language models, they learn from the text that is already been indexed and ranked by Google.

However, what we have to say is this, there’s a lot of research that states, that just because you rank top 3 organically, doesn’t automatically mean you business is going to be cited by the LLM’s.

That’s because, the LLM’s may have spotted a very precise answer, that was taken from a page that may have ranked on say page 7 of Google’s organic ranks.

This means that LLMs like to extract and then mention a very precise answer to a question. This means they may have taken that answer from page 10 on Google, because the LLMs have recognised that is a very precise answer.

The point that we are making is, there is no direct coloration between where your business ranks within the Google’s organic results, and if your business will therefore be mentioned by the LLM’s.

 

How can we better optimise our product category pages?

The product category pages are very important when it comes to improving your e-commerce sales.

We would recommend the following advice:

 

Why are some products displaying and not others on Google’s organic results?

Some product pages might be better optimised than others. For example, you might have hired one agency, which added really good quality product descriptions. Those pages might have a high E-E-A-T score. On the other hand, you might have hired say a freelancer, or another agency which used AI text or duplicated text, and those pages wont rank as high in Googles organic results.

 

Is it important to remove duplicated content?

Yes, duplicated text, means that the page will rank lower in Googles organic results.

It also means that the page might not even be indexed, which means that the product page might not even appear in Googles results.

 

Is it important to improve the dwell times?

Yes, if your main pages have incredibly high dwell time, this means that your e-commerce store is attracting visitors and keeping them on the website for longer.

Higher dwell times, means that the e-commerce store is offering higher engagement.

How can your leading SEO company help with this process?

 

We are one of the best e-commerce agencies around, for a free quote, contact Ryan Walsh.

 

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