A Complete Guide to E-commerce SEO

Learn how to increase organic traffic and boost sales

By Nathan from Gotch SEO

Introduction

In this comprehensive guide to e-commerce SEO, I will share with you the exact process we used to grow a supplement company's monthly traffic to over 150,000 visitors from Google. As an experienced SEO professional, I have led numerous successful e-commerce SEO campaigns since 2013. So, let's dive right in and learn how to optimize your e-commerce website for search engines.

1. Finding the Right Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of every successful e-commerce SEO campaign. While anyone can find keywords, the real challenge lies in knowing which ones to target. Let's start with some simple ways to find keywords in your industry:

• Start by analyzing your own website using tools like Ahrefs. Enter your domain and go to the "Organic Keywords" section. Focus on keywords ranking from positions 2 to 15, known as "low hanging fruits," as improving their rankings can lead to a significant increase in organic search traffic.
• Steal keyword ideas from your competitors. Use Ahrefs' "Organic Competitor Section" to identify competitors ranking for more keywords than you. Take note of their top ranking keywords and target them in your own SEO strategy.

Once you have a strong keyword list, it's essential to qualify these opportunities. Here's how to filter and prioritize keywords:

• Use keyword difficulty (KD) to filter keywords based on lowest domain rating (DR). Start with websites having a DR of 50 or lower and focus on keywords with a KD of less than 30.
• Set a filter to show keywords with a search volume greater than 100.
• Prioritize keywords with transactional intent, targeting users at the bottom of the sales funnel. Understand the five main categories of search intent: informational, investigative, comparison, transactional, and navigational. Craft your SEO strategy to target keywords at each stage of the sales funnel.

2. Conducting a Technical SEO Audit

Ensuring that your e-commerce website is technically sound is crucial for SEO success. Follow these steps to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit:

1. Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider, a tool that will crawl your website and identify technical SEO opportunities.
2. Integrate Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs APIs within Screaming Frog to gather essential data on your website's performance.
3. Analyze the crawl report generated by Screaming Frog, looking for the following opportunities:

• Poor SEO performance: Identify pages with zero sessions, clicks, impressions, and backlinks. Determine whether these pages should be upgraded, optimized, or removed altogether. Consider 301 redirecting underperforming pages with backlinks to existing pages.
• Duplicate content: Check for duplicate content that could harm your SEO efforts. Use canonical tags or implement redirects to resolve duplicate content issues.
• Site speed optimization: Evaluate page load speed using Google PageSpeed Insights and optimize for faster loading times. Ensure your website's core web vitals meet Google's standards.
• Mobile-friendliness: Audit your website's mobile version to ensure it offers a seamless user experience on mobile devices. Optimize for responsive design and fast mobile loading speeds.
• URL structure and internal linking: Review your website's URL structure and internal linking. Ensure URLs are optimized, descriptive, and contain relevant keywords. Implement a logical internal linking structure to improve user navigation and search engine crawlability.

By conducting a technical SEO audit, you can identify and address any issues impacting your website's search engine visibility and overall performance.

Note: This article continues with more tips and strategies for e-commerce SEO.

Improving SEO Performance: Technical SEO Strategies and Optimization Tips

1. Page Redirection

Sometimes, it is more beneficial to redirect a webpage to an existing page rather than optimizing it separately. This option is typically recommended in two scenarios:

• Keyword Cannibalization: When multiple pages target the same keyword, it is advisable to redirect them to a single webpage. This ensures that the page receives maximum visibility for the targeted keyword.
• Page with Backlinks: If a webpage has valuable backlinks, redirecting it to another relevant page can help preserve the link equity and boost the SEO performance.

It is important to ensure that the redirected page is closely related to the original page's content, provides a seamless user experience, and maintains a clean redirect.

2. Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal links play a crucial role in enhancing crawling, indexing, and the distribution of link equity within a website. To identify internal linking opportunities and streamline the website's architecture, follow these steps:

1. Extract the appropriate data using tools like Screaming Frog.
2. Analyze the "crawl depth" to determine how many clicks it takes to reach a particular page. Ideally, every page on the website should be accessible within three clicks.
3. Identify pages with limited internal links and investigate the reasons behind their low link count. Lack of internal links can signify neglect or poor topic authority.
4. Generate additional assets and create more internal links to relevant pages. If no suitable pages exist, consider creating new content.

By addressing internal linking issues, you can improve your website's SEO performance and facilitate better visibility for important pages.

3. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages within a website target the same keyword, leading to competition among the pages. To identify instances of keyword cannibalization:

1. Focus on the title section of the pages.
2. Filter the data based on specific keywords to analyze their usage across the website.
3. Review pages that target the same keyword as the primary keyword. Assess whether these pages are relevant and aligned with the overall SEO strategy.
4. Consolidate pages that display clear signs of keyword cannibalization, eliminating the issue and maintaining a clear content hierarchy.

While mild instances of keyword cannibalization, such as similar product pages targeting specific keywords, may not significantly impact SEO performance, addressing major instances with consolidated content is crucial for maintaining keyword relevance and visibility.

4. Optimize Existing SEO Content

To enhance the performance of existing SEO content, start by targeting low-hanging fruits - keywords that rank between positions 2 and 15 on search engine result pages. Follow this process to optimize your content effectively:

1. Utilize tools like Surfer and conduct a SERP analysis for the target keyword.
2. Check the word count of the target page and ensure it falls within the recommended range of 1,000 to 2,800 words. Pages with inadequate word count should be expanded to improve competitiveness.
3. Identify relevant NLP (Natural Language Processing) keywords within the SERP analysis and incorporate them into the content brief.
4. Use a content generation tool like ChatGPT to create an initial draft based on the keyword prompts. This draft can then be refined and customized to align with the brand's voice and style.

Optimizing existing content not only saves time but also improves the relevance and ranking potential of the webpage.

By implementing these technical SEO strategies and optimizing existing content efficiently, you can boost your website's visibility, enhance crawling and indexing, and drive organic traffic.

How to Create High-Quality Content Quickly and Easily

Creating high-quality content can be a time-consuming and challenging task. However, with the help of AI tools like ChatGPT and Surfer AI, the process can be streamlined to save both time and effort. In this article, we will explore how these tools can assist in generating content for your website and optimizing it for SEO purposes.

Starting with ChatGPT and Surfer AI

1. Begin by using ChatGPT to generate a first draft of your content. Within seconds, ChatGPT can provide a decent piece of content that you can modify and personalize to make it relevant to your brand.

2. Copy the generated content and paste it into Surfer's Content Editor. Without making any edits, add basic headings to structure the content. This simple step can significantly improve the content's score, with Surfer AI giving it a rating of 65 out of 100.

3. To enhance the depth of the sections, incorporate the word count from Surfer's Content Editor into ChatGPT. This will allow you to expand on specific topics in more detail.

4. Once you have the desired word count, run the content through Grammarly to ensure proper grammar and style. This will help polish the content and make it more professional.

5. Lastly, go through the content and add personalized elements and brand-specific information to make it unique. This will help create a more human touch and resonate with your target audience.

Surfer AI for Automated Content Creation

Surfer AI offers an alternative approach to content creation. By providing Surfer AI with the keyword you want to rank for, the tool can automatically analyze the top five competitors on the first page of search results. It selects the highest-scoring competitors and generates content based on their performance.

Surfer AI delivers fully optimized articles with headings and a high content score (up to 95) even without manual edits. This automation significantly reduces the time and effort required to create SEO-optimized content.

The Importance of an Editorial Process

While AI tools can expedite the content creation process, it is crucial to have an editorial process in place. Treat the AI-generated content as a first draft that requires refinement. Implement a second and possibly third draft, adding personalized elements and ensuring uniqueness.

Remember that the content needs to be human and avoid cookie-cutter approaches. An editorial process helps maintain quality and credibility, ensuring the content represents the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness required to rank well.

Additional Tips for SEO Content Creation

1. Upgrade and Optimize Existing Pages: Go through your existing website pages and improve them one at a time. Make substantial changes and update the post date every time to signal freshness to search engines.

2. Splinter Your Content: Identify keywords your website currently ranks for and create dedicated pages for them. By hyper-focusing on specific queries, you can increase your chances of ranking higher. Internal linking between these pages helps to boost their visibility.

3. Optimize for Google's EEAT: Google places a strong emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) in ranking websites, especially in industries such as health and finance. Inject firsthand experiences, provide expert knowledge, and include credible sources to build trust with readers and search engines.

4. Utilize the Reverse Silo Technique: Direct most of your backlinks to linkable assets on your website. Then, distribute the link equity to critical pages using internal linking. This strategy helps boost the visibility and authority of important pages.

By leveraging AI tools and implementing effective SEO strategies, you can streamline your content creation process and improve your website's performance in search results. Remember to combine automation with an editorial process to maintain quality and create unique, human-centered content.

Maximizing the Impact of Backlinks: Reverse Silo Technique and Acquiring High-Quality Relevant Backlinks

In the world of e-commerce SEO, driving traffic and improving site authority are key goals for any website owner. This article explores two essential techniques that can significantly enhance your website's performance through strategic link building: the reverse silo technique and acquiring high-quality relevant backlinks.

The Reverse Silo Technique

The reverse silo technique is a method that focuses on directing backlinks primarily to linkable assets, such as informative blog posts or resource pages. By doing so, you can leverage the link equity gained from these backlinks to boost the authority and performance of other critical pages through internal linking. This approach follows the principle that a rising tide lifts all ships, meaning that improving the authority of one page can positively impact the entire website.

To illustrate the effectiveness of this technique, let's examine Candy Funhouse, a company that used a clever marketing strategy to attract a plethora of backlinks to a unique page: the application for the position of "Chief Candy Officer." While the traffic to this page might not be remarkable, the purpose was to secure backlinks. Consequently, they managed to acquire an impressive 480 additional referring domains. As anticipated, the overall website performance witnessed a significant improvement. This example highlights the significance of focusing on building site authority one page at a time.

Acquiring High-Quality Relevant Backlinks

In addition to the reverse silo technique, acquiring high-quality relevant backlinks is essential for boosting your website's authority and visibility. Not all pages on your website are equally linkable, and it is essential to identify and create linkable assets that are likely to attract backlinks. Here are a few strategies to consider:

1. Create Ultimate Guides

Developing comprehensive guides on specific topics can be a highly successful approach, especially in industries where such resources are scarce. However, it is crucial to choose subjects that have not been extensively covered yet. For instance, while creating an ultimate guide on backlinks in the SEO industry may not yield significant results due to oversaturation, exploring unique topics such as the history of sandblasting could bring substantial success.

2. Create Data-Driven Content

Crafting content backed by proprietary data can be a powerful way to secure backlinks from authoritative websites. By conducting case studies or analysis with unique data, you can create a valuable asset that stands out from the competition. The success of such content lies in its unparalleled insights and reliability.

3. Create Free Tools and Software

Leveraging ChatGPT, an AI language model, can simplify the process of creating free tools and software to serve as effective link bait. By providing solutions and resources that address specific needs or offer value to your target audience, you can incentivize quality backlinks. Utilizing ChatGPT's prompts can generate a plethora of ideas tailored to your industry, allowing you to create useful tools without needing coding expertise.

For example, if you specialize in selling sandblasters, you can use ChatGPT to create an innovative tool like the Sandblasting Time Estimator. The generated code can be refined and implemented using appropriate plugins or development resources until you have a fully functional tool that enhances your link building efforts.

By consistently implementing the reverse silo technique and acquiring high-quality relevant backlinks, you can improve your website's authority, organic traffic, and overall performance. E-commerce SEO requires a strategic and proactive approach to capitalize on these techniques effectively.

If you're interested in exploring the proprietary e-commerce SEO systems, templates, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) developed by our team, consider applying for our E-commerce SEO Certification Program at GotchSEO.com/ecom. Join us on the journey to optimizing your e-commerce website for success.

Thank you for reading!

Please note that the additional information added to the article aims to enhance the content and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the discussed strategies.