eCommerce SEO: Ultimate Guide For 2022

The definition depends on whom you ask. For me, the whole purpose of SEO and eCommerce SEO practices is to help your pages/products be found and rank better in search engines (like Google) for desired/targeted keywords. This way, your pages/products gain more visibility and reach your potential audience in search engines without paying for search ads. Alternatively, check Web Almanac's SEO definition and add eCommerce to it.

Really? Are we still talking about the value of SEO? Let me fill you in with a couple of stats. 

Google now has 91.66% of the search market share and processes over 40,000 search queries every second. While it is true that Google is referring less traffic to websites than before, it is still the single largest online traffic source. 53% of web traffic emerges from organic search (the #1 spot on Google gains a 28.5% CTR while the #10 gains a meager CTR of 2.5%).

According to Google, 53% of shoppers say they constantly research before buying to ensure they make the best possible choice. That's probably one of the reasons why the average ROI of eCommerce SEO is around $2.75 for every $1 invested (source WebFX).

All of the stats quoted here show that if your product is not appearing in search engine results, you are losing $ big time.

Do I hear you saying, OK, how can I do SEO for an eCommerce website?

Glad you asked.

Before you can appear in search results, Google and other search engines need to crawl your pages. Once a crawler finds your pages, the search engine renders them like a browser would and, while doing so, analyzes content on those pages. All of the gathered information is stored in a search engine index from which ranking algorithms determine the relevancy of the crawled pages regarding keywords they found on the page.

Sure enough, you can wait for search engines to discover your pages naturally. But it’s far better for you to help them out and make sure their web crawler bots can find and crawl all of the important pages while staying away from those you don’t want them to see. So, how do you do that?

Robots.txt Make/use the robots.txt file to control which files and/or folders you want or don’t want bots to crawl. You may want to prevent them from crawling your images, internal search queries, or admin directory (like WordPress installs, for example).

Sitemap.xml Have a sitemap on your website to provide crawlers with valuable information about the website structure and website pages. The basic XML code example is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.examplestore.com/product.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2022-01-25</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Use Google Search Console for Google search and Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your website to Bing, Yahoo (because Bing's index powers Yahoo), and DuckDuckGo (because Bing is one of their search source partners).

One of the most common HTTP response status codes both crawlers and your audience get to encounter are 4XX client errors, most notably the 404 Not Found error. The 404 error occurs when the requested URL contains the wrong syntax or the URL is deleted. A real-life case would be you having a wrongly linked page (like linking website.com/thirt/ instead of website.com/t-shirts/ ) or deleting a page completely but not deleting links to it.

The best way to deal with this problem is to have a dedicated 404 page that you can/should customize by adding links to essential pages or a site search bar, for example. Or you can play on humor just like we did.

To avoid frequent 404-page shows, deal with duplicate pages and make sure new pages inherit popularity from the old pages link practice, set permanent redirects of old URLs. Proper HTTP 301 header information should be set. This will inform Google that the page has permanently moved so it can update its index. Browsers are automatically redirected when they hit 301 redirects, so customers will automatically find the new page.

Try to avoid so-called redirect chains. Over time, your redirects pile up so much that you may end up having 301 on top of 302 to end with 404 etc. These influence your crawling, link equity, and even website performance.

Simply put, the crawl budget helps you communicate with Googlebot on prioritizing what to crawl, when to crawl it, and how many resources to allocate to crawling. The search console is where you handle and track the crawl budgets.

Keeping your website well maintained and having a crawl budget on autopilot should be enough for most websites. In general, this means:

• Your sitemap is updated regularly.
• You’ve reduced errors and redirect chains.
• You’ve done all you can for better website performance.
• You’ve utilized robots.txt to ensure Google crawls just important pages and excludes internal search result pages, for example. 

However, if you run medium or larger websites (10,000+ unique pages) with rapidly changing content (daily), you might want to check the resource links section of the pdf version of this post (download link is further down this post). I’ve shared a couple of in-depth explanation posts of what you can do about it.

Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value. The link page is a good starting point for you to understand them better, so here I’ll quickly cover the basics.

Mobile-Friendly Product Pages. Google is checking mobile friendliness. It impacts ranking and also conversion. Make sure your pages are mobile-friendly. You can quickly test if your pages are mobile-friendly.

Use HTTPS. This is a housekeeping point, but do not forget to make your site secure with HTTPS. HTTPS is Faster than HTTP, so it is good for user experience, security, and SEO since Google gives a penalty if you are not using HTTPS.

Frontend Performance / Core Web Vitals. Making sure you have optimized your webshop for frontend performance means you’ve dealt with your Core Web Vitals issues. There are a couple of reasons why performance matters and why checking and continuous monitoring and optimizing your webshop performance is essential.

For the most part, your CWV and website performance depend on how well you handle the frontend, depending on the tech stack behind your website. Any stack can be performant. Still, some stacks are better than others.

If you are running headless eCommerce with JavaScript React SPA frontend, we have some additional tips for better SEO for React eCommerce SPA.

While third-party scripts provide a wide range of useful functionalities, they heavily influence website performance and security. How's that?

Performance-wise, every external script you add must be downloaded and then executed, adding up to page size and page load time. Security-wise, well, you can never be sure what the script is doing in the background when your page loads.

What can you do about it? First, consider removing the script if it doesn't add value to your website or business. Second, load the script using the async or defer attribute to avoid blocking document parsing. Finally, opt out to self-host some third-party scripts. It might be the case that the server from which they are served is slow.

Site speed represented with the Core Web Vitals affects your search engine ranking. That is a fact. Webshop frontends are typically built using a headless approach these days, meaning that you rely on an API service in your backend. 

In Jamstack, you typically pre-generate the pages as static to ramp up the speed and performance benefits. Why is API performance important if you generate static product pages on edge? Well;

• Product pages have updates like price and stock changes, which means you need to re-generate them quite frequently. Regeneration depends on API speed (faster speed means faster regeneration).
• Jamstack caching strategy typically involves a subset of your total pages on larger stores, meaning many pages need to be generated on the fly as regular SSR (Server Side Generated pages).
• Search is heavily used in eCommerce, and in Jamstack builds, it is handled by 3rd party APIs.
• Finally, eCommerce means you need to handle dynamic pages like a basket, checkout, and order placement.

The live eCommerce API you use to fetch product information and the custom Service API designed for your composable stack affect your overall API performance. This Service API is the glue in your headless architecture and often impacts integrated features like, e.g., dynamically calculating the basket values. Together, they all affect the customer/user experience that affects Page Experience signals.

Site architecture (or website structure) is how your pages are organized and interlinked. It should not come as an afterthought because it influences both users' and search engines' website perspectives. How is that? 

From a user experience (UX) standpoint, it's not the same if you have to click 2 or 10 times to get to the product you are looking for.

Search engine-wise, a good structure makes your website more accessible and potentially faster to crawl and appear in the search index. On top of that, the right site structure helps you spread link authority effectively (more on that later).

A good site structure is often defined as a flat rather than a deep structure. The difference is, of course, in the number of levels (clicks) you need to cover to get to the wanted page. As a general rule, make it simple and easily scalable, and keep in mind that no page should take more than three clicks to get to from any other page.

In an ideal scenario, while contemplating site architecture and conducting keyword/competitor research, you'd be thinking about URLs, navigation, and breadcrumbs as well. URL slug best practice boils down to two things: use shorter, keyword-oriented URLs with hyphens to break up words and make sure keywords are aligned (if not with product) with the intent you are pushing on the page in question.

Navigation not only helps UX but also helps search engines understand your website structure even more. Navigation should be simple, straightforward, and hold the most important pages.

And for eCommerce businesses, there is also a case of faceted navigation. Faceted navigation allows your audience to narrow down search results based on specific product features and attributes. Purely from a UX standpoint, they have vast potential, especially with businesses that have thousands of products, i.e. users can easily find what they’re looking for.

On top of that, you can also cover long-tail keyword opportunities that otherwise would not be easily available for you. For example, say you have a store that sells socks. You can have categories that match socks by color' red socks' easily. But having a dedicated page for 'size M SpongeBob SquarePants socks' might prove to be hard to pull. This is where faceted navigation shines.

Breadcrumb navigation indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy and aims at helping users navigate your website more effectively.

The first step for new businesses/websites/stores would be defining the keywords you want to target. For running businesses/websites/stores, it would be to evaluate the ones you already target. Running keyword research will help you with both.

Why do you need keyword research in the first place? Keyword research is there to help you understand which keywords people use to find similar services/products like yours, how popular are those keywords, i.e., traffic volume, the intent shown in search results for those keywords, what type of content is showing in search results for those keywords, and what will it take to rank for those keywords.

How do you conduct keyword research? Most businesses already have a list of keywords that best describe their service or product. Also, most have a list of real-life competitors. Use them as the starting point of your keyword research.

A couple of tools will help you at this stage:

Google. Study the results for companies that appear in the results and understand the type and intent of the content/pages showing. Use auto‐suggest and similar searches options to broaden your keywords and challenge the assumption of how your audience conducts a search. I am surprised that people look for the keyword ‘spongebob squarepants rehydrated socks’ more than ‘spongebob squarepants socks size M’.

Let’s make keyword research a bit more complicated. What is keyword difficulty (KD)? Most paid tools have a KD metric that ought to give you a rough sense of how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword. 

What is domain/page authority (DA/PA)? It is a metric that ought to give you a rough sense of the strength/authority of a website/page.

Both of these metrics are there to help you better evaluate your chances of appearing in search results for desired keywords. Useful as they are, there are certain…eh…limitations.

These metrics are tool-defined, i.e., each tool has its way of measuring them, and they are in no relation to what Google may or may not have in place, does, or does not do when ranking websites for keywords.

KD, DA, and high traffic vs. long-tail keywords. Most businesses immediately think about ranking for high-volume keywords, while the real value might be in long-tail ones.

For my made-up socks store, trying to rank for the ‘socks’ keyword is the holy grail, right? With 10.1K monthly searches globally, the keyword ‘cartoon socks’ is a no-brainer. However, because I focus on a specific cartoon, i.e., SpongeBob SquarePants, a keyword with 100 monthly searches, ‘spongebob squarepants socks’  may be a better one to focus on for several reasons.

More specifically, long-tail keywords provide you with better click-through rates and conversions.

It takes time and careful planning (of content and backlinks) to build the topical authority of a page and/or domain. If you are a gamer, think of it as leveling up your character. The stronger it gets, the easier it is for your character to deal with giant monsters. The more you rank for long-tail keywords, the easier it gets for you to rank for bigger ones.

And if you look close enough, i.e. study search results well, you’ll notice very often that KD and DA scores relate with perceived domain value by Google shown in ranking position in results.

For better or worse, the answer to all of the above is in the search results.

Understanding the searcher's intent behind a search query is the ultimate goal of any search engine.

It is not the same if I search for 'spongebob squarepants' and 'spongebob squarepants socks'. The first query is an informational one, i.e., I'm looking for info on my favorite cartoon, while the second one is so-called transactional, i.e., I'm looking to find the best purchase for the item in question.

Most SEOs distinguish four different intent types: Informational, Navigational, Transactional, and Commercial investigation. Let me just quickly explain with examples.

Informational. Questions like 'what is PIM?' or 'who is Elon Musk'; direction queries like 'nearest coffee shop' or topic/keyword queries like 'spongebob squarepants' or 'Novak Djokovic' fall under this type.

Navigational. Search queries like 'Figma sign in' or 'Crystallize' fall under navigational intent.

Transactional. Queries like 'buy spongebob squarepants socks' and 'DJIMavic 2 Pro price' and 'Amazon coupon' all fall under this category.

Commercial investigation. Queries like 'Cristllize vs. Shopify' and 'DJIMavic review' and 'best spongebob squarepants socks' and 'socks shop near me' and 'cheap cabins in Skien' all belong here.

What do these mean to your keyword research? Understanding the intent helps you craft better content (or rather build appropriate and expected content for the keyword in question). But the story for eCommerce does not end there.

Product pages are essential for any eCommerce business, no doubt about that. However, you are limited by the number of keywords you can rank for on them. So, if I manage to rank for the keyword 'spongebob squarepants socks' I may rank for 'spongebob squarepants red socks' or 'spongebob squarepants yellow socks' etc. as well. To reach a much wider audience, I'd like to explore other keywords closely related to the main one. In this example, that might be the keyword 'spongebob squarepants gifts'.

Analyzing search results, we can quickly determine it is a commercial investigation search query with search results full of listicle blog posts. Great. All I have to do is to write a blog post with a list of gifts (including my socks page), and that's it. Well, not really but we’ll talk more about that.

For now, understand that search intent helps you make sure you have the right type of content for your targeted keywords. But you won't pull off a good ranking with crap content.

Having multiple pages with the same keyword (however different with content) is a bad practice that can lead to keyword cannibalization problems. You don't need more than one 'spongebob squarepants socks' page, do you? Yes, socks can be red and yellow, but modern eCommerce solutions take care of this with product variants features.

Make sure that your TITLE tags and H tags are optimized. The search results show the title tag, so make it specific and keyword-oriented. While you’re at it, have your keywords at the beginning of the title. 

Also, make sure to repeat the title tag text as the main header on your product page. In addition, you should repeat the main keywords throughout the product description text, i.e., within the first 100 words on your page. For example, look at how the 700c white tires page shows in search results.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the most fundamental building block of the Web) is a hierarchical language, meaning every tag has its place and purpose.

Keep your meta descriptions up to date. This is the text shown under the page title in the search results. Keep it accurate and sell it. This is both a factor for eCommerce SEO and ensuring your customers click on your link when it appears in the search.

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. The best way to implement structured data on your website and webpages is to use Schema.org structured markup, a collaborative vocabulary supported by most search engines.

Why use structured data? Though having structured data on your page will not directly influence page ranking, there are a couple of reasons for having it:

• Structured data helps search engines understand the content on your page better (mainly if you aim to appear for search queries related to ecommerce, recipes, and jobs, i.e., queries for which search results show more than just linked title and description).
• Structured data helps search engines to display your content as rich results.
• Structured data will directly show reviews, price, and stock information in product search results. This also boosts click rates as the customers are better informed already from the search result page. 
• The web is getting more semantic as we target more channels like voice and visual search. Structured data plays an important role for those.

While there are three supported formats, JSON-LD is the most recommended one. As for determining the right type, the best practice is to keep focused and use a single top-level Type on a given webpage. Let's take my size M SpongeBob SquarePants socks page as an example.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org/",
    "@type": "Product",
    "name": "SpongeBob SquarePants socks",
    "image": "SpongeBob-SquarePants-socks.png",
    "description": "Beautiful SpongeBob SquarePants socks in size M.",
    "sku": "123456789",
    "aggregateRating": {
        "@type": "AggregateRating",
        "ratingValue": "5",
        "reviewCount": "2000"
    },
    "offers": {
        "@type": "Offer",
        "priceCurrency": "USD",
        "price": "9.99",
        "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock"
    }
}
</script>

This is the basic info with review and price data on my product page. Still, the primary Type I’m using is Schema.org/Product.The Tools/Resources/Additional Reading part of this guide has a couple of excellent links to both tools and articles if you wanna (and you should) dig deeper into structured data.

Did you know that image size is one of the most significant contributors to overall web page size? This means that proper optimization of images may come with substantial savings in page size and thus page load speed. And having a faster-loading page influences your search engine ranking (because speed matters) and your user experience and CTR.

What can you do about it? Lazy-load your images, i.e., load them when needed instead of loading them up front. Optimize your images, i.e., use modern, web-centric image formats like WebP and AVIF. Using both of these comes with a 25–35% reduction in file size while keeping the quality of an image the same. Optimize image delivery, i.e., use CDNs.

High-quality, relevant product images can improve user experience as well. Come to think about it, images are the driving force behind purchase. I mean, you can dominate the search engine rankings, but do you think you’ll convert that traffic without shitty images?

Finally, a big chunk of the searches done by shoppers is via the image search section of search engines. Again, you should, of course, use great photos. But for SEO purposes, you also need to make sure that you use a keyword-focused filename (like SpongeBob-SquarePants-socks.png) and ALT text, as this is being used by Google when indexing photos. For example, search for envelope leather backpack on Google. You’ll notice the image from the linked page ranked as #1 in the image search. Now connect the dots between page and image best practices I’ve mentioned here.

Product videos have become hugely important in eCommerce. You can showcase a product, tell a story about it, share testimonials or produce how-to videos for your product and use them for promotion or to incentivize sales. Remarkable as they are, they do come with a significant influence on page size (and thus speed and performance).

While lazy-loading videos is always an option, video optimization largely depends on the platform you’re using. We’ve talked about the different solutions for using video in headless/jamstack builds. The solutions mentioned there can be used with any platform (or at least popular ones).

You can have your videos on YouTube or served natively, or both. The thing to keep in mind is that by having the same videos on both YouTube and your site natively, you might have them compete in search results for the same keywords, and, in most cases, YouTube videos will rank higher. This might not be a bad thing, but it depends on your strategy which one would work better for you.

There are two types of links, internal and external, and both of them influence your SEO efforts. Navigational links, breadcrumbs, category links, links to your pages within posts/products/articles, etc., are all internal links. Their most considerable influence is making it possible for users and search engines to navigate the website and discover web pages more easily.

External links are the links to other websites, and they aim to help your page appear more credible to both users and search engines. Using other resources in your writing/page shows you did your diligence and researched the topics well by providing a link to an authoritative source on the subject you are covering.

Links build page and domain authority. Anchor text gives semantic meaning to the link and is good for accessibility and usability. But it’s also giving the destination page a boost for the linked keywords. All of these together influence your ranking.

However, don't be fooled into thinking that backlinks are a magic ingredient in search engine ranking. Influential as they are, they won't help much without the quality of your page and content on it.

There are two aspects of link building, i.e., link quality and link reach out. How do you determine the quality of a link? The quality of a link depends on domain/page keyword and industry affiliation and authority, anchor text of a link, page content quality, and link place.

Now, here is a mouthful as an example: being linked at the beginning of a fantastic piece of content, on a domain/page already established as an authoritative one in your industry for your keyword, is more valuable than being linked in a mediocre one, at the end of the content, or being linked from a strong domain in a different industry anywhere on its page. In other words, a link on the Disney website won't help an eCommerce SEO checklist like this one very much. But a link from searchenginejournal.com will (can anyone help with getting a link there!?).

How do you find quality links? Remember when I talked about keywords and competitors' research? Well, while doing those, be mindful of the websites appearing in search results for your desired and similar keywords (if they are not a competitor, they might be a link source). Also, be mindful of the places that already link to your competitors, i.e., check competitors' backlink portfolios. Chances are, some of those might consider linking to you as well. Find broken links or unlinked brand mentions of you and your competitors and reach out to those websites. Or consider guest posting on websites in your industry.

And how do you reach out for links? No silver bullet here. For some places, a simple but personalized email will be enough. For others, it might be better to establish a connection first, i.e., connect on Linkedin or Twitter and get to know each other before you do business.

Two things are certain: it depends on your industry, and it takes time (a lot of time). For example, getting a backlink in a B2B marketing space is hard because everyone is doing it, and they all know its value. You may fare better with just producing quality content.

Finally, you can use one of the link buying services, i.e., buy links for your website. While link buying is a BIG NO-NO for most search engines, it is only a crime if you get caught. But I'd advise you to think about it this way: why would someone sell links in the first place, and how many they sold already, making the effect of it questionable, i.e., is the risk worth the penalty? In my experience, it is not.

Thin is the line between duplicated and similar content. In eCommerce, even more so than in other industries. For example, how different can Yellow Size M SpongeBob SquarePants socks and Red Size M SpongeBob SquarePants socks pages be? Do you even need two pages here? 

Still, the problem of duplicated content lurks over SEOs heads like a rainy cloud mostly because there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how similar content needs to be marked as a duplicate. It depends on the industry as much as it depends on the search engine (I'm sure Google and Bing have different ideas).

I've found that Google's definition of duplicate content provides a decent frame of thought for the topic.

eCommerce has come a long way from simple product listing in categories and checking boxes of a product on a product page. Today you need to produce engaging rich content for eCommerce consistently. Content and commerce are merging, and customers expect rich, detailed information about your products, among other things (check the future of eCommerce post for more).

This means you need to be able to easily populate product information on the backend with pretty much anything from descriptions, images, and videos to specs, variants, and other essential information and quickly convey a message or a story on any channel on any screen.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (or Page/Domain Quality). Google introduced the concept of E-A-T in its Quality Raters' Guidelines. You see, besides complex algorithms, the big G relies on manpower as well, and their feedback helps them understand which changes they've introduced in the algorithms make Search more useful.

We’ll talk some more about E-A-T in our pdf guide. What guide?👇