In 2022, how do online stores drive organic traffic?

For eCommerce websites, search engine optimization is like low-hanging fruit to drive organic traffic. Despite the fact that SEO offers the highest return on investment of any eCommerce marketing effort. Most online stores are built with search engines in mind. Instead, we rely on social media or paid advertisements, which necessitate ongoing effort and a steady supply of cash. SEO, on the other hand, just necessitates initial work because once you rank, you almost make sales without incurring any additional costs. So Grab a cup of coffee, close the door, and read this article to understand eCommerce SEO methods to drive organic traffic.

Important Ecommerce SEO Techniques to Consider to drive organic traffic

The finest eCommerce SEO plan comprises the following elements:

• To find out what kinds of keywords clients are looking for, by conducting keyword research.
• Create a site architecture based on your Keyword research.
• Strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content for on-page SEO.
• Use technical SEO, to check your site’s crawlability. 
• Local SEO to help you get more organic traffic in your area.
• Content marketing to drive more organic traffic.
• Link building to boost your website’s authority.
• SEO tools to track your progress.

What is Search Engine Optimization and Why Should You Care?

Search Engine Optimization is the scientific process of optimizing your website for specific keywords in order to rank higher in search engines like Google. It’s about the technical parts of SEO, which include a creative user experience and design component. But, in the end, optimizing your site means achieving the best possible result for your goal phrase. Google’s goal is to rank search results that are good at answering all of the searcher’s questions so that they don’t come back to Google for more information.

So, how do you go about doing that?

• Reveal the most comprehensive solutions to the most common inquiries by conveying your views with better photos, videos, or examples.
• Improve the user experience by making the site faster, more mobile-friendly, and making the interface more intuitive.

Ecommerce Website Traffic Sources to drive organic traffic

eCommerce entails creating detailed, vivid product descriptions, as well as attractive, eye-catching photos with a large number of reviews to assist visitors in making purchasing decisions. It also implies that making the buttons large enough, maintaining your site free of glitches, and displaying social proof of products makes it easy for visitors to purchase. It also entails providing your site visitors with product comparisons to your competitors so they don’t leave to conduct additional research. 

Keyword Research for E-commerce to drive organic traffic

The first stage in an eCommerce SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research. One of two things will happen if you get this part wrong:

• You’ll try to rank for keywords that are too difficult to rank for, and you’ll never get to page one.
• You’ll be ranked for keywords that don’t receive much traffic with no leads to sales.

Then why eCommerce keyword research is critical to ensuring to have target keywords that are relatively easy to rank, with high search volume, to make a high conversion rate. However, choosing keywords entails more than how difficult it is to rank for them or how many people search for them. You must also consider commercial intent when selecting the optimal keywords. You’re undoubtedly wondering how to conduct e-commerce keyword research, calculate keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume, and determine buyer intent.

Let’s begin with the e-commerce colossus.

1. Conduct a keyword search to drive organic traffic. 

To locate keywords, use SEO tools to search for and obtain them. Check off all the terms and add them to your list each time you search, then save the list. However, we can’t just pick these terms at random. Before we employ these keywords in our store we need to check the search traffic, keyword difficulty, and also about the customer intent.

2. Conduct competition research to find keywords.

If you have competitors who rank higher in search results than you, you can take keyword ideas from their websites also. To begin, type your term into Google and examine their category and product pages for keywords. Don’t just copy and paste your competitor’s keywords. They may have a higher domain authority (DA) than you, but just because they outrank it doesn’t imply they’ve chosen the greatest keywords. 

3. Look for keyword possibilities.

An SEO tool can help you with keyword research, competitor research, and backlink building. Put your URL into the Site Explorer search field once you’ve signed up for an account with any SEO tool. Scroll down to see all the terms your site ranks for by clicking the “Organic search” option. These are low-hanging fruit, which implies effective on-page SEO and possibly some link-building to rank higher. Copy and paste your keywords into a new tab in your spreadsheet after exporting them. Let’s now take over our competitor’s keywords.

This time, enter a competitor’s name into the site explorer and navigate to the same Organic Keywords page. This will show you all of your competitor’s low-competition, relevant keywords. If you don’t obtain enough results, remove the volume minimum.

4. Check to see if you’re using the proper keywords.

To choose which keywords to utilize, you must first analyze keyword difficulty, search volume, and buyer intent. Calculate the approximate search volume and CPC. You should consider developing a keyword matrix if you are serious about SEO and want to maximize your keyword spread.

A keyword matrix is essentially a means to sort through all of your keywords and organize your spreadsheet so that you can easily select which keywords to employ on your pages. It’s dependent on search volume, search purpose, and KD.

Let’s start talking about how to use them now.

The Structure of an E-commerce Website

It’s time to put everything you’ve learned about the best keywords into practice. This begins with the structure of your website.

The architecture, or structure, of your eCommerce site, is how you organize your navigation, category pages, and product pages. It all boils down to providing visitors with the greatest, most relevant material by lowering the number of clicks required to find it.

When it comes to building a good site structure, there are three “golden guidelines” to follow:

• Make it scalable and simple.
• It should not take more than three clicks to navigate from one page to another.
• Create page URLs and subdirectories using keywords.

A poorly designed eCommerce site is not only difficult to navigate but also damages your search engine rankings. Also, now is a good opportunity to bring up content marketing. Great content can act as your most important plant, attracting a slew of external backlinks from other websites. The link authority from your content can be funneled to your product and category sites. Let’s have a look at how that’s accomplished.

A good Ecommerce Website Start with your site structure to get the maximum authority to your important pages. Also, keep in mind the golden rules. Internal linking and proper navigation ensure that those pages receive the most authority from your main page and, as a result, have a better chance of ranking highly in search.

E-commerce Sites: An On-Page SEO Strategy

It’s all about making sure your keywords are in the appropriate places when it comes to on-page SEO for eCommerce. Let’s talk about the three on-page techniques now:

• For eCommerce category pages, on-page SEO is important.
• On-page SEO for product pages in an eCommerce store.
• On-page SEO for the content of your blog.

On-page SEO is crucial because it aids your visibility in other Search Engine Results Page (SERP) aspects. Let’s take a look at all of the SERP ranking elements.

• Carousel – Local results with an image, business name, ratings, and reviews are displayed here.
• News – At the top of the results page, a time-sensitive news topic block is displayed.
• Images – At the top of a search, these show a horizontal row of photographs.
• Links to other websites – Up to ten site links can be featured alongside an organic result in a brand intent search.
• Review – This rich result (formerly known as a rich snippet) shows stars and rating information for products and other objects that can be reviewed.
• Tweet – Relevant tweets may show up in natural search results.
• Video – Inorganic results, and videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites can be presented with their thumbnail.
• Video Featured – It appears at the top of the search results and has a larger thumbnail and can provide more information.
• Featured snippet – A unique box that appears above the top organic results and answers a specific inquiry.
• Knowledge Panel –  It displays a block of information about people, movies, and events, to name a few, using semantic data from many sources, and it usually appears to the right of search results.
• Top Ads – AdWords ads that appear in the top four positions on the search results page.
• Bottom ads –  AdWords advertisements that appear in the last three slots on the search page.

On-page SEO for eCommerce product pages: How to Do It

If your category pages are found on Google, they’ll have instant access to all of your products in that category. You should use your target keyword in the following areas to fully optimize these pages:

1. In the web address.

It’s simple to include your major term in the URL, and it helps search ranks. Because Google prefers URLs that are shorter and easier to read which has an influence on SEO. This is especially true for websites that compete in more crowded niches. Optimized URLs are another technique to obtain an advantage over your competition and attract more traffic. 

2. In the tag for the title (H1).

The keyword should be as close to the beginning of the title tag, or H1 tag, as feasible.

3. In the body of the text

This is when things start to become a little more complicated. The majority of category pages skip the introduction and go right to the products, which is bad for Google. So Aim for a 300-word introduction with your keyword mentioned at least 2-3 times.

4. In the alt text of an image.

Google can’t read images so it relies on alt text to figure out what they’re about. This gives you another opportunity to incorporate your keyword on the website, as well as a chance to appear in Google image results.

5. Information in the metadata.

While putting your keyword in your metadata can increase the click-through rate. This is because Google bolds your important term in the search results when you add it to the metadata. Repeat it for all of your category pages before moving on to your product pages.

E-commerce Product Pages: On-Page SEO to drive organic traffic

Basically, follow the same steps that you did for your category pages, with two exceptions:

• A banner image isn’t required.
• Rather than writing 300 words, aim for 1,000 words.

The explanation for this is straightforward:

Long-form content of at least 2,000 words is common on Google’s top pages. As a result, Google believes that a page with a lot of information has a better probability of providing the answer a searcher is looking for.

Technical SEO Audits for E-commerce Websites: What You Need to Know

It’s not only about keywords when it comes to SEO. There’s also a technical side to consider, such as site performance, user experience, mobile-friendliness, and functional links. At the end of the day, it’s all about giving your users the best experience. 

So, how can you do a technical SEO audit and optimize your eCommerce SEO?

• Examine your crawl report after crawling your site.
• Make sure that just one version of your site is viewed.
• Examine the SEO of your home page.
• Ensure that the content is unique.
• Analyze the volume of search traffic.
• Check out the Google Search Console.
• Examine the profile of your backlinks.
• Improve the speed of your website.

That’s all there is to it! Your eCommerce SEO audit is now complete. Let’s get to work on local SEO now!

E-commerce Retailers Should Use Local SEO to drive organic traffic

While local SEO isn’t for everyone, if you have a real store or simply want more local site visitors, it can help. You must do the following three things in order to increase your local SEO rankings and drive organic traffic.

1. Go to Google My Business and claim your profile.

Google My Business is a wonderful service that allows you to enter your company’s information into Google’s database. This accomplishes a few things, but the most important is that it allows your business to appear in local search results. You can display information about your website, address, hours of operation, images, reviews, and more. 

2. Create citations in your local area.

Backlinks from other local websites, such as news outlets, periodicals, press releases, and other local media, are known as local citations. Citations are crucial for local SEO since they demonstrate to Google that you are well-known in your area. Backlinks from local sites, like backlinks from other sites, boost local SEO and drive organic traffic.

3. Get local websites to link to you.

Local connections are an excellent technique to increase overall domain authority and improve local rankings. Local news outlets, charities you support, locally-based blogs, and any local groups like a Chamber of Commerce are all quick wins.

How Online retailers can benefit from link building.

Backlinks to your website from other websites with a high domain authority help your rankings more than almost any other factor. It’s a little more involved and time-consuming than simply making a website change because they’re called off-page SEO. To get such links, you’ll need to collaborate with other bloggers and website owners. Let’s look at the three distinct link-building chances now.

1. Increasing the number of links to your resource page.

For lack of a better term, resource pages are sites devoted to your industry’s resources. While the latter may not provide much page authority due to a large number of links on the page, they are significantly quicker to obtain and provide a ranking boost. 

2. Collaborating with influencers

Influencers are persons in your business or niche with a huge following and/or a high-domain-authority website who aren’t directly competing with you. Working with influencers for SEO is a unique experience. Rather than paying an influencer to promote your product on social media, the idea is to have them a link to your website on their own. This might be in the form of a blog article highlighting your products or simply a link from a page on their website.

3. Creating broken links

Broken link building, sometimes known as “link building by mending the internet,” is one of the most influential and simple link-building strategies.

Organic Traffic by E-commerce Verticals on Desktop vs. Mobile

People prefer to conduct their research on desktop computers when it comes to eCommerce. While preliminary research can be done on a mobile device, more desktop searches are likely to follow. This is critical because you want your pages to provide the best possible visitor experience. Because Google is moving toward a “mobile-first” index, all e-commerce businesses should ensure that their sites are ready for this huge shift.

How to upgrade your SEO and make it more effective:

• Choose the best keywords for your product and category pages and long-tail keywords for your blog content.
• Make sure you’re using the proper keywords on the right pages of your website.
• Perform an SEO analysis, repair your site’s architecture, reduce thin content, and optimize your crawl budget as much as possible.
• Enhancing your site’s on-page SEO and generating or upgrading content to be the best result for its target keywords, while ensuring that your most critical product pages are linked back.
• Build white-hat links to your most important pages if necessary.

Just keep in mind that Google’s purpose is to deliver the greatest possible search results, so if you make that your goal, you’ll come out on top in the end.

Conclusion

The only one of these methods that are reliable, free, and relatively simple to obtain is search traffic. You must understand eCommerce SEO now if you want your site to receive Hundreds of extra sales you can generate by a simple SEO effort. It also doesn’t have to take you years to accomplish.

Please share this guide if you found it useful so that we can help as many store owners as possible build their companies. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or don’t have time to deal with all of this SEO, reach out to our staff for assistance using info@shopifytask.com.