E-commerce SEO Tips That Skyrocket Your Sales in 2022

It is no secret that the only way to increase your e-commerce website’s sales is by driving more traffic. While increasing the number of visitors to your online store is essential, we also need to keep in mind that the traffic you generate must be relevant to your store’s niche. 

There are several ways to drive targeted traffic web traffic. Search engine optimization is undeniably the best technique because it is comparatively inexpensive and offers better ROI. On the downside, optimizing your e-commerce store for search engines is tricky.

We shared six e-commerce SEO tips and best practices to help you drive a lot of organic traffic to your website. 

Here we go!  

1. Speed up Your Website

Fact: The visitors that come to your website from Google are not your customers but Google’s. Since Google is a customer-centric company, it hates sending its customers to slow websites.

Quick question: Would you prefer to go for a spin in a Chevy Corvette or Toyota Prius?! 

Just like how an average person loves riding a sports car, an average internet user enjoys browsing a website that is lightning fast.

Google has long been considering page loading time as a ranking signal. Therefore, you must make sure that the pages of your website take no more than a couple of seconds to load. The faster the page loading speed is, the better the rankings are. Great content and an ocean of backlinks can’t save your website from plummeting deep into Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) if your site is too slow and sluggish.

Fun fact: According to a funny internet saying, the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google results. Nobody ever goes there! Anything not on the first page of Google results can’t be considered a ranking. 

Key advantages of a fast-loading website:

• Better ranking in search engines
• Improved conversion rates 
• Increased customer loyalty and reputation 
• Boost in sales
• Customer acquisition from competitors. 

2. Devise a Search Engine Optimization Strategy

As Alan Lakein said, failing to plan is planning to fail! You must prepare a well-thought-out SEO strategy to be successful. 

The following are the five major components of search engine optimization. 

• Keyword Analysis                                                                                          
• Content Development and Marketing
• Link Acquisition
• Competitor Analysis
• On-page Optimization

Keyword Analysis 

Keywords or key phrases are the search queries that your potential customers enter into search engines to get relevant results. Let’s say you own and run a jewelry business in San Jose, CA. What do you think your targeted audience search on Google? 

Their search queries look like the following.

• San Jose jewelers
• San Jose jewelry store
• Wedding rings in San Jose

There are thousands of such keywords and key phrases your potential customers use to find a store or website that sells the items of their interest. 

How do you analyze such keywords?

Anyone who hasn’t had hands-on SEO experience may find the task of keyword analysis a little tricky. With that said, it isn’t rocket science. 

The following free keyword analysis tools help you list all the keywords and key phrases that can drive a lot of traffic to your website.

• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Google Ads keyword planner (Helps estimate search volumes)
• Ubersugges
• Google search suggestions.

You should use those keywords in your product titles, descriptions, blog posts, etc., for better search engine visibility. 

Content Development and Marketing

Content is king! It will continue to be king in the coming years as well. Content doesn’t necessarily mean blog posts. Content includes titles, descriptions, images, videos, social media posts, and even the transactional or promotional emails you send to your customers. Have total control of your content and make sure it speaks to your audience. 

 Five golden rules of content marketing

• Analyze keyword gaps and choose your keywords wisely
• Create a content calendar and stick to it
• Write content that helps your audience in one or the other way
• Avoid stuffing too many keywords
• Distribute content in social media channels 

Link Acquisition

Link building is a popular search engine optimization technique that web admins and SEO professionals use to rank their or their clients’ websites on top of the Google results. Simply put, the number of backlinks to your website helps search engines like Google determine the popularity of your site. Websites with many backlinks are highly likely to perform well in search engines than sites with fewer backlinks.  

The Murky World of Backlinks

Building backlinks is like skating on thin ice. Poor link-building strategy or trashy backlinks don’t add value. They can get your e-commerce website removed from Google’s search index altogether. Therefore, you must take great care to ensure that your link-building strategy is white hat and follows best practices. 

You need to build quality backlinks. Quality matters more than quantity here.

What is a good backlink?

Let’s talk about that San Jose jewelry store example again. An ideal backlink for the online store would:

• Be a do-follow link (No-follow links don’t count even if you build a million of them)
• Comes from a relevant website or blog (E.g., a blog that discusses fashion or jewelry)
• Comes from a blog or website with high domain authority/popularity
• Have a relevant and meaningful anchor text 

If you build a link that doesn’t satisfy any of the four rules mentioned above, your link acquisition efforts are going down the drain. 

Remember, easy backlinks from junk forums, comments, social bookmark sites, etc., are dead a long time back and add zero value to your link-building campaign.

Competitor Analysis

Analyzing the competition is essential for SEO success. This part of the strategy may be confusing unless you’re a digital marketing or SEO guru. Here are some factors you need to consider while analyzing your competitors.

On-page Optimization 

In addition to developing content and building backlinks, you need to optimize your pages for better SEO rankings. On-page optimization is critical. With that said, it alone can’t fetch you results. The following is a quick on-page SEO checklist for e-commerce. 

• SEO-friendly title tags
• Meta description
• Clean URLs
• H1 and H2 tags
• Bolding of keywords
• Al tags and image size optimization
• Internal page links
• Outbound links to high authority domains
• At least 300 words of content for each page
• Page speed optimization
• Mobile responsiveness 
• Usage of rich snippets, schema, and microdata
• Better call to action buttons
• Social sharing buttons 

3. Avoid Content Duplication  

Duplicate content is one of the main reasons many e-commerce websites struggle to perform well in search engine rankings. 

What exactly is duplicate content?

An E-commerce platform allows you to show a single product across multiple categories. The content related to that particular product, such as title and description, appears on various pages. Google hates it when the same content appears everywhere. Google calls it content duplication and may penalize websites that don’t address the problem.

So, how do you resolve the duplicate content issue in e-commerce? 

Content duplication in e-commerce, or any other e-commerce or CMS platform, can easily be avoided by using a canonical tag. A canonical tag on a web page informs search engines that the particular page is the master copy. When the canonical tag is defined, Google, or other search engines, don’t care if the same content appears on multiple pages.   

 This is what a canonical tag looks like:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/mens/tshirts” />

Luckily, avoiding duplicate content in e-commerce is not very difficult. Work with your developer to implement canonical tags across your website.

4. Get Your Product Titles Correct

The title of an e-commerce product is its meta title. Title tags help search engines display a page for a relevant query. To help you understand better, let’s analyze the title tag of this article.

E-Commerce SEO Tips That Skyrocket Your Sales in 2022

The title tells Google that it’s discussing SEO for e-commerce. What if we rename the title to “SEO Tips to Increase Your Website Traffic?”  Google no longer considers this article for e-commerce SEO-related searches. The year 2022 in the title indicates to Google that the content in the article is fresh. Hence, the chances are high that Google may rank this blog post on the top and ahead of old articles.

You need to use your product titles very smartly. 

Example of a poor title:

Art Expressions Women’s T-Shirt

Example of a good title:

Art Expressions Short Sleeve Pink Women’s T-Shirt

The second title may show the product page to people searching for a pink short-sleeve women’s t-shirt.  The “Short Sleeve Pink Women’s T-Shirt” is called a long tail keyword in the SEO terminology. You can research such long-tail keywords using the free keyword tools we mentioned earlier. 

5. Write Better Product Descriptions and Alt Tags

We know and understand that e-commerce business owners usually don’t have time to sit down and write product descriptions. Mark our words, a 300-word description of every product on your website increases website traffic. Since Google loves content and keyword-rich pages, writing 300 to 400 words product descriptions alone boosts your traffic without building any backlinks.

Ensure that all product images of your e-commerce store have proper alt texts. An alt-tag helps Google, or other search engines, understand a product image better. Remember, search engine bots can’t read or categorize an image unless there’s an alt tag for it. Don’t stuff keywords or key phrases in alt tags. Instead, use text that neatly describes the product. 

A bad alt tag:

Women’s t-shirts, women’s fashion women’s apparel, women’s tops

A good alt tag:

Art Expressions women’s black long sleeve t-shirt

 6. Set up an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap lists all of your e-commerce store’s pages and provides an easy way for search engine bots to crawl and index your website.

Creating an XML site is not very difficult. Depending on what e-commerce platform you are using, it takes a few minutes to a few hours to build a sitemap and make it live. 

Sitemap functionality can be added to open source e-commerce platforms like Magento and WordPress (WooCommerce) using plugins and extensions. 

DIY e-commerce solution providers like Shopify provides XML sitemap capability. You can control XML sitemap and many other features from the admin section.

A quick tip: Most websites have sitemap enabled by default or early developers. Check whether your website has a functional sitemap by typing yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. (Replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name).