E-commerce SEO what is it and why does it matter?

You may have the preconception that Google plucks only the biggest and the best brands and slaps them on the first page of its organic results?

However, to get there, to be ranked amongst the “who’s who” in your chosen industry, well, you need to improve many “Google ranking factors” on your website.

This is the same for organic and local SEO as it is for e-commerce SEO, but as this rather wonderful article will explain in detail, e-commerce SEO is well, more difficult.

The reason is there’s more competition, more money to be made, therefore as soon as you start to climb that ladder, well, the competitors will undoubtedly enjoy kicking you back down the ladder!

Not only that, not only are there potentially thousands of more competitors to enter the fold but also the sheer amount of keywords that need the be optimised. For local SEO, well you may just need to get the company number one for “employment lawyer + city”- now that’s hard enough!

But, ecommerce SEO, well depending on how many products you sell, you could be potentially improving the ranking positions for hundreds of keywords. That’s like spinning plates, blind-folded and with a mild hangover- its hard.

Therefore, here’s how our team can help and how we have become some of the best e-commerce brains in the business.

 

How can we increase organic sales?

Okay, we don’t need to preach about why e-commerce SEO is important.

It’s like water, we need it!

Its purposes don’t really need to be promoted as a marketing service, as it’s essential to how some businesses sell goods and well, survive as a business.

However, it’s the “how do we get there”- that’s the complicated part, that’s the part businesses struggle with.

 

Organic traffic

There are many ways a shopper, with their credit card firmly in hand, can reach your website.
They can get there via social media, paid advertising, ChatGPT or organic search.

So, as you would expect, you’re going to have relevant experts in every one of these marketing areas. From GEO optimisation experts, through to SEO geeks.
Now, the part, or the marketing channel that we are going to focus our time on here is how to climb the free part of Google- that’s the organic section.

 

Content marketing

Content marketing to e-commerce SEO is what cocoa beans are to chocolate.

They are needed, otherwise it doesn’t work!

If you’re to rise to the top of Google, to flog, well, whatever it is you want to sell, whether that’s the latest running treadmill with a live personal trainer on it or the latest and greatest engine oil, you’re going to need good content marketing.

 

Good content marketing needs to satisfy the following:

– Google EEAT
– Google’s Helpful Content Update
– Don’t make it spammy, or it will trigger a Google Panda update
– Reduce the bounce rate over time
– Increase the dwell time

Let’s break that down into a manageable chunk of advice- make the content marketing as useful, as good, as helpful as you can.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: imagine you’re at the top of the “sales funnel.” Basically, you have a problem you want solved.

Let’s say it’s a dripping tap- its keeping you up!

Well, have you ever emerged from reading a long article or watching a YouTube video and thought, “That was no help at all”?

I have just lost 10 minutes! All they were selling me was advertising for food boxes to come to my door! I don’t want blinking meal kits-I like cooking my own fajitas!

How do I fix that leaking tap? Well, sometimes you come across an article that’s so good it’s been written by one of the best SEO agencies in the land (cough* we are one of them). They have poured time and effort into the work; it’s just good, well-written, and the author knows about Google EEAT, which is reflected in the writing style and how informative the work is!

You come away, not only have you bought a set of taps from them, you’ve phoned the plumber and said, “I do need you now, I do not need you ever”. You’re confident that you can fix the annoying dripping tap yourself- that’s how good the blog post was that you have just read it was blooming helpful!

So now you see the difference between rubbish content marketing that doesn’t hold the reader’s interest and rather good content marketing that solves problems and helps sell more “things,” i.e., taps.

Website Speed Optimisation

Everyone likes fast things.

Fast checkouts

Fast cars

Fast food (I personally like that latter- not meal kits left on my door in the rain!)

Now, when it comes to fast, well, if you want to improve your business’s e-commerce SEO, well, your website needs to be super-sonic fast.

Think fast, Google Core Vitals.

Think fast hosting

Think about web design that makes the website fast.

Speed is key in hyper-competitive business areas, such as retailing electrical goods online.

What can separate, say, position 1 from position 2 on Google (organic results) could be how quickly the website becomes usable.

So, your multi-million-pound brands are often fixated on making their websites that bit faster.

 

Creating Internal Links

Internal links connect everything on an e-commerce website.

What gets shoppers from a blog post to a main product page? Well internal links!

They are also what “Googlebot” crawls and indexes, what Google uses to decipher how the website is structured and what the business sells.

For example, if you have 400 blog posts and many of them link to a main product category, it’s clear that the product category is important to the business.

It’s probably the main selling item, as otherwise, well, why would all those internal links be pointing there? Why would all that well-written anchor text be flowing and pointing through to that page?

Therefore, internal links help real shoppers, as they can go from reading about “the 10 best kitchen blenders” to then clicking on the kitchen blender of their dreams.

However, the internal links also tell Google how the website is structured.

Keyword research

Keyword research is important, as a company director may well swing around in his chair very confidently and say he knows how customers would find his products online- but does he really?

For example, let’s say he sells roller shutter doors to the masses; he may say focus on that and ignore everything else.

However, after conducting keyword research and spending time sipping espressos and using Ahrefs, it might be obvious that, unless the website is optimised for “steel doors” and “commercial security doors”, he could be missing out on potentially millions in additional revenue.

When it comes to e-commerce SEO, how important is technical SEO?

Well, you could have the best copywriter in the whole world, and be paying them a tidy sum of money to publish informative content marketing, say, once a week?

They could be burning the midnight oil, writing thousands of words, adding fancy graphics and doing a blooming good job.

But what’s the point if it can’t be crawled and indexed by Googlebot?

Well, it’s like shouting a catchy advertising message and tune into an empty cave, time-consuming but a total waste of time- there’s just no one listening! Like having a online meeting 4:30 on Friday, switched off, vacated and the mind is someone else!

Therefore, to get your content marketing read by the masses, it needs to be “indexed”.

To be “indexed,” it must meet Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

But it needs to be indexed, so therefore it needs to get crawled and indexed by “Googlebot”- if it can’t get indexed, because someone written in robots.txt “go away Googlebot”- or something to that effect, or if we want to get technical added a “no-index” instruction, well Googlebot will do just that, it will walk away (well not walk, it’s a bot, but you get our drift).

Just like someone who’s been told to leave the stage at X Factor when they thought they were about to become the next rockstar! Googlebot will leave, wont do any more work, wont crawl and index the page, wont report back to Google’s algorithm. It will just leave, with its guitar and dreams!

So, you have to get Googlebot on the page, allow it to crawl and index the work, so it can report back to Google how good or bad that content marketing is.

If it’s your best effort, if you’ve caffeinated yourself to the extent you feel like you’re about to take off like one of Mr Elon Musk’s rockets because of the sheer amount of caffeine flowing around you, well, you might have written something good. Something from the soul, something with a super high Google EEAT score, and a dwell time so long you might wonder, why are customer spending 20 minutes reading that post? Who is that copywriter, give them a pay-rise they are blooming good!

Although we have to clarify how much caffeine you have in your system, that does not mean you will produce ace content marketing, but it does mean you are wide awake, so at least that possibility is increased.

 

How important is keyword research when improving a businesses e-commerce SEO?

Well, without optimising the website, that’s your e-commerce store for the right keywords, you’re not going to be found.

It’s almost like saying we offer the best glamming pod holidays on offer in Cardiff.

However, you don’t once mention Cardiff on your website even once, so you’re optimised for “glamping pods,” but no one, including Google, knows where you are located or how to get into a giant hot plastic dome for £300.00 for one weekend! (Just book hotel, honestly more comfortable, and central heating, its needed- who wants be baked in a plastic “glamping pod”.

So, you need to place keywords on your website, in a white-hat way, to explain to Google what you sell and what you do, then mould your offering around that, providing quality advice.

Then, when you “build it, they will come”- good film, Field of Dreams, see it if you haven’t already.

Does Walsh and Partners have the experts needed to operate all of the major CMS platforms?

Yes.

Yes, we do, once you’ve seen one, they’re all similar to honest. Some are bit rubbish, most are good and allow on-page SEO to be added like butter to bread!

As long as we can add content and make some on-page edits, we are good to go.

Whether you have Magento, WordPress with a Shopify extension, or another CMS like Drupal, we can use it and start the ball rolling on improving your SEO.

Choose WordPress if you have a choice; by the way, it’s just simple to use and makes things simpler.

How is e-commerce SEO different from other forms of SEO?

It’s not.

It’s not that different from organic or local SEO; it’s just harder.

Often, you won’t be the only one selling that brand of washing machines or hair extensions.

So will, well, perhaps hundreds of other retailers, therefore it’s hard work. If any company says yep, throw over a few hundred, we will make a dent in this, well, their nose is likely to get longer- as e-commerce SEO is hard.

It’s hard work because the competition on page one, perhaps turning over millions, driving the latest and the best hyper cars, they’re not going say, well, we had a good run at running that lucrative e-commerce store. It’s time now for the new companies to move up Google’s organic ranks and have a go.

Nope.

It doesn’t happen like that; their organic ranking factors will be strong. Their websites will be well-designed.

Their backlinks will be really good- they don’t want anyone overtaking them, taking even a 1% slice of their multi-million-pound empire.
So that’s why SEO is hard work.

But good things do come to those who wait. If you hire the right agency, plough the right amount of money into getting you higher on Google, well, we can take you there, we can take you to the top, but as Bruce Forseth once said, “The price has to be right”.

Backlinks- what are they, and are they important to the e-commerce SEO process?

Yes.

In short, your business will be on page 10 of Google if it doesn’t have links.

Backlinks send link juice.

The more link juice, the more important Google and the other search engines deem your website to be.

The higher the DA score or “domain authority”, the higher you will rank.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how a business can rank particularly high across a huge product range, it’s normally due to link equity.

That link equity should then be spread across to the relevant pages.

Those pages rank higher in organic search if the inbound links are as strong as Rocky Balboa’s bicep.

 

Why choose us? Why choose Walsh & Partners

Well, we are simply one of the best at what we do.
10 years!

10 long years of helping businesses reach the top of Google. Countless Google updates, countless articles, links, and technical SEO improvements.

We are good at what we do, one of the best in the U.K- the best part is we also offer free quotes.

Really fast quotes, so if you give us a few hours, sometimes, we can fling back a quote in the time it takes you to say “I wonder how much that SEO is going to set me back”.

Are you ready to get started?

Good, we hope so.

The longer you leave it, the more time your direct competitors have to improve their ranking factors.

And for your business to get to the top of Google, you need the strongest and best links, content marketing and on-page SEO.

If you want quality, come to Walsh & Partners.