Best Ecommerce SEO Practices for Beginners: Do’s & Don’ts

SEO is the ultimate channel to attract customers and drive conversions with little or even no budget. As a beginner, you may get overwhelmed by dozens of SEO tips and guidelines for your eCommerce stores. Therefore, this article consolidates the most time-tested eCommerce SEO practices for you to get ranked right from the start.  

Furthermore, the DON’T section points out some most common eCommerce mistakes. These, in return, save you time practicing tactics that don’t work and avoid harsh penalties from search engines.

But first, let’s find some motivations to do SEO for your eCommerce store. 

eCommerce SEO benefits: Does it really matter?

SEO (Search Engines Optimization) maximizes your digital stores’ chance of being found on the top results of Search Engines like Google or Bing. As 81% of customers do some research online before making a purchase and 67.60% of all clicks go to the first five search results, SEO enables your ideal customers to find your brand then make a purchase. 

Let’s see some other impressive SEO data

• 57% B2B marketers claimed that of all channels, SEO brings the most leads
• 88% of users who search something locally visits its related physical store within a week
• 93% online consumers use the internet to find a local business
• 21% users click at more than one results while performing a search
• SEO brings about 20 times higher traffic than advertisement’s Pay Per Click. 

Besides the ultimate goal of sales and conversions, SEO also helps improve many other aspects of eCommerce business such as:

• Cut cost for paid marketing
• Enhance users’ overall digital shopping experience: SEO requires eCommerce owners to optimize site speed, performance and contents, which is beneficial for users as well. 
• Raise brand awareness & increase reliability: By constantly providing helpful blog contents and expert knowledge for their customers, brands can create a connection with them, reinforce their images and build trust. 
• SEO blog empowers your email marketing strategy

eCommerce SEO checklist: the do’s

1. Keyword research

Keyword research is VERY important. Don’t skip it even though it looks so daunting.

To find information about certain products, customers would type some keywords into search engines. In return, Search Engines will show results with the exact or most relevant keywords, as they believe these sites have what their users need. 

Therefore, every page of your site should have at least a relevant keyword assigned to it. 

“But my store has like 20,000 pages, do I really need to do it?” – a concerned store owner who has a large number of SKUs may ask.

Yes, you do. Or else, you can focus on optimizing keywords for the most important pages first, and gradually improve the other pages. These pages include the homepage, all category pages, your best-selling products, your most dedicated blogs, and all of your blog posts from now on. 

Choose rankable keywords

Let’s be honest, high-volume keywords (keywords that are searched the most by users) are now all occupied by big companies. As these keywords are golden mines, thousands of other websites will also aim at them. Thus, a new site with zero SEO reputation can hardly rank with these keywords. 

On the other hand,  keywords that nobody searches for will drive little traffic to your page. Sometimes, it is not even worth assigning these keywords to any of your pages or writing a blog about it. 

Therefore, it’s best to be ambitious and plausible at the same time. Find a keyword with the right amount of popularity so that your store will stand a chance competing, get ranked, and drive traffic. 

Check these two metrics to judge if any keyword is your bite-size or not:

• Keyword volume: the number of searches for the keyword per month. High keyword volume means it’s a popular keyword.
• Keyword difficulty: how difficult to get ranked for this keyword on a scale of 0-100. 

Choose relevant keywords

So what if you find a keyword with great volume and few competitors, but it’s not related to your product at all?

“ I would rank for irrelevant keywords to get lots of traffic first. The more people are drawn to my sites, the more chance they will get interested in my products and buy them” – Many store owners may think this way. 

But this is a bad SEO keyword strategy in many ways.

Firstly, between people who purposely search for a product and people who come across it, the former will certainly be more likely to buy. 

Attracting traffic from irrelevant keywords can get your site exposed greatly, yet results in a poor conversion rate or low value per order.

Secondly, Search Engines do not like it. Relevancy is one of Google’s 9 most crucial ranking factors according to Ahrefs – a respectable SEO website.

For example, if your store sells digital goods, you must tell Google that you are all about electronics, phones, cameras, etc, and must not confuse it with some keywords about bicycle gears. It sends a strong message to signal that your store is a quality site for digital goods content. As a result, it is more likely to be shown up when people search for digital goods. 

Choose long-tail keywords over short-tail keywords

What are long-tail keywords? 

Long-tail keywords are keywords that have a lower search volume per month.

So where does it get the name “long-tail” from?

It comes from a common pattern that appears when doing keyword research.

Experienced SEO experts have found out that the majority of keywords generate less than 10 searches per month, whereas keywords with more than 100k searches per month only take up a small percentage. 

If you put all keywords you’ve found for one topic in a graph, it could be like this: 

As you can see, the green line looks like a long tail. Thus, the keywords reflected in the green line are our so-called “long-tail keywords”. Long-tail keywords are longer and offer a more specific explanation of what users are seeking. 

Example:

• high-protein low carb food
• low-carb food for diabetics
• low-carb food for weight loss

On the other hand, keywords reflected in the black line are called short-tail keywords.

Short-tail keywords are often less than three words. These keywords have the most search columns and can be used for many different search purposes. 

Example:

• low-carb food

What’s so good about the long-tail?

• Long-tail keywords drive better potential customers. People searching for long-tail keywords have more specific ideas in mind, thus, are more likely to buy if they find the right matches. 

For example, users who search for “low-carb diets” may find a definition, some recipes, etc. Keywords like “high protein low carb food” may bring you closer to the ones who actually spend money. 

• Long-tail keywords are easier to rank. It’s searched less, thus, it’s less competitive. 

Keyword tools

Where to find all keywords suggestions for your brand?

Luckily, the answer is right in front of your eyes: search engines and popular retailers.

Use some free tools for even more keyword suggestions: 

Note: Creating a Google Ads account and a campaign is a must to get access to the keyword planner tool. However, you can cancel the ad campaign anytime, so don’t worry, it won’t cost you any penny.

Or pay for a premium tool to find the most comprehensive keywords data as well as other precious SEO data. 

Tips for keyword research

• Look up keywords on search engines to see how many big competitors have already ranked for the keywords. This is another referential source to judge keywords’ rankability. 
• Transactional keywords such as “buy crypto online”, “bicycle for sale”, “Korean food near me”, “shop second-hand furniture online” indicate that people typing it need to buy urgently. Thus, these keywords are highly convertible. 

2. Have a clear site structure 

There are no reasons not to do this. It’s really easy to create an SEO-friendly site structure for eCommerce. Besides, if you miss it, you can mess up badly with your eCommerce SEO performance. 

A good example of eCommerce site architecture

An eCommerce site structure can easily be seen in its mega menu. Ideally, it should serve as clear and simple navigation for customers to easily search for products. For instance, IKEA has a huge collection of SKUs, but the mega menu helps users find the product they are looking for in a blink of an eye. 

For amazing SEO results, we would recommend using a site structure like this. 

Why should my product page be only a few clicks away from my homepage? 

In SEO, authority is the life force of your site. If search engines regard your digital store as “high authority”, your pages will be more likely on the top search. 

Guess what page in your store has the most authority? That’s right, the homepage. 

Lots of effort is put into homepage designs. Every other page links back to the homepage, every visitor interested in your brand checks it out, many third-party blog posts refer back to it, etc. 

The homepage is the heart pumping blood to all other parts of the system. 

So the closer a page to the homepage and the easier it is to access the page from the homepage, the more “blood” is pumped. 

As a result, using a good site structure helps distribute the “authority blood” across your site more efficiently & enables better rankings for every page. 

3. Promote local SEO on Google (for local business)

This is a crucial step for all brick-and-mortar stores, whose revenues greatly come from local customers. 

It’s a simple concept, as you have probably come across examples of local SEO for eCommerce like this before. 

Local SEO is getting your store information on Google Business. Thus, address, store reputations, reviews, etc… can be easily accessible when your buyers are in need. 

Let us walk you through some steps to get your site to be found on Google

1. Create your store profile on Google Business. Fill in all essential information such as name, address, phone, email, etc
2. Encourage your customers, your relatives, etc to write reviews. This is an important step. According to BrightLocal, 87% of customers consult reviews for local businesses. 
3. Citation building: Have other local websites cited your store.

We believe that the first two steps are easy to follow, so let’s go straight into building citations. 

Citation building: creating backlinks for local Google SEO

In theory, citation building is like building your store’s popularity locally, so search engines can consider your shop as a reputable name in this particular area. 

You can achieve this by finding all local directory websites and adding your business information. Then, these directories should have your store’s listing information like this

Your Company Ltd.
42 Wallaby Way
Sydney, NSW
W1G 9FD
610 7583 2334

Another way is to ask for citations on online sites for local charities, events, local news outlets, or local blogs.

The task is simple, but it’s quite manual. You may need to find and send proposals to dozens, or even hundreds of sites, which can be frustrating and hard to manage at the same time.

It, however, is based on your experience. If it’s not pleasant, there are lots of tools for local SEO listing management on the internet to take advantage of.

These tools help you find reliable directories, send info for them in bulk, and even review your past listings to avoid any duplications. 

4. Write keyword-specific title tag and meta description

Remember how keywords can help users find your site? Now, use these keywords for your homepage, category pages, product pages, and blogs.

The idea is to write title tags with keywords so that your pages get displayed on search engines. Also, the title tags have to be attractive so your customers can not resist but click. 

Let’s examine some good examples of famous eCommerce sites.

Good examples for title tag and meta description

• Example 1: using transactional keywords – SHEIN

SHEIN uses the transactional keywords “Shop Clothes Fashion” to attract more potential customers.

Its meta description is filled with CTA-driving keywords such as “free shipping”, “latest women’s fashion”, and so on.

• Example 2: Boast your selling points

If you use a short and general keyword, it’s worth including your product selling points to increase the chance of getting clicked. 

In this example, H&M uses cashmere & turtle necks to highlight their products’ quality among many other search results. 

Moreover, people are more enthralled to buy products from reputable brands. That’s why Amazon always includes their name in their search results.

Thus, if the product you are selling belongs to a famous brand, adding the brand name to the title tag is another good tactic, too. 

• Example 3: Be short, simple and informative

A long title tag may get truncated by search engines, like this:

In this case, users may miss some information you intend to deliver, not to mention that it doesn’t look very professional. 

Thus, it’s best for the title tag to be less than 60 characters, like how the Auto Body Toolmart does. 

The company uses the symbol “&” instead of “and” to make the title shorter. 

Furthermore, you can see that there are two distinct pieces of information in this title: the company name and what they sell. This is a very straightforward and effective way to introduce your brand name in SERPs. 

Also, Auto Body Toolmart uses the separator “:” between the two different sections, which enables users to understand the text contents immediately. 

Tips: Users are more likely to click on titles with prefixes like “best + something”, “lowest price”, “% off”. Moreover, if you are offering sales, freeship, or any attractive promotions, don’t hesitate to include the info in the title too. They can help increase CTR (Click-through rate). 

5. Reducing your image file size

Hefty images may slow your digital store down significantly. Nobody wants this.

But that’s not all. They can affect your site much worse since speed is also a crucial factor to getting high-ranking positions. 

In fact, Google has made it clear in the Core Web Vitals update that User experience including speed will be their top priority these upcoming years.

Shopify suggests that for a digital store, no image should exceed 70KB. 

And that’s the number you should reduce your photos to while trying to maintain image quality at the same time. 

Luckily, there are numerous tools to decrease photo sizes automatically.

How to reduce photo sizes for stellar speed

If your store is brand new, we recommend using tools like TinyPNG or CompressJPG before uploading any photos. The free tools allow you to resize 20 photos at a time and pro plans are available for more powerful bulk photo reduction. 

On the other hand, if you have uploaded thousands of SKU photos already, using a plugin for photo optimization might be your only choice. 

These handy plugins will turn heavy photos into feather-lightweight in a few clicks. What’s more? They can give you controls over image quality or photo backup.

Best image formats for eCommerce

Finally, you might wonder what the best image formats for eCommerce sites are? For small and lightweight photos, JPEG and WebP can offer the richest quality. While JPEG is a no-brainer image format for everybody already, WebP is an emerging one that can create images 25-34% smaller than JPEG. 

6. Write blogs frequently (it’s not a waste of time)

Let’s be honest. Blogging is not the easiest thing to do. It requires lots of effort and commitment. However, if you dream of getting high-profile customers through organic channels (which means no ads money), then it is the path to take. 

Let us explain more.

Why is blogging necessary for eCommerce?

• Bring more traffic to your site

First and foremost, buyers consult blogs before making any purchases. That’s why blog posts are so common in search engines. With a quick scan of search engines results, you can easily find out that blog posts appear the most in the first-page results. 

Similarly, lots of keyword results either start with “best“, “top“, “how to“, or end with “review“, “recipe“, “comparisons“, etc. These keywords, as you may guess, mainly refer to blogging articles. 

In a nutshell, write dedicated blog posts for topics your customer is interested in, and they will find you on search engines. 

• Increase your brand authority, thus, more traffic and customers

Blogging is also a playground for you to prove your field expertise. Customers usually go to blogs for information, tips, instructions, news, etc.

If your content is proven to be accurate & provides helpful insights, over time, those who read it will remember and trust your brand. 

Moreover, if you have multiple blogs sitting on the top positions, your product page and category page can also rank better. 

ECommerce SEO blog: a sparkling example

Let’s take Au Lit Fine Linens as an example of how SEO blogs can result in staggering traffic to your store. 

The brand features luxury goodies to improve sleep wellness from refined bed sheets, pillows to bath linens and loungewear, which are all made from natural fibers.

Au Lit Fine Lines has an impressive blog collection covering a wide range of topics from tips, trends, products, fabric, gift guides, etc. 

Now, let’s take a look at their SEO results, in numbers.

The company gains a pretty decent authority score of 40, which refers to their site reputation to search engines. Plus, they’ve got 81.4K organic search traffic. This is a dream for many brands. 

You can see in this graph that they literally pay nothing for search engines ads.

Now, let’s look at their keywords ranking. 100% of their most ranked keywords come from blogs, not product pages or category pages. Needless to say, the blog posts work like a huge bridge bringing an influx of new visitors to their home sites. 

Here are some takeaways we can learn from the case of Au Lit Fine Linens

• Keep it frequent: the brand has a big archive of articles, which has been accumulated through the years. 

Hubspot suggests the ideal blogging frequency of 3-5 blogs a week. However, since SEO works differently for each brand, you may upload less and still get amazing results. The key lies in quality (prioritizing quality over quantity) and consistency (always maintaining its quality over time). 

• Keyword-centric article: Apply all of your keyword research skills to find suitable ones for your store, and write some magnificent pieces of content around it.

• On-page SEO for blogs: by adding keywords to the title tag and meta description, optimizing photos, sprinkling some keywords across your article, and making it effortless to read. 
• Smartly promote your product as a solution. For instance, they have a Gift Guide category, where they curate their products as gift suggestions for various purposes, from Father Day’s gift, Luxury Gift to travel lovers gift. 

7. Get your backlinks 

Backlinks, in a nutshell, are links tracing back to your digital store from other websites. If someone is interested in a blog you write and link it to his article, you’ve got a backlink. 

Backlink tells search engines that your page content is trusted and well-received, thus, increase your domain authority. 

There are many ways you can generate backlinks:

• Create unique blog posts that people can use for reference (thus, link back to your site). This can be a very intricate how-to, a detailed product review, or an interesting interview with unique points of view
• Find bloggers of the same niche with your brand, propose to them to include your product pages or your homepage in their articles in return for some commissions. This is called Affiliate Marketing.

• Do some guest posts on other blogs that have links back to your eCommerce website

8. Get your site audit to find technical eCommerce SEO issues

Technical SEO issues prevent search engines from crawling your website, leave your dedicated blog pages unindexed, or even worse, get your store penalized by Google due to some petty errors.

Some widely-addressed technical issues are poor speed performance, duplicate contents, 301 redirects.

Once you get every other thing (on-page SEO, image optimization, etc) pretty much ready, it’s time to do a health check for your site. It’s called site audit.

Basic SEO Audit tools to find out the most common technical SEO issues

1. Google Search Console

• Find any issues that make it impossible for Google to index your page.
• Check if your page is mobile-friendly

2. Internet Marketing Ninjas

• Identify broken links: check if any links of yours do not work, which can cause a 404 error or 5XX error. 

3. Screaming Frog 

• Find duplicate pages 
• Scan errors for title tags, meta-tags, alt-tags
• Scan robot.txt
• And more

4. Google PageSpeed Insights

• Check if your site is fast enough on both desktop and mobile, and suggest solutions

How to fix these issues depends on the eCommerce platform you are using, as each platform has different backend interfaces and eCommerce SEO functionality.

If you use Magento 2, this article should solve most of the common technical SEO issues for the platform. 

9. Make your site mobile-friendly

As most eCommerce customers shop on mobile, this is the top priority for your digital sales strategy. Data, articles, and even daily life observations have proven the great importance of having a smooth UI/UX experience for your mobile eCommerce site.

However, that’s not all. Search Engines love a well-performed y mobile digital store as well. According to Google, they use the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking.

Maybe you’ve probably bought a responsive eCommerce theme, that’s great. 

However, a one-size-fits-all theme may not be best for your eCommerce store. Experiencing your mobile site and making further changes are important for SEO performance & your customers’ mobile shopping experience. 

Tips to make your eCommerce stores friendly on mobile? 

• Don’t use popups: 

Don’t we all hate popups eating up the whole phone screen and their tiny X that are unable for us to close? Google hates it too. The search engine will bury our site if we use these inappropriate popups for our mobile stores. Thus, popups are better for desktops only. 

• Make important things easy to tap: 

From a 2018 research, 67% of customers complain that contents on phone webs are hard to click. 

Since there’s not plenty of space on mobile like on desktop, you need to make sure all important pages and links can be easily accessed. Also, all CTAs should be bold and easy to tap, also, forms and checkout information should be big enough to type with fingertip easily. 

Turn your site into a Progressive Web App (PWA)

Progressive Web App enables your website to perform amazingly on mobile phones just like a native app. The application enhances speed, leverages UI/UX, and even makes offline shopping possible. 

Here comes good news for Magento website owners and owner-to-be. Magento is a leading platform for PWA, which offers the most powerful and complete PWA experience for mobile success. 

>> Implement an amazing PWA for your Magento site. 

10. Analyze your performance

If you spend tons of time writing blogs or researching keywords for eCommerce SEO, at least you need to know if it’s working.

And analytics is the way to go. 

Luckily, Google gives website owners two powerful tools to review our performances for free. Let’s take a look at what you can do with these tools.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives abundant useful data on how your site performs as well as dig a little deeper into your customer insight. Developed by Google, it’s definitely the must-have tool for all website owners.

Reviewing important SEO results with Google Analytics:

• Find out how many people come to your site (with traffic and users metrics), how engaged are they (with average engagement time metric), which pages are the most SEO-successful, and much more
• Your audience by age, gender, countries, demographics, and devices.

2. Google Search Console

We have mentioned this tool in the SEO audit section, remember?

Once you’ve set up your Search Console account with Google, which is easy, let’s explore the Search Results section under the Performance drop-down menu. 

Here you can search for each page, find its current ranking on Google, how many clicks it generates over a period of time and more. 

11. Get product reviews & create schema markups

Schema markups (structure data) highlight important information of your page contents for search engines to show in their results. The tag is available for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. 

Benefits of structured data for eCommerce stores

There are many kinds of structured data, but the most critical one for eCommerce is the Product structured data. With this, your page results in search engines will show review, price, vote, stock status like this:

Look at the prideful 4.9-star rated by a considerable number of users, wouldn’t it be much more enchanted for customers to click at?

In fact, some case studies have shown that schema markups can result in increases in click-through rates and organic impressions (the number of times your brand is shown to users).

But that’s not all, here are some other examples of what schema markups can benefit your site.

How to create schema markups for eCommerce stores

Technically, it depends on the eCommerce platforms you are using.

But luckily, you can implement it easily with an SEO extension, which is probably available for all popular eCommerce platforms like Magento or Shopify. 

Google also offers a helper tool for you to generate your own code without any tech skills needed. 

<!-- JSON-LD markup generated by Google Structured Data Markup Helper. -->
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Product",
  "name" : "1000 Kisses Deep",
  "image" : "https://unicorn.lush.com/media/__sized__/products/1000_kisses_deep_the_perfume_library_100ml_perfume_2021-thumbnail-255x255.png",
  "description" : "Warming myrrh and osmanthus soak",
  "brand" : {
    "@type" : "Brand",
    "logo" : "https://res.cloudinary.com/lush/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/lush_com/site_assets/commerce-site-logo.gif"
  },
  "offers" : {
    "@type" : "Offer",
    "price" : "£55.00"
  }
}
</script>

Above is a product schema markup generated by Google’s helper tool.

What’s more, there’re testing tools to review if your implementation works or not. 

The rich results test would show previews of your code snippet if it’s done right and check which Google rich results can be displayed for your page.

The schema markup validator checks all of your markups, which are valid for all aforementioned search engines.

eCommerce SEO checklist: the don’ts

1. Stuff keywords

We did mention the importance of adding keywords to your title tag, meta-description tag, blog posts, product description, etc.

Indeed, keywords are the most direct signal to tell search engines that your content is relevant to what your customers search for. 

However, this does not mean that the more keywords are repeated, the better the signal. In fact, keyword stuffing is considered a fraudulent act and may cause you some penalties from search engines. 

This is an example of keyword stuffing:

“This is the best sunscreen for oily skin that you’re looking for. The best sunscreen for oily skin offers the best protection from Ultra Violet rays and sunburn. Also, the product has a fine matte finish while containing Niacinamide, which gives your skin a glowy and healthy look the whole day.  We are offering free samples of Name – best sunscreen for oily skin in our store in London, so check it out.”

If you are a passionate consumer, we are sure you must have found these types of copywriting somewhere. It feels very unnatural to read, thus, deliver a poor experience to your customers.

Be sure to add keywords in moderation and all keywords should make sense in their contexts. 

2. Write thin product descriptions & copy content for product pages and blogs

There can be hundreds of SKUs in a digital store, not to mention that some products are just slightly different from each other. Therefore, writing unique descriptions for a bunch of products can be tough.

However, thin pages (page contents with little descriptions) are bad for SEO. With more words, search engines can understand your content better. 

It’s recommended that no SEO page should have less than 1000 words. On average, first page results on Google have 1,447 words.

Besides thin pages, plagiarism is another thing to avoid. 

Some eCommerce store owners often copy product descriptions from their manufacturers. This is a big NO. 

Copied contents are not preferred by search engines. Google, for example, has straightforwardly told us to avoid duplicate content. The term refers to content blocks that are either identical or considerably similar to other content within or across websites. 

We get your thinking. Are 1,000 words too many for a product description page? My customers would not bother to read that long.

Yes, we agree. The point is putting some effort into page product copywriting to make it informative, captivating, and reasonably long at the same time. 

Here are some helpful tips:

How to create long yet-not-boring product descriptions

1. Be very descriptive about your product:

Customers in the consider-to-buy stage need tons of information about the product. Is it compatible with my computer? Will I be comfy in this pyjama? Is it waterproof? etc.

Naturally, your product alone has many things to talk about. Think about its special traits, its selling points, and how it can benefit your customers. 

• General description
• Size and color
• Ingredients/materials
• Usage
• Shipping, Returns & Guarantees

Let’s take a look at Fenty Beauty‘s product description.

The brand gives both a quick and a detailed description of the product, so both lazy-reader and research-maniac consumers can be pleased. They also include brand fun facts and their product vision so buyers can understand and connect with what they sell on a deeper level. 

2. Be benefit-focused and use sensory words 

Talking about your customers’ pain points and showing how your products can solve these aches, this art of persuasion is as old as time, but it’s proven to be evergreen.

This organic-soap brand gives a detailed explanation of its ingredients and how it can benefit the skin, which are obvious things their customers care about. 

Also, if you are lost for words when writing, sensory words always work.

Think of how you can describe your products by their look, smell, sound, feel, and taste. It’s that simple. 

3. Let product reviews do their job

We have talked about this already, but we just want to highlight the importance of reviews for a long page. These work as an amazing referential source for your customers and boost your SEO ranking at the same time. 

3. Ignore image file name and alt-tag

It’s tempting not to fill the photo names properly, then upload these photos in bulk. 

However, photo names and alt texts give Google a better understanding of your photo context, thus, contributing to your ranking significantly. 

For eCommerce SEO, it also means getting your product featured on Image Search results. 

What is image alt tag? How is it different from the image file name?

The alt attribute is short for alternative text, which provides information for an image in case the image can not be displayed due to some reasons such as slow internet access.

Example:

<img src="https://www.ex.com/blog/Tshirt.jpg" alt="men wearing T-Shirt on blue background">

Since search engines can not read images, alt-text is a helpful tool for them to understand your page contents. 

You can regard writing alt-tag as describing a photo for a sightless friend. 

On the other hand, a file photo name serves solely as a title, which identifies one image from others. The attribute helps you find and manage all of your photos easily.

Example: Tshirt.jpg

Let’s look at some real examples.

• Example 1: 

Image file name: wool-cardigan.jpg

Alt text: girl wearing a long-sleeve wool cardigan

• Example 2:

Image file name: peaches.jpg

Alt text: four peaches in a woven basket

How to write SEO-friendly alt-texts?

• Make it short (less than 125 characters )
• It should describe your photo content
• Add keywords to some photos if it fits the photo context. 
• Don’t overstuff keywords

4. Look for the cheapest hosting options

If your eCommerce platform is a SaaS-based one like Shopify and BigCommerce, this is not even a problem. 

However if you use an open-source platform like Magento or WooCommerce, choosing a good hosting plan also means better SEO performance. 

Hosting can affect your eCommerce SEO ranking in many ways.

First, a website’s speed heavily depends on its server type and quality. The more traffic your site gets, the better server it needs. For a store that attracts about 1000 visitors a day, VPS hosting is an ideal option. If you have more visitors a day, you may consider cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. 

Secondly, a cheap hosting provider tends to be more unstable. It can cause downtime – a server error making your store inaccessible. Lots of downtimes directly affect SEO results, so it’s best to avoid them if you can. 

Lastly, options for Shared Hosting let your site share the same IP address with many other sites. This may not be the most secured option for SEO either, as search engines tend to prefer digital stores with great security. 

>> See more: Best eCommerce hosting options in 2022

5. Spam backlinks

As getting your site linked from another site improves your site authority, you may find the urge to get as many backlinks as possible.

This is only partly true because any backlinks considered “spammy” by search engines can cause a backlash. To put it in other words, search engines may penalize any sites with poor backlinks as a fraudulent attempt to manipulate search engines. 

So, what kind of links are considered spammy?

• Links from low-quality guest blogs: blog posts from a site with low domain authority, short blog articles with many suspicious links.
• Links from unqualified directory sites: If your page is listed in a creditable local directory like Yelp, then go ahead, it’s a good move. However, if a directory site seems to contain many trashy links, then do not even bother. 
• Link farming: link farming, by definition, is the practice of hyperlinking your website to a group of other websites which are built only for the purpose of link building.
• Links spammed in forums
• Links from social bookmarking and sharing sites

Get ranked now!

Unlike paid ads where you can get conversions in days, SEO is a longer-term practice. However, in the end, your effort put into research, blogging, backlinking will result in sustainable organic leads. 

Whereas there are many amazing guides and tips for eCommerce SEO on the internet, this guide consolidates all essentials & all red flags so that all eCommerce beginners can establish a robust SEO strategy for their stores to grow strong. 

Still wondering if your website SEO is taking the right path? Let us do an SEO audit for you.