SEO for E-commerce Websites: How to Increase Sales?

The Forbes Business Council has shared in their article Five E-Commerce SEO Tips to Drive New Sales in 2024 that organic search drives 43% of e-commerce traffic.

So, if you want to work on e-commerce sales growth, SEO for e-commerce is non-negotiable.

SEO is a vast strategy. Start with the foundation, i.e., keyword research around all stages of the funnel. Build your list. Thereafter, your website, site maps, and other technicalities.  Play smartly with the advanced SEO model for driving high traffic and conversion.

Most e-commerce businesses like Amazon and Etsy are smartly winning the game by building an SEO marketing strategy for different searches. For instance, AI queries, LLM searches, SERPs, and product recommendations on voice assistant or AIs.

After analyzing multiple SEO cases, we have also seen that most e-commerce winners use regenerative content marketing that is directly related to sales growth. They are mostly around UGC content like reviews and social media content on different platforms. For building SEO visibility, blog pages, FAQs, SEO optimized product pages still remain crucial.

Key Takeaway

• Keyword Research: Prioritize long tail keywords or phrases that match the exact queries for SEO for e-commerce
• Technical Foundation: Build up your website’s technical foundation and optimize the technical SEO.
• Product Pages: Optimize each product page around the intent of the final stage of the funnel.
• Content Marketing: Fuel the sales growth using a multi-channel content marketing plan
• Thrive on Your Competitors’ Strategy Gap: Plan your SEO strategy around your competitors’ gap.
• Seasonal SEO Plan: Plan ahead of the seasonal SEO to increase seasonal sales
• AEO/GEO/Zero Click search: Have a good SEO plan targeting AI, LLM, and zero click searches
• Plan Your Game Around Psychology of CTR: Optimize your pages around the psychology of CTR to boost SEO and conversion.

Ecommerce SEO Checklist

E-commerce SEO Strategy: Increase Online Store Traffic and Sales Growth

Prioritize Long Tail Keywords

Start with keyword research. They are the core of your e-commerce SEO strategy. Focus on the buyer’s intent, like what kind of queries they use. Make sure those are very specific in indicating the intent for searching for any products or buying.

There are three layers to this:

Informational keywords: ’how to choose the right laptop for students’/’what are some good laptops for students’— user is researching

Comparative keywords: “Dell vs HP laptops for college”— user is evaluating

Transactional keywords: ”buy Dell Inspiron i5 laptop online” user is ready to purchase

Focus on long tail keywords as they are less competitive and have high search volume. Incorporate your product USPs or brand name naturally into the keywords. It’s a good strategy to drive traffic from brand search.

Optimize product page titles and other on-page elements using transactional or directly buying intent terms. Use them in informational and comparative ways in FAQ pages, blogs, listings, etc.

Build SEO friendly Site Structure

The site architecture is a crucial part of SEO for e-commerce. No matter how good your strategy is, nothing will work in a bad site structure. Start working on the technical side of your website. Include a logical structure that users can navigate easily.

Google crawls your site the way a customer navigates it. So, make sure the people can easily understand the page hierarchy and access the product pages easily.

For instance, any product on your store should be reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage. Structure your categories logically: Home → Category → Subcategory → Product.

Pro tips: structures millions of products under tight category hierarchies. Make each category page an SEO powerhouse that funnels authority downward to individual listings. Meanwhile, encourage customer reviews and Q&A continuously add fresh, keyword-rich content automatically.

Work On Your Website’s Technical SEO

When building your website architecture SEO friendly, you have to consider the technical SEO of your site. It takes care of every element of user experience.

Use Google Search Console to access the Core Web Vitals. Check out the report of the website’s speed, responsiveness, interactivity, and visual stability.

In the next phase, have a checklist ready to strengthen your website’s technical foundation.

Page Speed: target 3 seconds. Use compressed images, Cache, and CDNs

Mobile Responsive Design: Optimize your e-commerce website for mobile devices. Mobile now drives 57% of global e-commerce sales. It also brings 66 % new users. Even Google indexes the mobile version of your product pages faster.

HTTPS: Secure your website with an SSL certificate, people and Google will not trust your brand.

XML Site Map: Submit an XML site map of new product pages, category pages, blog, or other content pages to the Google search console. It aids Google in indexing your pages faster.

Robot.txt: Enable Robot.txt files for pages that you want to get indexed and rank by Google. Block the robots.txt on cart pages, login pages, pages, and internal search results from being indexed.

Prevent Risk of Duplicate Content: Use Canonical tags for the same product variant pages; This will dilute the SEO weightage of each page.

301 Redirects and Broken Links: Frequently audit your e-commerce site. If you find a dead or broken link, delete it, move it, or redirect it. Never leave a dead link.

Optimize Core Web Vitals: Not just the speed, optimize your websites’ LCP, ICP, and CLS.

Optimize for Product Pages around the Intent

Optimize product pages to increase online store traffic from high-intent searches. These are the vital sources of sales generation. So, if you want ecommerce sales growth, optimizing the product pages is non-negotiable.

Here are things you should do to optimize the product pages:

• Title Tag: Include brand + product name or keyword + key benefit (50–60 characters)
• Optimize Metadata: include the primary keyword in your metadata naturally.
• H1 Heading: Match the primary keyword naturally, but make sure not to stuff
• Product Description: Use your version of product description using the core information from the manufacturer and write it in a compelling way, showcase USPs, features, everything.
• Product Images: Use WebP format images, they are very SEO friendly
• Image Alt Text: Describe every product image in natural language, including the primary keyword in it. As Google and AI both pull information from images.
• Reviews Section: Encourage customers to leave Descriptive customer reviews with images. You can give replies there while adding the term most users use. That’s how you can add fresh keyword-rich content automatically.
• Use Internal links: Internal links to similar products or the main product to supplementary valuable content keep users on-site longer. It reflects the relevance, and Google counts on it to rank higher.
• Use Schema: Mark up: use product schema, review schema, FAQ schema, or VideoObject schema.
• Give more relevant details: Just check out what your competitors don’t give , while customers have questions on this. This can be the Merchant return policy on a specific product, shipping delivery time, offers, set a scheme for them, and increase the transparency even better.

Types of Schema Mark Up Essential for Ecommerce SEO

Use Content Marketing for Building Trust and Expertise

Do you know, more 80% content reders comes from organic searches, SEO-focused content is still underutilized. Practices in the e-commerce SEO strategy,

More than 90% of e-commerce sites face thin content issues.

Good content not just drives visibility on organic searches, it builds trust in your niche. As long as good content can change people’s perspective about your business, it can portray your business as a brand.

Here are some content marketing practices you need to drive e-commerce sales growth:

• Content Marketing Challenges to Audience Behaviour: Align your content strategy to audience behavior. Outside your website, target the most useful content marketing channel first.
• Use informational blogs: Write informational blogs and supplementary content for comparison. This content helps a lot to push people through the Middle of the funnel.
• Use video content: Showcase product demos and how-to guides, etc., and optimize video descriptions using keywords. Google and AI searches pull, so it creates opportunities to rank your product. Plus, that’s how you can also drive traffic to your website from YouTube and Google searches.
• Keep a seasonal SEO calendar: This is crucial for driving more sales around festive months. Search engines need 2–3 months to discover, index, and rank new or updated pages. Build and optimize your landing pages well in advance. Even if they are not live to customers yet, they can be indexed and ranked by the time your campaign launches.
• Publish educational blogs: It helps literally to make people habituated to a new trend. Or, even make them aware of a pain that they are used to. That’s how you can generate demand for your products.
• Make Use of Topic Cluster: Build a topic cluster around pillar content that includes the key product page. Use related product pages, long-form content pages, and blogs around different related topics. It helps the key product page SEO weightage.

  Read our blog on B2B SEO strategy to get more insights!

Keep Eyes on Your Competitor and Use the Gap as Your USP

Keep a check on your competitors’ strategy. Like which product they are bot targeting. Work on competitive pricing, product building, unique product return policy, or delivery facilities, etc. Write content, optimize product landing pages with these. Remember, these are the areas where you can outperform your competitors. This will definitely help to stand out as a brand and drive e-commerce sales growth.

Utilize Organic Shopping Listings

Optimize your Google Merchant Center product feed for Shopping results. This is an alternative to the paid ads that show sponsored ads. Google’s organic shopping listings can bring in high-intent traffic without ongoing ad spend.

Give accurate titles, clear images, updated pricing, and availability. Your products can appear directly in shopping results. This increases visibility right when customers are ready to buy. It’s a simple but often overlooked way to get more clicks and sales organically

Prepare for Zero Clicks and AI Searches

AI traffic has been growing since 2024, and while AI overviews (AIO) reduce the organic click-through rates on SERP.

So, if you want to increase online store traffic, you have a good strategy for AEO and GEO.

People are now using Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Shopping, and Perplexity for products. So there is a high chance you can drive organic traffic from such queries directly. This is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

To appear in AI-generated answers, your store needs:

• Clear and factual product descriptions that AI can extract and cite
• Create brand mentions organically on third-party sites from where AI pulls answers. This can be review platforms, social media sites, community platforms, industry news platforms, etc.
• Structured data (schema) so AI can read your product attributes
• Build FAQ content around each area in communicative language, how people ask queries on A.

This is the biggest emerging gap in e-commerce SEO. Stores that optimize for AI search now will have a massive head start as this behavior grows.

Read our blog on increasing visibility ion AI search algorithm.

Have a zero-click strategy as 80% of Google searches end with zero clicks. Users get their answer directly from the search results page. Especially from featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, or Shopping panels.

Use this area to outperform your competitors by optimizing your website for zero clicks.

• Structuring product FAQ content in a clear Q&A format
• Using Product and Offer schema
• Optimizing your Google Merchant Center feed for the Shopping panel

Make Your Pages Clickable

A listing with 30% higher CTR is actually good for SEO. It sends a trust signal to Google that your page matches the user’s intent. It improves your ranking over time.

So, this is not just an SEO tip; it also plays a vital role in conversion rate optimization.

Optimize the meta tags and title tags around

• Use a number that triggers using USPs ‘Ships in 24 Hours’, ‘Over 10,000 Reviews.’
• Create urgency: ‘Limited Stock’, ‘Sale Ends Sunday.’
• Show Trust signals: ‘Genuine Product’, ‘Official Store.’
• Reflect Specificity: ‘Lightweight 180g Running Shoe’ beats ‘Great Running Shoe.’
• Use Price anchoring: use a discounted price
• But make sure those things are available, actually, otherwise buyers will feel deceived.

Final Thought

SEO for e-commerce is all about building a strategy. It’s not just about doing what others do; you have to go beyond and showcase the USP. Understand where the gap lies, where your current competitors don’t give notice to you, so you can thrive there. From keywords, backlinks to a seasonal SEO plan, the opportunity can be all there.

Struggling to increase traffic and sales on your e-commerce website? TTC can help you! Get a free SEO audit now!