Ecommerce SEO Tutorial to Get More Free Search Traffic

Amazon.com has achieved its eCommerce SEO generating over $1,000 in revenue per second. And although much of its

traffic

and sales come from

search

es within its own platform, SimilarWeb estimates that

search

contributes 30% of its total

traffic

and Ahrefs' Site Explorer estimates 706 million search visitors each month. But Amazon didn't become an overnight success. In fact, their search traffic has grown tremendously year after year. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through a complete eCommerce SEO

tutorial

, step by step, to get

more

rank and

more

bank. Stay tuned. What about SEO? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you increase your search traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche.

Today we'll talk about eCommerce SEO and how you can rank your product and category pages. This is what our agenda looks like today. First, we will address a couple of essential things for all online stores. Below, we'll break down keyword research for eCommerce. Then we'll tackle on-page SEO, get technical, tackle link building specifically for product and category pages, and finish with some content marketing for eCommerce. Let's do it. So there are two things that I think all eCommerce sites should adhere to. The first is to make sure you secure your website with HTTP. The main reason for this is to keep your customers' information encrypted.

And I'm not just talking about credit card details, but also names, addresses, and other personal information that you don't want to be compromised. And it's important that all of your pages are set up correctly because you don't want Chrome to show a privacy error screen like this or other warnings like this. And Google has officially stated that HTTPS will be used as a ranking signal, although it may not be the most powerful ranking factor according to our on-page SEO study. The second thing you should do is perform a site audit to identify your technical SEO issues.

Ecommerce properties are one of the easiest types of websites to unintentionally create a mess of indexing and cannibalization problems due to their large size. For this

tutorial

, I'll use the store Kleinfeld Bridal as an example site, which sells wedding dresses and other bridal clothing. So I'll go to the Ahrefs site audit tool and set up a simple SEO audit. The only change I will make to the default configuration is to run the audit on the domain without subdomains and then click Next. And then again to go to the trace settings. And for the sake of a simple SEO audit, I'll leave everything in the default state, but turn on "Run Javascript".

Finally, I'll turn off scheduled audits and run this just once. Now, while the audit is underway, let's move on to keyword research. In this step, you will need to choose a keyword to target for each product and category page. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's something that should be done or outsourced. Now when it comes to selecting keywords, there are two different types of pages I want to focus on. And those are category pages and product pages. First, you'll need to obtain a complete inventory of your product and category pages. Depending on the CMS you use, whether it's Shopify, Magento, Open Cart, Woocommerce or whatever, you may be able to export these pages directly from your backend.

Or you can go to your sitemap if you have one created. So for the bridal site, I'll simply add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL and you'll see a complete list of all the pages they want the search engines to crawl. From here, you'll want to prioritize them based on the pages that generate the most revenue or the pages that generate the most traffic for your business. Now, for each of your pages, you'll want to search for a head term and long-tail variations. Generally, a top term would be a more popular keyword with a higher search volume.

The long tail would probably have a lower search volume, but they are modified variations of the main term. You can find them by going to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and typing in a seed keyword that is broadly related to your niche. So I'll write "wedding." You can then go to the “have the same terms” report and you will see a bunch of irrelevant keywords like “wedding invitations”. So you can make it relevant by using the "include" search box. Here, I will write some keywords like dress, dresses, shoes and accessories which should represent some of your main categories that broadly match the type of wedding related products we sell.

And I'll set the dropdown to show keyword ideas that contain "any" of these keywords. And you can see a ton of great keyword ideas here, some of which would make perfect category pages, others that are perfect subcategories for that parent, and a rare one that's irrelevant. So you can match the best keywords to the current structure of your site based on the types of products you sell. Based on these results, you'll probably want to focus on a broader term like "wedding dresses" as the main category and then add subcategories like guest dresses, plus size, cheap, beachy, and vintage below the main category.

Selecting keywords for product pages is a little different. For example, if you sell a brand name product like Gucci shoes or an iPhone 8 Plus, then you will want to include the brand name and/or model numbers as they will likely maintain search volume due to the brand's recognition and reputation. brand. And if you're on the other side of the spectrum where you sell unbranded products or products with unfamiliar names, then you might want to stick with the more descriptive terms that people search for. For example, if you look at these shoes from Nordstrom, you'll see that they called them the "Gabe Pump," something no one seems to be looking for.

On the other hand, there are around 350 monthly searches for “Vince Camuto shoes”, which could act as the main term for the product page with some variations or modifiers such as the use of colors, the type of toe or heel, or simply putting the title with "women". If you look at the Amazon product pages for Vince Camuto pumps, you'll see that they've put a little more thought into keyword research and on-page optimization. They use the designer's name, a modifier keyword, the brand line and the type of shoe, which is both descriptive and keyword-rich. A good way to find product keywords is to search for your brand name as a seed in Keyword Explorer.

Next, go to the “Have the same terms” report and enter the type of product you sell. In this case, we're talking about bombs, so I'll write "bomb." Another way to find ideas for product and category pages is to analyze your competitors' home pages. If you look at the top pages report for David's Bridal, one of Kleinfeld Bridal's competitors, you'll see that some of the top keywords for their most popular pages in search include "mother of the bride dresses," "prom dresses " and "maid of honor." dresses." And it turns out that all 3 are categories that our example site does not yet offer.

From here, you can click on the keyword drop-down menu and search for long-tail variations on these main terms. Here you will see that, although your word main key is "mother of the bride dresses", they still feature prominently in variations like "mother of the groom dresses" and this one that uses "long" as a modifier. Now before you select a keyword, there is a very important step you need to take. And that is to ensure that the search intent of the keyword matches the page you want to use it on. Going back to our list of keyword ideas, you can analyze the search intent by clicking on SERP dropdown menu next to any of the keywords.

So when looking at the SERP for "wedding guest dresses" you can see that they are all category pages, so you'll want to stick with the same format because the intent of Search shows that people are looking for a list of different dresses that they can browse. If you look at the SERP for “Meghan Markle's wedding dress,” you can see that these are all blog posts, so satisfying search intent with a product or category page probably wouldn't be in your best interest. Taking 10 seconds to analyze the current SERPs can save you a lot of time to ensure you are not targeting the wrong keyword.

I could continue with more keyword research techniques, but this should be more than enough to give you a solid list of keywords. So let's move on to on-page optimization. The first thing is to optimize your meta titles, descriptions and H1 tags. Now, most

ecommerce

sites use templated versions, especially those with thousands of different products, which makes sense from a timing perspective, but isn't exactly ideal from a search perspective. It's a bit ugly and, from my point of view, none of these really attract a click. In fact, these 3 pages may seem like duplicate content issues, but they are actually completely different products.

With this, you can go for a somewhat hybrid approach. So instead of using the type of wedding dress for the meta title like they do here, you can use the product title, which you should be able to formulate easily if you do keyword research. As for the description, it seems like they wrote unique meta descriptions for each product, but they look the same simply because they prefix the description with a template. In this case, they could simply move that part of the template to the end or remove it, so that when people start reading the meta description, they know that they are actually different products.

The h1 tag is quite simple. Simply use the category title or product name. And again, if you've done everything correctly up to this point, then everything should fit together pretty well. The next tip on the page is to optimize your URLs. There are certainly different ways to do this, but my preference is to keep them as clean as possible. Remember this hierarchy we talked about? You can use these to formulate the structure of your category pages. So, for example, you could have domain.com/vestidos-de-novia/ as a parent. You can then add your subcategory by adding plus sizes as a new subfolder.

And if you have a plus size product, the URL may look like this with the product name as the final part of your URL. Other sites often follow the same category structure, but you'll also see sites that have product pages like domain.com/product-name, which is also fine and a good way to avoid duplicate content by having the same product in multiple categories. . We'll discuss more advanced URL features, such as filtering queries and parameters, in the technical SEO section. The next part of on-page optimization is writing unique product and category descriptions. So product pages often lack content.

Sometimes they don't even have anything besides the product title. I won't go too deep, but here are some copywriting tips: Include your primary target keyword in the description; Add long-tail variations and synonyms that maintain semantic relationships with the parent term. For a wedding dress product page, you can include keywords like bride, dress, designer's name, etc. Make sure they are well written and legible to visitors; Tell visitors things they might want to know. Don't try to meet a word count quota. Be brief, concise and direct. And lastly, use user-generated content through. product reviews to add more context.

The last tip on the page is to use schema markup. By adding schema markup, you can make your product pages appear in searches like this. Beyond appearing more visually appealing, structured markup has generated click-through rate increases of 30%. I won't go into a coding tutorial, but you can check out best practices at Schema.org or use Google's Structured Data Markup Helper, which makes a daunting task super simple. Once you have your products marked, you can enter your page URL or paste the source code into Google's structured data testing tool. So for this page, you can see that they are using breadcrumbs and product brands.

One important thing to keep in mind is that if you decide to mark products within your category page, according to Google, they all need to be marked. Schema markup is not required, but it is certainly a good way to stand out in the SERPs and increase your CTR. Alright, we're in our technical SEO section. Now, the SEOTechnical is very important for eCommerce sites simply because it is much easier to create duplicate content, cannibalization, and other problems that often go unnoticed. We've already talked about general navigation in terms of URL structures, but as an eCommerce store, you need to be especially careful with faceted navigation.

And by faceted navigation, I mean parameters that are added to the URL using. filters that don't exactly have a semantic relationship. For example, if I search for an iPhone on Amazon and then choose a screen size of 5 to 5.4 inches, only in gold color, and from this random seller, they really have no semantic relationship when combined all together. While these filters are great for the user experience, they often lead to issues with duplicate content that leads to other issues, such as how the link value is distributed among the other pages. And for larger sites, crawl budget becomes something to consider.

So there are two main questions that we must resolve. Number one is duplicate content, which will affect how your link value is distributed. And number two, wasted tracking budget. And the most effective way for beginners and intermediates is to set a canonical URL for different facets that you don't want to be indexed as a separate URL. And if you look at the source code of that Amazon category page, you'll see that it's something they set up here. But this doesn't solve our tracking budget problem. So the way you can do it is to add nofollow internal links on the facets that you don't want to be followed.

And you can see that our example bride site does that here on certain filters. It is absolutely vital that you take care of faceted navigation, as Google has explicitly said that it contributes to having many low value-added URLs, which affects the crawl budget. You can check to see if you're having issues with faceted navigation by simply grabbing one of your URLs with some filters that you don't want indexed and then pasting it as a Google search. Next is to fix other duplicate content issues. Now, if we go back to Site Audit, we can head over to the "Content Quality" report in the left sidebar and you'll see a nice map of groups of near-duplicate pages.

The green ones have matching canonicals and the red duplicates have mismatched canonicals. And in almost all cases, the green ones can be left alone, but the red ones will need some tender love and care. If I click on one of the red ones, you'll see the duplicate pages that don't share the same canonical URL. And if I open a couple of pages, you'll see that the pages are actually the same, but they have different canonical URLs depending on the page number. But they are using the pp parameter, which means per page, which causes a potential SEO problem.

So in this case, they can't follow internal links to the number of results per page filter, index the pages that contain that filter, or add some additional conditions in the backend to fix this problem. But more site-wide fixes would probably need to be made, as these types of issues tend to run deep. You can click on the URL you want to examine, then click on "internal links" within Site Audit and you will be able to see all internal links pointing to this page. There are a lot of options you need to weigh, and since I have minimal knowledge about this site as a whole, a more detailed analysis would be necessary before making a big move like this.

There are other types of duplicate content problems. A common one you'll see on eCommerce sites is having the exact same product page across different categories. For example, you may have a URL similar to this one, found in the new releases section. But that same product could fall into your dresses category, creating two identical pages. In this case, you can use the canonical tag or, if it is no longer relevant, you can delete the page and redirect it to the correct URL. The last thing is to find and fix keyword cannibalization problems and we have a great video and blog post about it, including a

free

template that you can download and view after this video.

Because right now we're going to tackle link building for eCommerce, which is a real struggle for many of us eCommerce site owners. Building links to your product and category pages is difficult compared to getting links to blog posts. So let's talk about some tactics you can use that will help you get more links to your income-generating pages. The first is to find sites that link to your competitors' home pages. And the reason I choose homepage links is because it is much more common and easier for

ecommerce

sites to get than links to product pages. With the link intersection tool, you can go into your competitors' domain and see what sites link to them and try to understand why they link to them.

If you're not sure who your competitors are, you can go to the Competing Domains report in Site Explorer and look for sites that have a lot of common keywords, or just flip through the visual graph here and look for a lot of green. So you would take these 3 domains here and paste them into the link intersection tool, which I already preset. And then at the bottom you can enter your domain. Next, I'll change all of these dropdowns to URL mode. Finally, I'll change this filter to show pages that link to any of these pages and run the search.

And you can see that there are almost 5,500 sites linking to these competitors, but not to Kleinfeld Bridal. Now, some of these links will be irrelevant, but you will also see that they have Vogue links. Then you'll see a bunch of links from what looks like a wedding magazine constantly giving them editorial links. These are the kind of people you would like to network with! Another link building strategy is to appear on manufacturers' "where to buy" page. You can do a Google search for something like this: The manufacturer whose product you have in stock, then the title: ("where to buy" OR "distributors").

Sometimes you will find directory listings like this and other times you will be able to contact the manufacturer who will be more than willing to list their online store there. You can also do this in Site Explorer. Just enter the domain of one of your competitors, so I'll enter Davidsbridal.com. Then go to the backlinks profile. Next, type something in the "include" search box like "where to buy." And you can see here that there are some decent opportunities to get some editorial links. The next link building strategy is to look for people who have reviewed your competitors' products.

Now, the wedding dress industry probably wouldn't be the best for this search as it has high priced items. So, let's use Tata Harper, who sells natural beauty products, as an example. You can do a Google search for intitle:”tata harper” intitle:review. And you can see that there are a good number of results, including YouTube results. You can also do this in Content Explorer. I'll simply type "Tata Harper" as the phrase match and set the search parameter to title. And you'll see a nice list of pages that eliminates many of the junk pages you'd normally have to filter out on Google and YouTube.

A big advantage of using Content Explorer is that you can see all the SEO metrics to know which site owners and authors are worth building relationships with. Now that we have a list of prospects, you just need to reach out to them. You can say something like: Hi, this is Sam, with Sam's Natural Health and Beauty Products. I saw your review on Tata Harper Organic Cleaner. I thought you might be interested in doing a review of our . Cosmopolitan rated it the best natural cleanser in 2018 and Forbes called us "a skincare company to watch." I liked the thoroughness of your Tata Harper article and thought it might be a good choice to provide an objective review of our "Organicks" line.

Let me know if you are interested and I will be happy to send you some samples and a few gifts for you and your family. Regards, Sam. Now, if they choose to write a review, this will naturally lead them to a link to your site and/or product page. The last one is a little different, but has enormous potential for ranking highly competitive phrases. The caveat is that it is extremely difficult to execute. Do you remember #thedress? Basically, one woman saw this dress as blue and her friend or family member saw it as gold. They posted it on Tumblr and the story went viral.

But in which store did you buy this dress? And of course, people would do everything they could to find out. And it was a little shop in the UK called "Romans Originals". Once people found out, guess what happened? Authority sites like Huffington Post, Forbes, BBC, and Mashable started linking to their product page and homepage. And look at the increase in referring domains! Now, classifying by hashtag, the dress, is not going to add much value on its own. But look at their “Better by Links” report to see what they did. They started redirecting all their viral links to their /dresses category page.

And if we look at the overview page for their dresses category, you'll see that they had a massive increase in Google traffic to their pages when they redirected those pages. Now, creating a viral hit like this is not an easy task. But if you or your team are able to come up with something creative, you can use a similar post-viral strategy: get the links from virality, leverage as many links as you can until the hype dies down, and then redirect those pages to a page relevant that can improve your ranking. The last and final piece of the ecommerce SEO puzzle is to do content marketing.

And by content marketing I mean blogging, creating infographics and tools that will be useful to your potential clients. As I mentioned above, content attracts many more links and much more easily than product or category pages. Now, rather than repeating what I already said, I highly recommend watching our SEO tutorial, which you can view by clicking on the card and I'll leave a link in the description below. So keep working, get results and see you in the next tutorial.