Underused SEO strategies for ecommerce stores

If you’re looking to grow your organic traffic, these underused SEO strategies for ecommerce stores could be just what you need.

We’ve spoken at length in previous blogs about SEO strategy, including writing an SEO strategy in 2022, but today we’re going to focus on some underused SEO strategies that you may not have considered before.

Updating existing content can be a quick win

Did you know that it’s often easier to increase your organic traffic by refreshing existing content than it is to create new content.

The reason for this is that any new pages or content will need to be crawled and indexed by search engines like Google. Existing content, however, should already be indexed and ranked.

With that in mind, our first underused SEO strategy for ecommerce stores is to update existing content on your website.

This content marketing strategy is a great way to gain rankings or traffic for keywords you already rank for.

In order to action this strategy, you’ll want to first identify articles that you can refresh. A great tool to do this is Animalz Revive. It integrates with your Google Analytics to analyse your site to look for content decay. It will then identify content that should be refreshed.

To refresh your content, you can do a variety of things. It may be as simple as adding some more keywords into the post, adding some headings or simply making the post longer. More advanced solutions would be to add some structured data to the post or optimise the internal linking.

Internal linking is an underused SEO strategy for ecommerce stores

Speaking of internal linking, it’s an underused SEO strategy that ecommerce stores should look to utilise to improve the on-site experience for crawlers and users.

You should review your current internal linking structure and the internal links currently pointing to the page in question.

Do you have enough internal links coming to the page? Are internal links coming from other authoritative pages? What anchor text is being used to link to the page?

Considering all of these factors and updating then or adding new internal links is an underused SEO strategy for many ecommerce websites, who often get caught up in optimising new content only.

Optimising your click-through-rate can lead to marginal gains

As SEOs, we often focus on improving ranking for keywords or pages that don’t rank well or drive the desired level of traffic. We often forget about the keywords that rank well, making optimising click-through-rate an underused SEO strategy for ecommerce websites.

Let’s look at an example. I’ve searched for “men’s running shorts” on Google and the website SportsShoes.com caught my attention.

They currently rank second for the keyword but their listing definitely leaves a lot to be desired.

This is a classic example of how optimising your metadata can have a great impact on your click-through rate on the SERPs. The team at SportsShoes.com are probably delighted to rank well for a keyword like this – particularly as they outrank the likes of Decathlon and Nike – but optimising their meta data here could have a great impact on their organic traffic by boosting their click-through-rate.

I would recommend using a tool like SeoTesting.com to test different variations of your metadata to find a winning formula.

Evergreen content can be a constant traffic source

Evergreen content is a type of content that doesn’t date. By creating relevant, information-rich content you can acquire a consistent stream of organic traffic.

For ecommerce stores, this can be an underused SEO strategy. Don’t forget that SEO traffic compounds so evergreen content can have a great impact on your traffic.

One example that comes to mind for ecommerce websites is a Black Friday landing page. Say you’re a brand like Nike. Every year people are going to be searching for your Black Friday sale every year.

By having an evergreen Black Friday page, say with a slug like /black-friday, instead of an annual page like /black-friday-2021 or /black-friday-2022, you’ll attract users to a page with authority every year.

Which underused SEO strategies should you implement?

As part of your SEO strategy for 2022, there’s no doubt you should implement some of these underused SEO strategies to drive growth for your organic traffic.

But if you were going to implement just one, which should you choose?

First of all, I would say that you should assess each one and implement whatever one makes sense for your business.

In terms of quick wins, updating existing content makes a lot of sense for most websites and is the tactic I would recommend implementing.