Looking for the complete ecommerce SEO checklist to optimize your online shop? I have got you covered.
Ecommerce stores face fierce competition from both their online and offline rivals.
Ecommerce SEO will reach $188 billion by 2025. In countries such as Ireland, ecommerce is expected to rise by 20% in 2020 while in the UK online sales is expected to rise by 5% by 2022.
By doing SEO, you can bring your ecommerce store to the top of the search engine results page and generate more sales.
However, SEO is vast and comprises lots of factors. Besides, there are several ecommerce SEO mistakes that you should avoid.
In this guide, I’m going to show you each SEO element that will help you increase your ecommerce store’s visibility in search engines.
Now, let’s jump into the checklist.
Ecommerce SEO Website Setup Checklist
These are the things that you should focus on when creating your website. If you have already built your online store, check if these factors are optimized.
1- Branding
A brand is everything. Right? People will remember you from your website, and that’s why branding is very important for your business. Pick a domain name that is easy to remember. Design a logo that is easy to recognize and memorable. Also, ensure that your brand logo is clearly visible on your homepage.
Related: Most Powerful Brand Words and Basics of Color Branding
2- Good Web Hosting Service
Web hosting is very important for every website. However, buying the right hosting is challenging, especially if you are a newbie or have a low budget.
The primary reason hosting is essential is that it affects your website speed, which is one of the top-ranking factors considered by Google.
Related: Improve Your Page Speed
If your site has a delay of 2 seconds, you might lose 15% of your customers. So, buy a premium hosting. I recommend Bluehost, Siteground & WPX hosting for ecommerce stores.
3- Blog
Creating a blog on your website helps you update your site regularly, thereby attracting search engine crawlers to index your store frequently. Also, Google loves new and fresh content. Write on topics related to your products on your blog.
For example, if you are selling “healthy oils”, ” you can write blogs that talk about the benefits of oils, how to use them, etc.
4- Subscribers List
For every business, email marketing is very important. Having an email list enables you to directly contact your customers and send them promotions and updates directly in their inbox.
Related: Top 10 Email Marketing Tools and Top FREE Tools For Email Marketing
There are two ways to build subscribers list on your ecommerce store:
- First, through your blog. Create great content that your customers would want to receive on their inbox.
- Second, take customer consent to add them to your subscriber list when they sign up on your website.
5- Payment Methods
Provide as many payment methods as you can. Customers should be able to pay you in various modes apart from only debit and credit cards. Try to accept payment options like PayPal, COD, Payoneer, and Apple Pay. It allows your customers to make payments through their preferred mode.
6- CTA
CTA refers to “call to action”. CTA’s are very important for every ecommerce site as they encourage users to take action.
I recommend adding CTAs like:
- Page CTAs: You should add a “add to cart” button on the pages like homepage or category pages. So that customers can directly add the products to the cart without even opening the product.
- Wishlist CTA: You should also add a functionality called “wishlist” that enables shoppers to save any product to buy later.
- Freebie CTA: In this type of CTA, you provide freebies to your prospects to encourage buying from your store. For example, “free sample.”
- Compelling CTA: In this, you can add various promotions like seasonal or limited offers on your homepage. For example, “claim your 10% off” or “get free shipping this week.”
7- Contact Info
Adding contact information about your company is an essential step, especially for the ecommerce stores. It shows you are a legitimate business and helps build trust with both customers and search engines.
Make it easy for shoppers to contact you. You can add various contact details like:
- Live chat
- Address
- Phone
- Your physical store location map
UI/UX Ecommerce SEO Checklist
User experience and website design play a crucial role in your SEO. If it isn’t easy to navigate or purchase from your website, you will see a decline in ranking and conversions.
Here’s the UI/UX checklist for ecommerce sites:
1- Filter Option
Adding filters on your product pages or categories enables customers to quickly find items they are looking for.
For example, users can set product price, type, color, and other filters. It will save shoppers time on finding a product. While filter options don’t impact your SEO directly, they improve the overall user experience of your online store.
2- Responsive Design
Gone are the days when shoppers only used their desktop to buy products. In the coming years, mobile shopping will dominate other devices. Even Google prefers mobile-friendly websites. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor.
Hence, you should make your site mobile-friendly. How? It’s pretty simple, just use a responsive theme if you are a WordPress user. But if your website is built purely with coding, you can ask your developer to do the same.
Tip: Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to determine if your site is mobile-friendly or not.
3- HTTPS
HTTPS acts as your front-line security warrior. It prevents intruders from accessing the personal information of your customers. Google considers HTTPS as a positive sign that you care for your customers and enhances your ranking accordingly. To implement HTTPS, you need to buy an SSL certificate. You can purchase it from your domain provider.
If you don’t use SSL, then Google will display a warning at the top of the address bar.
4- Search Bar
Adding a search bar on your site helps users search for their desired products directly without even opening any page or category. If you have a big site offering lots of products, it’s essential to add a search bar.
5- Reviews & Ratings
Customers trust reviews and ratings. People check reviews before buying anything online, and that’s why it is essential for your ecommerce site to have the option of reviews.
Let’s say you are going to buy a laptop online. Will you buy without seeing reviews? Definitely not. First, you see all the positive and negative reviews of that product to understand the pros and cons and then you but the product.
Add review functionality on your product pages where customers can leave a review. Reviews usually include product names and other attributes, thereby supporting your SEO.
Tip: Don’t delete negative reviews. Be transparent.
6- Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are used to make your site navigation better. In general, breadcrumbs tells the users their location on the website or page. It helps search engine bots better understand your website hierarchy.
7- Website Speed
Fast website loading speed is essential both for SEO. Speed is the most significant ranking factor used by Google. Slow speed can kill your conversions and revenue.
Related: Fix LCP Issue, Fix FCP Issue, and Google Page Experience Update
You can test your site speed using the Google Page Speed tool. This tool also provides you with recommendations to improve your site speed.
Here are some ways to improve your website speed:
- Use Minification: Minification is the best way to decrease website load time. Identify if your site has unused HTML, CSS, and Javascript code. By applying minification, you can eliminate unnecessary files, which cuts down the page load speed.
- Enable GZip Compression: It is a format used for compressing the files. By using GZip compression, you compress all your data before sending it to the user’s browser. This way, your website takes less time to load.
- Use Lazy Loading: Images are the biggest part of your overall website page site. You use lots of images of different sizes, and it slows down your website. Here, lazy loading can help you. Lazy loading only displays images whenever the user scrolls to the image part until then, pictures remain hidden.
- Compress Images: Image compression is an effortless and most useful practice in terms of speed optimization. Other than just size, images also contain lots of data like meta info. This data adds extra weight to the image and impact page size. So, it is best to compress all images on your website. Tools like Compress JPEG, TinyJPG can help you compress images effortlessly.
- Remove Unused and duplicate images: When you run an ecommerce website, you need to upload lots of pictures for products, services, information, etc. However, there comes a time when you don’t need certain images, but they are still using your library spaces. So, go and delete the images you don’t need. The same thing applies to duplicate images; most of the time, we upload the same photo having different extensions like abc.jpg and abc.png. Remove the ones that you don’t need.
Basic Ecommerce SEO Checklist
Once you have created your ecommerce website, follow this basic ecommerce SEO checklist to ensure it is properly optimized:
1- Create Sitemap
The sitemap is an XML file that tells the search engines how many pages your site has. A sitemap helps in crawling and indexing of your website.
Here’s how a sitemap looks.
To check your sitemap, just put sitemap.xml after your website domain in the address bar.
Example: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Creating a sitemap is simple, If you are a WordPress user, then Yoast will do this automatically for you. Otherwise, you can use third-party sitemap generators like xml-sitemaps.com.
2- Create a Robots.txt file
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages to crawl on your website. Here is an example of a robots.txt file:
In the image, you can see that robots.txt contains the sitemap URL. Then after this line, we have some codes. These codes are included to help search engine crawlers.
For example, this robots.txt file has a code-named “disallow,” which tells crawlers not to index certain pages.
Add all the pages on the robots.txt file which you want the search engines to disallow. Pages related to payment and add to cart info should be deindexed from search engine crawlers.
3- Setup Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential tool for every webmaster. Google Analytics can give you insightful data on how your visitors interact with your website. For example, analyzing bounce rates and time on page can give you an idea of user experience and engagement.
It’s very easy to add your site to analytics; just follow the below steps:
Step 1: Go to Google Analytics and signup.
Step 2: After that, you need to add the account name and then select between the website and app. Here you should choose website.
Step 3: On the next step, enter your website name, URL, category, and country.
Step 4: In this last step, you will get a code on your computer screen. Just copy the code and add it to your website’s header section (before <head>). That’s it.
4- Setup Google Search Console
Google Webmasters is a must-have tool for anyone who has a website. With this tool, you can track your website’s performance on the search and see the keywords that you’re ranking for.
Using this tool, you will get lots of important features such as total clicks, impressions, avg. CTR, and avg. position on the search results.
Here are some basic steps you can follow to install Google Webmasters on your website.
Step 1: Visit Google Search Console and login using your email id.
Step 2: After signing, you will see a screen like the below image.
Step 3: Select “URL prefix” and add your website URL.
Step 4: In this last step you have to approve your website, for doing this, you just have to add the code you will get after clicking continue. The process is the same as we did for Google Analytics.
5- Install Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO is a free SEO plugin for WordPress users. It does lots of tasks like creating a sitemap and robots.txt file, helping in the optimization of title and meta description, and other important SEO tasks.
In simple words, it helps webmasters to optimize the website for SEO without any coding. Apart from Yoast, you can also use other SEO plugins like All in One or Rank Math. But I recommend Yoast SEO over other plugins.
Ecommerce On-Page SEO Checklist
Now that you know everything about the basic ecommerce SEO Checklist, its time to optimize your website with an ecommerce on-page SEO checklist. Let’s take a look at the on-page SEO checklist.
1- Use Short URLs
Short yet descriptive URLs tend to perform better than long ones. While there’s a clear correlation, it doesn’t mean causation. A simple way to choose your URL is to set it as your primary keyword target.
For example, if you are selling Samsung mobile phones, your URL should look like “www.yourdomain.com/samsung-mobile-phones.”
As you can see, It’s short, and anyone can tell from the URL what the topic is on, i.e., Samsung mobile phones. This helps you make your URLs search-engine friendly.
2- Create Catchy Title And Description
A catchy title and description entice shoppers into clicking on your URL. Ensure your title and description give users a fair idea of what they can expect on the page. For example, if you sell gluten-free food products, make sure to include the phrase “gluten-free” in the title.
3- Use Internal Linking
Internal linking helps search engine crawlers find different pages on your website easily. It also gives your site visitors more reasons to stay, thereby decreasing the bounce rate and increasing average pages per session.
A quick way to find these pages is to go to Google and search for something like site:yourdomain.com and then add a keyword related to your topic.
For example, site: yourdomain.com “keyword.”
You’ll then see all posts from your domain that include your keyword. Visit these pages and add internal links with relevant anchors texts.
When you do this properly, you can pass link equity to your new page and possibly increase the speed that Google discovers your page.
4- Add Image ALT Tag And Title
Alt image tags are very important, but many webmasters don’t give it a priority. An alt tag is used to tell the user what the image is all about when their network is slow and the picture isn’t loaded.
Does the Alt tag helps in the ranking?
The answer is “YES”, it definitely helps improve your website’s position in the search results page, especially Google Images ranking.
Did you know that Google Search Console (Webmaster) helps you in optimizing images? Here’s how:
Step 1: Just go to Search Console. Click on Performance, as shown in the below image.
Step 2: Now, click on “Search type” and select Images from the options. (you can also compare with various ranges).
Step 3: Here, you can see how many times someone clicks on your images, how many impressions you are getting, and whats the position of your image on the Google search.
Step 4: Now, just scroll down a little bit, and you will find some metrics like:
- Queries: These are the keywords for which your image is appearing.
- Pages: These are the top-performing pages of your website.
- Countries: This section shows the country where most of the traffic or visitors are coming.
- Device: This metric tells that from which device someone is visiting your site, including desktop, mobile, and tablet.
- Dates: It shows traffic and impressions your images are getting on particular days.
5- Use Canonical URLs
Sometimes you have some pages of different variations.
For example:
/category-1/colour-1
/category-1/colour-2
/category-1/colour-3
/category-1/colour-4
This confuses search engine bots as to which page is the primary one.
To solve this issue, you should implement canonical URLs. This thing tells the search engine to which version of the page to crawl and appear on Google search.
6- Add Pagination
Pagination is yet another important SEO aspect for your website. Imagine you have 50 products on a category page, then serving all these 50 products at the same time hurts your website and user behavior.
Pagination separates your content into different pages and arranges them in sequential order.
You can serve pagination in two variety:
- Previous/Next
- Numbers
7- Add Schemas
Schema is a type of markup language that adds extra layers of structured content to your website. By implementing schemas, you can display your product ratings, or provide additional tabs to your webpage.
For example, take a look at the below image. It shows ratings for the Dell laptop.
Ecommerce SEO Content Checklist
Choosing a topic with high search traffic potential and doing some basic on‐page SEO is important. But all of your efforts will be in vain if your content isn’t up to par. Here are a few things you can add to your to-do list when creating your content.
1- Add Categories Pages
Categories pages are the most powerful pages on your website. And also, these are the pages you want to rank higher on search results. These categories also help in building authority.
Divide all the products in your inventory into different categories. Go as deep as possible and divide your products on the basis of color, size, features, price, etc. The more sorted your category pages are, the better will be your conversions.
Always add 2-3 paragraphs of content into your category pages because Google takes into account the content of a webpage to determine relevancy. This is the reason, major ecommerce sites have at least 1000 words of content on their category pages. The more you can add, the better it will be.
2- Write Engaging Intros
Always write an engaging introduction. Use headings and subheadings that match the search query. The intro’s purpose is to let your readers know they’re in the right place and that your page will address their concerns. Fail to do so, and your readers will be gone fast!
Start with something that resonates with the reader, build trust or credibility, and promise a solution to the user’s problem.
3- Improve Readability
Make sure your content is easy to understand. Readability is divided into two broad categories:
The first is visual comprehension; that is, When a reader visits your page, the first thing they’re going to process is how your page looks. And if they land on a big wall of text in 10pt font, they’ll likely get overwhelmed and leave. Instead, break your content into pieces by writing in short sentences and short paragraphs.
Other visual assets you can add are images to separate paragraphs. But don’t just throw in stock photos for the sake of faking visual appeal. Put some effort into creating or finding images that will enhance the reader’s experience.
Now, the second category in readability is reading comprehension such as copywriting. According to a study, 50% of the US population reads below an 8th-grade level. It means that if you’re writing at a higher level, you’re alienating half the community as well as non-native speakers. There’s a free tool called Hemingway Editor. Just paste your content in there, and it’ll give you a readability score, as shown in the below image.
4- Try to Solve Users Query
Ensure your content solves the reason for the searcher’s query. Great content is the one that solves a user’s problem or questions.
For example, if you sell Nike shoes and you came to know via the site search feature on your site that users are searching for the “Blue Nike Shoes” the most, then create a page for “Blue Nike Shoes” containing all the possible options you can offer. This will help that page rank higher in the organic search results and solve the user problems.
5- Add Related Pages
Product pages are the most important aspect of every ecommerce store.
Promote related products on each product page. But keep in mind that only show valuable and super related products. It also helps your visitors to stick to your website for more time. That’s how you can increase your overall conversion.
6- Add Videos
Videos are replacing text contents. Besides, videos are more engaging and can entice users into converting. Add product intro videos, shoppable videos, features and benefits videos, or how-to videos.
Conclusion
I have tried my best to include every point that is necessary for an ecommerce SEO checklist. I can assure you that if you use this ecommerce SEO checklist, you will be able to rank your website higher and beat your competitor (that’s the main thing!). Happy SEOing!
