E-Commerce SEO: Top Tips for Success, Common Mistakes, Best & Worst Web Platforms, and more!

Welcome to another very special edition of Crawling Mondays. Today's edition will be about ecommerce SEO. I have with me Kristina Sarenko, ecommerce and SEO consultant who's also the founder of Marketing Syrup, and Luke Carthy, an ecommerce and SEO consultant, also well known as ecommerce badass too. Hopefully YouTube doesn't cut me or flag me in some way. them with me today because today's episode is going to be completely focused on very actionable tips for ecommerce SEO. What are really the biggest differences in an ecommerce SEO process than the typical traditional SEO process in general?

Yeah, so that's a good question. I love that question. Alright, I'm gonna jump right in this and say that the biggest thing for me is the fact that There's nowhere to hide, right? So everything in ecommerce typically is down to sales online. So if something goes well, you'll see it in the money in the till, and equally if something doesn't work so well, then you'll see it there. So it's not— I think that's what I love about it. It's the speed, the spontaneity, how immediate it is versus sort of lead gen or say insurance, which is kind of, you know, there's multiple parts of the funnel. A lead is just the beginning. E-commerce is the transaction is outside of returns and cancellations, that's the pretty cool stuff. But I think the biggest thing is that traffic is not sales and sales is not traffic. So normally when clients are onboarded, their first thing is like, right, want more traffic. And my first question is, which always kind of baffles people is, why? Tell me why you want more traffic. I'm genuinely curious. And normally it's an answer like, well, we want more visitors, right? Actually, no, your actual end goal is the fact that you want to have a more successful ecommerce business. Traffic is just a way to get to that stepping stone. It's not the end goal. And I think that's one of the big things. So you've got kind of CRO blended in there. You've got internal search. You've got loads of stuff. But I think I market myself as an ecommerce SEO because it just makes sense for clients. But it's not all-encompassing in terms of what ecommerce SEO is all about.

I love what you mentioned about how tight this is and how much more obvious in this particular ecommerce scenario becomes the fact that SEO should be aligned and connected with conversion optimisation, for example. Because even if you attract high-qualified traffic, if the product page or the category page is not usable, well organised, attractive, shows all the credentials to be taken seriously, pretty much the goal is not achieved, right?

Yeah.

So it makes it even more important to align our activities. activities with other specialists even in the organisation.

I totally agree that also not providing traffic but also making sure that this traffic converts is one of the most important things. And also when it comes to ecommerce, I find that in most situations that the user journey is much longer because it includes not only 1, 2 pages but in most of the cases people People will look through different products, they add many products to the cart. So internal linking is sometimes even more important for ecommerce websites if you compare with other types of websites in the form of navigation, in the form of breadcrumbs or related products. This is really important. And also, especially for huge ecommerce stores, they might be very dynamic. So there are special challenges in making sure that the stock, the new products are indexed and crawled and indexed timely, because if they are not, they are not on Google. And also finding the processes around handling out-of-stock products, which are out of stock completely or temporarily.

I love that you touched that because I think in general, a lot of people think of dynamic websites and they think by default of news. But some ecommerce, especially global ecommerce marketplaces, they have such a high dynamic type of inventory that sometimes it's very hard to control how you can effectively link to avoid wasting your crawl budget. Sometimes how to work with facets to make them meaningful, how to avoid crawling and indexing issues in general. So I think that is very spot on and definitely relevant too.

Yeah.

And from what you have seen, what do you think is the number one mistake that you think businesses make time and time again regarding ecommerce SEO?

Hard to think about only one mistake, but I think that in many situations it's just not understanding that just having products, just having products for example under a single category won't bring you the clients who are looking for more specific things. So for example, one of my favorite examples, swing chairs. If I have a category for swing chairs, it doesn't necessarily mean that if people are looking for specific types like outdoor, indoor, or the one that I have on the back, that people can easily find this. So companies don't think about organising their products in different ways, creating more specific categories based either on filters and optimising these categories or in general creating specific landing pages listing particular types of products and optimising them. It's not just linking.

I love that you covered that because realistically, in general, a lot of people think, of course, they want what you mentioned, Luke. They want traffic. They want that their effort is worth it. They won't target long-tail queries necessarily at the beginning, but realistically there's so much more opportunity sometimes in product queries, product-related queries. There are products out there that are very, very, very popular. So for example, Yeezy type of shoes, right? When you search for Yeezy model plus black, the search volume is sometimes higher than many categories or subcategories searches. It's crazy. So it depends as usual, right? So it's important to open our mind and show how flexible it should be, the optimisation and the categorisation that should actually connect with the way that the people search. It's not about applying rules to all, but that you should have a categorisation system that is flexible enough in order to connect with the search behaviour indeed.

That point's massive. It's a big one and it's a constant pain point. I think I'm gonna kind of fire one in from an in-house point of view rather than the agency side, kind of working on both sides. And for me, it's kind of like, can you tell us why organic performance is down on this product compared to last week or last month or last quarter? Because that's a constant question that a lot of in-house SEOs in the world of ecommerce will get thrown. And I think a lot of that has to do with stock. Like if you don't have something in stock, naturally Google's going to deprioritize the index over someone who does. Price comes into it, description comes into it, and all sorts of things. But a lot of the things that are important are variable. So one of the biggest things I guess I'm trying to say is that how stock can have a massive impact on the performance of ecommerce. And a lot of, you know, my kind of situation was constant meetings each week. Well, this isn't performing as well because you put your price up 20%. Or it's not performing as well because it's low in stock or you don't have any stock or you only put it back into stock yesterday and Google hasn't seen that in its cache, for example. So like a number of things that are in-house where people just point the blame at digital even though that may not be the problem. But to kind of expand on Kristina's point, that's absolutely brilliant, like filtered search or filtered navigation, fastest search, whatever you want to call it, is huge. It can absolutely destroy a site and it can absolutely make a site. And I've been at both sides of the scale where someone's just let their internal search bleed into Google and then it's created tens of thousands, if not millions of pointless URLs versus people, as you said both earlier about opportunities in long tail where you said size and color. And this works really well in B2B commerce. So I have a client in the world of computer networking where you've got like Cat6 Ethernet, 2-meter with this specification in blue. And it's a really specific granular search term, but these are the only people in the industry that have that keyword right now because they've embraced the long tail. So yeah, I love that. That's a big point.

But you know what? Realistically, with facets, for me, it's fascinating too, because if you think about it, it's not only about the ability to attract these additional potential customers, but also to facilitate the customer journey and the conversions in your own website. Because let's imagine, even if you're capable, because Many links. Let's say you have all the link popularity in the world with your wedding rings, wedding bands category page, but you don't have your type of wedding bands indexed. So for example, the gold, platinum wedding bands, and there are huge searches for them. You end up ranking in the top 10, in top positions for this query. But even like that, those users that end up clicking on your results, even if they don't see the metadata that necessarily includes the gold term somehow, but they think that they are going to get They get it there anyway. They need to additionally filter, click, interact much more with your own website, with the navigation in order to be able to reach the final product. So you're challenging the customer journey there, the conversion journey in your own website. So it's not only about purely SEO, but as we mentioned, the interconnection with SEO, user experience and general and a good optimisation and conversion at the end. Whenever you're starting with a new ecommerce-focused SEO audit, what are the first steps that you will tend to do?

Okay. So for me, there's one that literally slices right through the middle of SEO and CRO. And I think I might have brought it up earlier, but site search queries. So depending on the size of the site, maybe to use a percentage, the top 10% of their search queries that we'd see in GA or, you know, if they've got it configured correctly or if they've got like a third-party search engine, like say Doofinder or SLI or whatever. Take those top 10% or even top 25% of queries and fire them into a crawler via custom extraction. And the reason why I want to do this is because I want to make sure that the top, let's say, 5,000 search queries are returning the right products. Because if the answer to that question is no, that's an immediate fix. That's like for me to be able to prove and justify that I know what I'm talking about and to kind of get more buy-in into the more hands-on stuff like Search Console and talk about budgets and all this kind of stuff. So kind of like quick wins that can be actioned in like a couple of days. Because the reason why that sits on both sides is one, if you have a keyword that is searched for internally loads, then that's something you can optimize for or to see how it's been optimized for. Equally, if it's a high search keyword that doesn't have any, you know, low number of products or doesn't return any results, then that's a quick fix you can go and make in the search program to say, hey, this typo, this misspelling, this product doesn't go here and it should. And one perfect example of that, it's not a client of mine, but it's something I found online, is there's a large healthcare retailer here in the UK called Holland and Barrett, and they specify like vitamins and medicines, that sort of thing. But if you search on their website for coronavirus, you get no results found, which I think is absolutely outrageous.

Ridiculous, yeah.

So if they was a client, that would be the absolute first thing I'd be looking at fixing to get confidence, buy-in, and more authority in other parts of the business. That would be my first thing.

Interesting.

You know what?

I love that you mentioned site search because I think that in SEO, right, we tend to look for site search just to make sure that it's not necessarily indexed and those queries are properly targeted by the categorisation system with the actual taxonomy that is internally linked, etc. There's also criteria and importance of how does this align with attracting more queries, better queries without overlaying or cannibalizing the proper categorisation system of the website and also identifying opportunities. This is critical because this is where the user would tend to go and search for something that cannot be easily found in the navigation.

That's great.

Yeah, indeed. I look at is also title tags because this seems pretty straightforward, but at the same time, especially huge online stores, they're using templates to generate title tags for products and for categories. And for example, if these templates are too general or they, in the worst case scenario, the same for the whole website across the website, this is a huge potential to have it right and then the traffic will shoot and more people will come to the website and buy the product because that's basically what they are looking for. So yeah, this is a huge thing. And also what I find is that, as I mentioned, sometimes there are no processes around handling out-of-stock products and processes of handling categories that no longer exist and seasonal pages. So I find that in many cases you would find lots of 404 pages which first have traffic, you can see it in Google Analytics, or can have potentially different links and authority, but they are removed so they don't serve at all. So these are also things to look at.

That is a great tip. One of the things that actually is sad but it's true, you always with ecommerce websites that haven't had consistent SEO processes. You go to the old pages with backlinks that are not properly showing a 200 OK HTTP status. So old pages that have external backlinks and are showing 404s or are 302 redirecting instead of 301 redirecting. Or that are orphan pages that are not passing their value anywhere else. And the website structure. So yes.

It's also important to educate clients from the beginning that first of all, they shouldn't just remove pages without consulting with anybody. And also the number of cases when they need to talk to you first before making any changes. Because I remember a situation when I was literally— so I came up with title tags and I was literally going to the page 2 hours later to update and this page was removed. I was like, what's wrong? Am I crazy? And then I went to archive.org and so yes, this page existed. I'm not crazy. And I reached out to the client and they said, oh, we just don't need this page anymore.

Yeah, I think this is critical, by the way, especially with websites like this that are highly dynamic. is not only go and fix something but actually establishing rules and validations so those principles can be applied and evangelised also internally. So those principles that we initially fix continue to happen automatically, ideally, right? Within the organisation and the website after. What is the best and worst platform in ecommerce that you have had to work with in regards to SEO? That makes that changes an e-commerce to implement and that one that facilitates it all.

I feel, yeah, I feel really bad because I've just been on a webinar with Shopify.

Oh my God, you read my mind a bit.

Shopify is hard work, man. Forget it. I'm not even going to bother sugarcoating it. Like, it's a pain in the ass. Not— I mean, I get it, it's a great product and, you know, the barrier to entry for people trying to get online, especially right now with everything going on, is brilliant. But what they need is just someone on the board who basically says, look, yes, we offer a great product that allows brands to get online and start selling within like 60 minutes, but what we need to do is focus on SEO and just allow people to have more fluidity. And I get some of it's kind of like products, you know, transitioning to Shopify Plus. I get that. But at the same time, people will go from Shopify to another CMS because Shopify Plus isn't cheap. Let's not try and pretend it's like 50 quid a month to say $100 a month. It's a big investment. So they need to almost have like a middle package, which is kind of like WooCommerce, but from Shopify.

I was going to exactly mention that because really, I know I'm coming from the international SEO side of things. Shopify at this point. Well, you need to create a store for every market independently as an independent type of website and you whether are stuck using ccTLDs or subdomains. You cannot have subdirectories as far as I am aware today. Painful. And then speaking about WooCommerce, indeed, for a product that is pretty much free, right? You see all of the integrations and plugins. that of course WordPress by default already has for international configuration to facilitate it all. Things like that can hugely impact the investment.

Yeah, I'm biased because I can't say I have a complete comprehensive view of all ecommerce platforms. Have I used BigCommerce? Yes. But do I know it well enough to kind of say, hey, I'm a, you know, I'm brilliant at it? No. But I have a bias for WooCommerce. I think it's brilliant. I think regardless of where you are in the spectrum, whether you're a startup or whether you're a multi-million pound international ecommerce facility, it can have a place in your ecosystem. But yeah, I think that would say the worst and the best. I think Shopify have an opportunity, but right now they're killing it. So I can hate, but I can't hate too much. They're doing things right. But yeah, that's what I'd say.

Amazing.

Right. I think these are great points. And I think that in general, the choice of the platform will greatly be influenced on tech savvy, if you can call it like that. And also how huge your store is, about your growth plans in general. Because at the end of the day, Shopify can be a good content management system for those people who are not tech savvy and who need to start quickly. This is a great platform for these situations. I definitely love WooCommerce because again, it has flexibility of, it has ecommerce component and it has WordPress component. And I love WordPress because all the plugins make it really easy. But it's more for people who can understand, who either can understand how to update these plugins, how to add these plugins in general and sometimes even do some changes in the code or have developer resources who would do this. It's also important to understand that because hardly a store owner, offline for example, store owner who has never seen any of the platforms would be able to just go to WooCommerce and configure everything. That is just hard. So in this respect, Shopify is a winner. But when it comes to also huge stores, I think Magento is a good platform as well, but you need to have lots of investment. And the reason why I'm talking about Magento is that I used to work for many years for a company which produces extensions. So I'm pretty aware about the limitations and extensions in general and how much they cost. But definitely it requires lots of resources and lots of development resources.

Which you will say is an SEO tip that you will share you would like to share with the audience, something that is not necessarily mainstream and you think that is pretty overlooked in general that you would like to share as a last definitive tip from Luca and Kristina?

Yeah, so what I'd say that is often overlooked as far as I can see are seasonal pages. So first of all, seasonal pages, what I mean by that, for example, Christmas gifts, Mother's Day gifts and all these instances when you need a page just for some period of time. And what I've seen many times is that stores just create these pages and then remove and the next year they create this page again.

Another one.

Yeah.

So don't do this. With the year in the URL every single year.

That's what I wanted to say. Just to let people know, the year in the URL is not a huge ranking factor and especially for seasonal pages, you don't need to do this. You can create an evergreen seasonal page which will be relevant every year. You can update the title tag and all this stuff, but make it easily found during the season in your main navigation, in banner promos and all this stuff. And during summer, during spring, just don't link to this page. You can potentially even make it an orphan page because nobody needs Christmas gifts in summer. But do have these pages in place because they acquire authority as well. And in general, they're very important and they will save resources on creating them all over and over again.

So it's /christmas, it's /blackfriday, it's /valentinesday. And I have to say that even if people People are unlikely to search about Valentine's Day in October, right? And you don't want to link or feature this page from the homepage in October too. You can definitely, for example, during other times in the year feature or refer to other types of promotions that you do have at that point, right? Oh, you're coming for the Valentine's Day promotions here, but it's not Valentine's yet. So in the meantime, you can take a look at this and this and this other type of promotions that we offer on the website. So it should be a win-win. Again, not only purely from an SEO perspective, but from a commercial one too.

I think for mine, it would be in the world of ecommerce, you cannot rely on a 200 response code, right? You just simply can't. So what I mean by that is, I'll give Home Depot as an example. So when you combine categories with faceted navigation and filters, it can be very quick to find a bunch of orphan categories. So when I say orphan categories, I typically mean categories with one or fewer, one or no products in at all. So when you're crawling the site, which is like a first go-to for any SEO, right? Crawl the site, see what's going on. A lot of people may just disregard a 200 response code and say, hey, let's focus on the 404s, let's focus on the 302s, the 500s, the whatever. But actually, if you think about it, for the vast majority of ecommerce sites, empty categories will fire a 200 response. So technically they're fine, but from a UX and kind of like, why does this category even exist? It's not fine. So I would say there's absolutely the first thing to do is go and chase to find how many empty categories are on the site and fix them. So it kind of segues nicely on from Christina's point because you may have a Black Friday landing page, but then you may have a Black Friday page which has products on, but then you might have, for example, like a filter that has 42-inch TV. Now I know that because I'm researching one right now, that 42-inch TVs don't really exist anymore. They're now 43-inch. So you might find that your 42-inch filter, which is something that may be indexed, has no products in. So you could think about maybe discontinuing that category, redirecting it, and passing that equity over to the 43-inch filter. But my point here is there's lots of hidden SEO things that you can find where you just see a 200 response and think it's okay, when actually there could be some big wins you could make by Redirects and stuff.

I think this is critical, especially with websites that are so dynamic like this. For example, because when we audited the website at the start, we started seeing all of this content cannibalisation, duplication, thin content issues. So of course, like this third-level subcategory that only has 3 products and you say at that point, oh, it's thin, we are going to create a little bit of FAQs, testimonials, descriptions here so it is not so thin anymore. But realistically, maybe after 2 months or 3 months, There are not even 3 products, there's none because there's no availability. So it doesn't really make any point that you still have that page indexed in the first place. So yes, applying rules that are smart and integrated with your inventory and can be set automatically based on rules that are set, I believe is critical on websites like this. Thank you very much for your time, guys. You have been amazing. You have been fantastic. And please, if you like today's video, like the video, leave your questions in the comments. I will ask them to answer your questions. If you have any questions for Cristina or Luke, please leave them in the, in the comments and they will come back to answer them. Yes, smash this like button! Smash, smash! Thank you very much. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Thank you.