A Thorough Guide to SEO Optimizing Your Ecommerce Pages

Ecommerce is one of the most important ways that people shop—global statistics estimate that in 2024, customers worldwide spent over 4.1 trillion dollars on retail ecommerce purchases. The potential for earning money is there—if you know how to make your business stand out.

SEO optimizing your ecommerce pages can help you capture your audience and stand out compared to competitors. This guide can help you learn the basics when it comes to optimizing your ecommerce pages.

Choose the Right Platform

When you’re setting up your ecommerce shop, choosing the right platform can make SEO-optimizing your ecommerce pages easier. Google Analytics offers advice for ecommerce pages, stating that website builders such as Shopify have data and measurements built into their code that works well with Google Analytics. Even if you have a custom-built ecommerce page, you can connect to these analytics.

Make Sure That You Optimize All Pages

Many people make the mistake of not optimizing all of the pages in their ecommerce site. They may think it is too much work and just optimize the landing page and a few section pages. However, this is potentially losing you a large chunk of your audience—and money.

Every page that you have will need to be optimized for different keywords and specifications, depending on your project. Make sure that you put in the work for each page individually. If you have too large a shop to do so, you can focus on a batch of important products for now, but make it your goal to optimize each page.

Choose Keywords Carefully…

The next step is to choose the keywords that you want to target for each page. You should only have one primary keyword per page. This is the main keyword that you are trying to target, usually the product name. Having more than one primary keyword per product page will be confusing.

You will also want secondary keywords, which you will use less frequently throughout the page. These are other phrases that people are likely to search when looking for products such as the ones you have for sale. You can use keyword research tools to generate which secondary keywords people are most likely to use when searching for your products.

…And Use Them Wisely

You want to incorporate the keywords into the text for your product page, but make sure to do so organically. Poorly written descriptions that try to stuff as many keywords as possible into their text often get dinged by the algorithm for spam, and will turn off potential customers that come upon your site.

Incorporate the keywords so that the words flow naturally in a sentence. Try creative solutions, such as using a semi-colon to combine an awkward keyword phrase with a more natural-sounding one or formulating a keyword into a question.

Optimize the Most Important Parts of the Page

While the text on the page is obviously important for SEO optimizing an ecommerce page, it is not the most important part of the page when it comes to ranking highly. The title tag, meta description, and Heading (H1) tag are the most important parts of your page. They are the ones that show up in search results and are the first parts of the page that are analyzed by the search engine algorithm, so be sure to edit wisely.

Make sure that you include the primary keyword in all three places: the page title, meta description, and relevant tags. This way, you ensure that you rank for this keyword. You can try to include secondary keywords, but they may add unnecessary length to your title tags.

Add Other Content Besides the Product Description

The bulk of your ecommerce page will be taken up by the product description, but other content on the page will provide additional information for the visitor and help you boost your SEO rating as well.

Many ecommerce sites include a few Frequently Asked Questions at the bottom of each product page. The FAQs can be about the product or about your business and help show that you are trustworthy.

Customer reviews are another feature that helps increase trust and boost your SEO. They can be reviews that someone left directly on your site or reviews that you found on other sites that linked back to your page.

A list of other suggested product pages, under a heading such as “you may also like,” not only improves your SEO but may also increase the customer’s cart before checkout. You should also structure a product variants page, such as if you offer the same product in different colors. These should be linked on the main product page but have their own separate pages and be tagged accordingly.

Optimize Your Images

The most important part of a product page is your image. People want to see what they are about to buy, especially when they don’t have the advantage of looking at the product in person.

Your images can also play an important role in your SEO rankings. Make sure that the images are high-quality and in the right format for the page (usually PNG or WebP). The file name is also important. Use your primary keyword in the file name and a short description, as the file name is also included in the algorithm’s robots when they crawl your page.

Make Sure That Your Page Is Technically Optimized

Once you are done creating or editing the content for your page, don’t forget to take a look at the structure of the page itself. There are several technical SEO audit tools (some even available for free) that can check your page and make sure that all of its technical aspects are working correctly. Search engines prioritize sites that are functional and usable.

Ecommerce pages should go through an additional technical SEO step, which is adding Product Structured Data Markup. Adding this data increases your chances of rising higher in the SEO rankings and getting featured in different aspects of Google’s site, such as Google Lens or Shopping.

These tips can help you make sure that your ecommerce pages are SEO optimized, ultimately improving your traffic and sales. Working with an experienced writer to create your content, including product descriptions, is just the first step.