If you’re a business owner, your job is to be in the know about almost everything that touches the brand. Meaning, things get overwhelming quickly.  

When we zoom in on marketing, it’s endless tracking and strategizing with social media, paid ads, referrals, content, partner programs, affiliates, and more. You likely know that SEO is an important pillar of the marketing department, but the knowledge barrier blocking the technical elements has caused you to put it on the back burner. 

Well, here’s how you can start bridging that knowledge gap to grow both your organic traffic and revenue. 

Why is SEO important for your e-commerce business? 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for e-commerce businesses. It builds website visibility, boosts organic traffic, improves brand credibility, and increases sales overall. 

Sounds great, doesn’t it? How does it work? 

By optimizing your website in specific (technical and non-technical) ways, you’ll improve your rankings on search engines like Google, Bing, and even ChatGPT. The data shows that only the top 5 search results get clicks, which could be your store. 

What’s included in an SEO strategy?

There are many elements of SEO that are tied not only to your website structure but also to the social proofing, external links, and content you create. Here’s a breakdown of the SEO basics. If you’re looking to get granular, book a free strategy call. 

Keyword research and mapping

Keyword research and keyword mapping are the foundations of nontechnical SEO. 

Think about your brand messaging. What do you sell, and what would your customers have to search on Google to find your store (aside from its name)? These are your high-intent keywords. For example, if your store called “CheckMate” sold chessboards, your top keywords might be “chessboards,” “chessboard setup,” “pieces on chessboards,” and “custom chessboards.” 

These high-intent keywords should be strategically placed throughout your website to tell search engines that your store should be suggested for those specific inquiries. If you’re unsure about making a keyword list on your own, you can use SEO websites like Moz and SemRush to determine which words are most relevant and have the highest search volume. 

Content optimization 

Your website’s content must be optimized for your brand's keywords, including blogs, product page copy, title tags, meta descriptions, and anything else written on the front and back end. 

There are ways to recycle content, cluster it, and use keywords in your metadata so that search engine algorithms will recognize your web pages and recommend them. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is where things can get intimidating. To put it simply, it’s about focuing on optimizing the backend of your website. Technical tweaks and optimizations will improve Google’s ability to crawl and index your store, meaning it collects information about your brand, what you offer, and whether or not it should recommend your site to customers. 

Technical SEO involves optimizing the architecture of your site, the coding, and other elements to help you rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERP). It can be a lot of work, but if you break it down into small parts, you’ll find your search rankings continue to rise as you optimize.

Breaking down technical SEO for e-commerce: The 5 things you need to know

1. Domain authority and backlinks

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine score developed by the popular SEO tool Moz. DA predicts how well your e-commerce site will rank on Google and Bing, and awards it a number between 1 and 100. The higher the score, the more likely you rank high on the SERP. One of the main ways to improve your DA score is with quality backlinks.

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Search engines see them as trusted references, which can improve your rankings. For example, if a popular chess blog links to an article from my chessboard store, that’s an excellent backlink. It’s like telling Google, “hey, these guys are a trusted source! I recommend them.” 

2. Core web vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google metrics that help web developers understand the user experience. Even though they’ve been established with developers in mind, these tools could show any site owner the breakdown of the customer’s journey on a page. The primary metrics included in Core Web Vitals are: 

• LCP: Largest Contentful Paint measures the user experience of load times on your webpage. It does this based on the render time of the largest blocks (usually images) visible. The longer it takes the largest blocks to load, the more likely the customer will give up and leave the page. Site owners should aim for a 2.5-second LCP when the page begins loading. 

• CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift measures how visually stable your web page is during loading, clicking, and hovering. It tells Google if elements like text, buttons, banners, and pop-ups are pushed while customers are reading the page and whether they add to or detract from the user experience.

• FID: First Input Delay measures responsiveness when customers interact with a page. This means FID only records key presses and clicks. E-commerce site owners should aim for FID responsiveness under 100 milliseconds. 

3. Pagination 

Have you ever clicked on a clothing category for “pants” and had it load 200 results super slowly? That website could have greatly improved its pagination. 

Pagination splits content across multiple pages to boost load speed and ensure customers can easily search, click, and find what they’re looking for in a big list. Loading thousands of items super slowly frustrates your customers and quickly becomes disorganized.

When implemented and optimized, pagination also helps search engines understand how your pages are related and connect. It’s a better experience for Google and your potential customers.

4. Broken links

A broken link is precisely what you might think it is. It’s a hyperlink that used to point to a particular resource or page, but that end point no longer exists. Usually, these pages are deleted or moved without a proper redirection set up. 

When users reach a dead end thanks to a broken link, the server returns an error, usually a 404 or a 410. In SEO, broken links can also include broken backlinks, and too many of either can lead to a poor user experience. It’s also a waste of your website crawl budget, as 404 pages are always dead ends. 

5. Site architecture 

Your website’s site architecture refers to its overall structure. This includes how your pages are linked together and how easily (or not) your customers can navigate within them. 

This is a very important piece of technical SEO, as Google will assess your site architecture and will likely de-rank you if it’s overly complicated or impossible to understand. Site owners should get their architecture analyzed by a professional team, which can determine where the issues are (if any) and what the fixes look like. 

Reshaping your site architecture isn’t the most lengthy SEO process, but if you do it right, more customers will find you and keep coming back. 

You’re in good hands at Placeholder for technical SEO (and more)

So now you understand the basics of technical SEO. It’s not too complicated, but this article only scratches the surface. To dig deeper into what technical SEO entails and what it looks like for your site in particular, reach out to the team at Placeholder SEO.

We’ll do a deep dive with a comprehensive audit of everything, front and back. We’ll also audit the content marketing side of things, conduct competitive analysis, and work with you to understand your business goals. 

SEO is a big job, but it doesn’t have to be daunting with the right team behind you.