April 21, 2025
You’ve decided to try your luck with an e-commerce business. You’ve set up your online store, you’ve got an inventory full of great products, and you’re ready to start accepting orders. What now? How do you start actually attracting customers and getting those orders in?
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say it’s easy—it will take some hard work. What you’ll want to focus on is increasing your visibility in the online sphere and building up your credibility so more and more people find you organically, and that starts with e-commerce SEO.
While brick-and-mortar stores can get away without online strategies, that’s impossible in industries as competitive as e-commerce. Extensive work on an e-commerce website’s SEO strategy is likely necessary to attract traffic, build trust, and stand out from competitors, as supported by research and industry practices.
So, let’s get down to business and see how you can develop your strategy with some of the most essential SEO elements. Send me your email to get your very own free e-commerce website SEO checklist and follow along with this guide more easily, or sign up for Rankioz and simplify the process further.
E-commerce SEO is a combination of different activities and processes that have the ultimate aim of increasing your store’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs). The purpose is to have your website appear as close to the top of the results as possible, as that’s one of the best ways to increase your click-through rates (CTR).
Be honest—when was the last time you even clicked past the first page of Google? Your customers are the same way. If your site’s not among the top results, it’s probably not even on their radar.
In a study done by FirstPageSage, the first organic result gets 39.8% of all CTRs. The second and third positions get 18.7% and 10.2%, respectively, with the CTRs continuing to decrease the further down the SERPs you go.
Therefore, maintaining a high position isn’t simply a “good business practice.” It’s a necessity that directly impacts how your online store performs. With a well-thought-out e-commerce SEO strategy, you’ll be getting:
Now, to reach a high position, you’ll need some elbow grease. Your SEO strategy needs to be virtually flawless, ensuring that your site delivers an exceptional user experience and that it’s easily searchable and indexable by search engines.
Search engine optimization has many moving parts, each of them impacting your SERP performance in one way or another. Considering that it would be virtually impossible to try and stay on top of every single one of the hundreds of ranking factors, at least at first, it’s a good idea to have a list of essentials to focus on.
When it comes to e-commerce SEO strategies, the critical elements include:
On-page SEO is all about making it easier for users and search engines to decipher what your pages are talking about. Of course, part of how they do that is through your content (which I’ll get into in a moment). Still, a big part of how they do that is through your on-page elements, as well.
From title tags and meta descriptions to product pages and images—everything should align with your primary keywords and user intent. Even your URLs and headers need to help search engines and users better understand your page.
With properly optimized on-page elements, you’d help put your entire website in context and show search engines that you truly are relevant to users and that you have something of value to offer them. You’d also help your users understand at just a single glance that you have precisely what they’re looking for.
Whereas on-page SEO is about impressing both search engines and real users, technical SEO is more focused on the former (though it certainly has some touchpoints with the latter, as all SEO aspects do).
It deals with all those, well, technical elements that make your pages crawlable, indexable, and convenient for the users. Technical e-commerce SEO also helps you create mobile-friendly pages, increases your website speed, and helps you organize structured data. Finally, it also builds up your website architecture and makes your pages easier to navigate.
If you don’t get your technical SEO ducks in a row, neither search engines nor users will be able to discover and fully enjoy your pages.
Naturally, if you want to make it big in any industry, not just e-commerce, you’ll also need a comprehensive content strategy.
High-quality content lets you use your targeted keywords to attract relevant customers. It’s what lets users and search engines discover you and understand your site and your products. It’s what attracts backlinks, social shares, and engagement. So, you’ll want to take advantage of it and create as many different content types as possible—create blog posts, publish product reviews, shoot engaging videos, and more.
The chances are that you’re not going to be able to, nor willing to, handle all your essential SEO tasks manually. To stay on top of things, you’ll need a dedicated e-commerce SEO service.
The good news? You’ve got hundreds of options available. The bad news? Many of them will just end up wasting your money if you’re not careful and highly selective.
First things first, you’ll want to decide whether you need an SEO service or an SEO tool.
If you go for the service, you’ll essentially be outsourcing most of your SEO needs to a company or an individual who specializes in it. They’ll be responsible for auditing your website, doing your keyword research, optimizing your pages, assessing your technical SEO status, and developing your strategy.
This tends to be an expensive service that is not easily accessible to small businesses with a strict budget. However, if you have enough resources for it, it’s worth checking out.
When choosing an SEO service, you’ll want to keep in mind a few things:
If you go for the tool, you’ll have to handle your SEO personally, but you’ll be able to automate most processes. You’ll just have to be careful with the tool you choose, as some can be more useful than others.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of SEO tools: dedicated ones that specialize in a specific aspect of SEO (keyword research only, technical SEO only, on-page SEO only, etc.) and all-inclusive ones that handle all the essential SEO processes. As a general rule of thumb, it’s easier and more affordable to go for the latter, as you’ll have all your bases covered without much fuss.
Some of the key things to keep in mind when choosing your go-to SEO tool include:
The more selective you are about your SEO service/tool, the easier it will be for you to navigate SEO challenges and improve performance without major obstacles.
E-commerce SEO pricing can vary wildly from one service/tool to the next.
For services, it all depends on the company’s expertise and reputation, the scope of services offered, as well as your industry’s competitiveness and your ultimate goals—it’s one thing making it to the first result in a low competition industry and quite another even making it onto the first page of SERPs in a high competition industry.
Most commonly, SEO services will use one of the following pricing models:
For SEO tools, the pricing mainly depends on the extent of features offered, access to databases, data accuracy, customization options, and automation capabilities. As a general rule, using tools rather than services is much more affordable, but also more involved. As mentioned, you’ll be handling your own SEO efforts, with the tool being there to give you the insights you need and letting you take advantage of its automation capabilities.
While most will distinguish between free and paid tools, there are some differences in the pricing models you may encounter, with the most frequent options including:
As you can tell by now, the pricing for e-commerce SEO services and tools is all over the place. You might not have to pay a dime, or you might have to cover thousands monthly.
The important thing to keep in mind is that pricing doesn’t always reflect the quality, especially when it comes to tools. Depending on your needs, cheaper or even free SEO tools could be more useful to you than paid alternatives. The best thing you can do is assess your needs, thoroughly research the tools you have available, and then compare and contrast their capabilities before taking into account the pricing.
If you want to take matters into your own hands, you’ll need to know precisely what you need to do to optimize your e-commerce site and kill it on SERPs. As I said, I’ve got a nice simple SEO checklist in Excel for you that you can follow along with to ensure you’re on the right track. It gives you a clear overview of all the essential tasks that are completed, in progress, or yet to be taken care of.
But what are the specific steps you’ll need to follow? What should you focus on when you’re getting started with e-commerce SEO? Let’s have a look.
As the name suggests, on-page SEO is all about the things you do directly on your website that impact your users and how search engines perceive you. It’s one of the first things you’ll need to work on to ensure that your site is appealing to your target audience and that it instills them with confidence to make purchases.
While there are many distinct elements of on-page SEO, the key components for e-commerce businesses include your product titles, descriptions, and images.
To create product titles, you’ll first and foremost need to identify the right keywords to use. Ideally, you’ll always have your primary keyword in the titles to ensure that both search engines and real users know what a specific product page is about and whether it meets the search intent.
The only thing you’ll need to be careful of is keyword stuffing. Not to name any names, but you want to avoid the practice adopted by sites that rhyme with ShmaliShmexpress, where you have titles like “Womens Shirts Mens Shirts Elegant Shirt Long-Sleeve Shirt Loose White Shirt.” It’s spammy and does you no good. Identify your primary keyword and use it sensibly.
Next up are your product descriptions. They’re quick overviews of the specific product that the page focuses on. They’re ideal for using your primary keywords without risking keyword stuffing, and they can either compel users to make a purchase or look elsewhere.
You’ll want to make sure they’re clear, concise, and contain all the relevant information. Generally, that means mentioning key features (such as color, sizes, materials, etc.), any benefits the users may enjoy, required usage information, and your unique selling point. It could also be beneficial to include a CTA in the description to nudge the customers to make a purchase.
Images are an important ranking factor, and you’ll want to give them due consideration. Now, it’s not enough just to upload a real, high-quality photo of your product (though that’s certainly essential). You’ll also want to make sure that your images come with relevant alt text.
A short, text-based description of the image, alt text can serve both search engines and real users. For search engines, it tells them what the image is (since they cannot actually see it). For users, it increases accessibility. If your image fails to load, they’ll still be able to understand what the image represents. If they have visual impairments, their screen readers can read the alt text aloud, which helps them visualize it.
Technical SEO can seem a bit frightening as it requires some technical expertise. Still, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with it, as it’s the key to ensuring your website is healthy and doing everything it should be doing. Don’t worry! Many technical SEO tools don’t require you to be an actual expert, so you shouldn’t have much problem with it, even as a complete beginner.
Like with on-page SEO, there are many different elements that’ll require your attention, the most essential ones being as follows.
Your bounce rates increase as your loading speed decreases. When your page load time falls from one to three seconds, the probability of bounce goes up to 32%! Having high bounce rates and slow-loading pages will land you at the back of SERPs.
So, whatever you do, you’ll need to ensure that your loading speed remains enviable.
Did you know that Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses your site’s mobile version for indexing and ranking? While it’s not absolutely necessary, per se, to have a mobile version of your website, it’s highly recommended as it could impact both your SERP performance and your user experience.
So, you’ll need to work on your mobile optimization and ensure that your site performs flawlessly across devices if you want to outdo your competitors and reach a higher ranking.
Schema markups are pieces of structured data or code that put your page in context for search engines and make them easier to understand. This additional structured data (that’s not essential for the functioning of your website but still beneficial) can make you stand out in SERPs by increasing your chances of appearing in rich snippets, improving your local SEO, and making your site better optimized for voice search.
Short product descriptions aren’t enough to increase your visibility and inspire your users to interact with your website. You also need well-thought-out content. It helps you deliver more value to your users, pique their interest, and showcase your expertise.
While it never hurts to diversify things, for e-commerce websites in particular, there are two types of content to focus on—blog posts and customer reviews.
Blogs are ideal for putting your long-tail keywords to use. Instead of following the example of ShmaliShmexpress mentioned earlier and stuffing all your keywords in your product titles, you can use insightful blog posts to incorporate them all into content that will serve you, the search engines, and your users.
You’ll want to start by conducting thorough audience research and understanding precisely what their relevant interests are. Then, create blog posts using topics that will either inform or entertain them. Add your primary and secondary keywords, but keep the density at around 1% to 2% to avoid looking spammy.
The first thing new website visitors do when accessing an e-commerce website is check out customer reviews and testimonials. Virtually no one wants to make an online purchase without looking into others’ experiences. So, put the reviews and testimonials you have to good use.
Highlight them on your website and make them easily accessible. They serve as social proof and can help you convince users to make a purchase. If you have any negative reviews, you don’t want to highlight them on your website, but you also don’t want to delete them. Address them professionally, and let your prospective customers see how you handle negative feedback.
With on-page and technical SEO handled and well-thought-out content on your pages, it’s time to perfect your strategy with the help of some links.
Your linking profile helps put your website in context for search engines and users and increases your visibility and discoverability. While it can take some time to build it up, once you have a strong backlink profile, it will pay for itself.
Internal links are those that lead from one page of your website to another. They simplify site navigation and make it easier for search engines to discover and index new pages. What’s more, they can help you better distribute your page authority, avoid orphaned pages, and create a clear site hierarchy—all important things that can ultimately improve your SERP performance.
Whereas internal links connect two of your own pages, backlinks connect outside domains to your pages. Aka, they are links that other websites are using to lead their users to your website.
You’ll want to have a rich and diverse backlink profile, as it can help you increase your brand awareness and establish you as an authority in your niche. However, that’s only if you have links from high-quality domains! So, reach out to reputable websites and find out what you can do to have them link back to you.
Last but not least, you’ll want to carefully consider the ecommerce SEO services you’ll use. This can often be easier said than done, as you have access to hundreds of different options. However, the more you’re committed to finding a service that suits you, the more it will pay off in the long run.
Although each e-commerce SEO service is unique, most of them are kind of similar. After all, they’re all designed to optimize your website and improve your rankings, but there are only a certain number of ways to do that.
To make your choice easier, it’s a good idea to test out a few different options. Most agencies will offer free trials or at least free demos where you can learn more about them and see whether they meet your needs or not.
When using SEO tools, you’ll either pay for them or you won’t. There’s not much wiggle room in between. When using SEO services, there’s a possibility that you can negotiate the pricing. Commonly, services are customizable to suit your unique needs, so if you just want help with a specific aspect of SEO (or don’t want any help with a specific aspect), you might be able to negotiate a lower price.
Although using an SEO service can be helpful if you want to get it all off your back, it’s expensive. As your site grows, it will only continue to be more expensive. So, if you’re only just gaining your footing and have a strict SEO budget, opting for an SEO tool instead would be much more sensical. And there’s no better option for e-commerce SEO than Rankioz.
An all-in-one SEO solution, Rankioz will take care of all the essential tasks that will ultimately improve your SERP performance. First, it’s essential to understand what your competitors are doing. Second, insights into all your keywords are necessary. Third, tracking your SE performance is key. Rankioz has your back with all of these.
A powerful yet affordable solution suitable for beginners just as much as for professionals, Rankioz has all the essentials you need to optimize your website and make it as user- and search-engine-friendly as possible.
It provides accurate insights that will help you better understand your competitors and what you can do to overtake them on SERPs. Intuitive, data-driven, and versatile, it’s a must-have tool for anyone in the e-commerce industry.
E-commerce is a highly competitive industry. If you don’t stay on your toes, you’re not gonna have a very good time. To ensure you stay competitive and accessible to your target audiences, you need to perfect your SEO.
For that, you’ll need to focus on key aspects that will impact your SERP rankings—your on-page SEO, your technical SEO, high-quality content, and a rich linking profile. While there’s certainly more to SEO than that, these are the essentials that will get you started.
And don’t sweat it! You have access to countless dedicated SEO services and tools that will help you through the complexities of optimizing your e-commerce website.
To simplify it all and get the results you’re after without breaking the bank, sign up for Rankioz and ensure your website gets the SERP position it deserves.
If you’d rather go at it solo, sign up with your email and download Rankioz’s comprehensive E-commerce Website SEO Checklist for free!
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