TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lesson 1: Welcome
Lesson 2: Introduction to eCommerce SEO
Lesson 3: Keyword Research For Ecommerce
Lesson 4: Shop Site Structure
Lesson 5: Shop Homepage SEO
Lesson 6: Shop Category SEO
Lesson 7: Product Page SEO
Lesson 8: Blogging For Ecommerce
Lesson 9: Link Building for eCommerce Websites
Copyright Information

Note: You can use the PDF Version for reference but it is highly recommended to
take the course using the online interface. Video content is not available in this
version.
 Lesson 1

Welcome

About this Course

Introduction
I finished my MSC Ecommerce Degree in 2001. At that time, the term eCommerce
had a completely different meaning than it has today.

Amazon and eBay were dominating the market and consumers were just starting
to trust the Internet as an option for their purchases.

Almost 20 years later, things have changed a lot. Amazon has grown to be a multi-
billion company, eBay has expanded to all continents and with the birth of modern
eCommerce management systems, almost all companies that have a physical
presence, they now have an online store as well.

The competition is intense in all industries but the number of online users has
also increased dramatically, giving eCommerce, a totally different meaning.

Local companies can target new markets, beyond their physical boundaries and
virtual companies can dominate markets without having any brick and mortar
stores.

Running an online business is not an easy job. The absence of a physical presence
does not make things easier or less demanding.

In order to succeed and make money from eCommerce, you still have to work
hard and invest a lot of time and money.

The front door of your business is your eCommerce website and this means that
any money you would invest in making your shop better, should now be used to
enhance your website.

Making an eCommerce website is very easy these days, you can sign-up with
Shopify, Magento, or setup WordPress and Woocommerce and you will be up and
running in hours.

But that’s not the end of the story, it’s only the beginning.

One of the most common mistakes a lot of webmasters make is to believe that
eCommerce is as easy as having a website loaded with products. You register with
Shopify, you upload products from Amazon or a drop shipping company, and wait
for the money to flow in.

That’s not the case.

To compete with the thousands of eCommerce websites and gain your fair share
of traffic and sales, you need to have a website that is optimized for both search
engines and users.

Most ready-made eCommerce WordPress themes or eCMS have a lot of features

out of the box but you still have to do a lot of work to use them correctly.

You still have to work on your On-Page SEO, keyword research, content
marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and link building.

You still have to take into account conversion optimization techniques and
perform a number of A/B tests to find out what your customers want.

How to use this course

In the lessons, I will take you through a journey that starts with the basic
eCommerce SEO concepts and ends with more advanced topics like blogging and
link building.

You will learn how to optimize your shop for SEO, how to do keyword research
correctly, how to structure your store, how to optimize your homepage, category,
and product pages, how to use blogging to get targeted traffic and how to
approach link building to promote your eCommerce business without taking any
unnecessary risks.
The Course is separated into 9 autonomous lessons that you can follow
individually depending on your needs and knowledge level.

In each lesson, you will read the theory behind each guideline, review real
examples and associated case studies, view pro tips and get actionable advice to
make sure that you will not miss anything important.

Author Information

Alex Chris

I studied Computer Science and E-commerce and after spending several years
working in the IT industry, I realized that my true passion was in blogging and
SEO and since 2002 I am working online as a Digital Marketing consultant and
professional blogger.

Over the years, I did consulting and SEO work for companies in the most
competitive niches like travel, jewelry, education, fitness, forex, software (to
name a few), and had the opportunity to experiment and learn the hard way how
the Internet works.

In my spare time, I blog about SEO and Digital marketing and my work has been
referenced by leading industry websites like Forbes,
contentmarketinginstitute.com, thenextweb.com, neilpatel.com,
socialmediatoday.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, searchenginejournal.com,
kissmetricks.com, sitepronews.com, lifehack.org, problogger.net, jeffbullas.com,
entrepreneur.com, marketingland, quicksprout.com, and others.

The best way to contact me is by email at alex@reliablesoft.net

 Lesson 2

Introduction to eCommerce SEO

eCommerce SEO for beginners

In this topic, you’ll learn what is eCommerce SEO and what is the difference with
general SEO.

What is Ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO (or Shop SEO) is a term used to describe the search engine
optimization process for online shops.

In simple words, it’s a set of rules to apply to an eCommerce website so that it’s
search engine friendly.

Is eCommerce SEO different than SEO?

The obvious question is, what is the difference between eCommerce SEO and SEO
in general?

Is it the same thing with a different name?

Not quite.

Ecommerce SEO includes all concepts of SEO with additional guidelines that are
specific to online shops that may not be applicable to other types of websites.

For example, for a non-commerce website, the category pages may not be so
important SEO wise, but for an eCommerce website, they are important and need
special attention.
Another difference is blogging. An active blog has a different role to play when
doing SEO for eCommerce websites and when doing SEO for non-eCommerce
websites.

To avoid any confusion, anything you read about SEO in The Complete SEO
Course, is applicable to online shops as well.

Shop SEO is over and above normal SEO.

Benefits of eCommerce SEO for online shops

What are the benefits of SEO for eCommerce websites? Why should shop owners
invest in SEO?

Exposure to search engines

An eCommerce website is, in reality, an online business. It’s not a hobby or a
website made for fun, but it’s a business that needs to make sales, profit and grow
over time.

Search engines respond to millions of queries per day and many of them are
related to eCommerce.

Besides going directly to eBay or Amazon, thousands of people per day are using
search engines, and in their majority Google, to find a product to buy.

Ecommerce SEO will help you gain exposure in search engines and get your fair
share of traffic.
Importance of eCommerce SEO

Get high rankings for keywords that matter

Getting traffic from search engines is the first step but it’s not enough.

What you need is targeted traffic.

Targeted organic traffic is coming from users who know exactly what they want.

These users have a clear intent and they express this when they type a query in
the search box.

For example, when they type “buy HD water resistance video camera” in the
search box, they have a clear intention and if you have an eCommerce site selling
video cameras, it’s the type of user that will most probably convert.

Through eCommerce SEO you will be able to identify and optimize those long-tail
keywords that can get you higher rankings and make a difference to your
business.

SEO It’s the only way to create a long-lasting online business

If you already have an online shop, you should know that there are a number of
ways to get instant traffic to your website.

Google Ads is one of the most popular and efficient ways to get traffic fast,
followed by Facebook and other social networks (depending on your niche).

The problem with these methods is that once you stop paying for advertising,
traffic and sales will drop.

That’s not the case with SEO.

A well-designed SEO campaign will bring traffic to your website 24X7 for months
or even years to come.

It does take time for SEO to work but the results are long-lasting, creating a
higher ROI in the long run, compared to any other marketing technique.

So, if you want to create a business that will generate traffic on its own without
relying solely on paid advertising, SEO is the way to go.

SEO will help you build a user-friendly website

Many of the concepts of SEO are related to usability and how you can make
websites that are friendlier to both search engines and users.

When you decide to adopt SEO principles or hire an SEO consultant to help you
optimize your website, the end result will be a website that’s easier to use and
ranks higher in the search results.

SEO will help you increase your conversion rate

Besides assisting in getting the right type of traffic, SEO can give you guidelines
on how to increase your conversion rate i.e. sales.

Conversion optimization is a process that takes time and requires a lot of a/b
testing but it is driven by SEO principles.

How to approach SEO for eCommerce websites?

The best way to optimize an online shop is to follow a structured approach. This
means that you need to have a plan in place that will cover all aspects of SEO.

To be more specific, here is a list of all the things you need to check and optimize:

Step 1: Review of Technical SEO

Technical SEO is always the first step when doing a website review or performing
an SEO Audit.

Technical SEO will ensure that search engines can crawl and index your shop
without any issues.

The most important tasks related to technical SEO are:

Optimization of Google Search Console Settings

XML Sitemap optimization

Correct settings for robots.txt

SEO friendly URLS and proper permalink structure

 Page speed optimizations

Step 2: Perform Keyword Research

Once you get the technical SEO correct, your next step is keyword research.

Keyword research is important for all types of websites but it’s even more
important for eCommerce websites.

If you target the wrong keywords, you will get traffic but you won’t make any
sales.

As you will read in the Keyword Research lesson, the results from the keyword
research will define the structure of your shop and give you enough data to
optimize your home page, category pages, and product pages.

Step 3: Optimize your shop’s structure

Ecommerce websites need to have an optimized structure. It has to be very easy
to use, simple and SEO friendly.

If your structure is not optimized, you won’t make any sales. It’s as simple as that.

What is the best structure for your store? Besides following some standard
guidelines (like having a hierarchical structure), keyword research will guide you
on how to structure your shop.

If you already have a store up and running, you get some traffic but you are
making no sales, it may worth reviewing and optimizing your site structure based
on the results of keyword research.

Step 4: Homepage SEO

Optimizing your shop’s home page is different than optimizing the homepage of
your blog.

The homepage of an eCommerce website has a lot of roles to play. It has to be a

highly converting landing page but at the same time, it has to be informational
and welcoming to the users.
Step 5: Optimize your category pages
It is normal for an eCommerce website to have a lot of category pages. For most
websites, category pages serve no SEO purpose but this is not the case with
online shops.

Category pages are essential for navigation purposes and very valuable for SEO
purposes.

Step 6: Product Page Optimization

The product pages are the most important pages for eCommerce websites and
have to be optimized for both search engines and users.

Product page optimization can be tricky, especially if you are selling products that
are also available on other websites on the Internet.

Failing to SEO optimize your product pages, will result in low traffic and more
reliance on other methods (besides SEO), to drive traffic to your store.

Step 7: Cart and Checkout page Optimization

I mentioned above that eCommerce SEO will help you create a high converting
website and in order to do that, you need to optimize your cart and checkout
pages.

It is very common for different types of shops to get users to the cart and
checkout pages but only a small percentage of them to actually convert.

Cart and checkout page optimization is not difficult, once you get it right once,
you can forget about it and concentrate on other areas of your shop that need
more attention.

Step 8: Reporting
When you first optimize an online shop, you do it based on the best standards and
practices.

You work on your technical SEO, do keyword research and optimize the structure
and pages of your shop.

So far so good.
In order to decide what to do next, you need to have a reporting system in place
that is properly configured.

A good reporting system besides tracking sales, it also tracks user behavior.
Analyzing user behavior can give you the next steps for your SEO optimization
process.

Step 9: Blogging
An eCommerce website needs to have a blog. Blogging for eCommerce purposes
is not exactly the same as blogging for general traffic.

There are some guidelines to follow before deciding what to write about and
which keywords to target in your blogs.

Step 10: Link Building For Ecommerce

Once you have a highly converting website, you need to get high volumes of
traffic to the site and make sales.

SEO techniques, such as those described above, will help you have an optimized
site with good rankings.

To get your pages to the top positions, you need good off-page SEO and link
building is one of the off-page SEO tasks you need to master.

Step 11: Marketing your Shop

Besides SEO, there a number of other methods that although are not directly
related to SEO, can indirectly impact your SEO efforts and success of your
eCommerce website.

Things like social media marketing, Facebook marketing and retargeting, email
marketing can work well with SEO and help you achieve your business goals.

KEY LEARNINGS

Ecommerce SEO is a must of all shops. A well-optimized shop will rank

higher in search engines and this translates to more traffic and sales.

The difference between normal SEO and shop SEO is that the latter includes
specific recommendations that are applicable to eCommerce websites.

Even if you are making sales through Google Ads or other PPC platforms,
spending a portion of your monthly budget on eCommerce SEO, is the best
investment you can make for your business.

The best way to optimize your shop for search engines is to follow a
structured approach.
 Lesson 3

Keyword Research For Ecommerce

The Keyword Research Process

In this topic, you’ll learn how to do keyword research for an eCommerce website.

How to do Keyword Research for an Ecommerce

Website
How is keyword research for an eCommerce website different from a blog or
other websites? What do you need to take into account when searching for
keywords you can target in your product pages, product categories or eCommerce
blog?

When running an eCommerce website, your primary goal is to make sales and this
is different from the goal you have on a ‘normal’ website, which is to get more
traffic.

To make sales, you don’t need any kind of traffic but you need targeted
traffic and above all, traffic that converts.

While there are many ways to increase your website’s traffic and many reasons
why this is not happening yet, it all starts with good keyword research.

Any time you spend on doing keyword research for your online shop (especially at
the beginning), is time that will pay off later in the form of traffic and sales.

Let’s say that you are selling ‘hair extensions’ in your store and you have product
pages for each different type.
How you will name your categories and landing pages, depends on the results of
the keyword research.

Keyword research will tell you what people are searching for that is related to
‘hair extensions’ and you will have to adjust your titles and on-Page SEO
accordingly.

If you skip this step and name your categories and products whatever you believe
it will work, or the internal names you use for your products, most probably it
won’t.

Keywords that matter for an eCommerce website

Another concept that is important when doing keyword research for an
eCommerce website is how to differentiate between general keywords and
keywords with commercial intent.

General keywords or head keywords are usually high traffic but don’t
necessarily have a specific intent.

For example, when a person is searching for ‘handbags’, is most probably at the
initial stages of the buying cycle.

At this stage, the searcher wants to get an overview of what is available without
necessarily having a clear intent.

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are more precise.

For example, the query ‘handbags for women’, shows that the searcher is looking
for women’s handbags but it is still not very ‘commercial’.

The queries ‘women’s shoulder handbags for work’ or ‘handbags for work Furla’
are very specific and have a clear commercial intent.

The reason I’m mentioning this now is the following:

When optimizing your product pages, you need to take into account the ‘intent’ of
the user and not go after what is more popular in terms of search volume.
Remember that your goal is to make more sales, so you need visits from
customers who are ready to proceed to the next step i.e. convert and these are
the keywords you should be targeting.

How to find keywords for your eCommerce product and

Category pages
Let’s see how you can practically find which keywords have commercial intent
and are easier to target.

Step 1: Amazon
What is the first thing that comes in mind when talking about eCommerce? Most
probably it’s Amazon.

Amazon is the biggest eCommerce store online and many studies have shown that
people looking to buy something, start their search with Amazon (and not Google
or any other search engine or platform).

So, if this is what people are doing, you should follow their path and start your
keyword research with Amazon.

Let’s see how it is done.

Go to Amazon and start typing a keyword that describes your products.

Keyword Research on Amazon

‘Amazon suggest’ will immediately give you an overview of what people are
searching that is related to your keyword.

At a glance, you can see the most popular categories (bags for work, bags for
school) and the most popular brands (Michael Kors, Louis Vuitton).

To take it a step further, select a category to view the results and look into the left
sidebar.

Amazon Categories

What you will find is the top categories related to ‘handbags’. If your store is
selling ‘women’s handbags’ then these are the best candidates for your product
category pages.
The above is very useful for your product category pages and website structure
but what about the actual product pages?

While on Amazon, go to the best seller’s page and navigate to the appropriate
department.

Amazon Best Sellers

Browse through the best-selling list and find products that are similar (or the
same), as the ones you are selling.

Open their product page and take a closer look at the:

Amazon Product Titles

Product title and Product Description

Amazon Product Descriptions

Take note of the keywords used in the title and description i.e. ‘casual double
zipper’, because we can use this later to find long-tail keywords related to the
particular product.

While on the product page, take note of the Customers also bought section. This
will give you a very good idea of how to set up cross-selling in your store.

Step 2: Use Google Search

Now that you have a better idea of what people are searching on Amazon, it’s
time to look into Google and the best way to start your keyword research is by
visiting Google.com.

As soon as you start typing, Google will make suggestions on how to finish your
search query.

At this stage, try to keep your search limited to 2-3 keywords, for example:
‘women’s handbags work’.

Scroll down (at the bottom of the page), and look at the ‘related searches section’.
Google Related Searches

What do you notice in the above screenshot?

The term ‘tote bags for work’ is a term related to ‘women’s handbags work’.

This is a great new keyword which we will analyze using our keyword tools to find
out more details.

I also strongly suggest to take this keyword and go back to Amazon and repeat
your search.

You can repeat this process for searching Google and taking a close look at the
‘Related Searches’ a number of times until you have a list of all related keywords.

Step 3: Use your Favorite Keyword Tool

Now that we have gathered enough keywords from Amazon and Google is time to
utilize the power of a keyword tool.

A good keyword tool will give us a better insight into the search volume for each
keyword and help us decide how to optimize our product pages.
There are many tools available but I personally like to use SEMRUSH. Even if you
don’t have a SEMRUSH subscription, you can follow the steps below and get
similar results using your favorite keyword research tool.

Login to SEMRUSH and select “SEO KEYWORD MAGIC” from the left menu
(under Keyword Analytics).

You can now start your search by typing the keywords we have found from
Amazon and Google.

Our goal at this point is to find out the search volume for each keyword and other
related keywords.

Once you add a keyword, SEMRUSH will group relevant keywords together (left
part). You can also narrow your search by using the filters in the top bar.

This is very useful when you want to find long-tail keywords that have a certain
search volume.

SEO Keyword Magic

As you can see above, when you search for your main keyword (‘handbags
women’) and then filter by ‘Work’, you can see the associated long-tail keywords.
What is more interesting is that by analyzing the keywords suggested by Google,
you will see that ‘womens tote bags for work’ is a better keyword than ‘work
handbags for women’, since it has more search volume and consists of more
words.

In general, long-tail keywords with 4-5 words, are easier to target than shorter
long-tail keywords.

Keyword Research using SEMrush

If you scroll down the list, you can find more keywords you can use for your
product pages.
Long Tail Keywords

If you combine these keywords with the brand name and model (remember
the example of Amazon titles), you will end up with perfectly optimized titles
for your product pages.

Step 4: Use the Google Keyword Tool

I know that not all people have a subscription to a keyword tool. Good tools are
not free and this keeps people away.

The truth is, if you want to succeed in eCommerce, you will need one. Besides the
keyword research, you can use it for spying on your competitors and improving
your SEO and content.

Nevertheless, there is a free option to use and this is no other than the Google
Keyword Tool.

What you should know about the Google keyword tool is that although it is free, if
you don’t have an active campaign running, it will show you ranges of search
volumes and not the exact estimates.
This is what it shows with no active campaigns:

And this is the same search with active campaigns:

Keyword Ideas

So, to make any good use of the Google keyword tool, it is best to set up a Google
Ads campaign first (even if it is for a few dollars per day) and then do your
keyword research.

When using the Google Keyword Tool, we are looking for the same things as
before i.e. Ideas for our category pages (The Ad group ideas tab is a good feature
to use for this purpose) and long-tail keywords with commercial intent.

Step: 5: Steal Your Competitor’s Keywords

Another way to find out which keywords work for your niche is to steal your
competitor’s keywords.
With the right tools, this is a straightforward process:

1st -> Search on Google for your target keywords i.e. ‘womens handbags for work’

2nd -> Look for websites that are selling the same products as yours. Avoid big
websites (like Amazon) but concentrate on websites that are similar to your
eCommerce store (both in terms of size and products).

3rth> Either take the domain or the specific product page and go to SEMRUSH
and select URL under Domain Analytics – > Organic search.

Competitor Analysis

This can be very useful in your process because you can see which keywords a
competitor’s page is ranking.

If you want to increase your chances of ranking for the same keywords, you need
to find a way to naturally mention those keywords in the body of the page.
Competitor Analysis

Step 6: Take a Look at Wikipedia

As a final step in your keyword research process, you can use Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has detailed articles for almost any topic you can think off and the nice
thing about their articles is that they organize the information in a structural way.

You can use Wikipedia articles to find related keywords for your term (this can
prove very useful later when you will write the actual titles for your homepage,
product categories, and product pages), and also to get a good idea on how you
can organize your shop’s structure.
Wikipedia

As you can see in the screenshot above, the categories suggested by Wikipedia for
handbags are similar to those you can find on Google, Amazon and the Google
Keyword Tool.

Keyword Research for your eCommerce Blog

Besides doing keyword research for your online shop, you also need to do some
research for your eCommerce blog.

Every online business needs a blog; in the case of an eCommerce shop, your blog
will help you to:

Build internal links to your product pages

Have good content to use in your social media campaigns

Attract links from other websites and improve your domain’s authority

It’s a great way to update your website with fresh content

It’s a very effective tool to communicate with your customers

Now, while looking for long-tail keywords for your products and category pages,
you will also come across some keywords which are perfect for blog posts.

To make the process easier, use the filters of SEMRUS’s keyword magic and:

include keywords like ‘how’ – people like to read articles on how to do

things.

exclude keywords like ‘make’ – unless you can show them how to make a
bag, exclude this from your keywords.

set the number of keywords between 6 and 8 – we really need to see long-
tail keywords so go for this range.

As you can see below, there are many good candidates for blog post titles like
‘how to clean a tote bag’.

Keyword Research for eCommerce Blogs

KEY LEARNINGS
Keyword research for an eCommerce website is slightly different from
normal keyword research. When doing eCommerce keyword research, your
main goal is:

To find out the actual keywords that customers are using to search
for specific products.

To differentiate between head keywords, long-tail keywords, and

keywords with commercial intent.

To find out the search volume of those keywords.

To find related keywords and terms you can use for your eCommerce
blog.

To find out as much as you can about your niche. Since during the
process, you will visit your competitor’s websites, make sure that you
don’t just look at the keywords, but take note of other things like the
number of overall products, website features, marketing techniques
they use, etc.

Once you are done with this step and you feel confident that you have a clear
picture of the keywords related to your products, you can proceed with the
next steps.

These involve optimizing your shop’s structure, optimizing your product

titles and category pages and start working on conversion optimization.
 Lesson 4

Shop Site Structure

How to Optimize Your Shop Structure

In this topic, you’ll learn how to optimize the structure of your eCommerce
website.

The site structure of an eCommerce website is very important. It has to be

easy to navigate, easy to crawl (by search engines) and it’s the starting point
to offer a great experience for your users.

A big eCommerce website may have a lot of pages and it’s necessary to have a
solid structure so that users can find what they want, in the least possible number
of clicks.

Why Ecommerce Site Structure matters?

A good eCommerce site structure has a number of hidden benefits to offer:

Speed

If you have any experience with website speed optimization, you know that when
it comes to fine-tuning your website’s load speed, you have to deal with a number
of things.

Websites that have a clear structure require fewer code resources (HTML, CSS,
javascript), make fewer requests to the server and they load faster.

In addition, search engine crawlers are able to crawl the website faster, discover
more pages and this, in turn, can have a big impact on your SEO efforts.
Site links

Site links are shown in the search engine results pages (SERPS) when someone is
searching for your company name on Google.

In the case of an eCommerce store, sitelinks will show your main categories, like
this example from Best Buy.

Site links shown in Google Search

Sitelinks are great for SEO. Not only they can attract more clicks to the most
important pages of your website but they are also good for branding.

The problem is that you cannot specify which pages of your website to include as
sitelinks.

It’s up to Google to decide what to show in your snippet.

A poor site structure will minimize your chances of getting sitelinks in the SERPS
while a good site structure will help Google pick up the right pages to show as
sitelinks along with your title and description.

More conversions
The ultimate goal of every online shop is to generate more sales.

To make sales you have to ‘push’ your potential customers into the sales funnel,
which may include a number of other conversions (sign up for the newsletter,
leads, etc.).

A well-organized site structure is crucial for this process to work as planned.

Visitors should easily find what they want without having to click many times and
without spending more time on a page than needed.

How to SEO Your Site Structure

Let’s see the steps for creating an SEO optimized structure for your eCommerce
shop.

Step 1: Create a Hierarchical structure with no more than 3 levels

An eCommerce website should have a hierarchical structure.

Your home page is at the top of the hierarchy and below you can have 2 or 3
levels before you reach the bottom of the hierarchy – your product pages.

To help you visualize how a hierarchical structure looks like, have a look at the
following diagram.

eCommerce Site Structure

The home page is at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the main categories
(level 1), sub-categories (level 2) and finally the product pages (level 3).

The best way to decide on how to create your structure is to take into account the
outcome from your keyword research process.

Keyword research is not only necessary for optimizing your titles and descriptions
but it can provide you with ideas on how to structure your website.

If you haven’t read lesson 2, I suggest you read it before continuing to the
next steps.

Step 2: Create a Simple Menu That Replicates the Site Structure

The navigation i.e. the menus of the shop should reflect the structure. If you get
the structure right, your navigation will be easy to understand and follow.

A few things to take into account, when deciding for your navigation structure
and menus:

Keep it simple – When designing the menu structure, always have in mind to
keep it as simple as possible.

Avoid adding pages to the menu that are not needed or creating fly out submenus
menus when it’s not necessary.

As a rule of thumb, each page on your website should be accessible from the
homepage in no more than 3 clicks.

Make use of side menus – When a user selects a particular category from the
main menu, you can show them a landing page with a sidebar menu to help them
find the products they want.

Have a look at how the woocommerce website is structured.

When you choose a category from the main menu, they show you a landing page
with all products in that category with several filters (like price) to narrow down
your selection.
Website Structure Example

The other options are also available so that you can choose to change the
category without having to go back to the menu.

Step 3: Consider creating a separate menu for desktop and mobile

It’s very likely that the majority of your traffic comes from mobile.

This means that you should give special attention to how mobile users navigate
your website.

Replicating the desktop menu (as is) it’s not a good option because of the limited
screen space available on the mobile device.

What you should do instead, is to create a separate menu for mobile and
include ONLY those options that are really necessary for navigation
purposes.

Pages like privacy policy, about us, etc. can be grouped together thus giving more
space on the menu for the important pages (category and product pages).

Have a look at woocommerce website again from your desktop and mobile.

On the desktop, they have a full list of products under the Extensions Store menu:
Desktop Menu

While on mobile they only show the Extensions store option since displaying the
full list of products would create a mess and this is not user friendly.
Mobile Menu

I’m using the same technique on my website, if you check the menu on desktop
and mobile, you will notice that the mobile version is simplified.

Step 4: Optimize your URL structure

Having an SEO friendly URL structure helps both users and search engines
navigate a website.

The site structure and URL structure are closely related since both have to
accurately represent each other.
For example, if you have an eCommerce store selling electronics and have a
section for Tablets, then your site structure can be like this:

Home page / Tablets / Android / Ipad

And your URL structure like this:

www.example.com/tablets/android and

www.example.com/tablets/ipad

When a word is removed from the URL then the page www.examples/tablets
should display all available tablets.

Use the following guidelines to optimize the URL structure of your

eCommerce website:

1 – Keep your URLs as short as possible

2 – Separate keywords in the URL with “-“ (dashes) and not underscores

3- Avoid having extra characters that are not needed (for examples numbers that
don’t make sense for the user)

4 – Do include attributes of your products in the URL. For example, if you are
selling “black ipads with 64 GB of RAM”, then you can make your product URL to
be:

/ipad-64gb-black

In general, include product attributes in the URL that may be used as search
keywords.

5 – Use only lowercase characters and avoid spaces

Make your URLs HTTPS

Having a secure website is very important, especially for eCommerce websites.

Not only it’s an SEO ranking factor, but it’s another way to gain user’s trust.
 Important: If you decide to change your URL structure, you need to be
careful not to lose your SEO and rankings. The best approach is to use 301
redirects to let users and search engines know that the URL of a page has
changed. Go through the lesson HTTPS and SSL of the Complete SEO
Course.

Step 5: Add a breadcrumb menu to all your pages

A breadcrumb menu is shown at the top of a page and it consists of a number of
internal links that allow visitors to quickly navigate back to the previous section
or the home page of your website.

Breadcrumb Menu

This is extremely useful when users are searching for a specific product and go
back and forth between the categories and products.

It is also useful when users land on a specific product page since they can use the
breadcrumb to see what other products are in the same category.

Add structured data to your breadcrumbs

Besides aiding the user navigation while on the site, breadcrumbs are also
displayed in the Google search results on mobile and if properly configured can
offer an additional advantage for your website in the SERPS.
Structured Data for Breadcrumbs

To make sure that Google can ‘interpret’ breadcrumbs correctly, you need to add
the relevant schema.

Step 6: Create a User Sitemap

For all types of websites, it’s always a good practice to create a user-sitemap
page.

A user sitemap is different from the XML sitemap that is submitted to search
engines.

A good user-sitemap page should display all important categories and

subcategories of a website is a single page so that users can find easily what they
want.

Here is a nice example from HP’s online store.

User Sitemap Example

The User sitemap can be added as an option in the footer.

From experience, when you create the user-sitemap page, it will help you
understand if your website is well structured or if you need to make any
structural changes to improve it.

KEY LEARNINGS

Ecommerce websites can quickly grow in size and if you don’t have a solid
structure from the beginning, you can easily get lost.

A well-defined structure will help users find what they want fast (in less than
3 clicks), and search engine crawlers will be able to crawl, understand and
index your website more efficiently.

When thinking about your shop site structure, consider the following:

Create a hierarchical site structure

Your menu should match your site’s hierarchy. Use sidebar menus to
aid navigation.

Give special attention to your mobile version and make sure that the
experience of the users is optimized for mobile. If necessary, design a
separate menu for desktop and mobile.

Optimize your URLs

Add a breadcrumb menu to all pages.

Create a user-sitemap and add it to your footer.

Finally, if you already have an eCommerce website with indexed pages and
you decide to change the structure and URLs, make use of 301 Redirects so
that you don’t lose any of your rankings and domain/page authority.
 Lesson 5

Shop Homepage SEO

Shop Homepage SEO

In this topic, you’ll learn how to optimize the homepage of your shop.

Good homepage SEO is vital for eCommerce websites.

The homepage is one of the most important pages of an online shop and it
has to be both user-friendly and search engine friendly.

When potential customers visit your store’s homepage, they should be able to see
at a glance:

Who you are

What you are selling

Why buy from you

How to find the product(s) they are interested in, in the least possible
number of clicks.

On the other hand, when a search engine spider crawls the homepage, it should
easily extract information about your business, address (if you have a local
presence) and products.

Why care about the homepage?

For eCommerce websites, the homepage is the most visited page of the site, even
if it is not set as the landing page for PPC campaigns.

It is the page people might link from their articles.

It is the page that users will visit to decide whether they should trust this
company or not

It is the page that represents your domain in the SERPS and it will become
stronger over time (and gain higher rankings), as you grow your website.

It is the page people will re-visit to check if you have new products or
offers.

How to Approach Homepage SEO

The homepage SEO process is divided into two parts.

The first part is the on-page SEO and the second part is the user optimization
process.

Both parts are equally important so there is no question as to which one to do

first or second, a properly optimized homepage should incorporate both elements.

How to Optimize your homepage for users.

Let’ start with the latter, user optimization.

As mentioned above, a user visiting your homepage has to be provided with

information about your company, its products, and its services.

To achieve this goal, you need to pay special attention to the design and structure
of the homepage so that it includes all essential elements.

ABOVE THE FOLD CONTENT

The first item in the list is the above the fold content optimization.

What do we mean by ‘Above the fold’?

‘Above the fold’ is the content that is visible to the user without having to
scroll down the page.
In other words, when the homepage is fully loaded, what does the user see before
touching the vertical scroll bars? That’s the above the fold content.

It’s your first chance to win the first impression and encourage users to stay on
your website and navigate to your products or services.

If you have the wrong content above the fold, then most probably you will lose
most of your potential customers.

What content to have above the fold?

These are the essential elements for the above the fold content.

Website Logo

Contact information

Menu options (The menu options should be based on the results of the
keyword research process and the structure of the menu, should match
the structure of your shop.)

Offers or promotions

Big headline

Search Box (if applicable)

Call to Action Buttons

Link to Shopping Cart or Account Login

The best way to understand these principles is to look at some of the most
successful eCommerce websites on the Internet (and some websites selling
services), and see how they are applied in practice.

Although each website shown below is in a different niche and has different
marketing goals, when it comes to homepage optimization, they have a lot of
similarities.

Example 1: Amazon.com
Amazon Homepage

When you visit the homepage of amazon.com, you will notice that they take a
good advantage for their ‘above the fold’ area.

Besides having the logo, search and sign-in button, they have a number of CALL
TO ACTION boxes to grab the attention of users from the time they land on their
homepage.

Example 2: Zappos.com

Zappos homepage
Zappos.com is another popular store and although their home page design is
different than Amazon’s, it has the same characteristics as described above.

Special Guidelines for Mobile

It is likely that the majority of organic traffic will be coming to your website from
mobile users, so you need to give special attention to how your eCommerce
website is shown on mobile devices.

Having a responsive website is a good first step but for online shops, you may
need to provide users with a more customized experience for mobiles.

A good developer can make the necessary adjustments to your responsive website
so that it renders better on mobiles.

What is so special about mobile?

The available space on a mobile device (that’s the screen width and
height) is less compared to desktop and tablets.

Mobile users are mostly on data connections so the speed and size of the
page are important.

Mobile users are on the go and they need to get the information they want
in the fastest possible way with the minimum number of distractions.

While you can use a desktop homepage to give them information about your
company and welcome them to your store, on mobile your homepage should give
users exactly what they are looking for without extra or unnecessary information.

Google has a very nice document about the principles of mobile site design and it
is worth reading and follow its guidelines. The most important related to an
eCommerce website’s homepage is:

Keep calls-to-action front and center

Keep menus short and sweet

Make it easy to get back to the homepage

Make site search visible (above the fold)

Take a look at the 2 websites on mobile and compare their versions with the
desktop to understand how they have customized their homepage to use the
guidelines outlined above.

Amazon Mobile Version

Zappos Mobile Version

How to Optimize your homepage for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization is for both users and search engines.

The guidelines described above are meant to satisfy the first part of the equation
i.e. to make the homepage user friendly.

Let’s see how to make your shop’s home page search engine friendly.

We will examine the following factors:

 Website Security (SSL)

Home page title

Home page description

H1 tag

Content and Keywords usage

Images

Structured Data

Footer and what content to include

Website Security SSL

An SSL will ensure that all information transmitted between your website and
server is secured. Things like usernames, order information, payment details are
all transmitted through a secure server communication.

Having a Secure Certificate installed on your server and properly configured is a

must for all eCommerce websites.

Besides the security aspect, having an https website will serve 2 more purposes:

It’s good for SEO. Https is a known ranking signal and although not a
significant one, it’s one of those ranking factors that you can easily gain
by adding an SSL to your website.

It’s vital for user trust. When you have an SSL installed, the word secure
is shown in the browser window (like the example below) and this
increases user trust – a factor that is very important for your online shop’s
success.

Secure label

How to optimize your home page title?

The title (<title></title>) tag is very important for SEO purposes for 2 main
reasons:

It is shown in your snippet in the SERPs (search engine results).

It gives a big hint to search engines on what your website is all about.

Homepage Title Guidelines

To optimize your home page’s title, follow these simple rules:

Titles should be around 60 characters – the reason for this limit is that you
want the whole title to be shown in your snippet and not just a part of it.

Include your brand name and location (if you have a local presence – like
the example shown in the screenshot above).

Important: In case you are selling a particular product or service and you
want to optimize your homepage for a specific term, include the keyword(s)
first in your title and then the description and brand name.

For example, if you want to rank your homepage for the term “online courses”,
then this should be the first word in your title. Look at this example from
udemy.com
Title Optimization Examples

If length permits include some benefits in your title like the example below from
zappos.com. Notice how they added Free Shipping and Returns in the title.

Title Optimization Examples

Use ‘Magnet words’, to grab the attention of the users and increase your CTR
(click-through rates).

Words like:

Free Shipping

Sale

XX Off

Money-Back Guarantee

Free Returns

Home Page Description Optimization

The description is also important because it may be shown in the SERPS. A good
description can have a positive effect on the CTR (click-through rate).

While it is up to Google to decide whether or not to show your custom description

in the snippet, in the majority of cases for the homepage it will show your version.

Your description should include:

Benefits and magnet words.

Mentions about your location and phone number (if you are selling local).

A summary of what you are offering.

Let’s see some nice examples from popular websites:

Adwords homepage description

Asos homepage description

Bestbuy homepage description

The H1 Tag
Each and every page of your eCommerce website (including the homepage),
should have one h1 tag.

An H1 tag (<h1></h1>) gives another hint to search engines on what the page
content is about. It’s another way to highlight the important parts of a page to
search engine bots.

A few things you should know about the use of H1 and tags in general:
The h1 tag doesn’t have to be the same as the <title> tag, but it’s ok to be the
same! – Most themes automatically output the title of the page as an H1 tag but
you can change it to be more informative if you want.

Important: Tags should be used in a hierarchical manner i.e. the first tag found
in the HTML code should be the h1, then you can have h2, h3, h4, etc.
For best results, don’t forget to add your target keywords in the H1 tag.

Let’s see a few examples where the <title> and <h1> tag is used correctly:

Example 1: Teachable.com

Title: Create and Sell Your Own Online Courses | Teachable

H1: Create and sell beautiful online courses

Teachable Homepage

Example 2: Houzz.com

Title: Houzz – Home Design, Decorating and Remodeling Ideas

H1: The new way to design your home

Houzz homepage

Home Page Content and use of Keywords

Besides the title, description and H1 tag, another important aspect of homepage
SEO is the content.

One of the most common mistakes many eCommerce websites are making is
not having any text content on the homepage.

They tend to showcase their latest offers or brochures as images but this does not
help in SEO.

Instead of having image only content, convert your banners or Call to Action
boxes into HTML so that search engine spiders can understand the content.

Having HTML code based CTA and banners is also better for mobile since images
with text on top, are not suited for mobile viewing.

What type of content to include on the homepage?

I have mentioned above that your most important messages, CTA’s should be
placed above the fold to grab the attention of the visitors but that does not mean
that you cannot have text content with your keywords, below the fold.

Amazon and Zappos don’t have to do this because they are known brands and
don’t rely as much on search engine traffic, but for less-known eCommerce
websites, it is important to have enough content on the home page for SEO
purposes.

For example, take a lot at Google Ads landing page:

They display their CTA and important messages at the top of the page (above the
fold) and below in a section style format they explain the benefits and features of
their product.

Adwords Landing Page

Here is another example from officefurniture.com

officefurniture.com landing page

Instead of having images of their featured products alone, they also added a bit of
text to explain their offerings.

The content on your homepage has to be unique. Avoid using exactly the
same text as it is used in other websites on the Internet, even if you are
selling the same products or services.

Image SEO
Images are essential for eCommerce websites, especially if you are selling
physical products.

Potential buyers before making a purchase, want to see how the product looks
and in addition good images can enhance the appearance of your shop and make
it less boring.

There are two main issues when using images on your homepage.

First, they increase the time it takes for your homepage to load and second, if not
optimized correctly they are not assisting your SEO efforts.

How to optimize images?

Your first task is to optimize their physical size i.e. to resize the images to match
the maximum size you are going to use them.

For example, if you have an image that is 1200px wide but it is shown as 450px
wide on the website, before uploading to your store make sure that it is resized to
450px.

This alone will reduce the file size of the image to 1/3.

Next, before uploading use a tool to further optimize the file size without losing
quality.

There are tools like imageoptim that can reduce image size by 10%-20% without
changing the quality.

If you are using WordPress, check that your installation is up-to-date because
since version 4.4 WordPress is using responsive images.

Once uploaded to your store, make sure that you use the ALT attribute to
describe what’s in the image and in addition that use a caption below the image
to put information in the text so that it can be read and understood by search
engine spiders.

Image SEO Guidelines

In the ALT text and caption add keywords naturally in the text but without doing
keyword stuffing.

Structured Data
Another element that is important for the SEO optimization of your store’s
homepage is structured data.

What is structured data and why it’s important?

One of the most difficult tasks search engines have to solve when crawling a page
is to understand the context of a page.

By context, we mean to have a clear idea of what the page is all about.

For example, if you have a page with a recipe, search engines will try to find out
the title of the recipe, ingredients needed preparation instructions, images, time
to complete the recipe, etc.

One of the ways to give them good clues is through the page structure, titles,
headings, formatting, and other on-page SEO techniques but this is not enough.

To make their job easier, search engines have agreed to a pre-defined set of
schemas that can be used by webmasters to tag their data so that it’s easier for
spiders to understand the meaning of the content.

You can read more about structured data and schemas in the Complete SEO
Course

When it comes to eCommerce websites and homepage optimization, structured

data can be used to give Google more details about your website and company.

You can implement the organization schema and provide Google information
about:

The name of your Company

Logo

Sitelinks

Contact information

Social Links

Search functions

Here is a simple example of a schema markup:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"url": "http://www.your-company-site.com",
"logo": "http://www.example.com/logo.png",
"contactPoint": [{
"@type": "ContactPoint",
"telephone": "+1-401-555-1212",
"contactType": "customer service"
}]
}
</script>
Successful implementation of the schema markup will improve the listing of your
store in the SERPS by giving more details to users about your company, address,
contact info, social presence and many more.

Footer
Last but not least, don’t forget about your website’s footer. The footer is, of
course, part of the homepage and it is shown on all pages of the website.

Things to add to your footer:

A list of links to the main sections of your website. This doesn’t have to be
the same as the main menu but use the footer area to give users easy
access to the main categories and pages.

Trust logos – if your company is BBB verified, PayPal verified, MacAfee,

verified or if you are an official representative of a brand, the footer is a
good place to add those logos and increase user trust.

Contact information – Make your phone number and address visible and
add links to your contact us page.

Your logo

Links to Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, Lifetime Warranty, and user

sitemap

Links to your social media pages

A way for users to register for your newsletter

Here is a nice example from JamesAllen.com that incorporates all these elements.
JamesAllen.com Footer

KEY LEARNINGS

Having an optimized homepage is very important for the success of your

eCommerce website. Before selecting a theme for your store or if you already
have a theme, before making any changes to it, consider the following:

Can both desktop and mobile users see as soon as they land on my
homepage who we are and what we are selling?

Can they find a product easily either by searching for it or navigating

through the menu?

Does the page load fast on both desktop and mobile?

Are my titles and descriptions optimized?

Does the page have a relevant h1 tag?

Do I have enough text content on the page to help search engines

understand what I’m selling?

When I test my homepage with the structured data testing tool, is the
schema information correct and accurate or does it show any errors?

Is my footer optimized?

Is my website secured (https)?

As a final word, don’t forget that when it comes to SEO for your homepage
and website in general, simplicity is always the best approach.

Keep things simple for your users and search engines. Don’t over-do it with
graphics or extra elements that don’t serve any real purpose other than
satisfying your desire to have a fancy and flashy website.
 Lesson 6

Shop Category SEO

Shop Category SEO

In this topic, you’ll learn how to optimize your product category pages.

Why are eCommerce category Pages Important?

Category pages are very important for eCommerce websites. Having

properly optimized category (or archive) pages can get you high rankings for
keywords that can potentially generate sales and revenue.

Category pages can potentially become high authority pages

Best practices for eCommerce websites indicate that you should have a
hierarchical structure with no more than 3 levels (Remember Lesson 4?).

This means that besides the homepage, the second most important pages of the
website are the category pages.

As you can see in the diagram below, authority and ‘link juice’ is stronger on
category pages since these are located high in the hierarchy.
Site Structure Example

To take advantage of this though and have some real gains in terms of rankings
and traffic, you need to do some SEO work to optimize those pages.

Failing to do so, may generate the opposite effect since Google will not consider
them as important and your overall domain authority will be negatively affected.

Category pages can help you achieve higher rankings

Another important reason why category pages are important is rankings.

Many eCommerce websites are unable to rank for individual product pages
because the same products are available on bigger websites and they tend to gain
the first places in the SERPS or because people don’t use the individual product
names to search but they use more general terms.

For example, let’s assume that you are selling ‘men’s surfing wetsuits’ like the
example below.

Users are more likely to search for “men surfing wetsuits” and other related
terms and not for the individual products.

Having category pages optimized for the general terms it’s the best approach.
Product Category Pages Example

How to SEO your category pages

Let’s see the 8 steps to follow to have properly optimized category pages.

Category URLs

Category SEO starts by optimizing the URLs. As explained in Lesson 3, your

category URLS should describe exactly what the page is all about without
additional characters or unnecessary information.

For example, if you have a category for men’s shoes your URL should be:
https://example.com/mens-shoes

Keep your URLs clean, short and to the point and make sure that the user
can tell from the URL alone what the category is all about.

Category URL optimization for WooCommerce

If you are using WordPress and Woocommerce as your eCommerce CMS, it is

mandatory to have a category slug. The default slug is product-category.

You can either use it as is or you can change it provided that all your products can
be grouped together.

For example, if you are selling ebooks, the default URL for the SEO category
would be:

http://www.example.com/product-category/SEO but since all the products you are

selling are ebooks, you can change the product category slug to ebooks and your
URL will become

http://www.example.com/ebooks/SEO which is better.

Note: You can find these settings in Settings -> Permalinks.

Category titles

The category title is a great opportunity to give Google strong signals about the
page and its contents.

When crafting your titles, take into account the following:

The outcome of your keyword research. Knowing which keywords people use in
their search queries will help you come up with highly optimized titles.

Start your titles with keywords and then add your brand name.

For example, do this:

Women’s Shoes: Boots, Heels, Sneakers & More | mybrand.com

instead of this:

mybrand.com | Women’s Shoes: Boots, Heels, Sneakers & More

Use specific characteristics of the category products in the title.

For example, if you have a category page with green athletic shoes, make sure
that this is reflected in the title as well i.e. “Green Athletic Shoes – Discounts
available for bulk purchases”.

Category META description

The description of a category page does not have a direct impact on the on-page
SEO of the page but it does have an important role to play for getting a higher
Click Through Rate (CTR), once you manage to achieve first page rankings for
that page.

What you write in the meta description field may be shown in the search results.

If you don’t provide for a unique quality description for every category page, your
snippet may look like the example below i.e. text that does not make sense.

This is not good for your brand and certainly, it does not encourage people to
click it.

Category Meta Description

In your category descriptions try to summarize your products and offerings. If you
offer free shipping, free returns, etc. say so in the description to encourage users
to click on your entry.

Here is a better example than Zappos. If you were searching to buy mens shoes
and saw these two entries, which one would you prefer?

Category Meta Description

Category H1 tag

Your category pages should be optimized the same way as other pages or posts of
your website and this includes optimizing the H1 tag and content of the page.

The category page should have only one H1 tag and this should be on top of the
page. It can be the same as the TITLE of the page or different, but it should still
contain your target keywords.

Below the H1 tag, you can also add a few lines of content to give both users and
search engine crawlers a good clue on what the page is all about.

If you want you can display the same content as the meta description.

Here is a very nice example:

Optimized Product Category Page Description

Category Text Content

When it comes to content, a lot of webmasters find it difficult to add text content
to an eCommerce category page because it can break up the design of the page
and draw the attention away from the most important elements of the page i.e.
the products.

A good way to overcome this problem is to have a few lines of content below the
H1 tag (as shown above) and then add some related text content at the bottom of
the page.
Above the Fold Content

As you can see in the example above, at the bottom of the category page they
added a couple of paragraphs of optimized content and internal links to product
sub-categories, which is great for SEO.

Conversion Optimization Elements

Don’t forget that a category page is also a landing page and it can be the first
page users will see from search engines, Facebook or Google Ads.

This means that is should also include all those elements that are necessary to
convince, encourage and keep users to your store so that they can eventually
convert.

Everything that we discussed eCommerce homepage SEO, are also applicable for
category pages.

Things like:

Your logo and contact information

Your offerings or promotions

Call to Action buttons

Links to Shopping cart and account login

Newsletter signups

Testimonials

Menu options

Highlight attention to your most popular products

If you have a lot of products in your category pages, make it easier for users to
find what they want by showing them a list of the most popular (or best-selling)
categories and products.

This section should ideally be placed above the fold and below your main heading
(h1), like the example below.
Above the fold content on product category pages

Visual Components and Other Usability Elements

Besides displaying the right content, a properly optimized category page should
also include images and other elements to help users find what they want in the
least possible number of clicks.

Search Filters

If you have a lot of products in the same category then you should have filters on
the category page to help users narrow down their selection and find the products
they want.

Consider the following example of a company renting villas. In the category page,
you have the option to refine your search based on a number of attributes and
sort the results.
Search Filters Example

Product Titles, Ratings, and Prices

Below the product images, make sure that you have an accurate description of the
product, and if applicable, show ratings and pricing.

If a product is a new addition to your collection, add a label on top of the image to
highlight this. The same goes for Offers or special deals.
Product Rating Example

Canonical URLs

In cases where your product category pages expand to more than one page or
when you use filters on the category page, you need to set the canonical URL.

By setting the canonical URL any backlinks are attributed to the main category
page (thus making your page stronger) and you avoid duplicate content issues.

For example, if you have a product category URL that looks like this:

https://www.example.com/my-product-category and you have paging enabled

when users click to go to page 2, the URL would be something like this:
https://www.example.com/my-product-category/2/.

To make sure that Google will understand that the subsequent pages are part of
the main category page, you need to set the canonical URL for the other pages to

https://www.example.com/my-product-category.

Read the Canonical URLs lesson in the Complete SEO Course for more
details.

KEY LEARNINGS

Category pages are important for eCommerce websites. It is vital to

understand that you don’t have any choice when it comes to SEO optimizing
your category pages.

Properly optimized category pages can help your shop achieve better
rankings in search while non-optimized pages can generate the opposite
results.

In summary, an SEO optimized category pages should:

Have an SEO friendly URL that describes the category

A title that includes keywords related to the products in the category

A well-crafted description that gives users enough information as to

why they should click your link from the SERPs.

A unique H1 tag (with keywords)

Text content that includes relevant information about the category

and internal links to subcategories or other pages of the website.

High-quality images of the products (or subcategories)

Filters and other features to help users narrow down their selection
and find what they want in the fastest possible way

Incorporate all conversion optimization elements like your store’s

homepage (offers, customer reviews, call to action buttons, etc.)

Set the canonical URL correctly so that there are no issues with lost
backlinks or duplicate content.
 Lesson 7

Product Page SEO

How to SEO Your Product Pages

In this topic, you’ll learn how to SEO your product pages.

Product page SEO is not just about SEO. As weird as this may sound, when
optimizing your eCommerce product pages, you need to take into account other
factors that affect the user experience.

A product page that offers a great experience for the users will also generate
more sales and conversions.

Your overall goal is to create a product page that is user-friendly, optimized

for conversions but at the same time to be SEO friendly and easy to crawl by
search engines.

Let’s see step by step which areas of your product pages can be optimized and
how to do this in practice.

URL Optimization
The first element that needs your attention is the product URL. Although it’s not
the most important ranking factor, having properly optimized product URLs is
recommended for a number of reasons.

1st – It’s easier for search engines to understand

2nd – It’s easier for users to understand

3rd – It’s good for readability purposes especially in cases when you (or someone
else) posts a URL of your products in a forum or a comment.

For example, it’s easier to understand that this URL:

http://www.example.com/products/macbookpro-256gb

will lead to a product page about a 256GB Macbook Pro

than this:

http://www.example.com/product_id=34?S256_DEF

How do you optimize your product URLs?

Everything that is recommended for an SEO friendly URL it’s also applicable
for product URLs with some variations that are specific for eCommerce
websites.

To be more specific, your product URLS should be:

Short and descriptive without unnecessary characters

Use “-” to separate the different parts of the URL

Use only lowercase characters

Avoid using stop words like “a,” “an,” and “the.”, in the URL.

Include attributes and product characteristics like the brand name or

color.

If you do have to include extra characters that are maybe needed by your
CMS, try to have those at the end.

Here is an example of an SEO optimized product URL:

SEO optimized product URL

And an example of a non-optimized product URL from Amazon!

Non-SEO optimized product URL

If you are wondering why Amazon doesn’t optimize their URLs, the answer is
simple.

First, they don’t have to do it because SEO optimization is not their priority and
second, they have a huge website with millions of products and it might be
technically impossible for them to do this change.

With that being said, if you have a lot of products or it’s too difficult to change
them, don’t spend time with optimizing the URLs, there are more important
changes to do to your shop (as you will read below).

If you are up to the job, then make sure that for each product page you change
the URL, you add a respective 301 Redirection so that the old URL is redirected
to the new URL.

Product Title Optimization

The next step is to work on is your product titles. This is one of the important
optimization tasks you can do for your product pages.

To be more precise, your titles should combine details about the product and
keywords that people use in searching for a particular product, in 60 characters
or less.

Why 60 characters or less? Because this is what is shown on average in the

search snippets, without breaking your title.

See the two examples below.

The first one is 60 characters (excluding the site name) and it shows as is, while
the second one is more than 60 characters so Google breaks it up.
Product Titles in Google Search Results

Important Note: You don’t need to repeat your domain name in the product
title, Google does this automatically.

How do you combine product names and keywords in the title?

Let’s see some examples to understand how to have both your product names and
keywords in the same title.

The first step is to refer to the results of your keyword research. Having a clear
idea of what people type in the Google search box is important.

Let’s say that you are selling shoes and you know from the keyword research that
people search for “men’s running shoes”.

Your first action is to optimize your category page for that term.

It’s a general term and a great candidate for category optimization.

Within the category, you can optimize your product names like the examples
below:

Example of an Optimized Product Title

Example of an Optimized Product Title

Notice the format of the title which includes the brand name, model and keywords
i.e. Men’s Running Shoe.

If your selling products that the brand name is not so important, you can change
the order of the words in the title to include the keywords first and then the brand
or type.

For example, look at this product title from Etsy.com. The keyword “boyfriend
gift” is at the beginning of the title and this makes the title more optimized.

Example of an Optimized Product Title

Last but certainly not least, don’t forget that each and every product page of your
eCommerce website needs to have a <title> and this has to be unique across your
site.

The product page H1 Tag

It is very common for the H1 tag of the page to be the same as the title.

While this is ok (and the default configuration for many CMS) if you want you can
change it to be friendlier for users (since you can safely use more characters) and
also, it’s another opportunity to enrich your page with related keywords.
Use of H1 Tag

Besides that, the other thing to check and ensure is that your page has only one
H1 tag and this is located high in the page and above the other headings (h2, h3,
etc).

When it comes to other headings (h2, h2, etc), use them according to best
practices.

Meta Description Optimization

What to include in your product meta description?

A description needs to include the product name and keywords. As you can see in
the examples below, Google highlights the words from a description that matches
the user’s query.

Other than that, to make your descriptions more inviting, you can add benefits
like free shipping and returns, money-back guarantee and other information that
can differentiate your snippet entry from the rest.

The snippet from Amazon below is a very good example of an optimized meta
description.
Optimized Product Meta Descriptions

Breadcrumb Menu
In the Shop Site Structure lesson, I have explained why breadcrumb menus are
important for user-friendliness and the usability aspect of an eCommerce website.

What is necessary to highlight again is that besides making your website user
friendly and SEO friendly, breadcrumbs can contribute to higher CTRs (click-
through rates), because they enhance the presentation of your snippet in the
SERPS.

To take advantage of this, breadcrumbs need to have the proper structure data so
that they can be understood by Google.

Look at the example below and see how Google is using the breadcrumb
information in the snippet (for both desktop and mobile), instead of showing the
product URL.

Breadcrumb menus

It’s more relevant and can contribute to better CTRs.

Product Description
Optimizing your product descriptions is one of the most difficult and time-
consuming tasks, especially if you have a lot of products in your store.

From experience, it’s also one of the tasks that most eCommerce owners get it
wrong.

Let’s see what we mean by product description optimization.

Unique Content
Google is looking for unique, high-quality content to show in the search results
from high-quality websites.

If your product description is an exact copy of what is already available in

other eCommerce websites on the Internet, that have a higher domain
authority and Google trust, it will simply ignore your product pages.

Google does not penalize websites because of duplicate content but it does not
reward them either.

An eCommerce website that has a lot of pages with duplicate content is

considered a low-quality website and the chances of ranking high for competitive
terms are minimum to none.

So, the first thing that you need to do is to ensure that your product page
description is unique.

Uniqueness is not limited to websites across the web but to your own website too.

In other words, each and every product of your shop needs to have a unique
description and not the same description as another product within your shop.

Content length

There is no golden rule as to the number of words your product description

should be, but it is proven that long-form content ranks higher in Google, and is
shared more frequently in social media.

Of course, your goal with eCommerce websites is to make sales so your product
descriptions should primarily serve that purpose.

The added advantage of providing for long descriptions is that with the proper
SEO techniques, you will have the opportunity to blend keywords into your text
and make your product pages both search engine friendly and interesting for the
users.

Look at any product on Amazon, they have a ton of content related to product
usage, product short and long description, customer reviews, Q & A related to the
product and a lot of other useful information.

Amazon is not doing this for SEO purposes, but because it helps users to
make a purchase decision.

Here is an example of a product short description shown above the fold

Content on Product Page

And the product long description is shown towards the bottom of the page:
Product Long Description

Many eCommerce owners worry that having too much content on the page will
break the design but that’s not the case.

You can follow the same pattern as amazon, i.e. have a short description above
the fold and a long description below the page.

Almost all modern eCommerce CMS (woocommerce, Shopify, etc), have this kind
of functionality build-in into their systems.

Here is another example from an eCommerce website selling online courses, that
we have developed.

The summary of a course is shown above the fold and below we show more
information about the specific product without breaking the design or tiring the
user with too much content.
Above the fold content

Content Optimization

While writing your product descriptions don’t forget about optimizing your
content.

The best way to do this is to go back to the results of your keyword research and
make a list of keywords that are related to the specific product.

Use those keywords in your headings and text naturally without doing keyword
stuffing.

Mentioning your target keyword 3-5 times in the text is enough and using related
keywords from your list in the headings will help Google understand what the
page is all about.

You can link to related products within the text but be wise, you don’t want to
drive people away from your product page.

Your goal is to keep them as much as possible on the page so that they eventually
take the next step, which is to proceed with a purchase.

Examine the bounce rate of your pages by looking at your Google Analytics
reports. Product pages that have a high bounce rate are good candidates for
improving their content further.

Image Optimization
Images are necessary components of your product pages. Regardless of the type
of products you are selling, your product pages must have images.

Avoid the use of bad stock images – using images that are not of good quality
can drive customers away.

If you cannot create original images of your products then make sure that you
select high-quality images that look real and authentic.

Using the real photo of you or your team can increase trust in the cases that you
are selling services or intangible products.

Use meaningful file names – I’ve mentioned many times before that image
filenames are NOT among the biggest SEO factors, but having good filenames has
a number of advantages:

It’ easier for you to manage the (possibly) hundreds of images in your
store.

When other websites use a URL to one of your images, it will be

 meaningful.

You increase your chances of ranking in Google image search.

Let’s see some examples of meaningful and not meaningful image file names.
Consider this image:

Image Filenames

Which is more meaningful to you,

this:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TmaDI8jRL._SY300_.jpg

or this:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/amazon-echo-blue-large.jpg

Try to use keywords in a natural manner in your image filenames.

Optimize your ALT Text – ALT TEXT (or alternative text) is one of the most
important elements of image optimization. Alt Text has two main purposes:

It is shown in the browser until the images are fully downloaded and
sometimes on mouse hover

It is important for SEO since it’s through the ALT text that search engines
can understand what an image is all about.
Image ALT Text

Tips for optimizing the image ALT TEXT

No keyword stuffing – this is not a good ALT text “buy sell villas Miami
beach”

Use natural language – plain English as you would explain to a friend what
the image is all about

Use a short caption below each image to give search engines and users
more information for the image (see example above).

Image Size

The size of the images does matter. Smaller images are faster to download while
large images may slow a website down.

Before uploading your images make sure that you optimize their size. If the
largest image size you need is 1200×650, don’t upload images that are bigger
than that size (even though they will be automatically resized by your CMS).

Use tools like image optim to optimize their size without sacrificing quality.

If you have a lot of product images, consider using a CDN so that images are
delivered by a network of servers and not from your server.

Use of Videos
Where possible, try to use Videos to make your product content more interesting.

People love videos and good original videos can differentiate your shop from
competitors and increase conversions.
You can use videos from the product manufacturers (if available) but the best
approach would be to create your own videos.

Whichever the case, here is your video SEO checklist:

Do not upload videos directly on your server, instead use a dedicated video
hosting service like Youtube or Vimeo. Once uploaded, there are various
ways to embed the videos in your product pages.

Wrap your videos with Video Schema markup

Create a video sitemap and submit to Google.

Product Schema Markup

What is Product schema?

In simple terms, product schema or structured data is a way to highlight certain

data items from your product pages (such as the name of the product, price,
availability, reviews, and ratings), so that search engines can read and
understand this information easier.

By highlighting, we mean adding specific lines of code to your pages that provide
this information to search engine crawlers.

Why add schema markup to your product pages? For 2 main reasons:

It’s a great way to help search engines understand more about your
product.

It’s another way to enhance your snippet in the SERPS and get higher CTR
(click-through rates).

Product Schema Markup in Serps

When product schema is configured correctly, your search snippet will include
the price of the item, reviews, and stock information, as shown in the example
above.

How to add product schema?

It depends on the eCommerce platform you are using. Most modern eCommerce
CMS (like Shopify or Woocommerce) have product schema built-in.

The first thing to do is to go to the structured data testing tool and enter the URL
of one of your product pages. If your product schema is configured correctly, you
should see something like this:

Structured Data Testing Tool

Notice that it shows no errors or warnings on the top right.

If your product pages are missing structured data then the best way to add them
is to use the JSON-LD format.

This is how the code looks:

Schema for products

Now, this is a part that may require more reading and it needs technical
knowledge. If you don’t feel comfortable messing with code then it is highly
recommended to hire a developer to do this for you.

Structured data information is heavily used by Voice Search Systems (like

Google Assistant) and this is another good reason why you need to have your
product pages configured correctly.

Open Graph meta tags

Open graph meta tags are similar to product markup. They are used so that any
information shared with social networks is accurate.

When visitors click a LIKE or SHARE button to publish your page in social media
networks, you want to have the correct image and description shared, and this is
achieved by having the right open graph tags defined.

Open Graph meta tags will not help you with SEO as they don’t have any direct or
indirect effect on rankings but they are important for the proper representation of
your brand and products in social media.

The good thing about open graph meta tags is that they are easy to implement.

There are two main categories, open graph meta tags are used by Facebook,
Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter Cards by twitter.

The easiest way to make sure that they are configured correctly is to install the
free version of yoast seo plugin or social warfare plugins and configure the
relevant settings.

How to check open graph meta tags?

To check that your implementation is correct, you can simply share one of your
product pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram and monitor how it
looks.

Product Reviews And Ratings

Product reviews are among the ‘must-have’ components of successful product
pages.

It is statistically proven that users are more likely to convert if they see
other people converting.

Product pages with real, positive reviews are more likely to have higher
conversion rates than product pages with no reviews.

How to use Reviews?

1 – Add Star Ratings and total reviews below your product title. See the example
of Amazon below. When clicked it should go to the “Reviews” section at the
bottom of the page.
Product Reviews Example

2 – Make sure that your product reviews are on the same page as your products
(don’t use a different review page for each product).

3 – Avoid having reviews in a tab that is not always visible.

Google mentioned many times that they consider content in tabs (that are not
active) less important than content in always-active tabs.

4 – Have the latest reviews shown first. People like to read reviews that are valid
for the product they are viewing and not for older products.

5 – Try to provide as much information as possible about the reviewer. If possible,

have their real picture and name to accompany the review.

Visitors can read the review together with the image and name of the person.
They can also click on the link to see where the review was posted.

6 – Don’t make the mistake of adding reviews without proof. Fake reviews can be
easily spotted by users and this can generate the opposite results.

Third-Party Reviews
I have mentioned above that you need to make every effort to make your reviews
look real. One of the best ways to achieve this is to make use of a third-party
review system.

Reviews posted publicity on third party sites are more trusted by the users (and
Google) because they cannot be manipulated.

Depending on your business, there are review systems dedicated to specific kinds
of products. Here is a list of the most popular review systems you can use.
 Google Customer Reviews

Google My Business Reviews

Facebook Reviews

Better Business Bureau (BBB) Reviews

Ivouch

Feefo

TrustPilot

YotPo

BizRate

User-Generated Content
One of the ways to have more unique content on your product pages is “user-
generated content”.

User-generated content is what the name implies i.e. content generated by users,
usually in the form of questions and answers.

Amazon does a great job in this, below each of the product descriptions you will
see a section called “Customer questions and answers”.
User-Generated Content

There are a few things to note about user generating content from an SEO
perspective.

Make sure that you nofollow any links in the answers or better disallow
users from entering links (allow only text). The last thing you want is for
spammers to fill out your pages with spammy content and links.

Monitor all replies before publishing. Publish only questions and answers
that are highly relevant to your product.

Don’t fill your page with Q&A content. Show 4 or 5 questions and then for
more questions redirect the user to a dedicated page (or to a hidden tab).

“User-Generated Content” is not always easy to achieve, your need to have

popular products and a system in place to email existing customers questions
your potential customers have.

Nevertheless, if you can have this feature it will be helpful for your SEO and
customer support.
Cross-selling
Giving users cross-selling options besides assisting in generating more sales, it’s
also a great way to add internal links for your product pages.

If you go to any popular online store, you will notice that below each product they
have sections displaying matching products or what other people have purchased
that is related to the viewed product.

Here is an example from a shoe store:

Cross-Selling Example

KEY LEARNINGS

Product page SEO is not as difficult as it sounds and as mentioned in the

introduction, it’s not just about SEO.

When SEO optimizing your product pages, you should have 4 things in mind:

Your Users (usability)

The representation of your brand and products
Conversion Optimization
Search Engine Optimization
To have a fully optimize product page, you need to work on:

Optimizing your product URLs

Optimizing your titles and description

Properly formatted breadcrumbs (with schema information)

A well-structured page with proper h1 tag and headings

Unique, meaningful and in-depth product descriptions

Great looking and unique images

Product schema implemented and verified

Open Graph meta tags and Twitter Cards

Product Reviews (with correct schema)

Cross-selling options
 Lesson 8

Blogging For Ecommerce

Running an eCommerce Blog

In this topic, you’ll learn how to run a blog for your eCommerce website.

Why should all eCommerce websites have a dedicated

blog?
Blogging is a valuable tool for all online businesses and that includes eCommerce
stores.

Through blogging, you can increase traffic coming to your website either
organically (search traffic) or from social media networks. It’s great for
brand awareness, customer support and if done correctly, rankings and
conversions.

There are many reasons as to why all eCommerce websites should have a
dedicated blog.

Many eCommerce owners believe that it’s a waste of time, but as we will see
below, a successful blog can assist in the growth of an online store and in many
ways, guarantee long term success.
Blogging Benefits

Less dependency on Paid Advertising

The majority of eCommerce startups follow the same business plan which consists
of three main steps:

Build a website

Add products

Run campaigns on AdWords or Facebook to get traffic and make sales.

While this is a good plan, once they stop putting money on advertising or for
various reasons advertising costs increase making the campaigns not profitable,
sales drop and problems rise to the surface.

This is the point where they start looking for alternative ways of getting traffic,
and soon they realize that putting all their eggs in one basket was not a very good
idea.

The thing is, blogging can be an alternative way to get traffic to a website but it’s
not as immediate as Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

To take advantage of blogging, you have to plan for it in advance.

 Any money you spend on setting up a blog or publishing content will not
generate any returns in the short term but it’s one of the best investments
you can do for your businesses in the long term.

It takes a lot of time to rank in Google and get traffic to your blog but it’s a step
you have to take and the sooner you take it the better it will be.

Over the years I had the opportunity to Audit a number of eCommerce websites,
both new startups, and mature businesses, and it always comes to the same
advice.

Don’t spend all your advertising budget on ads. Allocate at least 20% of your
monthly budget on content marketing and blogging and increase that gradually
until you reach a point where the dependency on Paid advertising is manageable.

The Internet is changing rapidly, advertising costs increase and competition is

becoming more intense in all niches but one thing is for certain.

A well-planned blog with high-quality content is likely to attract traffic from

search engines and social networks for years to come.

More quality pages in search engines index

Ecommerce websites tend to have a lot of pages (products, categories, tags) but
many of them carry the same content. While this is not necessarily bad for SEO,
it’s not good either.

Category and tag pages have the same content as product pages, the same
products may be available on other websites on the Internet and this creates
duplicate content issues.

Besides optimizing your category and product pages, another way to increase the
number of unique pages search engines have in their index is through blogging.

More quality pages in the index mean better rankings and more traffic.

Link building
When you start a link building campaign to improve the rankings of your shop,
you will soon realize that other bloggers or websites are not willing to link to your
homepage or product pages.

Why is that?

Because nobody wants to promote a product for free (unless they are affiliates or
have other benefits), and because they are afraid of getting a Google penalty (if
Google thinks that the links were paid for).

So, how do you get out of this loop and build natural links that can increase the
rankings of the most important pages of your store? The answer is through
blogging.

Everybody is willing to link to high-quality pages, even if these pages are part of a
website selling goods or services online.

Ok, but the links will point to the blog, how will this benefit my website?

In a number of ways.

For starters, it will improve the authority of your domain and it will increase the
overall rankings and traffic of your blog.

Second, as you will read in the link building lesson, there is a way to take
advantage of the incoming links to boost the rankings of your product or category
pages.

Internal Linking
One of my favorite SEO methods is internal linking. Internal links are links
pointing to other pages of your website (and not to pages outside your domain).

Unlike external links, there is no fear of Google penalties and besides being useful
to users, they also help search engine crawlers discover and index more pages
from your website.

Having an active blog is a great way to build internal links pointing to your
homepage, category and product pages.

Social media Marketing

Social media marketing is essential for eCommerce websites. Having a solid
presence in social media networks is a good way to promote your brand
(awareness) and products.

To be successful in social media, besides using paid ads, you also need to keep
your accounts loaded with fresh, high-quality content and a blog is a perfect tool
for that purpose.

Enrich your blog posts with images and videos so that they are more interesting
and attractive when shared by users.

The graph below shows the different types of content and their average shares in
social media networks.

Average Shares by Content-Type

Customer Care and Support

An active blog can also be used for customer care and support purposes. Use the
blog to cover topics related to your products that your users might have questions
about.

Use the blog to make new product announcements and establish a communication
channel between your company and customers.
Brand Awareness and Trust
Before making an online purchase, users need to feel confident that they will not
lose their money, so one of the things they do before hitting the “Buy Now”
button, is to search Google and find out more details about the particular
company.

If you have a blog, then it is very likely that a number of posts will show up for
searches related to your “brand name” and this besides indirectly promoting your
brand, helps in establishing trust.

How to set up your eCommerce blog?

There are many ways to set up a blog, depending on the eCommerce platform you
are using.

If you are already on WordPress and Woocommerce then adding a blog is a very
easy task since this is already built into WordPress.

If you are not using Woocommerce, you can still set up a WordPress Blog as a
subdomain i.e. blog.myecommercewebsite.com or folder
myecommercewebsite.com/blog.

What is important is to use one of the two versions above (i.e. subdomain or
folder) and NOT to set up a blog on its own domain.

The reason is that you want to take advantage of the pages/posts of the blog and
increase the number of pages you have in the index and of course to consolidate
the link juice from any incoming links pointing to the blog pages.

Other things to take care, related to the setup of your eCommerce blog:

Make sure that https is enabled on the blog. Your eCommerce website
should already have an SSL installed and the should be true for the blog as
well.

You don’t have to create all the categories that you have on your website
as blog categories. Your blog can have a structure that makes sense for a
 blog.

Follow all SEO best practices for optimizing a website.

Don’t forget to add a BLOG menu in your main menu, sitemap, and footer.
People are familiar with the term Blog and many times they are searching
for it.

Once your blog grows and traffic starts to flow in, you need to add several
CTA (calls to action) boxes to either redirect some of the traffic to your
product pages or get them to sign up to a newsletter so that you have their
contact details for email marketing purposes.

Add the appropriate schema data to your blog post (schema.org/article or

schema.org/review depending on the case).

What you should blog about?

That’s a very interesting question and one of the most common questions I get
from eCommerce owners when performing site audits.

Regardless of the niche you are in, there are always topics to cover in your blog.
How do you find them?

If you have done your keyword research correctly, you should already have a list
of nice long-tail keywords you can target in your blogs.

As a reminder, look at the example below (from Lesson 3):

Keyword Research for eCommerce Blog

Tools like SEMRUSH (shown in the above screenshot) will make this process
much easier and more effective.

Get Ideas from Competitors

Check out the blogs of your competitors. What topics do they cover in their posts?
What kind of content do they publish (text, videos, etc)? How often do they blog?

Of course, you don’t want to copy their exact titles and content but knowing how
they are utilizing blogging can give you some ideas too.

If they don’t have an active blog then this is even better, it means that by
maintaining a blog you will be a step ahead.

Product Reviews and How to Guides

Most people before making a purchase decision they like to read product reviews,
how-to guides, comparisons with other products and other related information.

These are great topics for blog posts. You can write in-depth guides with nice
videos showing how your products can be used or how they compare with other
similar products.

When doing so make sure that your blog post titles have this format:

Product name Review – Site Name

For example Nespresso Inissia Review – MyCoffeeShop

The reason is simple, you want your blog posts to appear high in search when
people search for reviews of the specific product.

One of the concerns many people have is that Google will not rank reviews
published on the blog of an eCommerce website selling the products.

This is not the case.

Google knows that the review is published on a website selling the product but
good product reviews can still rank high.

If you follow some basic SEO rules, these posts will also show up for terms like
“your brand name – Reviews” and this has a lot of advantages for your brand’s
reputation.

Tell your story

People love to read success stories and your company blog is a great place to
share your story with your audience.

Storytelling is another opportunity for you to promote your brand and build trust
with your potential customers.

For example, let’s say that you have an eCommerce website selling custom made
rings (which is a highly completive market dominated by giant companies).

You can publish a story on your blog on how you started your business, explain
your passion for making custom rings and how happy it makes you get nice
comments from customers, etc.

Potential customers reading your story will feel more confident to buy a ring from
you because of any fears they may have about your company, are overcome by
your personal story.

Blogging is not Limited To text only Content

When planning your blog’s content, don’t think only about the text. There are a
number of content formats you can use depending on the products or services you
are selling.

The infographic below shows a list of the most common content formats you can
use in your blog.

Blogging Formats
How often should you blog?

There is no golden rule as to the number of times per week/month you should
publish new content.

It is proven though that websites that publish content on a regular basis, tend to
rank higher and get more organic traffic than websites that don’t publish
regularly.

Producing good content for an eCommerce blog is a time-consuming and costly

task. If you don’t have a solid process in place it will be very difficult to keep to a
schedule.

If you are busy running your shop, then the best approach is to either outsource
this task to a Digital Marketing Company or hire a good writer and an SEO to
handle and run your blog.

The SEO consultant can give instructions to the writer as to which topics to cover,
what titles to use, how long to make the blog posts and as soon as a post is
written, it can be SEO optimized before publication.
How often to publish new content

As a word of advice, don’t set goals with the blog you cannot meet. Start by
publishing one post per week and if you can follow this schedule for a couple of
months, go to 2 posts per week, etc.

KEY LEARNINGS

All eCommerce websites should maintain an active blog. When configured

and managed correctly a blog can attract organic traffic to the site and can
serve as the medium to communicate with your customers.

Once you get into the point that it has enough traffic, you can either redirect
the traffic through CTA boxes to your product or selling pages or get as
many email subscribers as you can and use email marketing to introduce
your products and services.
 Lesson 9

Link Building for eCommerce Websites

Link Building Techniques for Ecommerce

Websites

In this topic, you’ll learn how to build links for your eCommerce Website.

Everybody knows that in order to get high rankings you need strong links
pointing to your website and yet the question remains, how do you build links to
your website that can positively influence your rankings?

There is no easy answer. Link building is not like on-page SEO where you can
follow a list and get your pages optimized.

When running link building campaigns, you have to be creative and learn to
think outside the box.

Your goal is not to get any type of links but to acquire those links that can make a
difference in your rankings and those links that can make your eCommerce
website stronger than competitors.

Why is link building important for eCommerce

websites?
Link building, also known as off-page SEO, it’s one of the important signals that
can influence rankings.

What does this mean for your eCommerce store?

In order to rank high in the search results and get targeted website traffic, you
need to get as many links as you can from a number of different domains.

Does this mean that without links, I will not be able to achieve any
rankings?

No. Links are just a part of the ranking algorithm, an important one, but not the
only one.

You still have to work on everything that we discussed so far in this course.

How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your

Ecommerce Website
Let’s see how to get those precious links that can make a difference to your
rankings and traffic.

Start and maintain an active blog

Having a properly setup and optimized blog for your eCommerce website can help
you get incoming links from highly trusted websites.

I have covered eCommerce blogging in a previous lesson, but what is important to

understand now is the following:

Your blog needs to be part of your domain, either as a subdomain

blog.mywebsite.com or directory mywebsite.com/blog. Having the blog on
a different domain does not help.

In order to get links from blogging, you really have to provide for great
content.

Other webmasters may link to your blog (knowing that it belongs to an

eCommerce website), only if it provides real value for their visitors.

Links pointing to your blog pages will indirectly improve the rankings of
your domain and product pages.

As we will see below there is a way to pass the link juice from the blog
pages to your product pages.

By having an active blog, links will not magically start to flow in.
 You still need to promote your blog posts in any way you can so as to get
the attention of other webmasters.

Get a Link from Manufacturers site

There are a number of ways to get links from the manufacturer’s website.

Visit their websites and see if they have a section with links to their
retailers.

If not, send them an email and ask them how you can get featured on their
website.

If they have a blog, ask them to contribute an article.

If they have a showcase section (most suited for service providers), submit
your entry.

See below a screenshot of how we managed to get a link for our client from
woocommerce.com.

We submitted for their showcase section, a website we developed using

woocommerce.

Links from the Manufacturer Website

Guest posting Part 1 – Websites That Accept Guest Posts
Guest posting is one of the most effective ways to get links from other websites.
The way it works is the following:

Find related to your niche websites that are actively looking for guest
writers

Read their publishing guidelines

Write a nice post which includes links to your website

The post is published and you get a link

It sounds like a straightforward process but it’s not always as easy as one, two,
three.

The first challenge is to find websites that:

Are in the same niche

Accept guest posts

Are considered by Google to be of high quality

Allow dofollow links in the body of the article

How do you find them?

Open Google and search for different terms like:

“write for us”, “guest post”, “guest blogger”, “writers needed”, “blog for us”,
“submission guidelines”, “contributor”, followed by your industry like shown in
the example below.
Searching for link opportunities

Visit the website’s and look in the main menu or footer for options like “Write for
Us”, “Contribute”, “Submit an article”.

Spy on your competitors

Competitors that have better rankings than you, most probably they are doing a
better job when it comes to link building. To find out more details about their link
profile, you can use a tool to do some spy work.

Spying on your competitors by analyzing their link profile is not as bad as it

sounds, you are not doing anything wrong.

On the contrary, if your competitors are doing a great job, it will save you a lot of
time searching Google to find websites to get links.

The most efficient way to get an idea of how your link profiles compare and where
to get links is to use SEMRUSH.

SEMRUSH has introduced a new feature called “Backlink Gap Analysis”. What
this feature does is to compare the backlinks of different websites (up to five), and
discover untapped backlink opportunities.

This is how the Backlink Gap Analysis screen looks like.

Backlink Analysis

You can go through the list of referring domains and find out from which domains
your competitors have links.

By clicking on the number of links (right column), you can see exactly the page
that the link is on.

When not to guest post on a website even if they accept posts?

Before proceeding to the next step, there are a few checks to make to ensure that
the websites you found are good candidates for guest posting.

I mentioned above that websites need to be of high quality. This is translated as:

Websites have good rankings in Google (and they are not under a Google
penalty)

They get a good amount of traffic per month.

They have original content of their own and it’s not only guest posts.

The first thing to do is to visit the sites and check when they were last updated
and what kind of posts they publish.

If you notice a pattern that they only publish guest posts, then they are not good.

Why?

Google will sooner or later find out that they only accept guest posts and they
may penalize them or devalue their links.

The second check is to go to SEMRUSH and type in their domain and click
search.

SEMRUSH will give you valuable data regarding the type of traffic the website
receives (and from which countries), whether is under a Google penalty or not
and the keywords they have good rankings.

Domain Analytics

Websites that have no traffic and rankings should be avoided, don’t waste your
time and resources to get a link from them, it can do more harm than good.

How to get your posts published?

Once you have a list of websites that meet the criteria explained above, the next
step is to contact them.

Before doing so, make sure that you read their posting guidelines carefully.
Some websites may want to see the full post before making a decision, some want
to approve the post titles first, etc.

Next, write an email, introduce yourself and company and send it to them.

Here is an example of an email template I’m using:

Blogger Outreach Example

Guest Posting Part 2 – Asking for Links

What I have described above in Part 1, was how to get your articles published in
websites that are actively looking for guest posts.

Websites that don’t mention that they accept guest posts, doesn’t mean that they
don’t.

I’m not suggesting that you should go out and start emailing any website you find
and ask for guest posts but do it selectively.

Websites that already published a post from your competitors are a good
place to start.

To be successful in this task, you need to follow a personalized approach.

What do we mean by a personalized approach? Don’t use a ready-made email
template to make the initial contact and ask if they accept guest posts. It won’t
work and you will be losing your time.

Instead, study the website first, find the names of the editors and send them an
email explaining how your article will benefit their audience.

In the email don’t only ask but also give. In other words, besides asking them if
they are willing to accept a guest post, offer them the opportunity to guest post
on your website too.

If you are thinking that this is link exchange, it’s not. If there is value in the guest
posts then you have nothing to worry about.

Here is an example of a personalized email:

Personalized email outreach example

To sum up, guest posting is a great way to get high-quality links from related
websites.

Besides finding the right websites to contact and using a personalized approach
in your emails, have in mind the following:

Don’t overdo it with links – don’t be greedy with links. Adding a link in the
body of the article pointing to your website is enough. Too many links will
get your article rejected.

Add links to other websites too – don’t just link to your website. Add links
to other high-quality websites. It makes the articles better and less biased.

Link to your blog posts and not product pages – As mentioned in the
 introduction, it’s difficult to get links pointing to your product pages
directly. Instead, add links to your blog posts.

Link to other websites from your blog

When writing content for your blog, don’t be afraid to link to other websites or
blogs. This, of course, does not include your main competitors but other websites
that are in the same niche.

Why?

It is likely that other webmasters will notice the link (from their Google Analytics,
SEMRUSH or WordPress Pingbacks) and if they find your website useful, return
the link.

Again, this may sound like a link exchange but it’s not. This is actually advice
given by Google, see the screenshot below published in the Google AdSense Blog.

Google Link Building Guidelines

Start An Affiliate Program

This is a bit tricky and you need to think about how to set it up, without taking
any risks.

Google officially recommends that any affiliate links or links on ads should be
nofollow.

How to use an affiliate program for link building

The first thing to know is that if you are using a platform like shareasale or any
other dedicated platform for affiliates, the links will be nofollow so there is no
gain from your part (in terms of link building benefits).
If you decide to use your own affiliate system, for example, affiliatewp, then the
links will be followed.

To protect your affiliates from getting into trouble and to still have some benefit
from the links, you can follow these simple rules:

On any ads that you create and give to your affiliates to advertise your
products, add the nofollow tag to the links.

These ads are usually placed in the sidebar and are site-wide and you don’t
want to get hundreds of dofollow links from the same website.

On any text links that your affiliates may use in content-rich pages, such as
blog posts, you can leave the links without adding the nofollow tag.

If you are familiar with affiliate marketing, then you know that it’s not up to the
vendor (in this case you), to control how the links will be added to other websites.

The best you can do to protect your affiliates and minimize the risk of getting
penalized because of your affiliate system is to give the above instructions to your
users.

Ask them to nofollow links on ads and links placed in the sidebar or the footer of
their websites.

Get published on Big Media websites

The benefits of getting published on big media websites like Forbes, HuffPost,
Inc, Entrepreneur, and others, are much more than getting a link back.

It’s a great way to promote your business online, for brand awareness purposes
and also it helps in building trust with your audience.

There are 2 ways in which you can make this happen:

Connect with Journalists

First, it’s a natural way. You may be thinking, if the links are to be placed
naturally, what can I do about it?

Here is the idea: If you want journalists to link to your website from their posts,
they need to know that you exist in the first place!

Without knowing about your brand and website how can they add a link?

How do you contact them?

In short, by emailing them, connecting with them in social media networks

(mainly twitter) and running targeted Facebook campaigns.

It’s a time-consuming process but if done correctly it can produce great results.

Pitch the Editors

Second, is by pitching the editors with your guest post idea. This is different than
the first method where you try to connect with the individual journalists.

Let me demonstrate this with an example to get an idea of how it works.

One of the trusted websites in the SEO industry is

ContentMarketingInstitute.com. I was following the website for some time and
noticed that occasionally they published articles from guest authors.

After examining their website in more detail, I found a link pointing to the email
address of the head editor and a summary of their blogging guidelines.

I pitched the editor with my article idea and I got published.

Guest Posting Example

It sounds easy but as in the case of Guest Blogging (explained in Part 1 above),
it’s easier said than done.

Editors of big websites get hundreds of emails per day from people asking to
become contributors.

If you are lucky enough and your email gets read, you need to grab the attention
of the editor, without telling him the story of your life.

Your pitch email has to be short and to the point. What is interesting information
for the editor is who you are, what you do, what is your idea (and why) and
examples of your previous publications (on websites other than your own).

The last part (previous publications), is very important so before attempting to

contact big websites make sure that you already have some examples to show
from known websites.
For example, before I applied for Entrepreneur, I first published a post on
SocialMediaToday (which is a good site but not as big as an Entrepreneur or
Forbes).

Once you get published on one well-known website, then targeting the rest
becomes easier and your chances of getting accepted are increased.

Needless to say, that the email has to be personalized for each and every editor
you are pitching, otherwise you are just wasting your time.

On the other hand, if you are persistent enough it’s a method that works. I got
published on big websites including Forbes, Problogger, MarketingLand and
others using the same approach.

Guest Posting Example

Important: Most Media Websites NoFollow the Links

A lot of contributors abused their ability to post articles on big media websites by
selling links.

Google has issued several warnings about this and as a result, as of September
2017, some websites including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc started to nofollow
links from contributors.

This means that in terms of link juice, you have nothing to gain BUT the benefits
explained above are still valid and getting your articles published on big media
websites, it’s still beneficial.
Use HARO
Haro it’s a service that brings journalists and bloggers together.

If you don’t want to follow the above path and start pitching editors with your
ideas, you can use HARO and answer questions posted by Journalists.

HARO

The way it works is the following:

Journalists post questions about different topics and want to get answers from
industry experts.

In many cases, they specify exactly what kind of answers they need and from what
kind of people.

For example, for nutrition-related questions, the answer has to come from a
certified nutritionist, etc.

When you register for the service (it has both a Free and premium package), you
subscribe to the categories you want to get notifications.

Twice a day, you get an email with the questions posted by journalist and you use
HARO to reply back.

When your pitch is accepted, the journalist will publish the story with a reference
to your name and website.
Overall, it’s a good and effective service but it’s also very time-consuming. To
increase your chances of getting accepted you need to:

Monitor the questions and reply as fast as you can. They get a lot of emails
for each query so you have to beat the queue.

Be specific, read their question carefully and answer the questions in the
format they want.

Give them your contact details for follow up questions.

Send products for review to influencers

I remember back in 2005, I was running a blog on Windows Mobiles (there was no
iPhone at that time only Windows Mobiles!), and got a lot of emails from
companies selling mobile accessories asking me if they can send me their
products (for free), to add a review on my website.

On the occasions I accepted the gift, I added a link to their websites from my
review, not because they asked for a link but because it was the proper thing to
do.

If you talk about a product, it’s normal to let people know where they can buy it.

You can use the exact same process (15 years later!) to get some links back to
your product pages.

As it’s always the case with link building, there are a few things you
should know.

Google officially doesn’t like the idea of sending free products for dofollow links.
Here is a screenshot from the Guidelines.

To avoid, getting into trouble don’t do this in scale. Getting a few links in
product reviews will not raise any signals but getting 100’s of links the
same way will do.

Send the products to blog owners instead of websites dedicated to

reviews. Those websites should have the links nofollow anyway so there is
not much to gain for link building purposes.

Don’t ask for links, when you send someone a free product and they like it,
 they will link naturally in their posts/reviews and this is even better.

Don’t ask for reviews either, articles on how your products can solve a
problem or be used in everyday life are more important than plain reviews.

Buy an already established blog

This is not very common and possibly not an option for small business owners but
it is still a method that works.

Basically, you find a content-rich blog with posts related to your niche that has a
good link profile, rankings and traffic and you buy it.

You can then either keep maintaining it and redirect the traffic to your website
through links or banners or move the content and merge it with your blog.

In this case, you need to do the migration correctly with 301 Redirects, canonical
URLs, etc so that any links pointing to the blog, will be transferred to your
domain/pages without a loss in PageRank.

Link Magnets
Link magnet is a term used to describe content that can go rival and naturally
attract links from other websites.

What kind of content is that?

Trending Infographics: Infographics are a good concept to use to present data

in a different form than text or plain images. It’s attractive and can be easily
linked to.

What is a better way to take advantage of infographics, is to use them for

evergreen topics.

Look at the example below from BestBuy, on how they created an infographic
about the History of Black Friday.
Link Magnet Example

You can follow the same concept i.e. create infographics about trending topics or
information related to the usage of your products or industry in general and
promote it on Facebook to get it in front of as many (targeted) people as possible.

Here is another example from a website selling kitchen equipment:

Example of an Infographic

Research data and studies

If you take a closer look at my blog, you will notice that my articles contain at
least a couple of external links pointing to research studies.

Why?

I added the links to prove a point and make your reading experience better and
more informative.

Websites like thinkwithgoogle.com, google trends and other websites with

statistics and research data, can give you a lot of information to create
infographics or articles that other people will be more than willing to link to.

How to redirect links to your product pages?

Important: This is an advanced technique and if you are not sure what and
how to do it, you better skip it.

Whichever method you are using to get backlinks to your eCommerce website, the
problem still remains.

The majority of the links are pointing to your blog posts and not to your product
pages.

What can you do to take advantage of this?

Under certain conditions, you can redirect the links using canonical URLs and
301 Redirections from the blog pages to your product pages.

When you do this successfully, link juice and PageRank will flow from the blog
posts to your product pages and boost their rankings.

Here is an overview of the process:

Redirecting links from blog to product pages

What are the conditions to do this?

First, you need to plan for this in advance. Before creating blog posts you should
think in advance, which product pages you are going to promote when making the
switch.

For example, if you want to promote a product page for the keyword “best
running shoes for men”, you need to create blog posts with titles and content
related to running shoes.

“How to choose the best running shoe for men”, “What to look for before
purchasing running shoes” as some titles you can use.

Next, when creating the blog posts you need to promote them to get links.

This method works only if the blog posts have links pointing to them. If not, then
there is no benefit from doing so.

Don’t make the switch too fast.

It takes time for Google to take into account any links pointing to your blog posts
so don’t rush into making the switch fast. Keep the blog posts for a few months
until they have some good rankings in Google and then move on to the next step.

When adding the canonical URs, make sure that your product pages have enough
content to support the redirection.

In other words, the content on both pages (post and product) should be similar
otherwise Google will devalue the links.

So, enrich your product pages with similar content (you can use the same content
like the blog posts).

Your first step is to change the canonical URL of the blog post(s) to point to the
product page URL.

Resubmit both pages to Google and after the pages are indexed again, you can
add the 301 redirections (from posts to product pages).
Things you should know:

Once you add the canonical URL to the blog posts, they will disappear
from the search results since all links and content authority will be given
to the product pages.

It does not mean that your product pages will achieve the same rankings
as your posts but most likely your rankings will improve.

Don’t do this for all your blog posts/products. Do it for one, monitor the
results and then do it for more.

KEY LEARNINGS

Link building is a difficult process. It is time-consuming and it requires good

knowledge of how SEO works.

If you are not sure how to do it and you go out and start getting links from
any website that you find, it will most probably generate the opposite results.

If done correctly, is the key to your business long term success.

Link building for an eCommerce website is even more difficult compared to

earning links for a blog. People are not willing to link to a product page so
you need to be creative and employ other methods to get those precious
links.

The 11 methods described above can do the trick. For each method, you
need to study the guidelines and use your creativity to utilize them in the
best possible way.

Blogging

Links from the Manufacturer website

Guest posting on websites that accept guest posts

Asking for Links

Link out to get noticed

Start an affiliate program

 Get published on big media websites

Use Help a Reporter Out (Haro)

Send Products for Review

Buy an already established blog

Link magnets

Don’t build too many links too fast. Consistency is important. Patience is
important too. Link building campaigns take time to execute and the results
in terms of improved rankings, need even more time.
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Copyright © 2020 by Alex Chris (Reliablesoft.Net)

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