April 1, 2025
Paid marketing can only take your online store so far before it starts obliterating your budget and minimizing your ROI. To ensure continued, sustainable growth, you must turn your eyes to organic marketing. And for that, you’ll want to come up with some good, reliable e-commerce SEO strategies.
SEO is all about making your site visible—primarily to search engines, themselves, and then to your target audience. Proper site optimization ensures that search engines can see, index, and understand your pages and, of course, present them to the users where that makes sense.
Although it’s called search engine optimization, after you’ve ensured that search engines can see you, it’s got more to do with optimizing your site for your target audience. After all, both you and search engines have the same ultimate goal—to make the users happy. You’ll achieve this by making your e-commerce website relevant, trustworthy, easily accessible, and user-friendly.
The more you focus on delivering an exceptional user experience, the better your rankings on search engine results pages will be. And the better your rankings, the more organic website visitors you’ll attract. It’s very much a vicious cycle—or should I say a benevolent cycle? A virtuous cycle?
In any case, you’ll want to have a good SEO strategy if you’re to stand out to your target audience and make it in an industry as competitive as ecommerce. The top strategies to focus on include your on-page SEO, content creation, and UX, so let’s get into them and see what they all entail.
Truth be told, SEO has everything to do with your online store’s success. Of course, you do need to have good products—that’s the foundation of it all. But those products aren’t going to market and sell themselves. SEO’s gonna do that for you.
The whole point of SEO is to make your site visible online, but that doesn’t simply mean to have your site appear when someone Googles your brand name directly or types in your exact URL. SEO should help you reach a higher position on SERPs when someone types in any search term relevant to your industry.
So, if you’re selling apparel, SEO should help your site appear in results when your target user types in anything along the lines of “winter sweaters for men, bridesmaid’s dresses, workout leggings,” or the like. If you have a well-optimized site (or at least one that’s better optimized than your competitors), you’ll appear towards the top of SERPs, with your ultimate goal being to reach the #1 spot.
You’ll want to aim for the first position because it attracts the highest click-through rates—approximately 39.8% of all search traffic goes to the first result. As the rankings drop, so do the CTRs. If you’re somewhere on the second or later pages of the results, you won’t be a very happy camper since barely any user will dig so deep.
Now, you might be thinking that SEO and your SERP rankings don’t matter much if you simply use paid advertising. To an extent, there’s a tiny, tiny sliver of truth in that. Paid marketing might bring you a sudden influx of website visitors, but that’s only an unsustainable, short-lived boost.
Without proper e-commerce SEO strategies, you’ll face countless challenges regardless of what your paid advertising efforts are:
If you rely on paid advertising alone, you can’t hope to become a serious competitor that attracts audiences. Overall, it’s much better for you to have at least a half-hearted ecommerce SEO strategy than no strategy at all.
If you’ve decided you won’t risk it with paid advertising alone and want to develop an SEO approach, you’ll need to know where to start.
Search engine optimization is a broad concept that encompasses countless tasks and processes. Search engines have hundreds of different ranking factors they directly consider and hundreds more that have an indirect impact on your SERP performance. Fortunately, you also have access to hundreds of SEO tools that can help you stay on top of all those ranking factors.
However, if you’re just getting started with e-commerce SEO strategies, you don’t want to be spread too thin and have to take care of it all at once. It will only end up confusing and overwhelming you.
Instead, you’ll want to prioritize a few SEO strategies that will make the biggest impact on your performance in the beginning. For e-commerce businesses, what you’ll want to focus on are your on-page SEO, content creation, and user experience. Have a look.
On-page SEO refers to all the things you can do directly on your site that will impact your SERP performance. There are many nuances to it, from structuring your URLs to optimizing your image alt text—I’ve got a full on-page SEO checklist for you if you’re interested.
In the beginning, however, you’ll want to focus on three things only—your product pages, meta tags, and headers. These are the critical aspects of on-page SEO for any business in ecommerce, as they help search engines and real users better understand what your site and individual products are about and how your pages relate to the users’ search queries.
Once you’ve perfected these three aspects, getting deeper into on-page SEO becomes much simpler.
You’ll want to start with your product pages first and foremost. Without them, your target audience won’t feel confident enough to add items to their cart and actually complete their checkout. So, you’ll want your product pages to be absolutely flawless.
The only question is what makes for a flawless product page.
Depending on precisely what your e-commerce business is selling, there are a few key details you’ll want to include in your product pages:
Although this seems like a lot of information to include on your product pages, it’s all essential. Just make sure not to cram it all into a small space. Anything that’s not absolutely essential (like detailed descriptions and reviews) can go below the fold and still be impactful.
The next thing to focus on in your e-commerce SEO strategy are your meta tags. Now, meta tags encompass a wide variety of HTML elements—robot tags that help search engines with crawling and indexing, viewport tags that adjust mobile viewing, google-site-verification tags that verify site ownership, and more.
It’s important that all of these meta tags are properly optimized, as they can help you improve site accessibility and make things run smoothly for both search engines and users.
One type of meta tag you’ll want to pay special attention to, however, is your meta description.
This tag is a short page summary that appears right under your page title in the search engine results pages. It gives a brief overview of the type of content users can expect to see when they click through.
While it’s not a direct ranking factor, it can help your pages stand out on SERPs and boost your CTRs, so you’ll want to make sure that your descriptions are on point.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your descriptions:
Don’t overthink things, and don’t play around with keyword stuffing! Concise, relevant, and natural is the way to go.
Technically speaking, headers are HTML elements that create a clear content hierarchy and help to improve readability and accessibility. Semantically speaking, they’re nothing more than simple headings and subheadings that break down your content. You can think of them as chapters in a book—the entire book deals with one unified topic, but the chapters focus on specific subtopics. It’s the same thing with your content and headers.
The whole point of headers is to keep your content nicely organized and to help you avoid huge blocks of text that will put off all your website visitors.
You just have to ensure that your headers are sensical and hierarchical. As a rule, you’ll have one H1 header per page. That’s your title. Subsequent sections can be divided into as many H2s, H3s, H4s, H5s, and H6s as you want—just keep in mind that they’re organized by importance, with H2s being the most important and H6s being the least.
Another thing to note is that you don’t want to jump randomly between them and have an H2 followed by an H4. Follow the clear hierarchy of H2 > H3 > H4 > H5 > h6. If needed, you can, of course, follow H2 with several H3s, H3s with several H4s, etc.
Though it seems like a minor thing, using your headers properly is more important than you may think. It helps you boost content readability, improve the user experience, and even simplify things for search engines when they’re assessing your content.
If you take a look at some stats from 2023 and 2024, you’ll see that 83% of professionals reported that the best way to increase demand was through content marketing, and 45% of leading companies in media and marketing in 2024 were planning on increasing their marketing budget.
So it looks like using content strategically has a lot of benefits, but what should e-commerce websites focus on?
In 2025, it’s all about sharing short-form videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. It’s a great way to give potential customers a good look at your product from all the different angles and in good lighting. You can focus on important details that set your product apart and show it in use, make fun behind-the-scenes videos to humanize your brand, or teasers for new product launches.
The best length for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos is about 20–35 seconds, short enough to keep the attention of the average Millenial or Gen Z viewer but still long enough to offer key information.
You don’t have to invest a lot initially, as most smartphone cameras on flagship models are good enough to create videos of a few products being used or worn “out in the wild,” and you can use free video editing software like Canva to polish them up.
Many marketers report good ROI with images as well, particularly when using the most popular meme formats. The trick here is to stay relevant and look for the most recent trends, as memes have a short shelf-life, and using an outdated format can easily get you labeled as a “boomer brand” that is behind the times.
When done right, though, it shows that you have a sense of humor and it can help you develop a unique brand voice that your target audience responds to. Some brands will even weaponize memes and use them to show that they are better than the competition.
They may also try to artificially create social proof, like with the distracted boyfriend meme, implying that users of a well-established competitor’s product are secretly lusting for the hottest new thing offered by their brand.
While they are not as popular as visual content, you can use blog posts on your site to go into more detail on how certain products are used, provide creative ideas, or address common questions or misconceptions.
Small business owners often create this type of content themselves, as they have plenty of insight into industry practices, the different options available, various use cases, etc. That way, they don’t have to spend any extra money on marketing, but they get to increase engagement and boost their SEO.
You can also post about upcoming events and new product launches, provide buying guides, or dispel some common myths.
As of 2025, 55% of US citizens older than 12 reportedly listen to podcasts at least once a month, and there are a total of 584.1 million listeners tuning in from all over the world. It is a massive market, with new podcasts popping up every day and carving out their own micro-niches.
These are generally long-form content, with a 1–2 hour runtime per episode being common, but they can be shorter. People usually listen to them while doing chores around the house or driving, and 71% said that they are more likely to sit through ad reads and learn more about the advertised brands than to watch ads on YT and other platforms.
You can set up your own podcast—all you need is a bit of space, a decent mic, and a laptop—where you talk about the industry and maybe interview a guest from time to time, or you can reach out to popular podcasters to have them read your ad copy.
As I’ve told you before, search engines have one ultimate goal—to keep their users happy. Do you know what makes the users happy? Websites that prioritize user experience.
Search engines will absolutely always place sites with excellent user experience much higher on their results pages than those with iffy UX. Even if your content is of better quality objectively and you have products that perfectly match what the users are looking for, if your site has low security, poor loading speed, and simply isn’t optimized for a great user experience, you’ll likely be disappointed with your rankings.
So, how do you improve your UX? What elements should you focus on?
The first thing you should know is that Google has what’s known as mobile-first indexing. What that means, in short, is that if you have a mobile version of your site, Google’s going to use that version instead of the desktop one when indexing your pages. So, if your site isn’t properly mobile-optimized, you could encounter issues with crawling and indexing, which will ultimately harm your rankings.
The second thing you should know is that online shoppers much prefer using their mobile devices than their desktops when making purchases. Last year, no less than 78% of global retail traffic came from smartphones, and no less than 68% of online orders were completed on smartphones.
If your site’s not mobile-friendly, it’s missing out on some serious revenue!
Page loading speed has an immense impact on your SERP performance and your user perception. Search engines will avoid recommending slow-loading websites as it can completely disrupt the user experience. It can potentially put users at risk and open your site up to vulnerabilities. It increases your bounce rates, decreases session length, causes issues with crawling and indexing, and presents an array of problems.
For users themselves, it raises suspicions. Slow-loading pages may indicate that a website is shady, and who would want to leave sensitive information like their credit card number on a potentially shady website? You’ll see a decrease in conversions, and your entire brand reputation may suffer. So, don’t play around with your loading speed, and do everything you can to improve it.
For a truly seamless user experience, you’ll need to pay close attention to your site’s vitals. The main metrics you need to improve to provide a better user experience and rank higher are known as core web vitals. These include:
In addition to these core vitals, there are a few other essential health metrics to keep an eye on that can help you improve the user experience and, subsequently, your rankings. Primarily, you’ll want to up the ante on your site security. Use the HTTPS protocol and make sure you have a valid SSL certificate—both search engines and users will pay attention to this!
Monitor your uptime/downtime to avoid issues, check for broken links, and perform frequent site audits to prevent crawling and indexing errors.
An aspect that helps both with your on-page SEO and with your overall user experience is your internal linking structure. As far as SEO is concerned, a good linking structure will help you distribute your page authority, optimize your keywords with relevant anchor texts, and improve crawlability and indexability.
Perhaps more importantly, it will help your website visitors enjoy a better user experience by making site navigation much easier. By being able to find more relevant information with a simple click on your internal link, your users will be more likely to engage with your content and linger on your pages longer, automatically reducing your bounce rates.
All this talk about the essential e-commerce SEO strategies means jack if you don’t first build your foundations up through technical SEO.
Technical SEO deals with your site’s architecture and involves all the practices that help keep your site operational, crawlable, and indexable. Without it, search engines wouldn’t be able to discover and understand your pages.
It’s very much a behind-the-scenes strategy that isn’t always noticeable to onlookers, but that directly affects your site’s performance, accessibility, and rankings.
Like all other aspects of SEO, technical SEO has many moving parts. The ones you’ll want to focus on as an e-commerce business include:
Of course, in addition to all of this, you’ll also want to keep your site speed and overall performance in check. Eliminate any elements that might be slowing down your loading speed and monitor your site for errors, broken links, and performance issues. Otherwise, you’re likely to see your rankings suffer.
If you’re just getting started in e-commerce, the chances are that you don’t really have access to unlimited resources, so you’ll likely want to give SEO a try yourself. After all, it’s generally the most budget-friendly option—all you have to pay for are a few essential tools, and then you can get to work.
However, just because handling your own SEO comes with a lower initial price tag when compared to outsourcing services, it’s not always your best (nor the most affordable) option.
As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to look into hiring expert e-commerce SEO services if:
With professional SEO services, you’ll get insider knowledge, tailored strategies, and faster results. The only issue is that it all comes at a cost, so you’ll need to consider carefully whether the benefits are worth the price tag.
If you still decide to go at it solo, you’ll need the help of a couple of tools. Mainly, you’ll need the help of tools that can monitor your performance and track your progress. Some of your best options include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Rankioz.
These tools together can help you keep an eye on all the most important metrics you’ll want to keep an eye on:
Continually tracking your performance will give you all the insights you need into your SEO strengths and weaknesses. What’s more, it can help you identify how you compare to your competitors and what you can do to outperform them.
If you want long-term, sustainable growth, paid marketing isn’t how you’ll achieve it. To shape user perception, build up your reputation, and establish yourself as one of the top e-commerce sites, you’ll need to work on your SEO.
Some of the key strategies to focus on include:
Of course, for all of those strategies to work, you’ll first need to perfect your technical SEO—that’s the key to ensuring that search engines can crawl, index, and understand your pages and that your target audience ultimately gets to interact with them.
Just remember that SEO isn’t a one-and-done deal. It requires you to continually work on it, stay up to date on the latest trends, and remain consistent. With tools like Rankioz, you can track your performance to identify any potential problems in your strategies and ensure that you’re always good to go.
Developing e-commerce SEO strategies ain’t easy. If you need help with it, Rankioz has got your back. Sign up for Rankioz to get detailed competitor insights and start with keyword optimization without further ado.
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