Building SEO Since 13 years Old. I didn’t set out to build an agency — I set out to solve a problem.
SEO (search engine optimization) is designed to help search engines discover and understand your website, ensuring you rank higher in relevant search results. It's a type of digital marketing that drives organic traffic to your website and, in turn, dials up your revenue. But there’s more to it than that: the core of SEO is user experience. A well-executed SEO strategy should serve the user with the valuable information they’re looking for. This is especially important for e-commerce brands, where visibility and user experience directly correlate with sales and success.
But what is SEO exactly, and how does it apply to online stores?
This guide will break down everything you need to know about SEO, including why you need to be implementing it (if you haven't already) and how to do so effectively. From complete beginners to established brands wanting to refine their current SEO strategy, this comprehensive guide will have something you can use to your advantage.
Let's get into it.
E-commerce SEO refers to the process of optimizing an online store to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive organic traffic to its website. If you're a complete beginner to SEO, it can feel intimidating. This is because there are so many different moving parts to e-commerce SEO, including both on-page and off-page elements.
The idea is to drive organic traffic to your website via search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and more. Today, this also includes emerging AI Search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which are becoming powerful new discovery channels for online shoppers. The goal is to convert all that traffic into sales and revenue.
For example, to fully optimize e-commerce websites for SEO, businesses need to develop collection or category pages, product pages, and more. This will help them target specific keywords that their ideal audience is searching for. This involves:
Furthermore, to optimize for e-commerce stores, brands need to understand their own customer behavior, including their desires and pain points. Brands need to be able to implement an SEO strategy that resonates directly with their target audience, wherever they are in the sales funnel. The way e-commerce SEO predominantly targets this is through high-quality content creation, such as in-depth guides, blog posts, and product information, as well as maintaining a technically sound site structure. It also involves link building and digital PR (but we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of it all later in this guide).
The goal of an effective SEO strategy is to rank higher in SERPS (search engine results pages) and improve your website's visibility. The simple truth is that it doesn't matter how fantastic your products are or how pristine your content is: if you don't optimize your e-commerce website, then your audience won't be able to find you.
Most users don’t scroll past the first page of Google, which is why you want an effective strategy that ensures you rank on the first page of the search engine results. This way, when a potential customer searches for a query, they’ll come across your brand. If your e-commerce website isn’t on the first page of search results, you’re losing out on a large share of highly targeted traffic that could be turning into sales.
Your competitors may be building awareness with other digital marketing methods, such as paid ads. This is what’s known as “push marketing.” However, if you invest in SEO, when potential buyers come looking for the products they sell, you’re the brand that will show up in the search results, which is what we call “pull marketing.”
With SEO, the user is the one in control of the search. They initiate the process by typing a search query, which could target a specific product (for example, “cold plunge barrel”) or seek information (“benefits of cold plunge”). When you provide the information that they’re looking for, it could build long-term authority and trust.
Although push marketing like paid ads can have its advantages, it’s important to be smart. Don’t just run paid ads; invest in SEO and show up in the search results when your audience has their credit card in hand.
So, in short: SEO makes it easier for people already looking for your products to find you through organic search.
Other digital marketing channels, such as paid advertising, are great ways to drive traffic to your website in a pinch. However, once your marketing budget runs out, so do your paid ads. Furthermore, they have a high customer acquisition cost, which means less Return on Investment for your business.
SEO, however, is a long-term marketing strategy that keeps driving organic traffic and revenue long after the initial investment. Once your e-commerce site appears highly in the search rankings for the search queries your customers are actively looking up, you can continue to attract organic traffic without increasing ad spend.
Furthermore, SEO is a marketing strategy that will live for years to come. When ChatGPT originally launched, many SEO sceptics were convinced that Search Engine Optimization would die off, but that’s not the case at all. SEO serves the user the right information, no matter what platform they’re using, whether that’s Google, Bing, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, to name a few. The most valuable information is still pulled for the user using the algorithm.
Platforms may come and go, but the fundamentals of SEO will remain the same. Focus on providing an unbreakable user experience to make the most of SEO.
Furthermore, paid ads are constantly at risk. There’s always the chance that TikTok may be banned, or Google will implement changes that may disrupt your marketing.
Because of this, SEO is one of the most effective and sustainable marketing channels for any e-commerce business. If you stay on top of trends and do SEO the right way, you’ll future-proof your marketing.
Although it’s widely expected that you need an average of 8 touchpoints to make a sale, research suggests that this number can vary by industry, and it may be even more than that. If your business consistently appears in web and search engines for relevant queries, this will improve brand recognition and show potential customers that they can trust you. Furthermore, they’ll start to associate your products and brand with the products they're interested in. Maintaining your visibility means you're always top of mind.
Artificial Intelligence is already shaping the future of SEO, with AI tools making a home in modern SEO strategy. AI can automatically conduct keyword research, optimize content, and even improve technical SEO. That said, we shouldn’t rely solely on AI, and human oversight is essential, as not every aspect of SEO benefits from automation.
Tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics use AI themselves to offer insights into user behavior and website performance, helping businesses make the most out of their SEO strategy and stay ahead of the curve.
As mentioned above, AI is not without its flaws. Although AI can assist and speed up processes, it's important to also use human oversight. One example of this is with AI-generated content, which oftentimes lacks the depth and nuance that users need. If you choose to rely solely on AI as a business, it can lead to generic, low-quality content that doesn’t resonate with your audience or meet Google's quality standards (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
In 2023, approximately 13 million American adults claimed to have used AI for search. This number is expected to rise to 90 million by 2027.
As more and more people are using AI to get answers to their queries, it raises an important question: will search engines like Google even exist in 5 - 10 years time? And will search engine optimization (SEO) become obsolete?
While Google dominates 90% of the search engine market, AI search engines, like ChatGPT, have already reached an astounding milestone of a million users in five days. This doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Moreover, search engine giants are implementing aspects of AI search, with Google's AI Overview being one example. Answers shown in AI overviews or AI chatrooms, such as Perplexity and Gemini, will often include links to sources of information, helping build trust between the audience and AI. The goal now shifts from simply ranking in traditional search engines to ranking in AI search, as well.
Because of this, SEO is more important than ever. While the platforms we use to search may change, the principles behind connecting users with relevant, trustworthy information will remain. SEO will continue to exist, but will simply evolve. Even now, SEO is evolving into new subsets with new names:
If you do SEO right, you will appear in AI results.
At DTC SEO Agency, we're continuously adapting our strategies as SEO evolves, especially regarding AI Search, helping to get your brand or business featured in AI citations and curated AI lists.
Technical SEO refers to your website's infrastructure. There are a lot of moving parts to technical SEO, but a few common components include:
A crawl budget is the number of pages that search engines will crawl on a website within a certain timeframe. Search engines calculate crawl budget based on crawl limit (which basically means how often their bots can crawl without causing issues) and crawl demand (how often they'd like to crawl a site). Note that search engines don’t have unlimited resources, and they’re tasked with crawling millions of sites across the web, which means they need to prioritize their efforts.
This means you need to make it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl, understand, and index your website properly. A website that’s messy or complex will cost more to crawl than a well-structured and optimized website.
Technical SEO helps search engines understand your site structure, so Google can do exactly that. Some of the best tools for technical SEO are Google Search Console, SEMRush, and Ahrefs, which offer invaluable insights into any indexing issues your website might be having.
As search evolves, the same principles of crawlability now apply to AI-driven discovery. Large language models (LLMs) powering tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity also depend on websites that are well-structured and accessible.
Sites that aren’t properly maintained or that rely heavily on scripts can be difficult for these AI crawlers to interpret, which could limit your visibility in emerging AI search results.
While emerging standards such as llms.txt have been proposed to help LLMs identify a site’s most important content, they haven’t yet been widely adopted by search engines.
On-page SEO is something that even many SEO beginners are familiar with. However, it’s also where most people misunderstand SEO in its entirety. Many people believe that SEO only encompasses on-page efforts and blog articles, when in actual fact, it’s about so much more than that.
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing the elements within your website’s pages so they closely match what users are searching for. It ensures that users who happen to come across your web pages through organic search are given an easy, user-friendly experience.
This can include:
Keyword optimization includes creating on-page content, such as blog articles, collection pages, and guides, and baking in relevant keywords that your audience is searching for. You can also optimize older, already-existing content to rank for specific keywords. It’s also important to ensure any information and data are relevant, as search engines (and users) value content that’s up to date.
Content optimization also includes adding your target keywords into the titles and headings of content. For example, your H1 should always include your main keyword, and your H2 should include a variation of that keyword.
Important note - Don’t fall into the trap of "keyword stuffing”, which is seen as a black-hat SEO tactic and can get your website penalized by Google. Furthermore, filling your content with too many keywords or keywords that simply don't make sense or read naturally will impact user experience. As a result, those pages are unlikely to perform well in search results over the long term.
Your SEO title (also known as the title tag) is the clickable headline that appears in search engine results. It should be under 60 characters, clearly describe what the page is about, and include your main keyword in a natural way. Ideally, place your target keyword toward the beginning of the title for maximum impact.
Meta descriptions are short summaries of your website content. They appear below the page title tag in search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimize these for SEO by making sure they're short, straight to the point, and contain the main keyword you're trying to rank for. Meta descriptions will factor into whether a user clicks on your webpage over one of your competitors.
Ideally, meta descriptions should be between 120 and 158 characters long. With e-commerce stores, it’s important that your meta descriptions incorporate USPs (Unique Selling Points) of your products or brand that will compel your audience to visit your website. Examples of USPs can include product benefits, free shipping, and more.
If you want to see how your title and description will appear in search results, try our SERP Snippet Optimization Tool.
On-page SEO involves optimizing images by ensuring they're the right weight (we recommend under 300KB), making sure they're named correctly, and also that you've included alt-text. You can use free compression tools to lower the weight of your image and ensure fast loading times.
We also recommend using the WebP format, as it provides high-quality images at significantly smaller file sizes compared to traditional formats like JPEG or PNG.
Internal links are an important factor for on-page SEO. In simple terms, they connect the pages across your website together. Internal links improve user experience by making it easier to navigate your website. But internal linking goes beyond that; they also help search engines understand your site structure, making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your website.
See internal linking as spreading power throughout your website. Because of this, you want to link more to high-priority pages that you consider most important. For e-commerce stores, this could mean linking more often to a parent page (root page).
Off-page SEO refers to the implementation of strategies that happen outside your website, but still have a big impact on your rankings. This is especially important when it comes to AI Search. AI and search engine algorithms need to trust you enough to show your website, and off-page SEO can help with that.
The biggest example of off-page SEO is link building, which involves finding trustworthy backlinks from reputable websites to link back to your own site. Other examples of off-page SEO also include digital PR and even social media to build the authority of your website and place your brand as a thought leader within your niche.
When done right, off-page SEO is just as important as on-page SEO, signalling to search engines that your content is trustworthy and highly valuable to your target audience.
International SEO and Local SEO are both branches of general search engine optimization. However, they serve very different purposes and, because of this, they need to be targeted at very different audiences.
Here are some of the main differences between International SEO and Local SEO:
International SEO involves optimizing your website to rank in search results in multiple countries. The idea is to target global audiences across different regions, languages, or countries. It's best used for global companies or e-commerce brands that ship internationally.
Some aspects of international SEO include:
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your online visibility to attract local customers from a specific geographic area (this could be a city, state, or region). It's designed to increase your brand's visibility in local search results. For example, users might search for "dentist near me" or "best pizza in Brooklyn." This makes local SEO the best choice for brick-and-mortar stores, franchises or multi-location businesses, and businesses that wish to target a specific city or region.
Here are some important aspects of local SEO:
Important Note – Many people don’t understand local SEO fully, which leads them to make mistakes. They want to target "near me" in SEO, but you don't want to target "near me" as a keyword. You target the location, such as Austin. Someone searching “near me” in Austin will then get the result. Expert guidance can help you avoid mistakes such as these.
Paid advertisements have always been popular. As we’ve mentioned earlier in this article, they provide immediate, targeted audience reach in order to make sales and increase revenue. In theory, this is an excellent strategy, and in practice, it can be effective. However, there are a lot of cons with paid advertising, such as:
Think of it this way: with paid ads, you're pushing your products in people's faces, whereas with SEO, you're targeting people who are actively looking for solutions to their problems, which can come in the form of your products.
In order to build an effective on-page optimization strategy, you need to complete thorough keyword research. There is a range of tools out there that you can use to identify high-traffic, low-competition search queries relevant to your products and services (but more on that later).
Here are some quick tips to complete in-depth keyword research that will help you rank:
Effective and well-thought-out keyword research will guide your entire SEO strategy and help you capture organic search traffic with the highest search intent.
Content creation is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Good, high-quality content is more likely to rank higher in the search results, which will drive organic search traffic to your e-commerce site. More than that, high-quality content also builds trust between your brand, your users, and search engines like Google. The more helpful and innovative your content is, the easier it becomes to trust you.
Here are some top tips for creating high-quality, valuable content that both users and search engines want to see:
Backlinks are a huge ranking factor, and your link-building strategy can make or break your SEO. There are a lot of ways you can earn links, such as through guest posts, collaborations, and high-quality content that other websites and social media profiles will want to reference. When it comes to digital PR in particular, the your brand is featured in authoritative industry publications, the more successful your campaign will be. This will help you build credibility.
Here are some tips for creating an effective link-building and digital PR strategy:
Search engine optimization is made much easier when you have the right tools. Here are some popular and effective auditing and keyword research tools that professional digital marketing agencies are using:
If you have the knowledge, it's absolutely possible to do SEO yourself. Many online retail business owners start out by managing their own basic SEO. Tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and certain keyword research platforms are free or offer basic plans, which makes it easier to get started and build an SEO foundation without hiring a professional agency.
That said, SEO can be complex, and as your website grows, investing in professional support can help you scale. SEO becomes more costly if you don’t invest and end up with a failing strategy. Pay a little now or pay a lot later to fix it.
SEO professionals understand exactly what strategies to implement so search engines discover your e-commerce site quicker and easier than ever. Professionals in search engine marketing can wipe your website clean of technical debt and fix website issues that you might not have even realized were having an effect on your SEO. Some agencies, like us, will even help you with market research for product expansion.
SEO is a fantastic and effective way to make money. Unlike paid advertising, which focuses on quick gains that disappear as soon as you stop paying for them, search engine optimization gives you a sustainable way to make a profit by continuing to target customers long after you've implemented the strategy. For example, a high-quality blog post can continue to make money years later.
Furthermore, since the focus is on driving organic search traffic, this makes it easier to turn those users into paying customers, especially if your keyword research targets multiple aspects of the sales funnel. The most successful businesses have a strong ads strategy and SEO strategy. This means product views, more conversions, and ultimately more revenue.
However, one thing to note is that search engine optimization is not a quick fix. In order to create an effective SEO strategy, you need an upfront investment of time or money, and patience. Most brands don't start seeing real results and big gains until at least six months in. But when done right, the Return on SEO Investment is substantial over the long term.
SEO is absolutely worth it for ecommerce businesses. In fact, it's essential. This cost-effective marketing strategy is designed to attract highly targeted traffic and build long-term brand equity. It doesn't matter if you're a completely new brand or a giant that's been carving out a place in your niche for decades – SEO benefits all. A strong SEO strategy will dramatically improve your visibility and, thus, your sales.
General SEO is the practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in search engine results (such as Google) for relevant keywords. The main focus of general SEO includes content (that means blogs and guides, service pages), site structure, backlinks, page speed, and more. The goal of any type of SEO is to provide valuable information your audience needs, and increase organic visibility and traffic to a website.
E-commerce SEO is a specialized form of SEO that uses the same practices, but is specially tailored for online stores that sell products. The general focus for ecommerce SEO tends to be product pages, category pages, technical SEO, structured data, and user experience to optimize conversions.
Some of the best SEO tools for e-commerce brands include:
Note – Avoid Shopify SEO apps. Apps such as Plug in SEO and Smart SEO can optimize incorrectly and tank your site. Instead, invest in expert Shopify SEO services.
SEO is not a quick marketing fix that goes away when you stop pouring money into it, like paid advertising. The main focus of SEO is providing users with the real, valuable information they’re looking for and increasing your digital presence. It's a sustainable way to improve your search engine rankings and achieve long-term growth, which makes it imperative for all businesses, especially those in the ecommerce sector.
There are many different components of SEO, such as technical optimization, keyword research, high-quality content, and link-building. When they work in tandem, you can position your brand to capture the right attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
We're a team of SEO professionals, expert-led by Thomas Phillips with 19+ years of SEO experience. We optimize and implement SEO strategies for ecommerce brands, skyrocketing brand visibility and driving huge amounts of revenue and ROSI (Return on SEO Investment).
Need a professional to manage your SEO? Apply to work with us today.
