What Ecommerce SEO Services Do You Need?

Although all ecommerce websites could benefit from a thorough SEO strategy, figuring out what specific services your website is crying out for is a different matter.

Not to worry though, as we’ll be breaking down what the different ecommerce SEO services are and help you decide what services you need.

As an ecommerce SEO agency that specialises in ecommerce websites, we know a thing or two about ecommerce SEO – so we’re happy to help!

Ecommerce SEO audit

A good first step to identifying what ecommerce SEO services you need the most is to get a free ecommerce SEO audit. This will help identify and evaluate any technical issues with your website that may impact indexing, crawling, or usability.

We refer to this stage as the ‘evaluative’ process of SEO – and as the name suggests, it focuses on evaluating the current state of your website and fixing issues. 

Some things we’ll assess in the SEO audit include:

• Page speed analysis – to ensure pages load in under 3 seconds
• 404-page analysis – to check any 404 pages that need to be set up as redirects
• Identify and set canonical URLs – prevents problems caused by identical / “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs
• Check crawl depth – to ensure Google is indexing pages within a website
• Check structured data – to check/implement markup on a page, to provide detail around the page’s content (e.g. recipes)
• Meta data analysis – to check any duplicate, missing, or too short/long meta titles and meta descriptions

The benefit of conducting an ecommerce SEO audit is it allows us to evaluate the current state of your website and understand what requires fixing or optimising.

These are usually easy wins in the sense that once they are all up to standard, it ensures your website has a solid foundation to move on to further optimisations.

Keyword research

Do you want your potential customers to find your site? Of course you do, so you need to conduct some keyword research to understand what your potential customers are searching for and ensure to tactically include those keywords on your website.

Tools like Ahrefs are ideally suited for keyword research – firstly, to conduct a keyword audit on your website to understand what keywords you currently rank for.

Secondly, to conduct a keyword gap analysis using your competing domains to identify new and valuable keyword opportunities.

The great thing about this is you can benefit from your competitor’s hard work!

Keyword strategy

The best keywords are those with high search volume, high potential to drive traffic, and low-medium keyword difficulty (this means they’re easier to rank for!). On top of that, you’ll want to match keywords with content on your website depending on the search intent. 

According to Yoast, there are 4 common types of search intent; informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial.

Search engines like Google aim to rank pages that are best suited to search terms and search intent. That’s why it’s important to factor in search intent when considering your keyword strategy.

On-page optimisation

Once you’ve completed your keyword research and have a strategy in place, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned.

Map your keywords across important pages on your ecommerce site so each important page has a clear focus (1-2 keywords per page). Next, optimise the following by tactically incorporating your keywords (only when relevant, avoid keyword stuffing!):

• Meta title
• Meta description
• H1s and H2s
• Page copy
• Anchor text
• Image alt text
• URL slug

You’ll also want to ensure you include unique and quality content on each page you want to rank. Duplicated content means your pages are fighting each other for the same keywords, so it’s best to avoid duplicated content wherever possible.

It’s essentially cannibalisation but for keywords.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is largely concerned with creating and managing a backlinking strategy to help improve the domain authority of your website.

You might have two questions: what is backlinking, and what is domain authority?

Backlinks are links from external websites going to your website. If the backlinks are from websites with a higher domain authority than yours, they are considered high value. Whereas, backlinks from websites with low domain authority can be considered spammy or toxic.

Great, so what’s domain authority?

Domain authority signals to search engines the quality and trustworthiness of your website. Hence, improving it can be a huge boost for ecommerce websites, and is certainly an ecommerce SEO service to consider.

How do I know ecommerce SEO services work?

So, you’ve implemented some of these SEO services and you probably want to make sure you’re getting a good ROI.

How do you figure out the impact of these services?

That’s where the measurement process comes in, a crucial part of any SEO strategy. What’s the point in implementing a strategy and not knowing whether it actually works?

The measurement process involves monthly reporting and data analysis to understand what’s working and what isn’t. That way, we can adapt the strategy and tactics to make sure targets and goals are met.

What’s more, we can use historical data to predict and forecast results, meaning we can set accurate and realistic targets.

Final thoughts

In this blog, we went through the popular ecommerce SEO services that are recommended for ecommerce websites.

In order to have an effective SEO strategy, your ecommerce business needs to incorporate each of these services to differing degrees. 

As we said at the start, the best first step is to conduct an ecommerce SEO audit, to understand your current situation and identify ways to fix and improve it. From there, you can utilise other SEO services like keyword research, on-page optimisation and off-page SEO.