In the field of marketing, it is unanimously agreed that SEO is the most effective internet marketing strategy for e-commerce companies. With 53.3% of all website traffic originating from organic search results (BrightEdge), it is important to optimize your website for search engines in order to gain the most amount of online traffic. Despite the importance of SEO in e-commerce, it is frequency underutilized by small-to-medium sized businesses. If you want to gain the benefits of SEO but don’t know where to begin, here are 5 steps to SEO optimize your online store.

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Step 1: Understanding what SEO is and the importance of optimizing it

The term SEO is an abbreviation of the term Search Engine Optimization. It refers to systems that affect website visibility in search engine results. When a website has good SEO, it is more likely to show up on the first page of a search engine.

To understand how SEO affects website visibility on search engines, it is important to understand how search engines index websites. Taking Google for instance, Google’s crawler (Googlebot) adds info in Google’s website index through following links. Search results are then pulled from this index and ordered in terms of relevancy to the user. To optimize the way the crawler moved through your website, you want the structure of the website to be efficient and the content on each page to be valuable.

Another benefit of SEO optimization is that, not only will you increase the visibility of your website on search engines, but you will also improve your website’s user experience. In short, a well-planned website is a SEO optimized website.

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Step 2: Recognizing your company’s keywords

Keywords are a collection of words that define what your website content is about. When you use a search engine, the text you type in the search bar are keywords. The search engine will use the keywords you entered to find websites that have related content. By having many relevant keywords in your website text, you are more likely to appear on the first page of the search engine when someone is searching for related subject matter.

Important terms to know when comparing keywords:

• Search Volume: The number of times a keyword is searched in a specified time period
• Competition: How difficult it will be to appear on the search engine for a particular keyword
• Short tailed keyword: Comprised of 1-3 words → Usually higher volume and higher competition
• Long tailed keyword: Comprised of 4+ words → Usually lower volume and lower competition

When picking key words, we want high search volume and low competition.

To cultivate a list of keywords for your company, Ubersuggest and Google Ad’s Keyword Planner are great tools to find keywords relevant to your business.

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Step 3: Improving your website content

After completing step 2, you are now equipped to make better quality website content. It is good practice that, for each page of your website, you have a primary keyword and three to five secondary keywords. While ensuring that the website content sounds natural, try to use these keywords as much as possible.

Search engines are able to pull more keywords from longer product descriptions so limit the number of pages with little content. It is generally recommended that there should be at least 300 words per page on your website. However, do be aware that the quality of the content matters much more then the quantity of words. As such, do not rely on redundancy to meet the 300-word mark. If you are having a hard time making a long product description, try adding some product reviews or statistics to lengthen the word count.

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Step 4: Refine your site structure

There are some rules to keep in mind when structuring your website so that it is attractive to search engine crawlers:

• 3 Click Rule: Structure your website so that it requires as few clicks as possible (recommended three clicks or less) to go from the home page to the desired product page.
• Meaningfully group products: Avoid very general product groupings on your e-commerce store. Instead, group products in a way that would be meaningful to consumers. (Ex. For a bakery, instead of having one grouping for all baked goods, it is better separate products into the type of baked good (birthday cakes, pastries, fresh bread, etc.)).
• Implement sub-navigation: Having breadcrumb navigation that outlines the user journey through the site makes navigating through the website much easier and efficient.
• Use page linking where appropriate: Having internal links to other areas of your website helps the crawler to cover more ground quickly when indexing your website (Ex. A blog post linking to a previous post). Only use this technique only where it seems natural to do so; search engines can find excessive linking to be suspicious.
• Choose the right URL: URLs should be short, contain keywords, avoid conjunctions (Ex. “and”, “of”, “the”, “a”, etc.), and be easy to read for real humans.

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Step 5: Ensure responsive design for mobile users

Not only is having a responsive website important for search engine crawlers, but with 34% of all online retail purchases taking place on mobile devices (Google), having a good mobile site is important for increasing online sales.

A responsive website is one that looks good on all screen sizes. Considerations that help make websites more mobile friendly are as follows:

• Avoid auto-play videos
• All text must be readable
• Touch commands cannot be too small or close together
• Graphics must be scaled so it does not overwhelm the screen

A great tool to test if your website is responsive for mobile devices is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

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There are a lot of techniques and strategies that go into making a website SEO optimized. Even so, with these five steps in place, your website will have the foundation it needs to get started with e-commerce SEO.