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SEO, or search engine optimization, can be a more cost-effective and stable revenue driver than paid advertising. By ensuring your business shows up on the front page of Google, you’ll maximize views of your online store. While it might take longer to see results with SEO than it would with a paid ad, you’ll set your business up to make money for the long term. One beauty brand the agency has worked with for a year and a half, for example, has quadrupled its traffic and sees about $500,000 in revenue every month from its SEO efforts.
While SEO has plenty of benefits, it can also come with lots of technical requirements and confusing terminology—making it a pain point for busy small business owners. Let’s look at some ecommerce SEO best practices and quick tips that will help your ecommerce business grow.
📌Table of contents
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There are many advantages to creating an intentional ecommerce SEO strategy, including:
While the time commitment or cost of hiring experts to tackle SEO might feel high upfront, with less-immediate results than paid-ads you create a stable, ongoing source of revenue, while with paid ads you have to consistently put money in if you want to get money out.
📙 Get the in-depth overview: What is SEO Marketing and How Does it Work?
Now, we’ll jump into the SEO best practices that can help your ecommerce business grow. 
Some of the top ecommerce SEO best practices to keep in mind in 2023 include choosing the right keywords and developing content to target those resources, among others.
Keyword research will uncover the words that people enter into Google when seeking a product just like yours. Once you uncover those words, you’ll put them in key places on your website to help different pages show up on the first page of search results on Google. When a page “ranks” on Google, that means that it shows up in search results on the first page for a given keyword, also referred to as a search term.
A keyword research tool will help you identify the best keywords for your business to target. Ubersuggest is a free tool with upgrade options, as is the Moz Keyword Explorer. While Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free version, the $99 per month option provides everything you need to search for keywords and track your rankings. 
Once you’ve chosen a tool, you’ll identify the words people most often search for when they’re looking to buy a product that you sell.
One easy way to do that is to search your product on Google. Find which business is ranking at the top of results and then plug it into a tool, see what keywords they rank for, and copy them. For example, searching for “rosette shaped succulents for sale” generates search results where the brand Succulents Box ranks first. 
There are a multitude of reasons why someone searches for something online. What you’re looking for are the people searching with intent to buy. For example, someone might Google “prickly pear cactus” because they’re looking for photos of one, or they might do so because they want to purchase one for their garden.
To uncover the keywords that actually have purchase intent behind them, you need to look at what keywords Google ranks product and collection website pages for. If Google is ranking product and collection pages for that keyword, then you know it’s buying intent.
For example, the keyword “prickly pear cactus” generates images, a definition explaining what they are, and care instructions. A search for the keyword “prickly pear cactus for sale,” on the other hand, yields collection pages. So, that’s the keyword with purchase intent behind it, and the keyword you’d need to target.
Now that you’ve uncovered a set of keywords aligned to the different products you sell, you’ll need to place them strategically on different pages on your website and build content around them. That means placing keywords in:
 
 
You can do all of this in the back end editing section of your ecommerce website. While it’s important to ensure your keywords are strategically placed, avoid overuse—a practice known as keyword stuffing.
The content in a blog post or on the collection page should focus on the features of your product, what makes it unique, and how it’s better than competitors’ products. If you can, putting that message on the collection page makes it a bit easier for Google to understand what the page is about.
📚 Learn more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide
Link building involves reaching out to different brands and publications online and seeing if they will link to a page on your website from their website. The more links you have, the more credible you are to Google. Google rewards that credibility with a higher position in search results. In short: If a lot of other folks trust your content and see it as worthy of a link, Google will as well.
Building backlinks to your website is an important ecommerce SEO best practice, and building relationships with other brands is one of the best ways to do it.
You’re going to have to create content that’s worth linking to. And once you create that content, then you can build the relationships and pitch that article to get links.
This is where creating content for a blog comes in. While other brands might not want to link to a collection page that shows a list of the products you have for sale, they may get excited about a helpful blog post. For example, they’ll be more likely to link to a blog post that shares succulent care tips than they are a collection page of succulents.
Link building requires outreach and relationship building, but internal linking involves creating links between pages yourself. That means linking to one of your blog posts from a different blog post or linking to a collection page from a relevant blog post. Both types of links are effective in helping pages rank.
A product page features a singular product, like a blue candle cactus. A collection page shows all of the products in a category, like all plants within the cactus family. While it’s challenging to get product pages on page one, collection pages are much easier to rank.
Google usually ignores product pages, but if you build links to a collection page, Google can actually rank you pretty well for it. The collection pages can respond really well to links, so it’s easier to spend your resources ranking those. Because there’s so much you can do SEO-wise, if you’re doing it yourself, focus your energy on helping collection pages show up in search results rather than product pages, which can become a dead end.
Urban Americana, a vintage midcentury modern shop in Long Beach, California, has found success with this. Its collection page for all midcentury modern furniture ranks #1 for the keyword “vintage mid century modern furniture.” 
A big benefit of ranking a collection versus a product page is that shoppers can see your entire inventory for a certain category. It gives them more options, rather than sending them to a single product page where they have only one choice.
Creating a blog is an important part of an ecommerce SEO strategy, but not for the reasons you might think. Rather than thinking about blog traffic as something that drives sales, the real benefit of having a blog is that it creates something called topical relevance.
Google likes ranking sites that are authoritative in their space. That could mean having a really good link profile. It could also mean having very high quality content that answers all the questions people have about a particular product.
For example, plant shop Succulents Box creates short pieces of content around informational keywords that relate to succulent care, such as: 
Once you create these pieces of content, add an internal link from each blog post to the corresponding collection. For example, you might link the article about growing succulents in sand to a collection page of succulents that thrive in sandy soil.
By doing that, you create that layer of relevancy and those blogs help the collection pages rank.
A blog post doesn’t need to be a long, in-depth piece of writing. In fact, shorter, more-specific pieces perform better. Google likes granular content. Instead of creating an ultimate guide and ranking for all these keywords, it’s actually easier and more effective to create separate articles for every type of fix, so that your article is hyper focused on one topic.
That means ditching the ultimate guide to succulent care, for example, and opting for articles that tackle smaller sub-topics—a practice known in the SEO world as targeting “long tail” keywords. Succulents Box, for example, publishes short blog posts about caring for specific varieties of succulents:
📚 Read more: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO
A meta title is the title of your page that shows up on the result page of a search engine like Google. Optimizing your meta titles by adding keywords to them is a low-effort, high-reward SEO fix you can make to your site.
People often say you don’t see SEO results for six months, but there are times when the biggest jump in results are from the first month just because the meta title is so important.
You should be able to set a meta title for any page on your website on the back end of the ecommerce platform you use. On Shopify, within your admin dashboard, navigate to the page you need to edit in the sidebar and scroll down to the “search engine listing preview” at the bottom of the page.

It looks like this: 
For example, Succulents Box ranks on the first page for the term “tulip prickly pear cactus for sale.” The meta title for the page that ranks is “Tulip Prickly Pear Cactus | Succulent Care Instruction.” The brand likely added “succulent care instruction” to capture the people looking for how to care for the succulent in addition to those looking to purchase one.
Similar to adding the keywords you’re targeting to meta titles, an SEO best practice is to add that keyword to the corresponding meta description as well.
📄 Learn more: What Are Meta Descriptions and How Can I Write Effective Ones?
Most ecommerce sites have multiple pages of product collections. This can cause Google to index the wrong page, which will hurt your rankings. Google will often try to index page two or page three instead of the homepage of a collection.
A way to know if there’s a duplicate content problem like this is to take a look at your URLs. If they include a 2, 3, 4 etc.—like this: https://www.example.com/collections/all-items?page=2—then you might be at risk. 
One way to fix this problem is to no-index duplicate pages. If you’re on a platform that doesn’t let you no-index a page (i.e., stop it from showing up in search results on Google) or you have a custom-built CMS (content management system), you can use what’s called a canonical tag. If you’ve built your store on Shopify with a theme from the Shopify theme store, canonical URLs are built in automatically. 
The canonical tag is a bit of HTML code that tells Google which page is the most important one, and the one you’d like to rank for. So, you’d want to let Google know with a canonical tag that the homepage of each collection is the one to check out or “crawl,” not a sub page. This will really help with rankings.
✅ Check all the boxes: Want to Rank Your Store? Get On Page One With This SEO Checklist
SEO can have a strong impact on your revenue, brand awareness, and brand trust if you take the time to invest in it. While paid ads can seem more immediate, they’re extremely expensive and unreliable, and when you stop paying for them, you’ll stop seeing traffic and conversions.
SEO is a much more stable way to send shoppers who have a high intent to purchase to your website. It’s a reliable, steady traffic source that will create a much stronger foundation for your business long term. 
Shopify has the SEO tools to help you implement these SEO best practices on your website.
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