11 Steps to E-Commerce SEO: A Comprehensive Guide

Marketing for e-commerce sites means facing very specific challenges. First of all, making e-commerce sites stand out requires the marketer to strike a good balance between user experience, conversion improvements, and SEO. Secondly, because online stores are often large and complex, on-site optimization can be a never-ending nightmare.

In this guide, all of the contextual and technical problems that e-commerce SEOs may encounter are addressed. In addition, applicable methods to deal with these problems and techniques that can save time are included.

Keyword research for e-commerce sites means going beyond search volumes and competitive analysis. The main reason behind this complexity may be the buying cycle. Each step in the buying cycle requires focusing on different keywords.

In general, when customers enter online stores, they go through 5 different steps before making a purchase. The keywords and keyword phrases in these different steps are different from each other just like the steps.

• Awareness: Searchers are looking for general information about a topic. It is not easy to rank for keywords in this field due to competition.
• Research: Visitors are looking for more specific information. The names of category pages are keywords to focus on.
• Comparison: Users look for the good and bad points of a brand, product, or store. Keywords in blog posts and product reviews are important.
• Purchase: Searchers decide what they want to buy and make a purchase. The focus here is on the keywords on the product pages.
• Retention: The best thing to do in this step is to try not to lose the customer who has been directly acquired. For this, it is necessary to reach the customer with interesting campaigns.

1. Create 3 Different Keyword Lists

As you can see in the steps above, the keywords used in the customer research, comparison, and purchase steps are the keywords with the highest conversion potential. You should try to create a comprehensive list of these keywords. To create a comprehensive list of these keywords, you will need 3 groups of keywords that you can then turn into long-tail queries.

But before you start, you should research your target audience’s current search behavior. You should have information about the gender, age and social status of your target audience. For example, if you are a man and don’t know about personal care products for women, you should try to get help from your female friends. You should try to understand the language of the target audience by spending some of your time on appropriate social media resources.

Note: An internal site search can provide you with information about the keywords your target audience uses to find your products or services. This information is extremely important for e-commerce sites. However, since you will manage to reach real keywords, you can have data on the demand and popularity of the products.

Once you start to understand how your customers talk and the words they use, you should add them to your keyword list.

• You should create a list of action keywords. “Buy, price, compare, or review.”
• You should make a list of all the product brands available in your store. “Apple, Samsung, Sony, or LG.”
• You should create a list of categories, product names, and key features. “TV, laptop, smartphone, iPhone, etc.”

2. Mix Keywords

Once you have the three lists ready as mentioned above, you can move on to preparing the search phrases. By combining general keywords with product keywords and their features, you can create dozens of long-tail keywords. “Buy Samsung Galaxy S24 smartphone” is an ideal example of this. You can create dozens or even hundreds of such search queries by tinkering with the keywords you have.

You can do this process yourself if you wish. If you wish, you can do this process in a much shorter time by getting support from keyword tools. You can instantly get long-tail keywords by using tools like Rank Tracker that can create word combinations. Open the Rank Tracker tool, click the Suggest Keywords button, select the Word Combination option, and click Next. You can then start typing keywords on the screen that appears.

In the next step, you will see a screen titled “Choose The Keyword You Need”. On this screen, you can easily access the long-tail keywords created for you. After selecting any of these keywords, you can proceed to the next step to access data such as the search volume and competition status of the keywords you have selected.

It’s as simple as that. You now have dozens or even hundreds of long-tail keywords that you can use efficiently. Whichever of these keywords has a good search volume and low competition, you should try to use those keywords in your SEO efforts.

Have you ever heard of keyword fragmentation? In a nutshell, this term means that more than one page on your site focuses on the same keyword. This means that these pages targeting the same query will compete with each other in terms of ranking on the search engine results page. In some cases, search engines emphasize the page you consider unimportant and leave the main page in the background.

To avoid the keyword fragmentation problem, you should try to create a keyword matrix. In this matrix, you should show which page targets which keyword in an appropriate way. Thus, you can avoid using similar keywords on the pages you will try to create in the future. With this simple method, you can avoid the keyword fragmentation problem.

Alternatively, if you are using a keyword tool, you can take advantage of the keyword map feature of that tool. This way you can easily see which landing page is targeting which keyword. If you are not using a specialized keyword tool, you can continue using the simple method above.

Once you have succeeded in matching keywords to landing pages, you should get rid of pages that have targeted the same keyword or try to change their keywords. Using a specialized keyword tool for this can be much more efficient. However, if you are not in a position to afford it financially, you can handle everything individually.

Note: If the content management system you use to manage your e-commerce site creates additional pages for variations of products, you should inform search engines that these pages are equivalent to the main product page. For this, you can take advantage of the canonicalization method.

An e-commerce site can have thousands of product pages, even if it usually doesn’t have many options in terms of category pages. Everything seems very, very simple when it comes to category pages, but when it comes to product pages, the landscape changes in an instant. You may not have enough time and resources to create unique titles, H1 tags, and custom descriptions for product pages.

You might consider yourself a bit lucky here because the keyword research method mentioned above can also be used for meta tags. You should create a title, meta description, and H1 templates for product pages. For example, you can use the pattern “Buy – ” on all product pages. In this example, the part shown will be different on each page. You should try to choose a content management system where you can easily make this change.

You should perform similar edits for H1 tags and descriptions. Remember that titles and meta descriptions will appear on the search engine results page. Therefore, you should try to increase your click-through rate in the results by using appropriate calls to action.

Since Google began to better understand the intent behind search queries, we’ve all adopted a semantic search approach. While the search giant is good at this, we still need to help search engines understand the specific content on a site. By embedding schema markup codes on our site, we can help search engines provide more informative results to users.

There are dozens or even hundreds of markups supported by Schema. However, two are extremely important for e-commerce sites. Product schema and evaluation schema are these two types of markup. After Schema markups are applied, your site will be able to inform your potential visitors about the rating, price, and availability in search results.

The problem of duplicate content for e-commerce sites is divided into two categories. The off-site duplicate content problem is the situation where the content used is on many different sites on the internet. The on-site duplicate content problem means that more than one page on the site has the same content.

1. Solving the Off-Site Copy Issue

The problem of off-site copy is a natural occurrence for e-commerce sites. Online stores use product descriptions, images, and feature information provided by manufacturers. This is logical because, for example, you can’t just add new features to the latest iPhone. However, it is possible to take various steps to eliminate this problem.

• Write unique descriptions for each item. If you have a team of copywriters, you should include unique descriptions for each item in your inventory. The only thing you should pay attention to here is to make the necessary changes following the changing inventory items.
• Utilize user-generated content. Encourage visitors to leave comments and reviews about the products they have purchased. Send them follow-up emails and try to get their comments. If necessary, try to offer them an extra discount for doing so. While doing this, you should not neglect to check all incoming comments so that the site can be healthier.
• Create a question-and-answer tab for each product. By adding a frequently asked questions section to product pages, you can take a good step towards making the page unique. Again, you should remember that you need to utilize human resources to do this.
• You may want to consider improving only the product category pages. If you don’t have enough time and resources to edit and improve product pages, then you should try to produce original content for category pages only. In doing so, you should disable the indexing of product pages. Even if it is not very useful, this method works to eliminate the problem of duplicate content.

2. Solving the In-Site Copy Problem

In-site copy problem is a common problem in online stores. The reason for this may be the content management system used by the sites, as well as site configurations that are carried out against logic.

Two different scenarios are usually encountered within the scope of improvement efforts. The first is when a product is associated with more than one category. For example, a Samsung brand television may be associated with both home appliances, televisions, and the Samsung category. When content management systems create separate site addresses for each product, the problem of duplicate content arises.

The second scenario is directly caused by the content management system creating separate pages for different variations of the same product. While this may not seem like a big problem, product pages created for white and black versions of the same product can cause you problems due to duplicate content. You can try the following methods to overcome this problem:

• You can review the URL addresses of the site. You can ensure that the user is presented with a single URL page regardless of the paths they will follow on the catalog page. Ensuring that all product variations are displayed on a single page and not including any redirection is the best thing you can do. In this way, you can eliminate the problem of duplicate content.
• You can resort to canonization. This technique eliminates the problem of duplicate content. However, it is an approach that can cause problems for your site in terms of user experience and crawling budget. Unless you know what you’re doing on your site, you should avoid trying this method.

To put it bluntly, out-of-stock of certain products in your e-commerce store is a situation you may encounter from time to time. You may even be faced with some items being out of stock. However, you need to handle these two situations differently.

1. Create special pages for temporarily unavailable products

If an item is temporarily unavailable, it is not an option to eliminate the page where it is located. This is because you can clearly state on this page that the item is temporarily unavailable and provide visitors with all other appropriate information.

• You can specify the resupply period of the products. If you specify such a date, you will inform the visitor about the status of the relevant product. Thus, you can make the visitor wait for the relevant product or turn to alternatives.
• You can notify visitors when products are available. You may not know when some products will be available again. In this case, you should consider the possibility of notifying visitors when the product is available.
• You can allow visitors to pre-order. If you think that a product will be back in stock in a short time, you can allow users to pre-order it. In this way, you let users know that the product will be available again. You can also offer them the opportunity to be one of the first to receive the product.
• Benzer ürün listeleri oluşturabilirsiniz. Eğer yapabiliyorsanız ziyaretçilere alternatif seçenekler sunabilirsiniz. Bir ürün stokta yoksa veya geçici olarak temin edilemiyorsa onları rakip firmaya kaptırmak yerine onların benzer ürünlerle tanışmasını sağlayabilirsiniz.

2. Identify a method to manage unsold products

If an item is permanently off sale, you have to find the best way to remove that product page from the site.

• You can create a 404 page. The most natural way to remove a page from the search engine index is to create a 404 page. In this way, you will not affect the ranking values of the site. As long as you remember to remove 404 pages from the XML sitemap, you will not have any problems in this regard. Search engines will remove relevant pages from search results over time. If the page in question ranks well for some search results, you should consider other options.
• You must create a 301 redirect page. You can redirect the page of the product that is out of sale to the page of a similar product or to the appropriate category pages with a 301 redirect. Thanks to this redirection, you preserve the link values of your site, but at the same time, you increase the opening time of your site due to 301 redirects.
• You might consider keeping the product page. You can keep the page of a product that is out of sale active, but you should indicate that it is out of sale. This way, you can prevent the page from losing rankings in the search engine and at the same time preserve link values. However, this option is not recommended for e-commerce sites whose inventories are constantly updated. Because the presence of unnecessary pages on the site means that the side budget is not used correctly.

3. Be ready for seasonal impacts and traffic values

If you are thinking of announcing a new product, you should take the first step after extensive research, because your goal should be to get a good position in the search engine results pages. You should create a page for the new product. You should strengthen it with images. You should include product descriptions and other content that will satisfy the customer. You should try to introduce potential customers to subscription forms that will let them know when the product is available for purchase.

When seasonal effects or traffic values occur, you should review the pages on your site. For example, if there are products you want to highlight during the Ramadan Feast period, you should try to deliver them to users from a page such as /Christmas-2025. When the season ends, you can consider redirecting old pages to new ones with the necessary 301 redirects. Thus, you will not lose the links to your site and you can keep the page up to date.

Pagination is a useful way to divide content into several pages. On an e-commerce site, pagination can help you create overlapping content. If your site has a pagination bar and contains only a few numbers that belong to visitable and clickable pages, you shouldn’t have any problems.

However, if there are too many numbers in the pagination bar and they do not take you anywhere other than the current page, then you will likely have problems because search engines will rarely come and crawl them. In short, pagination is valuable as long as you can provide the transition between pages. It is possible to eliminate the general problems you will experience with pagination by using the following steps:

• Consider adding a show-all option. You should consider adding a page that can show products from all pages. In this scenario, all individual pages must have the rel=“canonical” attribute, and each of them must be redirected to the show-all option.
• Consider using rel=“next” and rel=“prev” tags. These tags are used between the tags of the page to show search engines that there is a before and after version of a page. The first page should only contain the rel=“next” tag and the last page should only contain the rel=“prev” tag. All pages between these two pages should have both tags. These tags will inform Google and other search engines that they should consider individual pages. Thus, you will be able to preserve the value of the backlinks to your site. However, you can ensure that more appropriate results of your site are included in the search engine results page.

Site speed is a doubly effective ranking factor for e-commerce sites. A slow site means a bad user experience. A bad user experience means lower sales. Site speed has long been an important ranking factor. The fast loading of the pages of your site is a factor that can move them to the front of the search engine results page.

First of all, you should analyze the main landing pages on your site and check that there are no speed problems. You can do this quickly by using various tools. You can try using Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, or WebSite Auditor. All these tools will provide you with your site’s speed score after scanning your site in detail. In general, the factors that cause low site speeds of pages and are ignored by e-commerce sites are as follows:

• You should cancel unnecessary redirects. Often sites use redirects to switch between their non-WWW version and their WWW version. They do the same for the mobile version of the site. You can speed up your site by safely canceling such unnecessary redirects.
• You should improve product images. E-commerce sites usually have too many product images. Since all these product images put a lot of load on the sites, the opening of the pages can be delayed. You should make sure that all images are optimized and compressed in the best way. If necessary, you should try to use small versions of the images and show the large versions through clicks.
• You can benefit from caching for browsers. Visitors to e-commerce sites often browse different pages in a single session. Since it would be an unnecessary waste of time to make them reload and reload unchanging content, you should try to take advantage of browser caching technology.
• You can set the content to load as it appears. Thus, the content is loaded when the user scrolls down on your site. Thus, it is ensured that the instant load on your site is less.
• You should avoid using render-blocking JavaScript scripts on pages. When you use these scripts, you make the user need extra time to load the page. This is not a very useful method for user experience.
• If necessary, you should try to take advantage of AMP technology. AMP technology is a fairly new technology. This technology helps pages with fixed content to load faster than other pages.

50% of Google’s search traffic comes from mobile. Nearly 60% of consumers use their mobile devices to make purchasing decisions. If you have the goal of promoting an e-commerce site, you can’t ignore this huge audience. As with site speed, providing a poor user experience on mobile devices will reduce your sales and search engine rankings.

1. You should offer mobile support if you haven’t already

If you have not yet moved your site to the mobile platform, you should start doing this with the right technologies. You can use three different methods for mobile support. Dynamic presentation, separate mobile pages, and flexible design are three different useful methods. For e-commerce sites, flexible design is considered the best method because the benefits are what you will need:

• Desktop and mobile versions of your site will have the same addresses. You can optimize cross-device viewing through a single URL address. This makes it easier for users to interact with and share content. However, you enable search engines to find site pages more easily.
• Since it provides the most optimal cross-device display, your content presentation is almost flawless.
• The fact that no redirection is used is a great advantage. If you had a separate mobile version of your site, you would use redirects and add unnecessary load to the site. However, flexible design allows site pages to load faster and improves the user experience.

2. Double-check mobile pages

If you don’t know whether the pages on your site are mobile-friendly or not, you can make the necessary checks by using the tools offered by Google. If you wish, you can do this by using different tools, but it is a very good idea to use the possibilities offered by Google through Search Console for mobile compatibility.

In 2016, HTTPS was not a very important ranking factor. SEO experts have not made any serious findings on this issue and were not convinced enough about the positive contribution of HTTPS to rankings. But for e-commerce sites, making the switch to HTTPS is critical. Because you need to protect the credit cards and other personal information of customers who shop on your site.

To use HTTPS you need two different things. The first is a dedicated IP address and the second is an SSL certificate. To get a dedicated IP address, you need to contact your server provider. Getting a certificate is not too difficult because there are several trusted companies around, such as Comodo or Geotrust. Once you have installed your certificate, you just need to make sure to test it before confirming everything. However, you should be prepared for various problems when switching to HTTPS:

• If your site uses a content delivery network (CDN), third-party scripts or APIs, you should make sure they support HTTPS. Otherwise, visitors will start to experience errors with page loads or notifications.
• You should make sure that all internal links are redirected to the HTTPS version of the site. You need to ask the people who take care of the technical side of your site to solve this problem.
• You should redirect from the HTTP version of your site to the HTTPS version in the most appropriate way. Bad redirects are common problems. If you don’t want to have a headache with such problems, you should definitely perform the configurations in the most appropriate way.

The crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine crawls per day. This value differs for all sites because the crawl budget is determined by the authority of the site. This metric is especially important for e-commerce sites with large inventory. You can’t make search engines crawl more pages of your site, but you can make their job easier by removing obstacles that may get in their way.

• You must get rid of duplicate pages. You can eliminate duplicate content by using the rel=“canonical” tag, but it is not possible to bypass crawling duplicate content in this way. These pages strain your crawling budget and delay the discovery of new content.
• You can prevent SEO-useless content from being indexed. You can prevent pages such as privacy policy, terms of use and outdated promotions from being indexed.
• You should stay away from long redirect chains. If your site has 301 redirects that you don’t use for valid reasons, search engine crawlers may refuse to follow them. As a result, you may face a problem such as the redirected page not being crawled.
• You should try to manage URL properties in the best way. Your content management system may have created many dynamic URLs for one or more pages. Search engines that will encounter all these pages may have difficulty understanding what is going on. For this reason, you should define these properties, i.e. parameters, appropriately in your Google Search Console account.
• You should repair broken links. Repairing broken links will ease your crawling budget. By repairing broken links, you can prevent search engine bots from reaching unnecessary points.
• You should always keep the XML sitemap up to date. You should also define all XML sitemaps you have in your Google Search Console account.

You have to consider each of these steps when optimizing an e-commerce site. If you follow these steps successfully, you can make your e-commerce site competitive on the search engine results page.