E-Commerce SEO Guide

With the rise of E-Commerce trends, E-Commerce SEO has gained an additional importance. Therefore, SEO has become one of the important marketing strategies to increase sales on E-Commerce sites. In order to get ahead in this competition, E-Commerce sites apply to Digital Marketing Strategies such as SEO, content marketing, paid ads and extensive use of social media.

One of the most important marketing strategies for the developing competition among e-commerce sites has been SEO. One reason for this is that e-commerce sites that rank higher in search engines have high traffic. The high traffic of a website may not have a direct effect on conversion rates. However, with a successful SEO service, it becomes possible to configure the traffic to increase sales rates. In short, E-Commerce SEO needs to be considered in order to increase brand awareness and increase sales rates.

What is eCommerce SEO?

With the spread of e-commerce sites, the increasing competition has also been reflected in marketing strategies. One of these strategies is to rank higher in the results pages of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex. The work done to achieve this is called Search Engine Optimization, that is, SEO. With this marketing strategy and SEO studies, E-Commerce sites aim to get ahead of their competitors and increase their sales. Most E-Commerce sites aim to increase the traffic of the website with SEO studies. As a natural result of this, it aims to optimize sales and conversion rates and increase its earnings.

Why is Ecommerce SEO Important?

Today, among Digital Marketing Strategies, SEO offers many advantages. Most E-Commerce sites do SEO work to rank higher on search engine results pages. One of the important reasons for this is that search engines are determinative at a rate of about 40% in the formation of website traffic. We can list some of the advantages of E-Commerce SEO studies as follows:

• Increases the awareness and recognition of your e-commerce brand
• Your brand value increases
• The data obtained through SEO work also guides other marketing strategies.
• The ability to easily identify your target audience and the ease of determining your sales strategy accordingly
• As a result of Search Engine Optimization, you will get results that you can measure
• It reduces the burden of your marketing budget by increasing organic traffic.

How to do E-Commerce SEO?

If you want to do SEO work for your E-Commerce site, we will provide you with a detailed guide on this subject in this article. By following these steps in our guide, you can improve your marketing strategies and SEO efforts against your competitors.

Keyword Research

One of the most important points to be considered in terms of SEO Compatibility is choosing the right keywords. The reason for this is that parts of E-Commerce sites such as content planning and product information are SEO compatible only with the right keyword selection. For this reason, keyword research is of great importance. There are some plugins and tools that you can use in keyword research for an SEO compatible E-Commerce site. By using these tools, you will have the opportunity to do keyword analysis and you can use the words with high traffic volume at critical points in your content planning. In addition, the use of long-tail keywords increases your potential to increase your organic traffic.

Organizing Category Hierarchy

In order for your e-commerce site to be SEO compatible, it must give importance to user experience. For this, you should create a site architecture that facilitates access to products or content for users who will visit your website. Sorting the products on your e-commerce site in a regular hierarchy makes you stand out in terms of both search engines and user experience. In addition, the product descriptions on your site are in a regular category hierarchy, making your E-Commerce site more SEO Compatible.

SEO Compatible Permalinks

One of the necessary factors for a site to be SEO Compatible is that the site’s permalinks (URL) contain keywords related to the page content. Permalinks of a site designed without search engine algorithms are often determined automatically. Such permalinks are likely to contain random letters and numbers unrelated to the page content. On the other hand, if a site’s permanent links contain keywords related to the page content, it provides convenience in terms of user experience and search engines evaluate this situation positively. containing words will make you stand out. Therefore, it is very important that the pages of your E-Commerce site contain an SEO Compatible URL.

Constructing Canonical Structure

Canonical URL is a type of URL that allows a page with the same content but different permalinks (URL) to be combined under a single link via canonical tag. With the Canonical Tag (rel=”canonical”), an HTML Code Snippet, you can have a page with different permalinks indexed by the main URL you specify. There is a possibility that a page will appear to have multiple permalinks if the Canonical Tag is not used. The following permalinks exemplify this:

• www.example-link.com
• http://www.example-link.com
• example-link.com

Thanks to the editing of the Canonical URL structure, search engines cannot detect Duplicate Content on your site. This also prevents your site from being penalized and indexed by search engines. Make your E-Commerce site SEO Compatible based on Canonical URL Structure criteria and increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

Pagination Structure Pagination

It is the process of separating the content on your website into certain sections and pages. In this way, the content on your site takes place in numbered pages. At the same time, it is easier for search engine bots to crawl websites with complete pagination. Therefore, creating the pagination structure puts you at the forefront in terms of SEO. Many E-Commerce sites such as Amazon apply pagination to improve both SEO and user experience.

Improving Site Speed

Most internet users now expect a page they click to open within seconds. This expectation also forms an important part of the user experience. Websites with low site speed give users less confidence. In addition, low site speed also increases the bounce rate. Google’s research showed that bounce rate increased by 32% when page load time increased from one second to three seconds, and increased by 90% when page load time increased from one second to five seconds. For this reason, one of the most important factors in terms of search engine optimization in E-Commerce sites is the improvement of site speed. Because E-Commerce sites with slow site speed give less trust compared to their competitors. For this reason, site speed directly affects both site traffic and conversion rates. If an E-Commerce site wants to get ahead of its competitors and increase its organic traffic and conversion rates, it must optimize the site speed.

User Expectations:

• About 80% of customers who are “not satisfied” with the speed of a site do not consider buying from the same site again.
• More than half of mobile users expect a site to load in four seconds or less
• Nearly 50% of online shoppers expect web pages to load in less than two seconds

Many site speed testing tools such as Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix give information about your site’s performance. In addition, the testing tools also report optimization possibilities for site speed improvement.

Adding Structured Data Structured Data

Also known as rich snippets, rich results, JSON tags, and schema codes, is an important part of SEO work. Search engine bots detect structured data through schema codes and determine your ranking according to this data. It provides information that contributes to the user experience on the structured data, schema markup types and search engine results page that affect the ranking. Structural data, which provides better perception of the content on your website by search engines and provides convenience to users, is extra important for E-Commerce sites. This is because the correct perception of the products and the contextual information of the products on the E-Commerce sites by the search engines directly affects your ranking. However, the details about the product information appear on the search results pages and take up more space in the SERPs, attracting the attention of the users. In parallel with all these, E-Commerce sites have the opportunity to increase their conversion rate.

Some advantages of using Structured Data:

• Increases visibility in search results
• Impressions and Clicks increase
• User Experience will improve
• Contributes to the development of your content strategy

Optimizing Crawl Budget

Crawl budget, called Crawl Budget, serves to determine the number of pages that Google crawling bots will crawl and index in a given day. Since search engines like Google cannot index millions of sites in the same day, they add a certain number of indexes according to certain rules. Therefore, it is very important to determine the content of a site according to these rules. With a limited number of pages indexed each day, Google prioritizes sites that perform well. However, Google creates a crawl budget for each site based on site performance.

You can find out the crawl budget of your own website through Google Search Console. Accordingly, you can find out the number of pages indexed from the Google index section. In the crawl statistics section, you can find the number of daily crawls of your website. To find out your website’s crawl budget, you should divide the number of indexed pages you learned from GSC by the number of pages crawled per day. As a result of this process, you can calculate your scanning budget. In connection with this, it is important that your scan budget is as low as possible. This is because the lower the crawl budget, the faster Google will index the pages on your site. You can speed up the indexing process by optimizing the crawl budget of your E-Commerce site. In this way, it will be easier for you to take your place in search engines. Optimize your site’s crawl budget by following the steps below.

Reduce URL Redirects

You can make the job of Google crawling bots easier by removing unnecessary URL Redirects on your page. In this way, Google crawling bots will quickly scan your website without being stuck with redirects and your browsing budget will be reduced.

Fix Orphan Page Errors

Do not have Orphan Pages without internal and external links on your site. Because crawling bots have difficulty reaching such pages, this creates an unnecessary burden on the crawl budget.

Keep Your XML Sitemap Updated

Update your XML sitemap so that Google crawling bots can better understand the content and redirects on your site. Keeping your sitemap organized and up-to-date makes it easy for crawling bots, so indexing doesn’t take long.

Site Speed Optimization

The speed of your e-commerce site directly affects your browsing budget. This is because crawling bots can quickly crawl sites with high site speed and evaluate site performance accordingly.

Pay Attention to URL Parameters

Many E-Commerce sites change permalinks for processes such as product filtering. For example, when selecting a product, a separate URL is created when a filter with a price range is applied. When filtering is done by selecting the product color, a separate URL with a color code is created. For eCommerce sites, there is a possibility of creating an unlimited number of permalinks, given this type of filtering and other factors. The number of crawling bots crawling and indexing so many permalinks is pretty negative in terms of crawl budget. There is also a risk that crawling bots will detect such links as duplicate content. You can close all these URL Parameters to crawl bots by editing the robots.txt file or via Google Search Console. Thus, you optimize your scanning budget.

Fixing Index Errors

Google Crawl Bots may encounter problems with indexing during the crawling process of your site. In such cases, some pages of your website may not be indexed or may adversely affect the crawl budget.

You can find index errors on Google Search Console. After logging into GSC, click “Scope” under “Index” to view the Google Coverage Reports. In this section, Google reports index errors on your site. Fixing the bugs here will improve your site in general. In this way, you will carry out a general SEO work on your E-Commerce site.

Common Index Errors:

• URL Not Found (404)
• Server Error (5xx)
• Redirect Error
• Submitted URL marked “noindex”
• Blocked by robots.txt

User Experience Insights

User Experience is one of the most important factors for e-commerce websites both to rank higher in search results and to increase conversion rate. For E-Commerce sites, User Experience (UX) can be referred to as all the interactions a user or customer has with the products and services offered by the site.

For eCommerce sites, customers should face minimal hassle during the purchasing process. This is because an E-Commerce site with a poor user experience is not preferred by users and search engines negatively evaluate the performance of such a site. In parallel with this, the conversion rate tends to decrease.

User Experience Analysis (UX Analytics) is the process of evaluating and analyzing the data collected about the interactions of the users with the products offered on the E-Commerce site or the services provided. Most E-Commerce sites try to improve the user experience by producing solutions produced as a result of the analysis of the collected data. In this way, E-Commerce sites aim to make the purchasing process of users smooth and easy. You can follow these steps for User Experience optimization:

• Make your site mobile-friendly
• Have interactive content
• Avoid 404 Errors
• Match colors with the site
• Use Responsive Web Design

Mobile Compatibility

The majority of internet users now access websites via mobile devices. Mobile device users started to make up the majority of internet traffic, surpassing even those accessing the internet via computers. That’s why most websites aim to design their sites to be mobile-friendly in order to both improve the user experience and increase traffic. Different problems may arise for viewing pages, reading texts and other operations on websites that are not mobile-friendly. In addition, most content on such sites appears broken and incompatible. Therefore, a decrease in organic traffic and search results may appear on websites that are not mobile-friendly. You can test your site’s mobile compatibility via Google Search Console.

For e-commerce sites, mobile compatibility is one of the most important factors in increasing sales and brand awareness. The reason for this is that most of the online sales are made by mobile users. Thus, mobile compatibility for e-commerce sites becomes one of the most essential elements to increase traffic and conversion rates. In addition, many E-Commerce sites develop their own mobile applications to increase their domain and provide convenience to their mobile users.

The benefits of mobile compatibility for e-commerce sites:

• Better customer & user experience
• Increase in internet traffic
• Potential to increase in Sales and Conversion rates
• Ease of payment Variety in payment options

Solving Duplicate Page Problems

Duplicate page problem, also known as duplicate content, is one of the problems that needs to be solved in terms of SEO Compatibility. This is because websites with duplicate pages are negatively evaluated by search engines such as Google. Search engines treat duplicate content and duplicate pages as spam. As a result, it is inevitable to see a decrease in web traffic on sites with copy page problems.

Duplicate content is sometimes created for technical reasons or by mistake. For example, a category or product page on your E-Commerce page has multiple permalinks. This causes crawling bots to see your page as duplicate content. If this situation is not corrected, the probability of seeing a drop in search results increases.

If we give an example in the context of e-commerce sites, the product specified on a product page has different colors. In some cases, a different permalink may be created for each product color change on the product page. Google analyzes this situation as duplicate content and evaluates it negatively.

Follow these steps to avoid Duplicate Page Issue:

• 301 Redirects
• Use Beware of permalinks
• Check content regularly
• Remove pages with similar content
• Use Canonical Tag

Organizing Categories

The organization of the categories on the e-commerce site is at least as important as the product contents. In this case, you should definitely do a keyword research while determining the category names. In addition, add an article that briefly introduces the products there and passes a keyword in the category contents section. The product names, meta descriptions and images included here should be prepared with both search engines and customers in mind. In this way, while the user experience improves, you are more likely to rank higher in the search results.

Editing Product Details

You need to promote your products in the best way on your e-commerce site. Therefore, you should carefully create the information on your product page. You should both introduce the product features in detail and convey only the necessary details to your users. For product page optimization, product information, color, price and all other details must be entered within the scope of product features. At this point, it should be ensured that potential customers get concrete information about the product with net product optimization.

It is advantageous to present product information in the form of itemization or tables that make it easier for users to understand. The table structure is also included in the search results as rich content.

Some guidelines for Product Descriptions:

• Should be written in SEO Compatible way
• Must be sales oriented.
• It should contain technical information about the product
• It should be simple and understandable.
• It should not overlap with the category page.

Things to consider for Product Titles:

• Prices and models should be determined by commercial search intent
• The number of characters should be around 50-60 short and clear.

Must be SEO compatible Guidelines for Product Images:

• The product should be shot from different angles.
• It should be in high resolution
• Images need to be SEO friendly
• Image alt text should contain keywords
• Image size must be less than 100kb

Some ingredients for Product Videos:

• Narrator can be added for product details in product videos
• Videos should be short, clear and informative

User-Generated Content (UGC)

User Generated Content (UGC) is defined as all kinds of text, videos, reviews, images, etc. created by people instead of brands. The comments that customers make about the products they buy from you and the photos they upload are very important both on your site and on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram etc. Some sites even offer various discounts and campaigns to their users to encourage this. This is because potential customers consider user-created content more neutral and trustworthy than brands’ own content. As a result, the purchasing decisions of potential customers are affected.

User-Generated Content Benefits

• Creates original content about your products
• Provides trust to customers
• Increase in organic traffic
• Increase in brand awareness
• Increase in conversion rates

Setting up the Blog Structure

Today, many E-Commerce sites add a blog section to their sites to increase both brand awareness and interaction area. In addition to adding a blog to your page as a content marketing strategy, adding regular content is one of the most effective ways to increase traffic. Publishing content related to the products or services you offer on your e-commerce site will make you stand out in the search results. Because users who search for a product on your page are likely to encounter the content on your blogs. This expands your domain and increases organic traffic.

It is important at this point that the content in the blog section of your e-commerce site is SEO Compatible. When creating your content marketing strategy, using e-commerce SEO techniques such as theme selection, image optimization, and editing permalinks on your blog pages will make you stand out. However, the blog structure should be mobile-friendly, developed with responsive web design, and the user interface should be optimized. In addition, you can contribute to the crawl budget by internal linking to other articles on the blog when relevant. This speeds up the indexing process.

Steps for Developing E-Commerce Blog Content Strategy:

• Identify your Target Audience
• Create a clear goal for your blog
• Keyword Research structure
• Consistently enter content
• Analyze competitor blogs