eCommerce Seo - Ultimate Guideline 2020
Table of content:
1.What is ecommerce SEO?
2.Is SEO important for ecommerce?
3.How do ecommerce sites do SEO?
4.How much does monthly ecommerce SEO cost?
5.Is Shopify good for SEO?
6.How do I find SEO keywords?
7. How dojolab// can help your eCommerce.
Having launched and scaled more than 100 eCommerce brands in the past 7 years, our team at dojolab // have compiled an eCommerce SEO ultimate guideline for aspiring eCommerce owners to learn from our SEO strategies and methodologies.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce?
Among all the other marketing channels that is available right now, traffic from SEO strategy has proven to be higher quality and scalable compared to another marketing channel such as Facebook Ads / Instagram ads.
Metrics such as page views, average time spent on site, bounce rate and conversion rate are among the highest compared to all other channels.
However, the reason why it's stopping most eCommerce owners to invest in SEO is that they don't see ways to scale the traffic.
By looking at data such as keywords search volume and total potential growth, it seems SEO is not very scalable to most of them.
The data illustrated above is Ahrefs data for Shutterfly.com [ US largest photobook company] where SEO and content marketing able to bring more than 6.1M organic traffic/month
My point is, if you just look at the surface by keyword rankings and search volume, you will miss the bigger picture of scaling through SEO and content.
In this case of photobook business, if you are selling photobook, it makes sense to rank for all your commercial keywords such as Photobook, custom photo books, and etc. But remember, the photo book is in the business of selling memories. The product doesn't just happen when they print the actual book, but it's when important memories are created such as anniversary, birthday, newborn babies, and more.
It's the user journey, and when you being able to capture them early this is where you have the chance to capture massive users that are about to be your ideal customer.
Therefore the strategy from Shutterfly to go into content marketing makes total sense, as people are searching for "quotes", "ideas" and guides for them to create the memories.
3. How do e-commerce sites do SEO?
There are a lot of technical aspects of a good SEO, however, I'll cover the fundamental and kind of like overview of the best eCommerce strategy.
a. Site structure
b. On page.
c. Link building.
d. Signals and behavior
Site structure is the most important aspect of eCommerce SEO. For this, we rely on the pillar and silo concept, where each pillar is the main category of your product and the silo is an individual product that is under the proper category.
So let's say you are selling luxury ball pens, and you carry more than 100 brands and types of pens. Should you create a pillar based on the brand or types of pens?
In this case, we will take a look at EndlessPens.com . Since they carry a huge SKU of branded pens, the brand itself has higher search volumes compared to the general keywords.
So it makes sense to start structuring your brand as a pillar ( category) then all the products under that brand to be siloed.
That's for eCommerce products. How about if you are selling services? So lets say if you are digital marketing agency and you offer all sorts of digital services to your client. Then the easiest way is to turn all your main service into pillar such as:
Web design
Web development
SEO
Facebook Ads
Google Ads
Then your silo content could be "web design services", "10 web design ideas" etc but it should only do interlinks between same silos be only link to one main pillar which is your "web design" pillar
This way of structuring your content will allow Google to understand the structure and will carry more seo weightage to rank for competitive keywords
Next, once you have ironed out the proper structure you will need to craft out your call to actions, content readability and find ways to let users stays longer on the website and easily navigate to read more content.
I'll cover more in-depth on user behavior signals in this article later.
How much does monthly eCommerce SEO cost?
The average eCommerce SEO retainer is somewhere between $1,000 USD to $2,000 / month, depending on which country the agency is located.
Aside from the location price point, you need to know the key difference in how SEO agencies differ and what makes them good and bad before judging the price point.
There are literally 3 types of agency.
a. Agency that outsources their work
b. The agency that does in house.
c. Agency specializing in SEO
How to spot an agency that outsources their work? Well, its quite hard to identify if the agency doing the work in-house or outsource but from our experience, you may ask them these questions and from their answers, you would likely know if they outsource or do in-house
1. How many link building specialists you hired in-house?
2. What types of links you build for clients?
3. How do you optimize for on-page?
4. What are the SEO tools your team use for managing SEO campaigns?
5. How do you scale SEO traffic?
6. Do you have programmers to fix website issues?
By asking these types of questions, the most reply will reveal whether if the agency has an in-house team or outsource.
Is Shopify a good platform for SEO?
In a nutshell, yes Shopify is a good eCommerce platform for SEO. Below are a few reasons why Shopify is good.
1. Global CDN execution
2. Proper category/page structure
3. Optimised traffic flow + buy intent.
4. Robust platform with great plugins choices.
5. Secure and fast loading speed.
Due to Shopify's proper page structure and good CDN ( read this fastly CDN deploy by Shopify https://shopify.dev/tutorials/customize-theme-troubleshooting-about-cdns ) , the website loading speed for any traffic is considerable fast regardless of which country they serve the website.
Furthermore, Shopify's structure of showing category and the actual product page is good and fulfilled the search intent well.
For example, if someone search for a "mont blanc ball pen" , due to the "/collection" category page and ability to optimize this category content, Google is likely to rank this "commercial driven keyword" that shows the exact product that matches the intent.
Not only that, the Shopify marketplace is a great feature for most e-commerce owners where additional features can be deployed within a few minutes and cost-efficient too, rather have to build your own solution that takes up a lot of resources and time.
How do I find SEO keywords?
There are plenty of tools out there that can find potential keywords, however i'll review some of our favourite tools that save up time to do proper keyword research.
1. Ahrefs ( https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/)
2. Ubersuggest (https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-keyword-research-tool/)
3. SEOSurfer (https://surferseo.com/blog/getting-started/ )
There are few key metrics to keep in mind when selecting good keywords.
1. Keyword difficulty (KD)
2. Search volumes
3. Entity.
Keyword difficulty is a metric where Ahrefs given out to all keywords, ranging from 0 being easiest and 100 for being the toughest. When selecting keywords, you need to make sure the difficulty is easier to rank rather than choosing a big keywords where difficulty is tough.
Next, search volumes is the number of search per month based on the tool. The higher the search volume the better it is.
The last part would be "entity". The full definition of Google entity here (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/entity-seo/277231/)
An entity is anything that is:
Singular.
Unique.
Well-defined.
Distinguishable.
It's how Google identifies an object and search term and being able to show results best on relevancy.
Let's say you posted content about the biography of "Donald Trump" which covers his entire business career and journey in great length and good details. When searches search for "President of United States background", Google being able to classify your piece of content and serve the users with this blog post even if you mention less / zero mention of the president
This is how an entity works.
So when you optimized for your eCommerce keywords, bear in mind it's no longer keyword stuffing but it's more of fulfilling the search intent regardless of keyword density these days.
dojolab // is an eCommerce scaling agency specialized in SEO and content marketing. Having successfully scaled more than 100 eCommerce in the past 8 years, we strongly believe by doing good work will take us far as a company. The client loves us for transparency, honesty and great communication. If you have any questions feel free to write to gerald@dojolab.co or submit the form below here.