How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic in 2021

 

Ecommerce SEO Guide: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic in 2020

This is the most complete guide to ecommerce SEO on the web – period.

Whether you’re:

• The SEO manager for a bigger ecommerce company looking to demonstrate the ROI of SEO.
• A smaller online business owner trying to find scrappy ways to grow your business.
• Or a growth marketer looking for innovative and highly effective ways to increase traffic.

This post is for you.

I created this guide for one reason…

Search engine optimization is a low-hanging fruit for ecommerce websites.

Despite the fact that SEO has the highest ROI of any ecommerce marketing campaign, most online shops are put together with little to no consideration of search engines.

Instead, we rely on social media or paid ads. Which are great and all, but require a constant effort and stream of income.

SEO, on the other hand, only requires effort up front — once you rank, you practically make sales on autopilot with no recurring expense.

That’s a simplification, of course. But doesn’t the idea make you drool?

Free, recurring, high-converting traffic. That’s what you’re about to learn how to get.

Grab a coffee, lock the door and settle in… it’s time to learn ecommerce SEO.

Of course if you’re a BigCommerce merchant, you can schedule some time with our team to learn more about SEO coaching from BigCommerce University. 

Key Tactics to Include in Your Ecommerce SEO Strategy

Since this is a 9,000-word beast, you’ll probably want to take it one section at a time. To help you navigate, here are the topics we’ll be covering.

The best ecommerce SEO strategy includes:

• Keyword research to find the types of keywords customers are searching.
• Site architecture based on your keyword research.
• On-Page SEO through strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content.
• Technical SEO to help ensure search engines can crawl your site efficiently.
• Local SEO to help drive local organic traffic (if you have a brick and mortar).
• Content marketing to drive additional organic visitors.
• Link Building to help improve the authority of your website.
• Measuring SEO Success with tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.

Let’s get started!

What is SEO and Why Should You Care?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the scientific art of optimizing your website around specific keywords in order to rank higher in search results, such as Google.

I say scientific art because, while a lot is known about the technical aspects of SEO, there is a creative user-experience and design side to it as well.

But optimizing your site, ultimately, means one thing: creating the best possible result for your target keyword.

Google’s goal is to rank search results that answer all of the searcher’s questions so well that they don’t need to return to Google for another answer.

So how do you do that?

• Reveal the most thorough answers to the widest range of questions around the topic.
• Use better images, videos, or examples to explain your points.
• Provide a better user experience via a faster site, a better mobile experience, a more intuitive interface, etc.
• Get people talking about (and linking) to you.

A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%.

Additionally, a study by SEMrush examining 13 ecommerce verticals found that 5 (music, books, furniture, home & garden, electronics) were dominated by organic search, and for all 13 organic and direct accounted for 80% of all traffic.

Sources of Ecommerce Website Traffic via SEMrush

For ecommerce, that means writing thorough, vivid product descriptions with beautiful, eye-catching photography and plenty of reviews to help visitors make purchase decisions.

It also means making it easy for visitors to purchase by making the buttons big enough, keeping your site glitch-free, and showing social proof of your best products.

Oh, and it means giving your site visitors comparisons of your product to your competitors, so they don’t need to leave to do more research.

But more on all that later. For now, I just want you to understand one thing:

SEO is a holistic effort of all pieces of a business, including social media, marketing, web design, networking and copywriting.

If you are the best business for a customer to shop (and you do your SEO homework) you’ll claim the top positions. Isn’t it great how simple that is?

But I haven’t answered the most important question… Why should you even care?

Well, let’s say your store sells gifts for wiener dog lovers, like my client, The Smoothe Store. Obviously, you would want to rank for a key term like “Dachshund gifts”.

In search results, Google displays a few ads, then they show the organic listings. Most of the clicks, however, go to organic results. (Of course, this varies depending on the number of ads and the keyword, but for the most part it holds true.)

And since ~95% of people don’t go past the first page, getting to the top of the line is the only way to get real results. (Again, this varies, but mostly holds true.)

Now let’s do some math.

The keyword “Dachshund gifts” gets ~11,000 searches per month on average, according to Ahrefs (a tool you’ll learn about in a later section). Assuming 35% of those clicks go to the first result (the average across keywords), ranking #1 for that keyword would get you 3,850 clicks.

Now let’s assume you have a conversion rate of 10% (pretty low for a high buyer-intent keyword; more on buyer intent in the research section).

Ranking #1 for that keyword would score you an extra 385 sales per month!

 

And that’s just one keyword. Most pages rank for multiple keywords, and most sites will rank multiple pages.

You could get thousands of extra sales per month with just a little extra SEO effort — all for free.

You could even combine SEO with SEM (search engine marketing, like Google AdWords) to grab two search result listings and convert even more sales. But that’s a topic for another guide. (Though, if you’re interested in paid ads, check out KlientBoost’s PPC services.)

I hope by now you understand why Google is one of the best marketing channels.

But enough theory — let’s talk about how to actually do it!