Honda’s MotoGP team and former world champion Marc Márquez will be ending their 11-year partnership at the end of the season, the Japanese engine-maker said Wednesday.
The Angels’ Shohei Ohtani has a torn UCL in his right elbow and will not pitch again this season, while three-time MVP Mike Trout will return to the IL one day after being activated.
We all know the foundation of e-commerce SEO is keyword research.
Over half of shoppers surveyed in a global retail study say they use Google to research purchases they plan to make online.
This is why SEO is your golden ticket to increasing organic visibility.
How?
Think about it: Before you create your site’s content, you need to know what terms your audience is using to search for products like yours.
How will you solve their problems without knowing the keywords behind their search intent?
You have to build your content with search engines and your users in mind.
The sooner you understand how SEO is changing and adapt your strategies, the sooner you’ll see ROI from e-commerce SEO.
Isn’t it impressive how far SEO has progressed?
Jump on the SEO train with me and I’ll show you why it’s important.
Why Is E-commerce SEO So Important?
You’re trying to get new customers to have all eyes on you.
You can’t win their attention if search engines can’t easily find you.
Your site is basically the secret menu at Starbucks if you don’t invest in keyword research.
That’s why it should be the critical first step in your e-commerce SEO campaign.
One of two things will happen if you don’t get SEO for e-commerce right:
You won’t rank on page one—or near the top—because your target keywords are too difficult.
The keywords you choose won’t drive in the traffic you’re aiming for or align with customers’ search intent.
However, getting your potential customers’ attention can be expensive.
For example, the average cost per click for the apparel industry is about 89 cents. The average cost per action is right below $10 when you break down WordStream’s results. Cost per action is a pricing model where payment is contingent on a qualified specific action, like a sale or submitted form.
While cost per click generates fast, profitable sales, you could spend thousands reeling in new customers.
By using SEO for e-commerce, you’re gaining free organic traffic by getting your site to show up in the SERPs.
But there are some missteps you should avoid if you want to see success.
Common E-commerce SEO Mistakes
What are the user’s needs?
If you keep this question top of mind, you should have a solid e-commerce SEO campaign.
Here is a list of at least three e-commerce SEO mistakes I don’t want you to make:
Vague Product Descriptions: This is a place to fit in keywords that make sense for your product. Write a product description so your customer knows what to expect. Even when you’re naming the product, think about a user’s potential search queries. Optimizing your product pages gives them a great chance at a top ranking for items. Product descriptions provide clarity and answer important questions that encourage users to follow through with their cart.
Display of Product Reviews: The beautiful thing about product reviews is they’re customer generated. It’s basically on-screen user-generated content. Reviews share customers’ unique experiences with your product. The page is like a living update, bringing more people to your site. Take advantage of the SEO benefits reviews bring to your e-commerce site. For added benefits, make sure you implement product review schema so your reviews will be even more prominent in Google SERPs.
Non-Interactive Title Tags: Titles are not only a matter of SEO. They should line up with your users’ search intent. Focus on unique phrasing. The formula I like is this: Brand + Model + Item Type = Interactive Title Tag. If you want to see if the titles for your products are unique, use Ubersuggest to double-check.
There are many more benefits to SEO for e-commerce—and mistakes to avoid. I’ve got some examples of e-commerce SEO in action to serve as inspiration for you.
E-commerce SEO Sites That Are Crushing It
Some people say SEO is dead.
Well, I say they’re wrong.
No matter which side of the fence you’re on, you can’t deny the benefits SEO has on e-commerce.
Especially now with social e-commerce, there is big money to be made. Researchers see a trend in e-sales that will go beyond $1.3 trillion by 2025.
SEO for e-commerce done right drives relevant traffic to your social channels and website without spending big on paid ads.
Once you see those qualified leads come in, make sure your strategy is in place to convert them.
We chose these three examples to focus on because:
I’d like to show and tell you who’s crushing e-commerce SEO right now. We chose these three examples because:
They have schema mark-up on the pages which helps create a more enticing SERP result
They have built strong, natural looking backlink profiles
All of these factors are extremely important to help with boosting rankings. Our research shows that show when sites implement SEO strategy and optimized copy, they see a larger keyword universe and higher domain authority. Combine these together and you get high organic traffic numbers.
Let’s take a closer look.
Etsy: Strong E-Commerce SEO Strategy
Etsy is a global online marketplace where brands can buy, sell, trade, and collect one-of-a-kind products. It’s a marketplace where you’ll likely find your new favorite handcrafted items from independent artists and designers.
This is a great environment for a brand to win at e-commerce SEO.
Etsy is making strong strides in SEO marketing right now.
In May 2022, Etsy ranked for over 14 million keywords in position one through ten, including nearly 5.5 million of those in the top three positions.
Etsy’s main navigation is intuitive and easy to use. There’s a banner with season-specific, popular items for the summer as well as popular gifts people are purchasing.
Businesses gain brand visibility thanks to how content is laid out over the site. There’s a strong emphasis on discovery. Etsy leans a lot on “keywords by intent,” especially via blog mentions. Their most trafficked blog article features the best Etsy shops, which nets 1,061 visitors and $462 in revenue.
Overall, 61.1% of Etsy’s keywords are informational and 29.9% are transactional. A whopping 87.4% of keywords owned are non-branded. This shows us what users want to know about the brands within Etsy. How they’re educated as an audience matters during their buyer’s journey.
I’d also like to mention a lot of Etsy’s success comes from stellar Core Web Vitals. This is a huge ranking factor in this mobile-first index ranking world. The faster people see their shopping interests during their user experience, the better.
Etsy gets this right all while supporting the shops that rely on them for a degree of brand visibility.
Overstock: A Great Core Web Vitals Example
Overstock is an online retailer that sells home goods at low prices.
Like Etsy, Overstock has great Core Web Vitals, so user experience with their online database is sharp. They are a tech-driven company, so that’s to be expected.
Based on what users are looking for, they win a lot of traffic for non-branded keywords (83.2%) vs. branded keywords (16.8%). Overstock is capturing users searching for queries that are not associated with their brand. Meaning, they are catching a lot of users looking for a solution their site can solve.
It makes sense why much of the site’s keyword intent funnels in through informational search queries (47% in May 2022). The data shows customers want to be informed before they make their purchases.
Transactional searches are almost equally as high (42% in May 2022). Think of a popular search like “patio furniture.” The products Overstock offers are essentially what users are searching for.
SEO for e-commerce serves Overstock well by targeting keywords users are looking for, even if it’s not branded. They have mastered aligning keywords with users’ search intent, allowing them to see results with strong performing non-branded terms.
Lulus: How SEO for Ecommerce Helps A Brand
Lulus is a fashion brand with an affordable luxury feel.
They recently upped their Core Web Vitals, helping them rank higher and garner more organic on-page sessions. That’s just one of the ways they’ve upped their game.
Let’s look at how they’re crushing SEO for e-commerce to get these results.
I know it sounds simple, but if you’re searching for a cocktail dress for a company Christmas party, Lulus points you in the right direction on their site.
You’ve got the keywords and directions for your users. Now, they’re bound to trust you and follow through with their cart.
It goes the same way with backlinks. Lulus’ backlinks profile speaks for itself, with well over 19 million referring domains.
Follow links make up 80% of Lulus’ backlinks, signaling to search engines that the site is trustworthy.
Selling amazing products is one thing. Having outside sources vouch for your brand online makes you look even more credible. Think of the SERPs as one big popularity contest, and having other people vouch for you is a big help.
The traffic will come to you as potential leads to convert. They will make secure purchases knowing you have what they need, and they’ll come back to shop for other items they need in the future.
Whether they’re from fashion blogs or influencers, backlinks are e-commerce SEO gold.
This is how Lulus did it.
That’s what SEO for e-commerce does for a brand. It shows your customers you are their solution.
What We Can Learn From E-commerce SEO Done Right?
SEO for e-commerce is a game changer, so spend some time on it.
To play the game right means appearing high on the first page of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo for terms your potential consumers use.
If you know how your audience makes decisions, you can create content that guides them through their purchasing journey.
Yes, having high-quality content and copy matters. It won’t convert to users if your keywords don’t have high-quality search intent, though.
Strategic internal linking—linking to other URLs on the same site—and optimizing product and category pages are some of the hardest parts of e-commerce SEO. However, they’re definitely on my list of e-commerce SEO best practices.
That’s why I’m here. To give you SEO tips that work for you.
Conclusion
Search engines like Google mostly focus on providing users with a valuable experience.
Your website needs to make usability its top priority.
We all know the foundation of e-commerce SEO is keyword research.
Over half of shoppers surveyed in a global retail study say they use Google to research purchases they plan to make online.
This is why SEO is your golden ticket to increasing organic visibility.
How?
Think about it: Before you create your site’s content, you need to know what terms your audience is using to search for products like yours.
How will you solve their problems without knowing the keywords behind their search intent?
You have to build your content with search engines and your users in mind.
The sooner you understand how SEO is changing and adapt your strategies, the sooner you’ll see ROI from e-commerce SEO.
Isn’t it impressive how far SEO has progressed?
Jump on the SEO train with me and I’ll show you why it’s important.
Why Is E-commerce SEO So Important?
You’re trying to get new customers to have all eyes on you.
You can’t win their attention if search engines can’t easily find you.
Your site is basically the secret menu at Starbucks if you don’t invest in keyword research.
That’s why it should be the critical first step in your e-commerce SEO campaign.
One of two things will happen if you don’t get SEO for e-commerce right:
You won’t rank on page one—or near the top—because your target keywords are too difficult.
The keywords you choose won’t drive in the traffic you’re aiming for or align with customers’ search intent.
However, getting your potential customers’ attention can be expensive.
For example, the average cost per click for the apparel industry is about 89 cents. The average cost per action is right below $10 when you break down WordStream’s results. Cost per action is a pricing model where payment is contingent on a qualified specific action, like a sale or submitted form.
While cost per click generates fast, profitable sales, you could spend thousands reeling in new customers.
By using SEO for e-commerce, you’re gaining free organic traffic by getting your site to show up in the SERPs.
But there are some missteps you should avoid if you want to see success.
Common E-commerce SEO Mistakes
What are the user’s needs?
If you keep this question top of mind, you should have a solid e-commerce SEO campaign.
Here is a list of at least three e-commerce SEO mistakes I don’t want you to make:
Vague Product Descriptions: This is a place to fit in keywords that make sense for your product. Write a product description so your customer knows what to expect. Even when you’re naming the product, think about a user’s potential search queries. Optimizing your product pages gives them a great chance at a top ranking for items. Product descriptions provide clarity and answer important questions that encourage users to follow through with their cart.
Display of Product Reviews: The beautiful thing about product reviews is they’re customer generated. It’s basically on-screen user-generated content. Reviews share customers’ unique experiences with your product. The page is like a living update, bringing more people to your site. Take advantage of the SEO benefits reviews bring to your e-commerce site. For added benefits, make sure you implement product review schema so your reviews will be even more prominent in Google SERPs.
Non-Interactive Title Tags: Titles are not only a matter of SEO. They should line up with your users’ search intent. Focus on unique phrasing. The formula I like is this: Brand + Model + Item Type = Interactive Title Tag. If you want to see if the titles for your products are unique, use Ubersuggest to double-check.
There are many more benefits to SEO for e-commerce—and mistakes to avoid. I’ve got some examples of e-commerce SEO in action to serve as inspiration for you.
E-commerce SEO Sites That Are Crushing It
Some people say SEO is dead.
Well, I say they’re wrong.
No matter which side of the fence you’re on, you can’t deny the benefits SEO has on e-commerce.
Especially now with social e-commerce, there is big money to be made. Researchers see a trend in e-sales that will go beyond $1.3 trillion by 2025.
SEO for e-commerce done right drives relevant traffic to your social channels and website without spending big on paid ads.
Once you see those qualified leads come in, make sure your strategy is in place to convert them.
We chose these three examples to focus on because:
I’d like to show and tell you who’s crushing e-commerce SEO right now. We chose these three examples because:
They have schema mark-up on the pages which helps create a more enticing SERP result
They have built strong, natural looking backlink profiles
All of these factors are extremely important to help with boosting rankings. Our research shows that show when sites implement SEO strategy and optimized copy, they see a larger keyword universe and higher domain authority. Combine these together and you get high organic traffic numbers.
Let’s take a closer look.
Etsy: Strong E-Commerce SEO Strategy
Etsy is a global online marketplace where brands can buy, sell, trade, and collect one-of-a-kind products. It’s a marketplace where you’ll likely find your new favorite handcrafted items from independent artists and designers.
This is a great environment for a brand to win at e-commerce SEO.
Etsy is making strong strides in SEO marketing right now.
In May 2022, Etsy ranked for over 14 million keywords in position one through ten, including nearly 5.5 million of those in the top three positions.
Etsy’s main navigation is intuitive and easy to use. There’s a banner with season-specific, popular items for the summer as well as popular gifts people are purchasing.
Businesses gain brand visibility thanks to how content is laid out over the site. There’s a strong emphasis on discovery. Etsy leans a lot on “keywords by intent,” especially via blog mentions. Their most trafficked blog article features the best Etsy shops, which nets 1,061 visitors and $462 in revenue.
Overall, 61.1% of Etsy’s keywords are informational and 29.9% are transactional. A whopping 87.4% of keywords owned are non-branded. This shows us what users want to know about the brands within Etsy. How they’re educated as an audience matters during their buyer’s journey.
I’d also like to mention a lot of Etsy’s success comes from stellar Core Web Vitals. This is a huge ranking factor in this mobile-first index ranking world. The faster people see their shopping interests during their user experience, the better.
Etsy gets this right all while supporting the shops that rely on them for a degree of brand visibility.
Overstock: A Great Core Web Vitals Example
Overstock is an online retailer that sells home goods at low prices.
Like Etsy, Overstock has great Core Web Vitals, so user experience with their online database is sharp. They are a tech-driven company, so that’s to be expected.
Based on what users are looking for, they win a lot of traffic for non-branded keywords (83.2%) vs. branded keywords (16.8%). Overstock is capturing users searching for queries that are not associated with their brand. Meaning, they are catching a lot of users looking for a solution their site can solve.
It makes sense why much of the site’s keyword intent funnels in through informational search queries (47% in May 2022). The data shows customers want to be informed before they make their purchases.
Transactional searches are almost equally as high (42% in May 2022). Think of a popular search like “patio furniture.” The products Overstock offers are essentially what users are searching for.
SEO for e-commerce serves Overstock well by targeting keywords users are looking for, even if it’s not branded. They have mastered aligning keywords with users’ search intent, allowing them to see results with strong performing non-branded terms.
Lulus: How SEO for Ecommerce Helps A Brand
Lulus is a fashion brand with an affordable luxury feel.
They recently upped their Core Web Vitals, helping them rank higher and garner more organic on-page sessions. That’s just one of the ways they’ve upped their game.
Let’s look at how they’re crushing SEO for e-commerce to get these results.
I know it sounds simple, but if you’re searching for a cocktail dress for a company Christmas party, Lulus points you in the right direction on their site.
You’ve got the keywords and directions for your users. Now, they’re bound to trust you and follow through with their cart.
It goes the same way with backlinks. Lulus’ backlinks profile speaks for itself, with well over 19 million referring domains.
Follow links make up 80% of Lulus’ backlinks, signaling to search engines that the site is trustworthy.
Selling amazing products is one thing. Having outside sources vouch for your brand online makes you look even more credible. Think of the SERPs as one big popularity contest, and having other people vouch for you is a big help.
The traffic will come to you as potential leads to convert. They will make secure purchases knowing you have what they need, and they’ll come back to shop for other items they need in the future.
Whether they’re from fashion blogs or influencers, backlinks are e-commerce SEO gold.
This is how Lulus did it.
That’s what SEO for e-commerce does for a brand. It shows your customers you are their solution.
What We Can Learn From E-commerce SEO Done Right?
SEO for e-commerce is a game changer, so spend some time on it.
To play the game right means appearing high on the first page of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo for terms your potential consumers use.
If you know how your audience makes decisions, you can create content that guides them through their purchasing journey.
Yes, having high-quality content and copy matters. It won’t convert to users if your keywords don’t have high-quality search intent, though.
Strategic internal linking—linking to other URLs on the same site—and optimizing product and category pages are some of the hardest parts of e-commerce SEO. However, they’re definitely on my list of e-commerce SEO best practices.
That’s why I’m here. To give you SEO tips that work for you.
Conclusion
Search engines like Google mostly focus on providing users with a valuable experience.
Your website needs to make usability its top priority.
You’ve established your initial web presence and have an SEO strategy in place. There’s some steady traffic, and you’re even picking up some leads. Your job’s done, right? Not quite.
You see, it’s not that simple. Effective SEO is an ongoing process that takes consistent work.
Even if you’ve hit your key milestones and you’re where you want to be in the SERPs, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for improvement and that you don’t need to adapt. Especially when the competitive landscape is ever-changing.
Semantically-related keywords, image optimization, predictive search, and Google Analytics 4 are just some of the factors shaping SEO as we know it. In addition to these trends and developments, there are many other reasons why you should keep working on your SEO strategy.
In this piece, I detail why SEO is a continuous process. It’s not something that you can afford to ignore once you start seeing results.
Let’s get started with the first reason.
1. There’s More Than One Type of Effective SEO Strategy
There’s more than one type of SEO, and an effective SEO strategy covers each type. In digital marketing, we divide SEO into four separate categories:
On-page SEO optimizes a website’s content and structure to rank higher in the SERPs. On-page SEO includes optimizing the title and header tags, meta descriptions, images, and other elements affecting how a website ranks.
Off-page SEO includes building backlinks to your site from other websites. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher it ranks in SERPs, increasing your website’s authority and standing.
Local SEO helps to ensure that your website appears near the top of search engine results pages for relevant queries in your area. You can do several things to improve your local SEO, such as filling out your Google My Business profile. This free service from Google allows businesses to create and manage their business listing on Google.com and other Google services such as Maps and Search.
A great example of local SEO is the legal firm, Hasbrook & Hasbrook. It’s got a first-page ranking in the SERPs, attracting nearly 10,000 monthly searches for Oklahoma-centered keywords. It’s done this by using local keywords in its page titles and website URL, publishing local law content, and optimizing its Google My Business page.
Enterprise SEO is a large-scale method of SEO. It considers your business goals, target audience, and competition. It uses multiple optimization strategies and usually covers websites with high volumes of transactions or large amounts of published data.
Even if you don’t have time for a complete SEO overhaul, you can implement a minimalist SEO plan by following these six simple steps.
2. Your Competitors Aren’t Stopping
If you’re thinking about giving up on your SEO strategy, you can guarantee your competitors aren’t.
Effective SEO takes time. You might see an initial boost in your SERPs when you begin putting your plan into action. However, for the most part, you’re in it for the long haul, and you won’t see results instantly.
Additionally, to ensure their SEO strategy is as effective as possible, you can bet your rivals are tweaking and implementing new processes as the search engines update and evolve, leading me nicely to the next section.
As seen with the helpful content update that has started rolling out in August of 2022.
Some of these changes are small, while others are more significant. Remember Panda and Penguin? These two updates sent many website owners into a tailspin when Google introduced them.
Panda emphasized quality content, while Penguin penalized sites using shady backlinking techniques and keyword stuffing. Inevitably, however, many legitimate website owners got caught up in this, causing them to lose out in the SERPs.
Then, another update, Hummingbird, considered searchers’ intent, while the Pigeon update impacted local SEO.
However, it’s not just the major updates you need to consider. It’s the constant tweaking, up to twice a day, you need to be aware of.
While not all these ever-evolving algorithms significantly impact SERPs, staying up-to-date on the latest Google algorithm news is essential so you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
4. New Content You Create Still Needs Optimization
You know that awesome fresh content you keep creating? Well, it’s not enough on its own.
If you want your articles to attract organic results and reach your ideal customers, then you need to optimize each piece.
While there’s no denying the part social media plays in getting traffic to your pages, search engines deliver much more. One survey shows that Google drives eight times more traffic than all the social media sites combined, and the average top blog gets 66.47 percent of traffic from search engines.
Aside from keywords, an assessment of content using the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant tool showed that the top-performing articles measured a perfect score for:
SEO
Tone of voice
Readability
Originality
You can further optimize your content with:
Interlinking
Managing keyword density and including semantically-related keywords
Focusing on technical elements like meta tags
And covering topics in-depth
Let’s move on to search intent.
5. Search Intent Can Change Over Time
Searchers’ intent can change over time, significantly impacting how your website ranks on in the SERPs.
When John Shehata, VP of Condé Nast, asked Google’s John Mueller what the search engine views as a valid query, Mueller came back with this :
From that, let’s go with the theory that search intent can often be seasonal.
Now, imagine you’re a hotel owner.
It’s summer, your business is booming because people are looking for somewhere to stay near the beach during their vacations. So naturally, they search for something like a ‘beach hotel (location).’ In all likelihood, they’re looking for a place to stay close to the beach in their chosen hotel.
However, come wintertime, your business slows down because people aren’t looking for beach getaways. An effective SEO strategy considers these seasonal changes in search intent and adapts its plan accordingly. For example, you might change your keywords to ‘seasonal short breaks’ (location) or similar.
Obviously, you would do some keyword research to determine the exact phrases to use, and I’ve got a tool to help you with that to give me some ideas to run with:
6. Effective SEO Compliments Paid Marketing and Other Efforts
You shouldn’t just think about SEO in isolation.
Effective SEO is part of an overall strategy designed to optimize your results. When you use SEO alongside paid marketing, outreach, and other efforts, you get a balanced online marketing plan that delivers short-term and long-term results.
Ideally, you want to use SEO alongside PPC advertising. Here’s why:
SEO can increase the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns by targeting the right audience and increasing click-through rates.
By improving your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), you can drive more qualified traffic to your site.
SEO can help you target users who are already interested in what you have to offer, resulting in a higher conversion rate.
Paid search and SEO work together to create a comprehensive online marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals.
SEO can help you create quality content that attracts attention online. This content can be used for paid advertising campaigns, resulting in more leads and sales.
7. Effective SEO Still Drives Results
You can find countless articles online declaring ‘SEO is dead.’ Some of these articles go back to 2012 and beyond, and they’re all saying the same thing. However, I can tell you something with confidence: They’re wrong!
SEO is alive and well, but like everything else, it’s ever-changing, so you need to keep working at it if you want your SEO to be effective.
Then there are the marketers who still swear by SEO. Let’s take the IT sector as an example.
A recent Deloitte report notes that the industry has thrived over the past few years. Looking forward, evolving technologies like cloud computing, the move towards hybrid working, and a need to build sustainable futures are just some factors paving the way for an even brighter future.
How are companies in this sector building their visibility? As a forward-thinking industry, the IT sector is having to prepare for rapid change, and to help achieve this, they’re consistent investors in SEO.
Further, 89.3 percent said they’d conducted an SEO audit in the last year, and perhaps the most telling result of all, 78 percent use SEO for leads.
Whatever sector you’re in, SEO can work for you, getting you fresh leads and improving conversions, and taking your business to the next level.
Conclusion
If you’ve ever wondered whether SEO is a continuous process or a once-off project, this article should leave you with no doubt that you need to keep working on it if you want your SEO to be effective.
There are many factors to consider when optimizing a website. While the necessary changes may vary from site to site, the key to success is continually optimizing for SEO.
New trends and developments, changing search intent, and evolving algorithms are some of the main reasons to consider when developing an effective SEO strategy.
By following best practices and keeping up with the latest trends, you can increase the chances that your site ranks highly on search engine results pages, bringing more visitors and potential customers your way.
What’s the best way to implement and update an effective SEO strategy? Share your tips below.
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