8 Best SEO Strategies for Boosting Your Brand’s Ecommerce Traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to an effective ecommerce marketing strategy. In most cases, customers’ ability to search for and find your products is the primary driver of your top-of-funnel (TOFU) sales experience. Simply put, if potential customers can’t find your products, they are likely buying from your competitors.

Optimizing your omnichannel ecommerce brand’s exposure on third-party marketplaces and internet search engines must be a priority. A lot goes into driving web traffic, especially web traffic with the intent to purchase. SEO strategies constantly evolve and change as marketplaces and search engines adapt and modify their search algorithms.

There are several simple SEO steps every ecommerce business can (and should) employ on their own. These will help direct customers to your listings, and most are future-proof best practices that will remain relevant regardless of the latest algorithm evolutions.

1. Properly Categorize Your Products

Whether optimizing your listings on third-party marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay or setting up your first-party website, providing users with accurate and useful product categories is essential. Categories make it simpler for customers to find your products while browsing.

Clicking through a tree of nested product types and features helps users find the items they seek. If your products aren’t properly oriented within that organizational structure, you may miss out on potential views and sales. Search engines like categories, too. Properly classified listings make it easier to return relevant results when users search.

For most products, selecting the appropriate category is a multi-step process. Start with the most general descriptor you can and gradually narrow down to specifics. It is worth noting that some marketplaces will take your most specific category and nest it appropriately within its existing category structure.

2. Target Long-Tail Keywords

Not all keywords are created equal. Regarding SEO, the more general a keyword or a search term, the more competition there is for clicks. So, when you focus on generic, highly competitive search terms as your main keywords, you are unlikely to see any substantial uptick in traffic.

As a rule, less-popular results get pushed so far down the search engine results page (SERP) that they are hardly ever seen. The best way to get noticed and climb the SERP rankings is to hyper-focus on longer, more specific keyword phrases, often called ‘long-tail keywords.’ The more specific you are, the less competition you have and the more likely you are to attract customers looking for your products.

Including additional related long-tail keywords like ‘for glass cooktops’ and ‘dishwasher safe’ can enhance your specificity even further. Focusing on long-tail keywords increases your odds of being seen by a potential customer and drives down the cost per click of web marketing campaigns, such as Google AdWords and Amazon Advertising.

3. Use Search Boxes to Your Advantage

Unsure if you have the right keywords or categories? Let the auto-complete features of major marketplaces and search engines help you out. Try typing relevant product categories into Google and Amazon search bars. The autocomplete suggestion list is a treasure trove of keywords and SEO insights.

Not all the results will be 100% relevant to your products, but they will let you see what the algorithms and site users tend to look for based on the terms you enter.

4. Sign Up for Google Analytics

If you haven’t done so, consider signing up for Google Analytics. This free service tracks how users arrive at and engage with your website. Many useful metrics can help you refine your SEO strategies and identify how the pages on your site are performing.

5. Keep Your Page Structure Simple

When you create a listing on a marketplace, you don’t have control over your URL. However, you do have agency when creating the URL structure of your first-party website. Take advantage! It turns out that both customers and search engines appreciate short, keyword-rich URLs.

6. Optimize Your Title Tags

Few things matter more to SEO than a strong title. Titles are the first thing search engine scrapers and internet users encounter when deciding about your web content.

Some of the best terms to boost your ecommerce click-through rate (CTR) include:

• Cheap.
• Deals.
• Review.
• Best.
• Online.
• Free shipping.

7. Write Longer, Keyword-Rich Content

In the early days of SEO, people tried to game the system by stuffing their titles, descriptions, and code with keywords. However, keywords still matter to search engines. To get the best results, place your strongest keywords 3-5 times throughout your pages in ways that make logical sense.

8. Prioritize Omnichannel Keyword Consistency

Like your other branding and marketing efforts, unified, consistent messaging is important. SEO-focused revisions to your listing content are most valuable when applied across all your channels.