Ecommerce SEO Checklist – Our Complete Guide to Online Store SEO

Last year, e-commerce sales hit an incredible $6.6 trillion. If you sell online, one of the most important channels you have to reach consumers is search engine traffic, especially since over 23.6% of online searches for products begin on Google and 43% of all e-commerce traffic comes from organic Google search results. If you’re not making the most of your e-commerce SEO, you should probably take this as a sign to start. 

A study by Backlinko found that moving up one spot in the search results will increase clickthrough rates (CTR) by 30.8%. But even when you are on the first page of Google search results, getting traction can still be difficult if you’re not near the top. Users are ten times more likely to click through on the #1 result than #10. Just imagine the tales of SEO woe that besiege brands on pages 3, 4 and beyond. Statistics on search engines show that 75% of users never scroll past the first page or search results, anyway. 

If you’re here, you likely already know the value of search engine traffic to your business and may already realise that your competitors are outpacing you. So, what do you do about it? Our E-Commerce SEO checklist is here to help.

The big trends in e-commerce marketing

Last year, there was a surge in competition in the e-commerce space, with over 4 million live sites using Shopify. Despite this, Digital Third Coast reports that only 2.86% of e-commerce website visits convert into purchases. So, how do you stand out online in a crowded market? Here are the biggest trends in e-commerce that brands are currently leveraging for success: 

• Mobile first
• Everything is about the user journey
• Storytelling
• AI and chatbots
• Personalised experiences

These factors are paramount in how successful e-commerce is delivered online. They should be foremost in your thinking when engaging with any digital marketing aspect. 

In the UK, 46.5% of shoppers used their mobile to purchase something online.

The growth of mobile commerce is, in part, driving the increased focus on user experience because of reduced screen real estate and the need to keep user journeys simple, uncluttered, efficient, and quickly deliver what customers are looking for.

But there’s also a growing sophistication among search users who want increased relevancy and speed in getting to where they want to go. People are impatient with short attention spans. They are coping with a constant deluge of information that you need to stand out from if you’re going to make a sale. Keep that in mind when you’re optimising your site.

On the flip side, users are craving thoughtful and detailed online experiences. 81% of consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying; businesses can gain customers’ trust by making them feel special. This is where personalised experiences and storytelling come in. You need to take time to learn who your customers are and what makes them tick before you can expect them to repay the favour of listening to what you have to say. 

Your SEO checklist

Before diving into the fundamentals of e-commerce SEO, we recommend completing an SEO audit. An SEO audit will help you identify areas of your site that need improving, content that needs to be removed, and great performing content that you must guard with your life. To complete an SEO audit, you should: 

• Define your website’s goals and your target audience. 
• Use a crawling tool like Semrush to identify technical issues such as broken links and duplicate content. 

• Check for proper indexing of pages and identify any issues with the robots.txt file and XML sitemap.
• Evaluate your site’s title tags, meta descriptions, headings and URL structures for relevance and keyword optimisation. 
• Assess the quality and uniqueness of your site’s content. 
• Check for keyword cannibalisation and ensure each page targets unique keywords. 
• Analyse website speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. 
• Check to see if your site is mobile-friendly. 
• Check to see if your site has a clear navigation structure. 
• Evaluate the website’s backlink profile, focusing on the quality, relevance, and diversity of inbound links.
• Identify any spammy links that could harm your sites. 
• Evaluate your site’s content strategy, including blog posts and other multimedia assets. 
• Compile your findings into a comprehensive report that your team can use to improve your e-commerce SEO. 

Once you’ve established what needs to change, making those changes is the next step. Our e-commerce SEO checklist covers this in a lot more detail. Let’s go…

1. How to do keyword research for e-commerce

The first step in any e-commerce SEO activity is to target the right keywords to reach your consumers.

Head terms—if you’re not a heavy-hitting multinational with an SEO budget to match, ranking for a term like “men’s luxury watch” or “buy iPhone 11” isn’t going to happen. These holy-grail terms are often referred to as head terms or short-tail keywords. They are usually 2 to 3 words max and can drive a significant amount of traffic if you have the resources to compete for them.

If you’re in a specific niche (and you either have the budget or an established presence online), ranking for a head term that matches your niche may be attainable—for example, if you’re a musical instrument retailer and you want to rank for “Gibson Electric Guitars” or “Nord Keyboards.” The more niche you are, the more attainable these head terms are.

You will want to use any head terms on your primary pages—the home page, about us, category pages, etc. 

Long-tail keywords – when it comes to your e-commerce product pages, most of your effort should be focused on long-tail keywords. Why? Because they are less competitive for one thing, they also convert far more effectively than short-tailed phrases.

There’s also the consideration of relevance – you want your page to be as relevant to the consumer search as possible. The perfect alignment of this is when a customer searches for the particular make and model of your product – and that’s what comes up first on the search results page. Long-tail keywords convert better because they’re more likely to precisely match what the customer is searching for.

Many guides on keyword research out there discuss this in more depth, but for a down-and-dirty version, you can follow these steps:

Create a list of seed terms

The best place to start here is from your own experience. What are the names and types of your products? For example, if you’re a musical instrument retailer, you might start with keyboards, guitars, drums, etc. Then, break that down by type—synths, pianos, organs, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, bass guitars, etc. Then, you can break it down by brand or by a particular feature (12-string acoustic guitars vs. 6-string, analogue synths vs. digital or hybrid).

Use Amazon

Amazon is the world’s biggest retailer. But did you know it can also be an incredible secret weapon in your keyword research? Use the standard search bar from the Amazon home page, then enter your seed term. Amazon will then suggest a list of items related to your term. Again, look for long-tail terms of four or more words. Here, we might look at “acoustic guitars for beginners” or “acoustic guitars full-size fender.”

You can also look at what categories your competitors use on Amazon. That can help you decide what category-level pages and category-level keywords you need to have on your site (as well as letting you know what categories you need to enter if you’re also selling on Amazon!).

Use a keyword tool to research ideas

Most good keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner or Semrush, will tell you how many people are searching for a particular keyword, how competitive that term is, and suggest other terms you can use.

Let’s continue with the musical instruments, using the term “acoustic guitar”:

Keywords – for a musical instrument retailer, “acoustic guitar” would probably be a top-level or secondary-level (under “guitars”) category page. If we wanted to create other category pages beneath that, we might look at the phrases “guitar strings”, “Martin guitars”, or “Yamaha acoustic guitars”.

Search volume—the next thing we want to look at is search volume, which indicates the average monthly searches. We want to target phrases that are getting a reasonable amount of volume. Search volumes depend on your industry: you might be in a small niche where 1000 searches per month are significant or a bigger market where 100,000 is average.

Competition—you can also refine by competition. What’s critical here is that competition is measured by who is bidding for the term on Google Ads. That means that if it’s a low-competition phrase, then it’s probably not worth going after commercially (otherwise, someone would have recognised it already!).

Medium or high volume suggests that there is a market for the term because advertisers are committing budget to it and would expect to see some return on their investment. This, in turn, suggests that people are willing to spend money on products or services related to that term.

Separate into two “piles” based on search intent

Firstly, be aware that just because a term gets lots of searches and is high volume, it might not fit with your business. The more you can narrow it down to terms that are super relevant to what you offer, the more likely you are to connect with users and convert them into customers. This will save you money and deliver more sustainable results in the long term.

Once you’ve eliminated any non-relevant terms, separate your phrases into two piles.

1. Informational phrases – any phrases which contain a question (“how to…”, “how do I…”, “what is…” etc.) should be categorised as informational. These phrases can then be used in your content strategy to answer user questions with blog posts or long-form guides. You can add to this list by looking at the real questions your customers are asking your sales team and by using tools like BuzzSumo or Answer The Public to look at what other topics people are writing about based on the same keywords.

2. Purchasing intent – any phrases which are more driven by a purchase intent (“buy xxx” or just the name of the product” etc.) can be used on your category or product pages.

You can further categorise by head terms or long tail – any terms with four or more words are likely to be long-tail terms.

2. Site architecture: get your hierarchy right.

I’m not going to talk much about site architecture here as it’s a technical issue that your developer also needs to play a part in. But it still deserves a place in our E-commerce SEO checklist, and here’s why:

When it comes to content, you need to make sure that the user can get to the right page in as few clicks as possible from your home page. As we mentioned above, with a mobile-first approach, this is more important than ever, especially as mobile users will leave a website if they are frustrated with the navigation. 

It makes sense to categorise pages efficiently – it makes it easy to find your destination from anywhere within the site, it makes it easier to manage your online inventory, and it allows you to create SEO-friendly category pages which can rank for some of your head terms. So, if you can create a nice, easy-to-use structure like:

Home > Electric Guitars> Gibson Guitars> Flying V

Then, you have a path that gets you from A to B and back again as simply as possible.

Your keyword research above should inform this process, but you should also look at your current stats to see which pages get the most traffic and ensure these are as high up in the user journey as possible.

Once you’ve planned your hierarchy, use your head terms for your category pages, becoming more long-tail as you move down the hierarchy.

How to write a good URL

When you have a zillion products on your site, you can easily get into bad habits regarding the URL structure. Long, convoluted URL structures with lots of numbers and special characters can confuse search engine robots and users. What you should do is:

• Use a simple, short structure
• Use your main keyword for the page
• Keep it clean – no capitals or special characters
• Use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words

In short, a user could look at the URL and know pretty much what the page is about.

3. Meta (Page) Titles

The next item on our e-commerce SEO checklist is your site’s meta titles. The meta title shows the name of the web page – you can see it displayed on your browser, usually at the top. It tells users – and search engine bots – what page they are on. Again, it’s about thinking about what’s useful for the user; it’s also a place where you can not only optimise for search by considerate keyword placement, but you can also optimise for conversions by including action words like “buy now”, “limited offer”, “learn how to…” etc.

Bad meta titles: 

• Speakers
• Debt Information
• Medieval History
• Digestive Supplements

Good meta titles

• HiFi Speakers: Buy Our Award-Winning Speakers
• Debt Advice: Learn How To Get Out Of Debt Quickly
• Free History book: Download our Medieval History PDF
• Relieve Upset Stomach: Sale On Digestive Supplements

How to write meta titles

• Keep them short: no more than 55 characters is a good rule of thumb
• Use your target key phrases – it’s good to use a couple of variants within the text if possible
• Use initial caps to make words stand out
• Align your meta title with your other metadata
• Use action words to engage users and boost conversions
• Read it aloud – does it make sense? Does it appeal to the consumer?

4. Meta Descriptions

The meta description is the first thing customers see about your company when they receive the search results page. Again, it’s about considering the user experience first rather than overthinking what Google wants.

One myth is that the meta description can play a significant role in your page’s ranking—that’s no longer the case: Google does not currently use meta descriptions as a ranking factor.

HOWEVER – and this is very important – because this is effectively your advert on a page of search results, it can make a big difference to the CTR from the SERPs, and there is a significant amount of evidence that CTR is one of Google’s 200 or so factors.

So that’s the e-commerce SEO case, but we think the user journey should be the primary consideration when writing meta descriptions. Sure, you need to include the keywords, but it’s more about trying to write something that stands out for your potential customers, that is highly relevant to the user’s search, and that will help to increase your clickthrough rate from the search engine.

Writing your meta descriptions

• Think of them as your pitch for the particular product, service, article, etc.
• Include your keywords – like the page title, use a couple of variants within the text
• Use compelling words – “quick”, “easy”, “bargain”, “sale” etc
• They should be between 50 to 160 characters
• Differentiate yourself from your competitors – include the things that make you stand out
• Don’t duplicate meta descriptions

5. Product description writing

Most of the product copy we write for our clients is short: 50 to 150 words, depending on the product. It doesn’t have to be that short—sometimes longer is better. However, there are often budgetary considerations and the sheer time and organisation it takes to deal with hundreds of thousands of words.

However, we think making content too short can be a false economy. We’ve seen lots of research showing that long-form content – that is, upward of 2000 words – works best for blogs. Long-form content attracts 77.2% more clicks than shorter content. But it’s also true of product pages. You only have to look at the product pages on Amazon, which regularly outperform the brand manufacturer for the same product.

You don’t necessarily need to grind away writing individual product descriptions of 1000 words – that could get pretty tedious and/or very expensive quite quickly. Some of those words can come from customer reviews, technical specs and FAQs.

When it comes to the product description itself, though, how long does it need to be? If you’re hitting the word count with other features on the page, it will depend on the nature of the product and the level of awareness that people already have – the less they know about your product, the more you need to tell them. There’s also a certain amount of common sense required – a set of screws will require a shorter description than a car, for example.

You also need to ensure that you have enough room to include all your keywords, accurately describe the product, and convey a sense of the brand and product story.

Our experience is that the product description is there for several reasons:

1. Information– the customer needs to know that this product is right for them. Some e-commerce companies think pictures can tell the whole story, but while images are important, they can leave a lot to the imagination.

2. SEO – you need to get your keywords in the text in a way that looks natural, which may dictate a longer word count. It doesn’t need to be excessive, but it helps search engines index the page correctly AND quickly indicates that the user (who has just clicked through from a search engine) is in the right place. Need help writing optimised content for your website? Check out our SEO copywriting service.

3. Brand—don’t just think about SEO. This is where you can reinforce your brand tone of voice and build a relationship with your customers. Even some of the biggest brands often overlook this, but your product page is a great place to emphasise your unique tone of voice and engage with your customers—use humour, be conversational, and be individual.

Writing your product descriptions

Make it easy to scan—We have developed a standard approach to writing product descriptions that makes it easy for customers to scan the text.

1. H1 – headline to include the target keyword. Keep it reasonably short with just the essentials of the product.
2. Standfirst is a short sentence—usually one or two lines—that conveys the main thrust of the product story. It could be the inspiration, the standout feature, an award—anything that gets the customer’s attention and summarises the product quickly. This should include the target keyword toward the beginning of the paragraph.
3. Intro Paragraph – perhaps 2 – 3 lines that summarise the main benefits. We include a keyword variant within this text.
4. Sub-header – contains a keyword variant and usually a secondary benefit that wasn’t in the standfirst.
5. Sizzle statement – 2 – 3 lines on that little extra sizzle summarising hidden or surprise benefits. It could be something like a celebrity endorsement, a cool feature or a stat (1 million have been sold this year)
6. Standout features – 4 – 6 bullets on the product’s main features. We turn these into benefit statements (see below)

Get your keywords in there – your keyword should be in your H1 tag with 2 – 3 mentions of close variants, depending on the length of the text. The trick here is that you want the text to be as natural as possible, so don’t start bending the rules of grammar just to fit your keyword in. It should sound natural, not like someone tripping awkwardly over phrases that are crowbarred in.

Concentrate on benefits – our maxim for our writing team is that all features should have a benefit associated with them. It’s not enough to say “front-facing rivet” on a pair of sunglasses. It should be something like “front-facing rivet adds a distinctive retro aesthetic”.

This adds a persuasive element to the copy and allows you to express your tone of voice. It also ties directly to your brand—”distinctive retro aesthetic” may not be right for some brands, but it will be extremely evocative for others’ target consumers.

Make it stand out – people love product stories

Our approach to brand stories is similar to the site architecture. We start with an overall brand tone of voice – what’s the DNA that runs through everything you do? Then we develop a collection story – what’s the inspiration and theme for this group of products? Then there is an individual product story – what makes this particular product stand out?

By developing this consistency in the narrative that runs through your site, you’re more likely to develop a deeper relationship with the customer.

Be accurate – it reduces returns

It’s important to accurately describe the essential features in your product copy—not only will this help sell the product, but it can also minimise returns. Include materials used, size, shape, weight, technical specs, etc., anything that conveys information that can’t be delivered in the image.

What should you avoid?

Don’t duplicate—search engines don’t like duplicate content. Forget the scare stories about being banned from Google and the like—that’s unlikely to happen. It’s just that the search engines don’t know how to handle duplication, so they may not index your page. This can lead to strange situations where a reseller of a product ranks using the content it has taken from the brand/manufacturer, but the brand itself doesn’t rank.

Avoiding duplication is not just a search engine issue. Customers also don’t like duplication.

Firstly, it’s confusing because many people like to browse your product collection and will visit many pages to make a decision. If the copy is all the same, it doesn’t help the customer differentiate and make the right choice.

It’s also a missed opportunity. If you think of every aspect of your copy as a conversation, then repeating yourself continually is going to be a big turn-off. Saying the same thing over and over again just gets boring!

Do I need a page for every SKU?

The conventional SEO wisdom might suggest that you write a description for every product you have so you can rank for each page separately, thus increasing your keyword reach.

So, let’s say you have men’s Mr Tickle socks in four different colourways and write a separate product page for each one. However, because customers increasingly use mobile devices, it’s not good usability for them to have to click through four different pages to see each colour when you could just have that functionality on one page.

As we’ve come back to again and again in this article – the mantra is: think of the user. What benefits the user should also help your SEO.

6. Optimise your product images

Product images can easily be left to one side – particularly if you’re a content writer concentrating on the product description text. However, there are some elements that you should not overlook when optimising your product pages.

Image size – make sure your images aren’t too big – this could slow down your site speed which can have a dramatic effect on your SEO. Either adjust the file size before you upload, or you can use a plugin on your site to compress images like Smush.

File name – use a keyword-rich file name for the image file – if necessary, change the image file name before you upload it. This can make file management easier, too.

Alt tags – write a keyword-rich alt tag – search engines can’t interpret images, so they need some markup to tell them what the image is. This contributes to how a page is indexed and where it ranks. You can see the alt tag of an image by going to “view page source” in your browser.

• Keep your alt tags short and direct
• Use natural language – don’t keyword stuff
• Use the same keywords that you’re optimising the page for

That concludes everything you need to do to master your on-page SEO. But the work isn’t done yet. In the next sections of this e-commerce SEO checklist, we look at off-page and technical e-commerce SEO tips that you need to get right if you want to see results. 

E-commerce Off-page SEO

Your off-page SEO includes any external factors that influence your site’s authority with Google. These factors are as much about building brand awareness and reputation with your customers as they are about creating a good repertoire with Google. Your off-page SEO needs to consider: 

Backlink building: 

• Seek opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites relevant to your industry.
• Guest posting, influencer collaborations, and partnerships are effective strategies for building backlinks.
• Ensure backlinks are natural and relevant to avoid penalties from search engines.

Social Media Engagement:

• Establish a strong presence on social media platforms relevant to your target audience.
• Regularly share engaging content, including product updates, promotions, and customer testimonials.
• Encourage user-generated content (UGC) and interact with your audience to foster community engagement.

Online reviews and reputation management: 

• Monitor and manage online reviews across various platforms, including Google My Business, Yelp, and industry-specific review sites.
• Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and promptly address any negative feedback or complaints.
• Build trust and credibility by showcasing positive reviews and testimonials on your website and social media channels.

Local SEO optimisation: 

• Optimise your website for local search by including location-based keywords in your content, meta tags, and URL structures.
• Claim and optimise your Google My Business listing with accurate business information, photos, and customer reviews.
• Build citations on local directories and ensure consistency of NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across all online platforms.

Technical SEO for eCommerce

As for your technical SEO, while we recommend working with an SEO agency or professional who can guide you through the technicalities of these behind-the-scenes features, at a glance, here’s a short guide:

1. Website speed and performance:

Optimise your page loading speed by minimising server response time, leveraging browser caching, and compressing images and other static resources. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix can help you identify performance bottlenecks and implement recommended optimisations.

2. Mobile-friendliness:

Next, ensure your website is responsive and provides a seamless user experience across different devices and screen sizes. Test mobile-friendliness using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and address issues such as text readability, tap targets, and viewport configuration.

3. Indexing and crawling:

Make sure search engine bots can crawl and index your website effectively by avoiding crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content issues. Make the most of the robots.txt file and XML sitemap to guide search engine crawlers and prioritise important pages for indexing.

4. Canonicalisation and redirects:

Implement canonical tags to consolidate duplicate content and indicate the preferred version of a page to search engines. You can use 301 redirects to redirect outdated or non-existent URLs to relevant, active pages to maintain link equity and user experience.

5. Schema markup:

Schema markup provides search engines with additional context about your content, such as product information, reviews, events, and FAQs. Implement structured data using JSON-LD or microdata format to enhance search engine visibility and potentially qualify for rich snippets.

6. SSL certificate and HTTPS:

Lastly, you can secure your website with an SSL certificate to encrypt data transmission and enhance user trust and privacy. Ensure all pages are served over HTTPS to avoid browser security warnings and receive a ranking boost from search engines. This is pretty standard, so your developer will likely have done this already; if you have a very old site, you should check.

Don’t worry if a lot of this goes over your head. While e-commerce professionals need decent SEO knowledge, they’re not necessarily expected to be thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of technical e-commerce SEO. Sometimes it pays (and eases stress) to get a professional SEO team on board.

SEO for Amazon, Shopify and Etsy

SEO isn’t just for Google; Amazon uses it, too. The platform’s algorithm is pretty sophisticated, and while you may have already read our guide on writing product descriptions for the retail giant, here are a few e-commerce SEO tips to help you win big on Amazon.

• Write descriptive and keyword-rich product titles that accurately represent the item and its key features.
• Include relevant keywords at the beginning of the title to improve visibility in Amazon search results.

• Maximise the use of backend search terms provided in the product listing backend to include additional relevant keywords that may not fit in the title or bullet points.
• Research and include synonyms, variations, and long-tail keywords to capture a broader range of search queries.

• Write persuasive bullet points and product descriptions highlighting unique selling points, benefits, and features.
• Incorporate relevant keywords naturally within the content while ensuring readability and clarity for potential customers.

• Use high-quality, visually appealing images that accurately showcase the product from different angles and perspectives.
• Include informative image alt text with relevant keywords to improve accessibility and search visibility.

• Understand the factors influencing Amazon’s A9 algorithm, such as relevance, conversion rate, and customer satisfaction.
• Continuously optimise your product listings based on performance data and algorithm updates to improve search rankings and visibility.

If Amazon isn’t your top priority, Etsy or Shopify might be. To optimise your e-commerce SEO for either platform, these tips are pretty universal. However, on Etsy, meta titles and descriptions are less impactful due to the system’s internal search feature, which prioritises keywords in the product titles and tags. 

Likewise, Shopify offers a range of apps and plugins (similar to WordPress) that provide additional SEO tools to enhance your site’s performance. These allow you to track performance, improve technical SEO, and change your site’s user experience. 

Recap: how to write for SEO

The bottom line for your entire e-commerce SEO strategy and the most crucial point you can take from our e-commerce SEO checklist is this: everything you do needs to be for your user. You can’t cheat the system, and you certainly can’t manipulate Google into thinking your content is better than it is – sites that have been doing this were caught red-handed and deindexed in the most recent Google algorithm update in March of this year. 

In short, your e-commerce SEO strategy needs to: 

• Ensure your website is easy to navigate with intuitive menus, clear categories and a responsive design across different devices. 
• Include search-led, relevant long-tail keywords throughout your copy. 
• Use high-res images and videos to showcase your products effectively. 
• Aim for a fast page loading speed. 
• Implement a clear and compelling call to action. 
• Tell your product and brand story. 
• Continuously monitor performance and optimise based on these results.

What next?

There are so many components to a good product page that it can be easy to overlook some vital steps in your optimisation, whether it’s copy-and-paste meta descriptions, a lack of alt tags or a lifeless product description.

However, when dealing with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of products, product pages can often be an afterthought – time-consuming and low priority when competing with budgets for advertising, content marketing or social media.

When faced with those objections, we recommend clients take a phased approach to optimising product pages. Start with the top 20% according to your priorities – that could be the top 20% most profitable, highest traffic, least competitive to rank for etc. We recommend always starting with your most profitable products because the returns are worth the effort.

Once you’ve chosen the top 20%, really go for it—work on a compelling product description that conveys the product and brand story. Sell the benefits. Optimise every element of the page, and (particularly if it’s a high-ticket item) test every element on the page until you have achieved perfection.

Big Star has been creating optimised product descriptions (that actually sell) since before the iPhone. Drop us an email to find out more. You can also read more about our SEO copywriting services here.