Having your products be found by customers is at the top of every e-commerce business’s mind. With similar products and competitors fighting for the same customer’s attention, what can help make an e-commerce website successful and stand out in the rankings? Never fear…e-commerce SEO is here to save the day! In this ultimate guide, we will discuss what e-commerce SEO is, why it’s important, and how you can improve your e-commerce SEO. Let’s get started!

What is E-commerce SEO?

E-commerce SEO consists of processes, strategies, and optimizations that go into improving the visibility of your online store in SERPs (search engine result pages).

SEO (search engine optimization) is focused around gaining organic traffic for a site through implementing different strategies and optimizations. These strategies could be based around link building, optimizing your on-site content, utilizing targeted keywords, etc.

E-commerce SEO is essentially taking all of the strategies of SEO and putting an e-commerce focus on it. Specifically, it focuses on the products your small business sells online and working to find organic ways for the right target audience to find them. It’s important for your products to be seen and found by your customers and SEO is the perfect tool to solve this issue.

Why is SEO Important for E-commerce Companies?

For e-commerce companies, SEO is the best kept secret within the industry. With some SEO work on your site, you could start driving free (Yes, you read it correctly) high-intent traffic to your site in a reasonable timeframe. With social media and paid advertising, there is a constant need for expenses and updates. With SEO, once you reach the first page of Google for a keyword, the clicks and traffic will come free with minor updates needed. If you are still debating whether SEO is a good strategy for your e-commerce site, check out these three statistics:

Over 30% of online shoppers start their first shopping experience on Google, whether they have a specific product in mind, or just looking for inspiration.
37.5% of all e-commerce traffic comes from organic search.
Very few users will scroll past the first page of Google, with only 0.78% of users clicking on something on the second page.

Whether you’re running a small business or an enterprise organization, SEO can bring numerous benefits to your business including:

Helping your brand get discovered by a new target audience. Organic search visibility opens the doors to any and all users across many demographics. It helps your brand get found online in unique places and by new people every day.
Increasing exposure to your products and services. With a focused SEO strategy, e-commerce SEO will help improve visibility across many product and services pages, not just the home page. Have a specific product you want to promote? E-commerce SEO can help reach a wider audience more quickly.
- E-commerce SEO can help increase your sales. Organic search traffic is known to produce lower bounce rates in comparison to paid / social media advertising. It can also produce more qualified traffic for your business. With improved and added qualified traffic on your site, website sales should increase over time.
- E-commerce SEO can offer your business a sustainable growth solution for the long-term. It has been and continues to be a long-term strategy for most businesses. In this case, long term strategy = long term results. SEO isn’t the marketing strategy you will need to pour money into constantly with seeing little to zero ROI.
How to Improve Your E-commerce SEO!
If you’re new to e-commerce SEO, it can be hard to know where to start or what strategies are the best to use. Here are the main areas to focus on when improving your overall e-commerce SEO:
Keyword Research
Keywords are the building blocks that help strengthen your e-commerce SEO strategy. Keyword research is needed to be done first to help find the right keywords. These keywords could be long-tail or short-tail, but conducting keyword research helps your business find understanding and direction in what keywords are best to implement.
Long-tail and short-tail keywords, also known as head terms, define what type of keyword they are, based on if they’re a few words or a full phrase. Long-tail keywords tend to have a higher conversion rate despite generating lower search volume. It’s important to start with finding the right head keywords and then go into finding medium keywords that people are looking for.
Places such as Google’s “People Also Ask” featured snippets, related searches at the bottom of SERPs, and the auto-suggest feature in the search bar are all areas in which medium or long-tailed keywords would be the most effective. When you find a few keywords that could work, it’s important to check their intent. This is critical if you want your keywords to work and be effective. You can check this by analyzing SERP intent for each keyword and finding what organic results populate and rank for already. This enables your business to implement keywords in the right areas of your site to further improve SEO for e-commerce websites.
Along with conducting keyword research, it’s important to enable the search function feature on your website. Doing this will help you receive data on what customers are searching for when they’re on your website. It also helps identify:
- Different keyword opportunities or options from you to choose from
- Customer demand in inspecting what they are searching for and finding
- Does the navigation on your website make sense? Is it confusing to the point where it’s necessary to use the search bar?
- Identifying these elements will help utilize the best SEO practices for e-commerce websites.
  Competitor Research
- Along with keyword research, performing competitive research for SEO will help you understand what is working (ranking), and areas to stand out from competitors. Learning more about your relevant online competition provides more insight as your business looks to grow. Not sure how to find your competition online? Based on your keyword research findings from above, search relevant keywords online to see which companies rank for various keywords. Once you begin to understand who your competitors are, perform extensive research in these three areas:
  - What they’re doing well: Analyze their site to locate areas of strength. Take notes of features on the site you found valuable and engaging.
  - What to avoid: Find aspects on your competitors site to avoid publishing to your site. This could include non-user-friendly elements of the site or anything that you feel is hurting their site.
  - What unique advantages your website can bring to users: Consider any areas of your e-commerce site that could be unique, better, or special? Determine ways that your e-commerce site can stand out from the competition.
  Additionally, use these questions to further audit and understand your online competition:
  - What pages do they have on their website and how are they optimized?
  - What keywords are they going after?
  - What is their supporting content like?
  - What topics are they covering in their resource and blog pages?
  - What is their site navigation structured like?
  - Are they incorporating video marketing to their website?
  Use the answers to these questions to help shape your ecommerce SEO strategy. Standing out from online competition can help improve your keyword rankings. It is a crucial way to accomplish goals of driving traffic and sales. Now that you have performed competitor and keyword research, we will start exploring more of the technical aspects of SEO.
  Site Navigation and Architecture
  Site navigation and the architecture of your ecommerce website are critical in having a successful user experience. Having an organized and structured site navigation helps add an SEO element in keeping customers on your website. It’s important not to push down your most important pages too far into the menu or too far away from the home page. One method to prevent this from happening is by following the 3 click rule.
  The 3 click rule is when you shouldn’t have to take more than 3 clicks to get back to the homepage. This rule should be followed for all of your pages including product pages—it should not take more than 3 clicks to make a conversion.
  One great rule of thumb to help keep your pages organized can be through mega menus. Sometimes with SEO, the most authority can go to pages that are in the main navigation (such as the Home, Products, Services, About Us, Contact pages). Mega menus are a great way to organize all of your products and categories without it looking cluttered or diminishing the site’s architecture value and design.

Optimized Site Structure

Unoptimized Site Structure

Another way to keep your pages organized can be through categories. Especially for your products, having them categorized can help customers find what they are looking for. Let’s take a suede chair for example. A suede chair can fit under multiple categories such as: Furniture, Living Room Furniture, Living Room Chairs, Arm Chairs, Suede Chairs, Accent Chairs, etc. Putting the chair in all of the categories it applies in helps customers find it easier and doesn’t require entering multiple pages. Creating categories helps improve site structure and the architecture of your ecommerce website.

Another factor to consider in site structure and architecture is your URL structure. You want to be sure your URL structure makes sense, goes to the right place, and is optimized for your products and the page. It’s important to be mindful of the different pathways your customers could take on your product page. If there are multiple avenues, be sure to stick with a clean URL structure for all of your products. That way the categories or filters are not accounted for in the URL folder pathways. This can sometimes be overlooked and can cause issues of duplicate content further down the line.

Be mindful of the breadcrumbs you’re implementing and structuring. Doing so helps improve user experience and helps customers know where they’re going on your ecommerce site. If a customer learns to understand your site, it will give them a reason to keep coming back and visiting when they recognize and know how to get around. Overall, it’s important to have a structured and organized site navigation and architecture to help create the best SEO practices for your ecommerce website.

Technical SEO

A site’s navigation and design is not the only aspect that is important for SEO. Technical SEO (although complicated at times) plays a key role in ensuring that your website will beat out the online competition. Ecommerce websites often have a lot of elements and pages. Making sure they are working flawlessly can often make all the difference! Here are a few of the most common technical SEO issues, why they matter, and how to fix them:

Secured Website (HTTP vs HTTPS)

One common technical SEO issue is having an unsecure website. An unsecure website happens when the SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate is expired or non-existent. When the website is unsecured, the URL will show HTTP instead of HTTPS. A secure website not only builds trust and provides security for your website, Google has confirmed that a secure website is a part of their ranking algorithm.

How to fix an unsecure website:

Contact your domain registrar or web developer to purchase, install, or renew your SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate.
Use Google Search Console to make sure all http URLs are redirected properly.
Update the XML sitemap as needed.

Broken Links

Another common technical SEO issue is broken links. Broken Links are links on a website that lead to a 404 error (page not found) or the wrong page. Although a minor direct ranking factor, broken links will affect the page user experience which can hurt your SEO.

How to fix broken links:

Use Google Search Console or to locate the broken links on your website
Redirect broken pages links to working pages using a 301 redirect.

Out-of-Stock Products

Permanently out-of-stock products

If a product is out-of-stock and will not be restocked again, it’s best to delete them from the page. From there, there are a couple of options to choose from. First, once the page is removed, the product URL would return a 404 status code. This is an acceptable route to take if there is not a similar or relevant product to redirect the website visitor to. A 404 error page should be optimized to still help customers navigate to other important pages on the website, such as the main product categories, an FAQ or help center, or the home page.

The second option is If there are other product options that are similar to the out-of-stock product, you can add a 301 redirect to send website visitors to another product page instead of just a 404 error page. Regardless of the route that’s taken, remember to remove internal links pointing to the deleted page to avoid redirect chains and loops. This can hurt the website’s user experience and can also slow down site speed performance.

Temporarily out-of-stock products

f a product is temporarily unavailable, but will be restocked in the future, do not remove the page from your website. To maintain a good user experience, it’s best to leave a note or disclaimer notifying customers of restock dates and future plans so they can be aware.

Some businesses choose to no-index the page so it doesn’t rank in Google SERPs and drive traffic to a product that can’t be purchased at the time. This can cause people to leave the site resulting in a higher bounce rate which can hurt the page performance, but there are other options to reduce the bounce rate instead of making a page not-indexable. Implementing strategic internal links on the product page can help maintain and increase user engagement on the website and direct them to available products in the similar category.

Duplicate Content

It can hurt your technical SEO if your website contains too much duplicate content. Instances of duplicate content happen when your website includes too much text that is already published on other websites. Google highly recommends avoiding any sort of duplicate content in order to closely follow their algorithm. Google crawlers systems (along with other 3rd party tools) can easily find and flag duplicate content or pages on a site.

How to fix duplicate content:

Use Siteliner or a similar tool to locate duplicate pages or content
Use canonical tags, 301 redirects, or delete content as needed
Create fresh new content for improved SEO

Now that we understand some of the most common issues that will pop up, let’s look into other technical SEO elements that are important for your ecommerce website:

Schema Markup

Schema markup (also known as structured data) is a script of code that helps Google better understand what your website or webpage is about, therefore, helping it better understand what rich snippets to rank for. And rich snippets (or rich results) are all of the visual and interactive experiences on a Google SERP beyond the organic listing.

For example:

A review or star rating associated with a product or service
Google’s Knowledge Graph
Google’s Answer Box (the very first result and snippet of text that shows up in response to a question at the top of the page)

The screenshot below shows an example of Schema Markup used by Google.

Although schema markup is not a direct ranking factor, it can have a positive effect on rankings. It is especially important for product pages on ecommerce sites. As seen above, it allows you to display valuable information about specific products. This type of information can improve your click-through rate, generating traffic and sales.

How to implement schema markup

If possible, it’s best to work with your web developer to implement the schema markup code onto your website. But for those that are looking to do this themselves, thankfully it’s not difficult!

Step 1: Find the appropriate schema markup for your website or webpage using schema.org. This source serves as a repository of many different schema markup types. Find the one that’s most applicable to your website and webpage.
As an ecommerce store, you will most likely need to implement Product schema but there are many different options to choose from as well that are even more specific!
Step 2: Use a schema markup generator, like Technical SEO, Google Structured Data Markup Helper, or Rank Ranger. These tools simplify the script creation process significantly! All you need to do is provide the information for the requested fields and the tool will generate the script for you.

JSON-LD scripts are the industry best practice.

- Step 3: Test and validate your schema markup to identify and troubleshoot any issues before implementing it to the website. We like to use Schema.org Structured Data Validator. Simply paste your schema markup script into the tool and run the test, or crawl an existing page to see if the script is working correctly or if there is none associated with it.
- Step 4: If everything is working correctly, the last thing to do is add it to either the header of the entire website or the individual page (depending on the type of schema markup you are implementing).

For Product schema, you will only need to add that script to the header of the product page in question. If it’s LocalBusiness schema, that can apply to the entire website.

These steps are simple enough to follow, but always work with your web developer on generating and implementing the script if you’re not confident in doing so alone.

Internal Links

An internal link is simply a link on one page that takes you to another page of your website. An ecommerce example of an external link would be the area on the site that displays “similar products” and customers can click on that link to go to that product or page. Internal links are important for many reasons including:

Helps improve user experience by providing readers and customers with easy-to-find information.
Keeps users on the site for longer – which helps drive site interest and engagement.
Intentional internal linking gives your site visitors and customers access to more valuable information, related products they would like, etc.
Strategic internal linking can help transfer value to other pages, therefore, helping increase page performance and keyword rankings.

Internal linking is as simple as including a hyperlink within the text or publishing as a CTA (call to action). It is good to have an organized content index or a good understanding of how to find your content. As you create content or pages for the site, look for areas where you could link additional content or resources. Most CMS (content management system) platforms make it very easy to add internal links.

Pagination

Pagination is the process of dividing content and/or products into multi-page lists. For e-commerce, this is the process of dividing a series of content/products into multiple pages, rather than having a “load more” or “infinite scrolling” option.

To see an example of a website that uses “infinite scrolling”, check out CosmoProf’s hair color page and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Notice, there isn’t an option to visit page 2 or page 3. The page will keep loading more items as you scroll to the bottom of the page

Pagination helps to keep large websites and blogs organized instead of having users infinitely scroll on the site to find more products and/or information. It gives ecommerce websites better organization and provides a more user-friendly experience.

How to implement pagination

If you’re thinking “pagination seems great but I couldn’t ever figure it out myself”, don’t worry! Most ecommerce CMS platforms (content management platform, like WordPress or Shopify) make it easy to implement pagination with a simple setting change or click of the right button. Most CMS’s will have resources and guides to help if you have questions. Additionally, the CMS will usually let you determine what comes after for the URL pathway. It’s best to keep it simple, for example: “/page/2” for page 2 and “/page/3” for page 3.

Sitemap

A sitemap serves as a blueprint for your website. They tell search engines what they’re crawling, which pages are important, how to find them, and how to read your website. For ecommerce and other large websites, sitemaps are crucial because of the significant amount of web pages they have. When sites do not include a sitemap, it makes pages on the site difficult to find and index. In turn, the lack of indexing will make it difficult for users to find the site through relevant keywords.

Most large CMS platforms will generate a sitemap for you as you build out your ecommerce site. You can easily check your sitemap manually by searching typing “/sitemap.xml” after the home page and performing a Google Search. It is one of the best SEO practices for ecommerce businesses to consistently submit a sitemap into Google Search Console to allow faster indexing.

If you are needing to manually create a sitemap (uncommon), work with your web developer to ensure it is created and submitted correctly.

User Experience

User experience has everything to do with making sure that anyone who comes to your site is pleased with getting around it in an easy manner. When your ecommerce site becomes difficult and hard to navigate around, your ecommerce business should always be on top of improving these issues and preventing them from happening. There are a few areas of your site that are incorporated most with successful user experience.

Mobile Responsiveness

One of the most important ones is mobile responsiveness. Having your ecommerce website be designed from a desktop and especially mobile experience is extremely important for having great user experience. It’s best to design from a mobile experience view first (versus over desktop) since things are switching more over to mobile-first indexing. When you’re working on mobile design and view, there shouldn’t be any overlapping or cut off elements or any clickable items that are positioned too close to each other. Text size should be at a minimum of 16px for the best visual mobile experience. Incorporating and operating these design elements to work together is critical in having an effective user experience.

Site Speed

Site speed is another crucial factor for user experience. Site speed factors in how fast your website loads when a user clicks on it, how long it takes to get them to a different page, or how fast a certain product page opens up. A consumer study shows that the stress response to delays in mobile speed are similar to that of watching a horror movie or solving a mathematical problem, and greater than waiting in a checkout line at a retail store. If your website doesn’t load fast enough, it gives your customers a good reason to visit your competitors. While this is something that should not go unnoticed, there are ways in which you can help improve the speed of your site:

Compressing images to be smaller (but still quality enough for users)
Hosting videos on other platforms such as YouTube
Cleaning up your code and remove any unnecessary elements
Reduce the amount of redirects
Compressing heavy Javascript, CSS, and HTML files

If you can increase the speed of your website by just one second, there are guarantees that you’ll see improvements in revenue, traffic, and growth. While you’re making these changes and improvements, don’t forget about the quality of media assets. While it might be beneficial to decrease an image size for site speed, be sure your images, videos, animations, etc. are all quality and still help you rank for SEO purposes. Finding the best quality user experience can be a juggling act, but it’s important for your ecommerce SEO strategy to succeed.

On-Page SEO For Ecommerce

On-page SEO for ecommerce is all about optimizing the page for certain keywords and implementing those keywords into specific sections on the site. In this section, we will show you each of the areas where it is important to optimize for your target keywords and best practices to keep in mind:

URL Structure

It is important to create user-friendly URLs for each page of your ecommerce website. A clean, optimized URL structure will build trust into your website, for both search engines and users. Here are some main items to keep in mind for your URL checklist:

Avoid random numbers, letters, and symbols within the URL structure.
Use keywords in the URL if possible — regardless of short-tail or long-tail keywords.
It is not recommended to use stop words (and, of, the, a — unless it’s part of the keyword).
People (and search engines) should know what the page is going to be before it loads fully solely based on the URL. It needs to be intuitive and an accurate representation of what the page will display.
URL length does not affect the rankings of keywords, but a really long URL could impact featured snippets.
Do not create duplicate content by having a separate URL for each filter or category that can be applied to a product.

Meta Title and Description

Create engaging meta titles and descriptions that would entice a searcher to click on your organic listing. Incorporate CTA-focused words into your meta title to increase the click-through-rate (CTR), such as:

Buy now
Shop
Sale
Free
Learn more
See More Details

It’s always a best practice to test out different meta titles to understand what words are the top converting so that they can be used more throughout the rest of the website to generate more site visitors.

The same goes for meta descriptions. There is more real estate to work with to create an engaging description that would persuade searchers to click on your listing. Use CTA’s to initiate a response from the searcher and use the keyword in the description as well. Even though the meta description does not impact keyword rankings, having the keyword in the description has been shown to influence the CTR.

As a reminder, stay within the character count best practices for meta titles and descriptions which is around 50-60 characters for meta titles and 150-160 characters for meta descriptions.

Image File Name

When uploading an image file from a database or image library, the image will most likely come with a standard, computer/software-generated file name or description. When implementing the image, change the name to something that is not only intuitive, but also features the keyword for the page it will be published on. Optimizing an image file name is another spot to capture a keyword that can help with image search and online visibility.

Image Alt Text

Along with editing an image file name, optimizing the image alt text for the keyword is another key element in on-page SEO for ecommerce. The purpose of image alt text is used to explain what the image is. Screen reader software reads the alt text aloud to individuals that are visually impaired. At this point in time, Google search is unable to identify what a picture is without text or a description.

With ecommerce SEO, always explain what the image is, but aim to fit in the target keyword of the page if it’s possible to do so in a natural manner. Try to optimize every image on the website with this, but especially important pages where the goal of the image is to specifically drive traffic and value.

SEO Content for Ecommerce

Having effective SEO content for ecommerce websites is one of the most critical factors for ecommerce SEO. You have to think of your products and how you want to showcase them and your ecommerce business. Having optimized content that reads and flows easily and has implemented keywords helps improve your businesses’ success drastically.

Some of the best practices for SEO content for ecommerce websites comes from avoiding specific practices. First, it’s important to avoid thin content. Thin content means not over generalizing things or being repetitive or redundant across your ecommerce site. This can be tricky when some pages can’t be overburdened with a lot of content. However, it’s important to be creative and think outside the box at how your products can come across or how your ecommerce business can be of assistance. FAQs are one good way of doing this.

Another practice is to avoid creating duplicate content. Especially for ecommerce websites, this can be a struggle. Your products can be very similar and sometimes there’s no way around this. The best practice is to include canonical tags and unique descriptions to help avoid search engines seeing your pages or products as duplicate content.

You can also diversify your content through utilizing video marketing as much as possible. While videos and large visual assets can slow down site speed, there are ways to optimize it and embed it properly so it’s not causing unnecessary slow downs. Product pages with videos convert up to 80% better than those without. It’s an excellent way to establish trust with potential customers and help them to visualize what the product details are.

Home Page

Your home page should be a full reflection of your ecommerce business. It is the central starting point of the website and the most important and authoritative page. Within the homepage content, you should have optimizing keywords to help users find your site. Whether it’s in your headings, body, meta titles, meta descriptions, anywhere that captures the user’s attention. This allows your ecommerce website to be more user-friendly. It will also allow you to link out intentionally to other pages you want to transfer its value to and help boost their performance.

Product Pages

Some of the best SEO ecommerce practices come from having optimized product pages. Your products are the core of your ecommerce website and SEO strategy. For this reason alone, it’s important to create unique content for product pages by writing detailed descriptions. It’s important to provide as many pictures and videos of the product for prospective customers to get the best possible representation of the product before they purchase. This builds your ecommerce website trust with the customers and helps keep them coming back for more. You can also focus on generating positive product reviews to help develop strong E-A-T. Encourage customers to upload their own product images and speak on their experiences.

FAQ

FAQ pages help answer your customers’ most frequent and popular questions. By posting and answering these questions, it helps solve a problem for your customer whether it be a specific business question, a product question, or sometimes questions to do with shipping and business processes. FAQs serve as supporting content and can give your ecommerce site the chance to answer commonly asked questions by providing support/help to new or existing customers.

Blog Articles and Guides

Adding blog articles and guides to your ecommerce site can really help to improve your ecommerce SEO strategy. For one, it gives your business the opportunity to deliver even more supporting content to your main and product pages. Having this type of informative content is great for SEO purposes and developing stronger E-A-T. While writing and adding blog articles and guides to your website helps improve the quality of your site, it also helps your audience grow and expand.

When you have interesting and engaging content, you’re able to capture a larger audience based on the buyer’s funnel. These forms of content help drive informational and curiosity traffic to your ecommerce site. It also creates additional resources in helping cater to a customer making a decision or purchase. Finding ways to incorporate blog articles and guides within your ecommerce SEO strategy will help expand your audience and improve your rankings.

Additional Pages

While you already have so many different webpages, it is important to include all the other necessary pages to help your ecommerce SEO strategy succeed over time. Sometimes including these pages is good for improving your credibility while also covering some legal points. Be sure to include these pages to your website for a better user experience:

Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy (if necessary for the industry)
Shipping and Return Policy
Contact Us Page

Off-Site SEO for Ecommerce

The final aspect of learning the best SEO practices for ecommerce is the use of off-site SEO strategies. Off-site SEO tactics are additional key elements in furthering the E-A-T for your ecommerce site.

Backlinking

A backlink is created when another site links any page from your site, onto any page from their site. A general rule to keep in mind is that the more authoritative the linked site, the better. Links from high authority sites will show trust and authority to Google. Did you know that with an effective backlinking strategy, your ecommerce site could rank higher than sites like Amazon and Walmart? Search engines give a lot of value to websites with high quality backlinks and in turn, tend to rank those websites much higher. So how do you get the right backlinks for your ecommerce site?

Blogging and Resource Page: A blog or resource page is a great first step in building out the content on your website while opening up the door to backlinks. High quality content published on a blog has a chance to rank for many different types of keywords. In turn, this means that more people will use your content and link your ecommerce site to their page.
FAQ: In the ecommerce realm, many consumers will have questions about various products and brands. Creating a frequently asked questions page will allow your site to rank for popular questions that people may have about the brands and products you offer.
Video Content: Create videos that explain the benefits of your product or services. These videos can be highly valuable and interactive online, especially when there is limited information available about your product.
Influencer Bloggers: Consumers love to talk about their favorite products! Find popular bloggers within the industry, reach out to them and ask to be featured on their blog. You can incentivize them by offering free or discounted products.
Digital PR Campaigns: Although tricky, quality digital PR content can create many backlinks over time. This could range from launching interesting and unique products, to creating content around trending topics. Think outside the box!
Social Media Sharing
Although not a direct ranking factor, social media sharing can have a significant impact on your overall website traffic and SEO strategy. As you create engaging content on social media, make sure there is a way for users to share the content across all social media platforms. This will help increase overall exposure for your products, leading to more organic searches and traffic.
For example, let’s say your ecommerce website sells a unique, industry-changing water bottle. An engaging post on social media about the water bottle will have a higher opportunity to be shared through social media links. As the water bottle post is shared across various platforms and networks, it is helping to create exposure for that product and your brand (if done correctly). In turn, these can generate more organic traffic for the water bottle product, resulting in more sales.
Ecommerce SEO FAQ
How is SEO for Ecommerce Different Than Traditional SEO?
Traditional SEO focuses on a variety of different SEO factors that all work together to make your website optimized and seen by users. The difference between traditional SEO and ecommerce SEO is that ecommerce SEO has a stronger focus on a few of these factors such as:
Having detailed product pages (along with their descriptions)
Diversifying product content and information to stand out against competitors
Incorporating quality images
Having an organized homepage
Is a Subdomain Better for Ecommerce SEO?
The decision of using a subdomain vs root domain should come down to your ecommerce site’s individual situation. It should not be fully based on SEO strategy. Being said, using the root domain is more common and should be used as often as possible. Here are the exceptions of when to use a subdomain:
You are a small business using a 3rd party ecommerce store.
International websites that need to follow different rules and guidelines.
Testing out new products or services (less risky than using an existing domain).
Generally, using the root domain helps provide a better user experience and makes analytic tracking much easier. Depending on your situation, the above exceptions are when it may make sense to use the subdomain.

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