4 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Get More Traffic to Your Online Store

Google is the operating system of the Internet. If you want your online store to be visible to users, it needs to be available to the search tools they use to find almost everything online. The ecommerce SEO tips in this article are a good place to get started.

Let’s look at some quick search stats:

• Site searchers are over 200% more likely to convert than regular visitors.
• 43% of site visitors immediately go to the search box.
• Shoppers using search spend 2.6x more.
• 12% of users will go to another site if their search is unsuccessful.

If search is how people research, find, and buy—then your ecommerce store needs to be visible and valuable to search engines.

Why you should seek out ecommerce SEO tips

SEO sometimes has a negative reputation. In the past, scam artists were able to game Google with shady tactics that didn’t serve the user or the site, such as stuffing keywords into invisible text and buying links from spam services. Nowadays, however, Google is more sophisticated, and it’s more beneficial to think of SEO as a partnership.

Though it often feels like a competition between you and other online stores to climb the search engine results pages (SERPs), your interests and Google’s are more aligned than you think. You want customers to find your store. Google wants to help users find what they’re searching for. SEO, at its essence, is about communicating clearly to your users, via Google search, that your site is indeed what they want.

Seeking out new tips, re-optimizing your site, and maintaining SEO best practices as you scale is essential for achieving and encouraging organic search traffic. Every improvement you add widens your customer acquisition funnel, leading to higher potential conversion rates.

In this article, we’re sharing four ecommerce SEO tips that you can start implementing today, so you can see results and start watching your ecommerce site grow.

1. Switch to HTTPS security encryption

You’ve probably seen HTTP and HTTPS so often—at the beginning of almost every URL—that you don’t even think about them. In essence, they’re both kinds of requests and responses that clients and servers make between each other. When HTTP was originally invented, it helped clients and servers interpret data but did nothing to protect it. HTTPS does.

Google ranks HTTPS sites more highly than HTTP sites, which means switching offers an immediate SEO benefit. But HTTPS isn’t just beneficial to Google. The extra encryption will help you earn the trust of your customers, who will be sharing their personal financial information with you. If you want to help protect your customers’ data and rank highly in search engine results, HTTPS is key.

2. Compress the size of your image files

Online shoppers need images to make decisions, but without the right optimization, images can make sure your site isn’t seen at all.

When images on your product pages take too long to load, they slow down the overall page speed. Google penalizes websites that are slow to load, especially on mobile devices, since no customer wants to wait for a product to load.

Shopify and Magento have their own image size recommendations, so you’ll want to size accordingly, depending on your ecommerce platform of choice. There are also services such as TinyPNG that can compress images as necessary.

3. Choose appropriate keywords

Keywords are the primary tools Google and other search engines use to understand your content. Though search algorithms are complex, and many of the details hidden from onlookers, a core truth is that the repetition of certain words indicates the subject matter of a piece of content. When Google is trying to determine what a piece of content on your site is about, it’s going to look first at which words you use and how often you use them.

Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Alexa enable detailed keyword research that can return all the information you need. The best keywords are relevant—with high search volume and low competition.

For instance, you don’t want to optimize your website or homepage for a keyword that no one is searching for. If no one is searching, there’ll be no one to find it. At the same time, you don’t want to optimize your website for a keyword that’s already dominated by the major ecommerce players, like Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, and eBay. Google cares about the reputation of each site, so be realistic about what you can compete with.

You should also make sure to use short and long tail keywords. Short tail keywords have higher volume but more competition, whereas long tail keywords have lower volume and lower competition. The latter is easier to rank for, but the former returns higher yields if you succeed. Make sure your strategy includes both.

You may want to consider working with an SEO consultant to help you put together an SEO strategy if you’re not sure how to do it yourself.

4. Incorporate keywords into product descriptions, page titles, meta descriptions, and category pages

Once you’ve chosen your target keywords, you want to take the time to incorporate them into your site content without being too obvious or heavy-handed. Keywords should flow naturally into your content. If you want to rank for a particular keyword, you should build content that naturally suits that keyword. Not only will the content be better, but readers who search that keyword and find content that fits it will be more likely to stay on your site. Good user experience is another valuable sign for Google.

You also don’t want to overuse keywords. If you’re not sure how page titles and meta descriptions work, you may want to partner with an SEO consultant who can help you better understand these components of a website.

Once you understand the basics of SEO for your ecommerce website, you can also use blogging to further grow organic traffic. By writing high-quality articles about topics your customers are interested in, you can draw them to your site where they might eventually make a purchase.

If you start incorporating these ecommerce SEO tips today, you’ll be on your way to ranking on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. Before long, you’ll notice a bump in organic search traffic to your website, and you’ll be able to start taking steps to convert those visitors into life-long customers.