Improving the positioning of an online store or e-commerce to end up in the top positions of Google can be overwhelming: product listings, categories, blog content, keywords, duplicate content, organic traffic, loading speed, etc.
Where to start?
In this article we are going to take a tour of the steps you must follow to lay the foundations for a correct SEO strategy for the online store of your business or brand.
Keyword Research para eCommerce
The basis of any web page (not just online stores or e-commerce) must be keyword research.
Keyword research or keyword study is an analysis of how your potential customers perform internet searches.
When we talk about the internet or search engines we will refer to Google, since it is the search engine that currently takes more than 90% of organic traffic in Spain.
Knowing how they search for you in Google or other search engines will allow you several things:
- Get to know your target audience and users in more detail.
- Analyze the search volume of the different keywords.
- Determine common patterns in your searches.
- Know the trends.
With all this information processed, you will be able to establish a correct web architecture that resolves all the search intentions of your users.
Search intent is the reason a user conducts an internet search. Whether it is to solve a problem, search for information, buy a product, visit a well-known website…
Hundreds of keywords can be grouped under the same search intent.
For example, if someone wants to buy a gaming laptop, they can perform the following searches:
- gaming laptops
- Laptop to play.
- Best gaming laptops.
All of these (and their related keywords or phrases) respond to the same search intent.
For each search intent, you must create content on your website that resolves it.
It does NOT have to be an article of more than 800 words.
In some cases, it will be an individual product sheet, a product category, or even informative blog articles. Depending on the nature of the search, you will have to provide one type of content or another.
Generally, transactional searches (which denote a certain purchase intention) are attacked from the e-commerce itself, leaving more informational searches for the blog.
Continuing with the previous example, a search that could be attacked from the blog would be “Gtx 1050 graphics card performance analysis”.
Thus leaving a product sheet to the position by the search “Buy graphic gtx 1050”.
Web architecture for eCommerce
Once you have done a complete keyword study, it is time to materialize it and translate it into the website. That is, define what content you are going to work on and what dependency they will have on each other.
You may think that in an online store or eCommerce this is a simple task: just create categories and subcategories. However, I am sorry to disappoint you but this is not so.
Depending on the type of products of your brand or business and online store, the architecture of the web can be very complicated. It is clear that it will have categories and subcategories. Returning to the previous case: “Gaming laptops” will be a subcategory that hangs from “Laptops”, which in turn hangs from “computers”.
In a more visual way, the hierarchy of said category would be: Computers > Laptops > Gaming laptops
Things get complicated when incorporating brands and attributes or characteristics. This is known as faceting.
Although the short-tail keywords in SEO have the highest search volume, the most traffic is generated through the combination of all their longtail keywords.
Thus, someone could search: “MSI gaming computers with 1 tera SSD”. To the main search we are adding the MSI brand and the one TB SSD hard drive feature. In this case, it would make sense to generate a subcategory that attacks that search intent. The URL could be: domain.com/computers-laptops-gaming/msi/1-TB-SSD
However, it does not make sense to generate an “unlimited” number of URLs in the online store to respond to absolutely all search results. There will be some that are so specific that hardly anyone looks for them. For example, “Gaming laptop with SSD 1 tera 16GB ram and full HD webcam” is such a specific search that few people will search for it for a month. Very few buyers do.
From the analysis and application of keyword research, you will have to decide to what point of the combination of attributes you are going to generate URLs to position for said search results.
As the crawl budget of a website and its authority are limited, you must limit the URLs of the website if you want to have good positioning.
This does not mean that there are no filters or combinations of filters within the store, but rather that, based on a certain grouping, they should be excluded from the web architecture. Either by obfuscating said URLs or dynamically generating product loads.
Other alternatives could be the use of index or even the blocking of certain routes through the robots.txt
This is usually a quite delicate aspect and, if applied poorly, it can negatively affect the project. If you do not have the necessary knowledge or the advice of a professional, it may be a better option to leave everything “open” and traceable”.
Content optimization for e-commerce
Once you know how many and which are the URLs that you are going to position, you have to optimize your content.
We could go a long way with the On-Page or On-Page SEO aspects of an online store, but we are going to focus on the most important ones. These are:
Structured data markup
Structured data markup helps search engines better understand the web and its content.
In addition, it favors the appearance of rich results when the result appears for a specific search. For example, the rating stars, the price of an offer, or the units in stock.
There are different ways to do structured data markup, but mainly JSON-LD and microdata are used.
All the information that is marked must appear visible in the product sheet or online store.
You can use this official tool to verify if the content on your website has structured data marked and if it is correct.
Heading Hierarchy
Headers are used to structure content on your website. They range from H1 to H6.
They are used hierarchically. That is, without an H2 an H3 could not be used.
In practice, this is not 100% true because sometimes menu items or related products are marked as h4 or h5 without having top headings.
Even so, within the content itself (product sheets, categories, or blog articles) I recommend you follow a hierarchical order whenever you can.
The H1 is the most important and it is recommended to incorporate the keyword that you want to position in it.
In the rest of the headings, it is positive to incorporate related keywords to improve semantic density.
Internal link
Although it is closely related to web architecture, internal linking in content is something that you must take into account and work on your web page.
In an online store, they will help you with several things. On the one hand, they make it easy to create a flow of visitors to the products or categories that you are most interested in selling. On the other, they allow you to reinforce certain URLs to improve their positioning, increasing the authority they receive.
It is recommended to use synonyms and related keywords when working with internal links.
Internal link health
In online stores or eCommerce with a high rotation of references, it is likely that there will be a constant high and low of products. If not managed properly, this can lead to a large number of broken links and redirects. This does not only affect the user experience, but it is something negative for the positioning of the web.
In addition to negatively affecting the crawl budget, it can lead to problems with the distribution of authority.
It is advisable to periodically check the web for errors and redirections that should not exist.
All internal links should lead to the final URLs (with very few exceptions).
Link Building strategy for your online store
It is not a secret that backlinks or external links are very important in the positioning strategy of a web page. These allow us to give authority and popularity to our website.
However, we must pay attention to the type of links we create or get since not all of them are useful or add value. The type of backlinks you should look for are those that come from a website with a related theme, from the related content. If the website also has authority and is positioned, it will be much better.
It is not the same that your brother-in-law links you from the blog that he has just created, as it is done by a reference medium on your subject. Google knows that and will add more value to the second link.
In addition to trying to get links, you should pay attention (among other things) to:
- referral URLs
- Anchor text used
- Follow / Nofollow relationship
- Countries and reference IP
You should always work on a link-building strategy that is as natural as possible since Google discourages any manipulation of backlinks (either buying, exchanging, or creating them themselves).
In short: SEO for eCommerce
The positioning of a website and, more specifically, of an online store or eCommerce is complex and requires prior work before even launching the website. Laying the foundations from the beginning and planning a strategy will facilitate the execution of tasks and the monitoring of the project.
SEO is not about doing one thing perfectly, but about doing many things well. It is a game of adding many small things.
