The Beginner’s Manual to SEO for E-Commerce

E-commerce SEO

E-Commerce is lucrative and the best route to take if you’re considering digital marketing.

However, as easy as it is to make money from a product, it’s much more difficult to appear in search results against much larger competitor brands with budgets in the millions and a long history behind them. But that’s not to say it cannot be done. You just won’t be able to do it without professional expertise.

What do we mean? Ecommerce SEO is the technical task of generating more organic search traffic (i.e. free traffic, non-advert traffic) from major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo – and even within Google Local.

What the rest of the internet is not telling you right now is just noise—taking your newly launched site to number one for competitive search terms like “watches” will be near impossible if you follow guides teaching you how to do metadata.

So, if you’re serious about bringing your product to market properly, here’s our popular marketing checklist you’ll need to get up and running (which is far more helpful than reading ten pages on tips that will never get your brand on the third page, let alone the first).

Marketing & SEO E-Commerce Step-By-Step Check-List

The basics to getting you seen online:

Devise a strategy or a roadmap of what the following year in business looks like for you.
Next, plan how you will achieve your strategy; what steps will you take?
Find an SEO & Marketing company to conduct keyword research and identify long-tail searches and the large-trafficked keywords that will bring customers and online users to your store.
Ensure your SEO company has a well-researched plan for your site’s architecture, long-term structure, and strategy for the content it will create over the next 12 months.
Review your content plans and any content created and submitted by agencies to ensure they align with your branding and tone of voice and are related to your product and the buying intent around your product.
If you have a physical store and want your online presence to drive footfall, work with your SEO company on a strategy that has you appear in local searches.
In the meantime, as the organic search warms up, experiment with Facebook Advertising, Social Media, or Google Ads (be careful to set budgets and stay focused on spending).

Bulldog SEO writes something interesting here about turning users into paying customers.

Let’s Rank Together – Management & Teaching

We understand that managing the above, taking care of staff and customers, and running a business is a lot to take on. You can’t be successful without handing over some of your responsibilities.

Handing over the marketing and SEO might initially be challenging. Whether you’re a new business or an existing one, your brand, message, and tone of voice are essential, and you don’t want to put the market off from ever buying from you or remember your company for all the wrong reasons.

But by knowing your goals and devising a plan of what you want to achieve and how you want to sell, you can reiterate this to professionals like ourselves, who can make the magic happen and make your product successful in the market.

What companies can expect to see in our E-Commerce package:

Vanilla Circus turns searchers into users and users into customers:

Keyword research (we already have all the tools) plus latent semantic indexing keywords where there is a demand
Audience-led strategies to develop emotional marketing techniques
Monthly in-depth analysis of the brand’s competitors and position in the market
High-intent keyword planning (we go after keywords that show commercial intent)
Backlinks from highly authoritative websites and members of the press
Unbeatable site architecture with longevity that looks at the structure of your site
Goal tracking – see how, where and when a customer converts through your website
Writing content, including copywriting for main pages, product pages and descriptions
Product metadata (done the right way to increase sales)
Technical SEO for logical linking throughout your site
Optimising product images (size, file type and alt tags)
Fixing site errors highlighted in Google Search Console, including page speed
UX web design and experience
Product page creation and product categories and tags
Meta tags, titles tags, descriptions and titles (all for images too)
Schema mark-up for products and videos
Optimising tags and labels to convince searchers to click
Deals, offers, graphics and banners to push hero products
Coupon codes, discounts and promotions (modifiers)
Abandoned cart messaging
Welcome and thank you emails (confirming orders and account)
Product wishlists
Blogging and continuous link-building
Duplicate content and canonical URLs

Tools we use and platforms we work with

Ahrefs for keyword research and audits
Majestic for domain authority and backlinks
MOZ for domain authority
Keyword Optimiser for words related to your search
CRMs like Shopify, WordPress, Magento
Product optimisation on sites like Amazon
SERPbook to measure your ranking movements
HubSpot to track sales conversions
Enquirybot to track enquiries through the website
LiveChat to speak live with customers and browsing users and help answer their queries.
Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Google Analytics (GA4)

What Not To Do Right Now

Looking for SEO for e-commerce? Thinking of going alone? Don’t be fooled. The first sponsored results in Google today show me the following:

Ecommerce SEO: How To Drive Traffic & Increase Sales – Elementor
Insights for Smarter Marketing – Marketing & Sales Tools – Mailchimp
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO – Shopify

Let me break them down for you:

Elementor is a website builder platform on WordPress. It will only provide more flexibility over the design of your shop, which will, yes, increase sales as your pages are nicely designed. But it won’t do it for you.
Mailchimp is a marketing automation tool, more commonly used to send newsletters to your customer base. But before you can do that, you need to be able to sell.
As you might know, Shopify is a platform to host your shop, which is easy to control, process, and ship orders from. But they need special tools to help your website rank.

The first few results for newbie companies don’t help them.

The internet is here to sell you something, just like we’re doing in this blog post. While many come with a free trial, it makes better economic sense, especially when considering the cost of each tool, to let the professionals use them as part of your e-commerce SEO package.
As a new business or shop, don’t waste time reading guides, how-tos, or tip articles. At this stage, you will need help to pay for your stock and ensure your growth if you want to scale.

The first 17 results on Google for “SEO for e-commerce” showed nothing but unrelated companies selling products like keyword research, AI, hosted platforms and web builders. There was only one SEO agency as a sponsored listing at the bottom of the page.

Going It Alone Will Keep You Small

In my 12 years of experience, I’ve seen countless newbie shops or business owners taking on the challenge of organic search. The internet (thankfully, and sometimes, lamentably) is a great source of how-tos, ultimately trying to “teach” you how to do many things you would otherwise pay others to do. But is it enough?

“How to do SEO” as a keyword produces 341,000,000 search results alone – an incredible figure of articles and pages on the internet revealing DIY tips to get the job done yourself. Even Google themselves have joined in with their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Starter Guide.

So, with all this readily available knowledge claiming to turn you into an SEO expert in just a few months, why would you need an agency? Let me put it to you this way: Let me remind you that the internet is the internet.

“How to do dental filling yourself” has around 15,200,000 search results, but learning to do a filling at home, doesn’t make me a dentist.

Online how-tos should never replace trained professionals. Playing around with a site and learning can be fun, but as I’ve been there and done that, I can’t tell you the countless errors I faced and the countless errors I spent trying to reverse my mistakes.

It’s the same for SEO. You’ll read 10 Top Tips breaking down tasks like Meta Data, Tags, Categories, and Internal and External Linking – and whilst they’re correct, it’s ticking the small boxes rather than walking you through the skill, experience, language and marketing bravo required to take you to the top of the search.