5 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices for 2024 and Beyond
Ecommerce SEO is a specialized form of SEO designed to enhance an ecommerce operation’s search engine performance. It utilizes many of the same principles as general SEO along with some others that are more specific to ecommerce itself.
Mastering ecommerce SEO can take some time, at least according to the experts at Salt Lake City’s Webtek Digital Marketing. An ecommerce operator unable or unwilling to put in the time to learn is probably better off outsourcing SEO to an experienced provider.
Any successful ecommerce SEO provider will adhere to industry best practices. Ecommerce operators should not be afraid to ask an SEO agency whether it does. Here are five industry best practices for 2024 and beyond, best practices that Webtek adheres to:
1. Conducting In-Depth Keyword Research
The foundation of all SEO – ecommerce and otherwise – is the keyword. Every SEO agency should conduct in-depth keyword research regardless of the site being promoted and its target audience.
In ecommerce, keyword research is a little bit different because you are not always trying to promote brands per se. Instead, you are promoting specific products. Brand is still important, but it is irrelevant to customers who aren’t shopping for the types of products you are selling. So keywords matter here.
2. Stay Up To Date with Search Surfaces
Source: vdigitalservices.com
The modern search engine is more than just a list of organic results. Most search engines now have multiple surfaces. Ecommerce SEO providers need to understand those surfaces and stay up to date with each one. A few examples of Google’s search surfaces include:
- Google Search (organic results)
- Google Images
- Google Lens
- Google Shopping Tab.
Understanding search surfaces gives SEO providers more knowledge about how to attract attention. Although utilizing the additional surfaces isn’t mandatory for a site to appear in organic searches, taking advantage of them certainly helps.
3. Include Structured Data
Google strongly suggests that ecommerce operators include structured data on their sites to help algorithms better understand content. Structured data is a very specific kind of data that ecommerce SEO providers should excel in. If they don’t, their efforts are not going to be as productive as they otherwise would be.
4. Design a Friendly URL Structure
Ecommerce sites are different from other types of sites on multiple levels. Some of the largest can be extremely complicated from a web crawling and indexing standpoint. Therefore, ecommerce SEO demands that a site be designed with a friendly URL structure.
Google gives a significant time and space on their Google Search Central site to explaining site structure. Every agency that offers ecommerce SEO should put some time into going through Google’s documentation.
Source: searchenginejournal.com
5. Put Time into Product Descriptions
Last but not least is putting time into product descriptions. This is the one area in which so many SEO providers fall down. They look at product descriptions as generic and largely meaningless text that doesn’t help SEO results. But truth be told, product descriptions are incredibly important to ecommerce SEO.
Remember that Google and its competitors constantly strive to return the most relevant results for searches. In an ecommerce scenario, the most relevant results are those listings that match exactly what the consumer is looking for. Product descriptions go a long way toward helping search engines get it right.
SEO is as important to ecommerce as it is any other industry. If you run an ecommerce site and have not put any effort into SEO, the chances are pretty good that your website isn’t producing as well as it otherwise should. Consider investing in paid ecommerce SEO from a provider with a good reputation.
