Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s performance or rankings in search engines such as Google. Nowadays, it can be difficult for e-commerce stores to acquire customers, and many rely on paid media to drive conversions.
SEO, on the other hand, is a free channel. Of course, it takes time and energy to build an e-commerce SEO strategy. But ultimately, the goal is to appear highly in the organic, or unsponsored, section of search engine results pages (SERPs).
E-commerce brands should implement several different SEO tactics. For example, they might want to drive traffic to a specific product on their website or to a specific category or collections page, and they might also want to drive visitors to their website’s content or blog section.
If you’re just starting your SEO journey, there are two fundamental things to get right: You want to make sure to identify the keywords that searchers are using to find information online, and you want to build or surface webpages that properly address those keywords.
In this article, we explain why SEO is an important channel for many e-commerce brands, highlight the different types of pages to create, and examine the strategy that a popular e-commerce website is using to drive hundreds of thousands of visitors per month from SEO.
Why Is SEO Important for E-commerce Websites?
We all want to acquire new customers. But these days, a single click on a platform like Facebook can cost an average of $0.63, or $9.78 per 1,000 impressions.
I fell in love with SEO early in my career simply because I needed to reduce my customer acquisition costs. Over the course of a few years, SEO became our largest customer acquisition channel in terms of conversions and our highest-margin channel.
According to Google, 50% of consumers use search engines to discover new brands, and 59% of the shoppers surveyed reported using Google to research a purchase before making it.
For e-commerce brands, proper SEO does two things:
- It makes it easy for consumers looking for your brand or product to find them.
- It allows new potential customers to discover your brand and products even if they have never heard of your company before.
Types of Pages to Consider Building and Ranking
E-commerce websites typically have many different types of pages. Here are a few that most e-commerce websites will have:
- Homepage
- Category pages
- Subcategory pages
- Product pages
- Blog or content pages
Site Architecture
A concept called site architecture is one element of SEO. Site architecture refers to the way your website’s pages are organized and internally linked. Organizing webpages clearly and logically will help searchers and Google’s crawlers navigate your website.
You’ll want to ensure that users are able to discover your most important pages within just a few clicks. For example, from the homepage of your website, you could internally link via a menu to your high-level category pages. From these pages, you could link to lower-level subcategory pages and then to individual product pages. In other words, a website visitor could find almost any product on your website within three clicks.
An Example of Fantastic E-commerce SEO
I thought it would be helpful to look at an example of an e-commerce company really succeeding with SEO: JM Bullion, an online dealer in precious metals, including bullion and rare coins. I have no affiliation with JM Bullion other than being a happy customer in the past.
Today, JM Bullion is driving an estimated 1.2 million visitors per month from organic search and ranking for 169,000 unique keywords, according to Positional’s Keyword Tracking toolset:
Bidding on Google Ads to drive similar traffic from those keywords would cost the company an estimated $1.2 million per month. So organic search must be a very important channel for JM Bullion, especially since they are in an industry with high customer acquisition costs and tight margins.
JM Bullion has four different types of pages that I want to focus on:
- High-level category pages
- Lower-level subcategory pages
- Product pages
- Content or editorial pages
High-Level Category Pages
On the JM Bullion website, the menu elements are among the first things you’ll notice:
If you click on Gold in the menu, you are taken to a collections page highlighting many different types of gold products:
This collection page is important for any website visitor, but it’s also very important for SEO. A person using a term like “buy gold” or “gold bullion” in a search engine probably doesn’t yet know what product or type of product they’re looking for. And JM Bullion’s directory solves for that by highlighting many different types of gold products to consider.
This page ranks really well in Google’s search engine, driving tens of thousands of visitors per month by ranking for broad searches related to buying gold products:
On your website, you may want to consider having a broad, high-level category page to capture searchers that are just starting their buying journey. These keywords tend to be more competitive, but if you can rank for them, they also tend to be very high volume.
This webpage is also important from a site architecture standpoint, as it internally links down to the more specific types of gold products a visitor might be interested in.
Lower-Level Subcategory Pages
As consumers advance in their buying journey, they will often know more specifically what type of product they are looking for, but they might not yet know the exact make and model.
I really like how JM Bullion has well-defined subcategories that they link down to from their high-level category page:
For example, a searcher might be looking for Gold Krugerrands, a specific type of gold bullion. If we click into the Gold Krugerrands subcategory, we’re presented with another subcategory page highlighting the different types of Gold Krugerrands:
With this page, JM is targeting searchers who already know that they want to purchase a Gold Krugerrand. And the page is ranking really well for keywords specific to this type of product:
If we click deeper — for example, into a more specific subcategory such as 1 oz Gold Krugerrands —, we’re presented with a collection of specific 1 oz Gold Krugerrand product pages:
Yet again, this page is ranking really well in search results — it ranks highly for keywords related to buying 1 oz Gold Krugerrands.
And notice the permalink structure that JM Bullion is using along the way.
We started here: https://www.jmbullion.com/gold/.
We got more specific to Gold Krugerrands here: https://www.jmbullion.com/gold/gold-coins/south-african-gold-krugerrands/.
And we got even more specific to the distinct types of Gold Krugerrands here: https://www.jmbullion.com/gold/gold-coins/south-african-gold-krugerrands/1-oz-gold-krugerrands/.
A user navigating this website can simply click from page to page to go deeper, but the permalink structure is also very logical. You can see, within the URL path, JM Bullion getting more and more specific. This is helpful for users looking to navigate a website using the URL paths, and it also really helps search engines understand how pages are closely related to one another.
As you conduct your keyword research process, consider how a consumer would find your product through the different buying stages. Start at a high level, and then use category and subcategory pages to get more specific. It’s often much easier to rank and drive traffic from more specific or sub-category pages, as the more specific you get, the less competition there is.
Product Pages
Finally, we’ve made it to the product-specific pages. JM Bullion has product pages for the different variants of each product:
Here, JM Bullion has a product page specific to 2024 1 oz Gold Krugerrands. It’s ranking for keywords related to this product, and I’d imagine that the traffic landing on this very specific page is likely high-intent, given that the searcher knows what they want right now — albeit there is lower search volume.
I like how JM Bullion internally links from their product pages to other closely related product pages:
This is helpful for searchers looking to find other related products, and it helps search engines understand how different products might be related to one another.
JM Bullion has made the decision to put individual products on a clean URL path, for example: https://www.jmbullion.com/2024-1-oz-south-african-gold-krugerrand-coin/.
I think this approach is acceptable, given that the URL paths would have been very long by the time that the user actually lands on an individual product page; however, you could make the argument that JM Bullion could put the individual product URLs on the same path as the category and subcategory pages.
Content or Editorial Pages
JM Bullion has done a great job with the creation of their category pages, subcategory pages, and product pages, but they’ve also done a wonderful job with the editorial section of their website. E-commerce SEO isn’t just category and product pages; it can include blog posts and other types of content, too.
JM Bullion’s customers might just be getting their start in coin collection, or in building their precious metals portfolio. And they might want to do a lot of research to learn how to get started. This is an opportunity for JM Bullion to target longer-tail keywords and informational search queries.
For example, for the keyword “buffalo nickel value,” this JM Bullion blog post is the No. 1 search result:
It provides a bit of history about buffalo nickels and value estimates for different mintages.
JM Bullion’s website also has a fairly robust Investing Guide section where they target questions and search queries related to coins and precious metals:
While much of the content is fairly basic, perhaps targeting first-time buyers, the site also has some more in-depth resources — for example, guides to understanding the tax implications of buying and selling precious metals.
JM is effectively using their blog and editorial content to target potential customers who might not be looking for specific products today but likely will be in the future. This content is also very helpful from a topical authority standpoint, and likely having a positive impact on how Google perceives the helpfulness of their website, bolstering the rankings of their category and product pages as a result.
General Tips and Best Practices
This is by no means an exhaustive list of best practices to implement, but I’ve tried to answer a few common questions that you might have at this stage of your SEO journey.
Prioritize the Right Keywords
Early in your SEO journey, you’ll want to go through the process of keyword research, or identifying the right keywords that you should create webpages for.
There might be keywords related to the specific types of products you offer, or the products themselves. There might also be keywords that address questions your potential buyers have during the buying process. And there are different stages of the funnel: some of those keywords and questions might be high in the funnel, where people are just learning about your product space, and some might be toward the bottom of the funnel, where a searcher is actively looking for the best solution or to compare options.
There are many different tools that you can use for keyword research, including popular tools like Positional, Ahrefs, and Semrush. Inside a keyword research tool, there are a few pieces of information that you can use and approaches to discovering new keywords.
Two common metrics are keyword difficulty (competition) and monthly search volume. These metrics attempt to predict how hard it will be for a website to rank highly for a given keyword and estimate how often certain keywords are used in searches.
Given that you probably have a limited amount of time and/or resources, you’ll want to prioritize keywords that are relevant to your business and, in a perfect world, that have both high monthly search volumes and low difficulty. That’s in a perfect world, at least, and companies in more competitive industries might need to target longer-tail or more specific keywords to start, as these keywords tend to be less competitive.
Keyword research tools, like Keyword Research by Positional, will provide you with these metrics and additional keyword ideas:
If you spend an hour iterating on different keyword phrases, you’ll likely be able to come up with quite a few ideas for new webpages to create.
One of my other favorite approaches to doing keyword research is to go through the process of competitor keyword research, or looking at the top keywords and pages that your competitors are ranking for or have created.
For example, if we were competing with JM Bullion, I might plug their website into a keyword tracking toolset to see the top keywords they’re ranking for, how much traffic they’re driving to each, and the types of content they’ve created to serve each keyword. For example, you could use Positional’s Keyword Tracking toolset or Competitor Research toolset to accomplish this:
For each webpage, you’ll want to identify the primary keyword or the most searched variant of a grouping of keywords. You’ll want to use the primary keyword in the H1 tag of your webpage and in the URL slug.
Determining the Right Type of Page to Rank
In the JM Bullion example above, we highlighted a few different types of pages including category pages, subcategory pages, product pages, and content pages.
After you’ve identified the primary keyword that you want to rank for, the next step is determining the right type of page to create.
Generally, in SEO, you don’t want to go against the grain. The easiest way to determine the right page format is to look at what Google is favoring now for a given search query. For example, if you Google the keyword in question and see that the majority of the top search results are blog pages, that would indicate that you’d want to create a content page to serve the keyword. You wouldn’t, for example, want to try to rank a product page for a keyword asking for a content page, and vice versa.
Submit Your Sitemap
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to submit your sitemap in Google Search Console (GSC).
E-commerce websites often have many thousands or tens of thousands of pages, which makes indexing mission-critical.
In order for Google to index or show your pages in search results, it first needs to discover and crawl them. Make sure that all of the new URLs tat you add to your website are updated in your sitemap. And after you’ve submitted it within GSC, Google will know where to check for new URLs as you add them.
In this guide, we highlight the steps required to submit your sitemap within GSC.
Write Thoughtful Product Descriptions
It might go without saying, but you should write detailed product descriptions on your product pages.
These descriptions will be helpful for users navigating through your website and help search engines know what your webpages are about.
Notice how JM Bullion provides detailed information about the coin’s history, characteristics, and specifications. They also provide an explanation of different pricing options, shipping FAQs, and suggested products to purchase alongside the core product.
Implement Canonicals Properly
If you have many similar or nearly identical product pages, consider specifying a canonical to tell search engines which webpage is the primary source of information or the URL that should rank in search engines.
E-commerce websites often have repetitive pages, for example, for different colors or sizes of given products. And if you’re using URL parameters to enable on-page filtering, you’ll want to have a canonical in place to tell Google which version of the URL should be used in search results.
For more on canonical tags, I’d recommend reviewing our guide to using canonical tags.
Double-Check Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Your title tag is the title that gets displayed on SERPs:
Your meta description is the description that gets placed below the title tag:
Your title tags are really important because they are what convince someone to click on your webpage from the search results. Your title tag should include your primary keyword clearly and, if possible, work to engage the searcher. Your meta description furthers the conversation with the searcher.
I spoke with Nam Le on the Optimize podcast, and I asked him about title tags and meta descriptions specifically, given his experience working at Wayfair, one of the largest e-commerce companies. Nam reiterated that his team ran hundreds of “tests every year just to really understand what is the messaging that really clicks with, you know, the shoppers, what is the messaging that really delivers the promise that Wayfair makes to our customers.”
Given that e-commerce companies have a very large number of webpages, it is possible to test different types of title tags, formats, calls-to-action, and lengths.
Take Advantage of SERP Features
SERP features are the listings or sections on a search engine results page that don’t conform to the traditional organic result format.
APMEX, a competitor of JM Bullion’s, is displaying a rich snippet highlighting the reviews for their store. You implement rich snippets with structured data or schema.
Rich snippets are especially important and helpful for e-commerce websites, as they allow those sites to take up more real estate within the search engine results pages and can help entice a searcher to click.
Improve Performance
Page speed and performance are critical for all websites but especially important for e-commerce websites. Even small improvements in load time can positively impact conversions, especially if your buyers are visiting your website on mobile.
Performance is also really important when it comes to search engine rankings. Google, and other search engines, would prefer to direct visitors to sites that they know load quickly, as that allows searchers to find what they are looking for faster.
In GSC, Google provides Core Web Vitals or a number of metrics that you can track to know whether your website is providing a great user experience.
For example, if you notice a spike in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), know that your website takes too long to load quickly as a user first lands on your webpage.
Link Building Can Help
You may have heard that backlinks are really important for SEO. And that is generally true, as backlinks, or PageRank, have always played an important role in how Google determines where to rank your website and its webpages.
A backlink is simply a hyperlink from another website to your website. A backlink might point to your homepage, a category page, a product page, or to a piece of content on your website.
As you accumulate backlinks to your website, your domain authority, a metric used to quantify the strength of the backlinks that point to your website, will increase. As your domain authority increases, you’ll find that your webpages will likely rank higher in search results and rank faster.
As you accumulate backlinks to specific pages on your website, the page authority of those pages will increase, which might help those pages rank better in search results.
I’ve stressed the importance of blog and editorial content a few times thus far, and know that one additional benefit of creating this content is that this content will likely accumulate backlinks more naturally than category or product pages. And by internally linking from your content pages over to the other sections of your website, you can shift PageRank onto the most important pages on your website.
For e-commerce websites in competitive industries, building some backlinks might be essential. There are many ways to build backlinks, including through guest blogging, creating link-bait, and PR.
SEO Takes Time
Establishing an SEO channel will typically take a few months. In my experience, it will often take two to three months of consistent work to start to see the leading indicators of success.
In the very beginning, you’ll want to track metrics like the number of webpages indexed, search impressions, and the number of keywords that your website is ranking for.
Over time, your KPIs will switch from impressions to metrics like traffic and individual ranking positions for certain keywords, and ultimately to conversions.
If you’re planning to invest in SEO, go into it with the expectation that it’s going to take time to see results. However, if you’ve already got a large and established presence, small changes here and there, such as testing new title tags, can lead to meaningful gains quickly.
Final Thoughts
SEO can be a fantastic channel for e-commerce companies, small and large.
In this article, we highlighted a specific example of an e-commerce company that’s really excelling with SEO. They’ve done a good job in making their website easily crawlable and well organized with thoughtfully designed category pages, subcategory pages, and product pages. And they’re using content-led SEO alongside to bolster their topical authority and serve keywords that require content pages.
As a starter, make sure that you pick the right keywords and implement the right types of webpages. From there, you’ll want to ensure that Google is indexing your webpages quickly and comprehensively and that your website is performant.
Small changes to title tags or meta descriptions can have a big impact on CTR for e-commerce websites, and a little link building might be just what your website needs to reach new heights.
Just remember that SEO as a channel takes time to develop, and there is often a delay between when the work is done and when the traffic starts to increase. But over the long term, organic search can become a high-margin and high-conversion channel to supplement your work across other channels like social media and paid.
