For the average business, SEO is recognized as a key pillar for growing e-commerce brand presence, but is often overlooked in practice. But what if we told you that you could improve best practices on the content marketing side that have added SEO benefits baked in? Here’s how to optimize both departments with one strategy and get that traffic you’ve been looking for.

What is e-commerce SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing process by which e-commerce businesses edit their website to increase organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, or ChatGPT. 

There are both technical and non-technical strategies for boosting SEO, and numerous ways to improve your business's position on the search engine results page (SERP). You could enhance metadata, build strategic sitemaps, do a broken link audit, and run page speed tests, to name a few. 

However, a large portion of SEO work is closely tied to content marketing strategies. 

What is content marketing? 

The goal of content marketing is to produce writing (“copy”) or media for blogs and web pages that convert readers into paying customers. This is done through content that educates, informs, and engages a specific target audience. 

The content itself is typically long-form writing, but it can also take the form of infographics or GIFs, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and even offline events. Content marketing engages audiences, builds brand awareness, and ultimately drives sales. 

What does content marketing have to do with SEO?

When it comes to SEO and content marketing, there’s a complementary relationship where optimizing one enhances the qualities of the other. 

Strong SEO helps people find your web pages and content through search engines. Content marketing, on the other hand, creates opportunities for SEO improvement and better search rankings. 

SEO and content marketing are effectively executed by sharing high-quality articles and product pages that attract organic traffic, enhance domain authority, and establish credibility with your audience. 

10 ways your content marketing strategy could boost your store’s SEO

1. Conduct on-page SEO

On-page optimization gives search engines (and customers!) more context about your brand, your reputation, and your product offerings. There are four key areas for optimizing your on-page SEO:

• URL structure: You should be using keyword-rich, simple but descriptive URLs that reflect your page’s content succinctly. 

• H1 tags or page titles: These inform search engines about the content of each page. Put your main keyword in the H1 tag at the top of the page, and make it sound like a title. 

• Headings: Each page should be well-structured and formatted with the correct heading sizes (H2-H6). Proper heading structure is easier for users to interpret and is a great way to leverage secondary keywords.

• Metadata: Your meta descriptions and meta titles should be short, catchy, include keywords, and speak to user intent. 

2. Make a topical map

Topical relevance informs search engines about your website’s expertise and authority. It will help them assess if your products and content are relevant to a given search query and if they align with your overall website. 

For example, if your e-commerce website sells cat sweaters and you write a blog post about “The best cat sweaters for the Christmas season 2025,” that would be considered topically relevant to that search query and will appear in the search results. 

That’s why the content you produce should adhere to your brand’s topical map. It ensures your website is relevant, a voice of authority, and a strong source to recommend to customers with relevant search intent. 

3. Make blog keyword clusters

Speaking of staying relevant, blog keyword clusters are a great way to adhere to your topical map, create valuable content, and boost SEO. 

After conducting your keyword research, create groupings of 5 or 6 blog posts around that topic, and interlink them with each other. This will gradually increase your relevance to search engines, provide users with more content to click on and stay on your site, and improve your rankings. 

4. Be a thought leader

Producing thought leadership content is a newer strategy used by brands to establish themselves as a voice of authority on topics that their ideal customer profile (ICP) might find useful. Thought leadership is a way to stand out and provide value in various forums, on social media, in search, and through any other channel shoppers might frequent. 

By producing valuable thought leader content, you encourage other bloggers, leaders, and websites to link to your pages. This means you receive valuable backlinks that improve web authority and search engine visibility.

5. Boost your EEAT scores

Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) indicators in your web content determine credibility and boost visibility.  

• Experience: Demonstrates that your content was made by someone with first-hand experience on the topic. 

• Expertise: Shows that the author of your content is knowledgeable about the specific topic. Licensed professionals, thought leaders, and other professionals with authority make great posters. 

• Authority: Add links or citations to other reputable websites, and interlink thought leader posts to prove you have authority over a given subject. 

• Trustworthiness: Customer reviews, case studies, ratings, and testimonials all boost trustworthiness with the search engines. 

You should apply EEAT rules to page content, blog content, social media content, and essentially anything customer-facing. 

6. Recycle your content with care

Made a really engaging and valuable blog post? 

Great. Now make it into a social media post, add a key blurb to a product page, produce a spinoff for your newsletter, and make sure it’s a topic on your podcast. Recycling your content improves your EEAT scores, streamlines your content marketing efforts, and gives your audience more opportunities to engage with that piece. 

Just make sure when you recycle, you’re not taking the exact copy. Varying the original content a bit looks more trustworthy than direct copy clones that could derank you.

7. Produce evergreen content

On the flip side of topical, relevant, timely content, we have evergreen content. 

Evergreen content remains valuable for a longer period of time. The advantage of creating evergreen content is that it can consistently attract traffic for years. It’s timeless, relevant, and often educational. It can also be reused and repurposed; often, evergreen content is what earns your website the most valuable backlinks. 

Examples of evergreen content include checklists, blog guides, glossaries, FAQs, and case studies. 

8. Work with guest posters for backlinks

Speaking of backlinks, guest posting is another great way to acquire them. Original research and quality content are like magnets for other authoritative sites, and guest blog posters with experience in a relevant topic are great content machines. 

Hire them as a freelancer, do a blog post swap, or seek out a new writer or thought leader looking for portfolio experience. They can link the content they create for you back to their company site and on social media, broadening your reach and providing your readers with value.

9. Don’t forget to interlink

Internal linking, also known as interlinking, is crucial for SEO. It helps search engines understand your website’s structure, enhances the customer experience, and distributes link equity. 

By strategically linking product pages, collection pages, blog posts, and other relevant content, search engines can better understand how to index your content and guide users to the pages they are looking for. 

10. Work with a professional team

Lastly, work with a professional team that specializes in SEO and content marketing. They’ll conduct a comprehensive audit of both the content and technical SEO aspects, and provide recommendations to enhance SEO and create the right content to drive long-term traffic. 

SEO isn’t just a one-time marketing initiative. It requires constant monitoring as Google, Bing, and ChatGPT algorithms evolve and change. So, kill two birds with one stone by partnering with a team that can develop a flexible strategy tailored to your business goals now and in the future. 

Work with a team that does it all

Here at Placeholder SEO, we specialize in tackling both content marketing and SEO for e-commerce businesses. We produce a thorough audit to understand your current position and your business goals, and build a tailored strategy that’s proven to get results. 

Book your free strategy call here, and we’ll walk you through how you can scale your business.