Ecommerce SEO is a multi-faceted process.

When you start selling online using web marketing, you want to ensure that you are directing the right type of customers to your site. You can accomplish this by making sure that you have the right kind of content that contains the right keywords.

Search engines rely on matching the words that people are searching for to the words that are found on your website, meaning SEO for an ecommerce website includes informative, descriptive text.

If you have the words on your site that shoppers’ type into a search engine, you stand a better chance at being found.

In fact, more than 50 percent of users find a new company or product after a search.

However, it’s difficult to figure out which words to add to your site, and secondly, how to make sure that you have room for all the different phrases you need. To start the ecommerce search engine optimization process, you should know what keywords or phrases you want to target.

Before making any changes to your website, we first do research to identify the words and phrases you need to include in your content. These are called keywords or keyphrases.

By using keyword research tools, asking your customers how they describe your products, or working with you to find the keywords you already know are successful, we'll find out how you should describe your store or products to rank highly in searches.

Why keyword research is important to ecommerce SEO Keywords most often pertain to your products or your store’s central theme. If you sell eco-friendly pet products, for instance, you may target keywords related to that theme or focus. A few examples include, “eco-friendly pet products,” “eco-friendly dog toys,” and “eco-friendly dog harness.”

Your company’s unique features can also enhance other aspects of your ecommerce SEO. If you’re investing in content marketing, for instance, you may create blog posts that discuss harmful products in dog food. For that type of post, you may target the keyword, “bad ingredients in dog food.”

Keyword identification is a critical part of our ecommerce SEO services because it establishes an effective strategy for your business.

The next step in our process is to implement these high-value, relevant keywords onto your website. We use these keywords in several places, including:

• Homepage
• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Product descriptions
• Image alt text
• And more

This step is essential to an ecommerce SEO strategy. Without optimizing your website for these relevant keywords, it’s difficult for search engines — and even users — to see that your website is relevant to a search query.

While you can do your own copywriting to implement these recommended keywords, an advantage of partnering with a full-service digital marketing agency, like WebFX, is that we offer SEO copywriting services — note that some copywriting comes with our ecommerce SEO packages.

If you decide to invest in our copywriting services for ecommerce SEO, we feature a talented team of copywriters that specialize in several different areas, from manufacturing to retail to automotive. With their expertise, we produce content that’s not only well-written but also on-par with your brand.

Every page on your website needs optimization for search engines.

When it comes to ecommerce stores, it's hard to find anything more important to optimize than product pages. Product pages are extremely important because they are most likely to rank for very specific search phrases, also known as "long-tail keywords."

If you sell rubber dog bones in green, you’re probably not going to have the long-tail keyword, “green rubber dog bone,” on your homepage. Instead, your ecommerce SEO strategy would focus on optimizing product pages for these appropriate long-tail keywords.

To ensure that your product pages earn a high ranking in search results, we'll make sure that each page has a title, as well as a paragraph or two of keyword-rich copy that describes the item. It’s also a good idea to include the model number (if there is one) so you show up in searches for that, too.

Your product pages should also include images of the items you are selling.

Images offer value to users and search engines. For users, your images provide perspective on your product, from its size to its color to its uses. For search engines, your images offer insight into the context of your product page.

It’s important to note, however, that it’s critical to optimize images for search engines. Google, as well as Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines, cannot “read” images. They rely on the image filename, image alt text, and nearby content to understand images.

That’s why our dedicated team optimizes your images for SEO.

Plus, we review each page of your website in-depth to ensure that you're targeting long-tail keywords and that you're not missing crucial SEO elements like title tags. The result is a product page that’s ready to convert consumers.

An ecommerce SEO strategy also includes making your site user-friendly. You need an easy-to-navigate website, even if you carry a wide variety of products. We'll make sure that everything has appropriate sections or categories, and that there is a link to each top-level page from somewhere in your menu.

It's also essential that your navigation is easy-to-use and understand.

If not, you may find that users get confused and leave your site almost as soon as they arrive. Why stay if they can't find what they want? This quick departure — also called a "bounce" — can lead to a higher bounce rate.

High bounce rates tell search engines that your website isn’t as relevant for the search terms it’s ranking for — which is why a high bounce rate can lead to a drop in your rankings. That’s why web design, as well as the design of your landing pages, is an imperative feature of ecommerce SEO.

One of the best ways we've found to improve SEO for ecommerce is to use breadcrumb navigation.

Breadcrumbs are small links that appear at the top of a menu, category, or product page. Like the story of Hansel and Gretel, a trail of breadcrumbs on a website leads you back to where you were previously.

Our award-winning web designers will use this method to add links and keywords to your pages and maximize the usability of your websites for users. For maximum results in your website’s usability, we offer user experience testing services.

Since it's difficult to compete online, one of the best ways you can both add SEO value and draw in shoppers is to create original content for your ecommerce store. Content can come in the form of a blog, articles, press releases, and even ebooks.

A content marketing strategy serves two purposes: one, to give search engines even more content to crawl for keywords and phrases, and two, to tell your potential customers that you are knowledgeable and trustworthy.

The best part is content marketing can double your website’s conversion rates. Why? With unique and informational content, you’re offering value to users, whether by answering their questions or offering them guidance.

Consumers love it too.

More than 60 percent of users prefer companies that create custom content, which can set your ecommerce store apart from others in your industry. That’s why companies that use content marketing more than quadruple their conversions compared to businesses that don’t.

For content marketing, most ecommerce websites choose to set up a blog. Blogs come in many shapes and sizes and can have one post a month or multiple posts a day. For your online store, you may find it easiest to focus on one or two posts a week.

You can write about anything your customers might find relevant, like trends in your industry or new products. If you sell pet supplies, you could even run a contest to find the cutest pet among your shoppers.

Additional content may include:

• Videos for how-tos on product maintenance or uses
• Infographics on topics related to your products or industry
• Articles about industry topics you are knowledgeable about
• Long-form content like ebooks or white papers

With a talented team of writers, as well as a creative team of Internet marketers, Nilus builds innovative content marketing strategies as a part of our ecommerce SEO services — our ecommerce SEO packages include quarterly content.

What form this content takes is up to you, and we'll work together to decide what kind of content is best for your website, then create it for you and implement it on your site. SEO for ecommerce sites includes all these factors and more to make your website rank as highly as possible.