E-Commerce SEO Services

E-Commerce SEO Specialist For Your Business

​We don't need to explain how important the organic traffic channel is to online businesses and reducing marketing spend on other channels. But when it comes to growing its share, then businesses need to work with an SEO that can handle the intricacies of online retail, and who understands the strategies required for success in e-commerce aren't going to be the same as the SEO strategy in a lead generating site.

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North West SEO has 10 years experience across e-commerce websites in a variety of industries. If you are looking to increase revenue driving traffic to your retail business' digital channel, contact us to create a plan to increase sales through organic traffic channels, i.e traffic from SERPs and from referrals within generative AI.​

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The Pillars of Our E-Commerce SEO Services

​When it comes to optimising e-commerce websites, our focus is on ensuring the foundations are strong: clean technical SEO, coherent URL architecture, strong Core Web Vitals (CWV), and content that is well focused on the target keyword, topic and intent. Here's how we handle each aspect of SEO for online stores.

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SEO for PLPs (Product Listing Pages)

SEO for PLPs needs to take technical elements into account, but also category content needs to be best-in-class for search engines.

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At a technical level, PLPs need to exist in a URL architecture that makes sense, and allows PageRank and authority to flow from the domain root to the PLP in a focused and logical manner. For example, fashion e-retailer would have a Men's, Women's or Kids' folder under the root, and various clothing would live under the gender folder.

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Additionally, e-commerce sites need to control their faceted navigation to ensure filters do not create infinite URLs and waste crawl budget and create cannibalisation issues. This also means canonical URLs must be correctly implemented. Internal linking also needs to be healthy and not contain silo pages and we would look for opportunities to create a 'hub and spoke' model for the website.

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In terms of PLP content, we'd look to craft tight, keyword rich category content that has semantic variations (LSI keywords) and doesn't keyword stuff. The aim is to feed Google's Natural Language Processing (NLP) with the text it expects to see in the PLP.

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SEO for PDPs (Product Detail Pages)

For PDPs, SEO considerations again need to meet technical and content best practises. Our SEO strategy for PDP pages will aim to ensure that keyword cannibalisation does not occur between product variants with similar SKUs, and will go beyond simple descriptive key-word rich content to ensure PDPs rank. Ranking in e-commerce incorporates having as many helpful elements for the user - from a rich gallery of well-optimised images, to size charts to reduce return rates, spec tables and reviews to encourage trust and show product quality. PDPs also need to show competitive USPs to encourage conversions.

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Site architecture and internal linking

Site architecture and internal linking are high priorities when we handle online stores. URL mapping needs to be keyword researched, and folders/PLPs need to make sense, so we take time to map out the URL architecture of your store.

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Additionally, we ensure internal linking to PDPs and PLPs showcase their weighting to the site, by ensuring there are hub pages and support pages. While category content is one way to achieve this, some e-commerce stores benefit from quick links to sub pages too. We will work with you and your team to find every opportunity possible to signal a pages importance.

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Off-page SEO and link building 

Finally, as well as working with you to showcase your website's authority using on-page SEO, we can also work with you to build authority off-page through link-building campaigns. We will aim to drive links to your home pages, core PLPs and best-selling PDPs, as well as informational content to ensure there is a natural mix of links. We can do this by working with you on digital PR campaigns, while we can also utilise outreach to grow your backlink profile.​

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E-Commerce schema markup

Rich Snippets such as schema markup are a crucial element of SEO, and our aim is to work with clients to ensure your CMS offers as granular schema markup as possible, from Review schema, to Product Offer for discounts, to Price and FAQs. Any information shared on the page needs to be implemented through markup as this allows search engines to understand the entity and your website can win rich snippets.

 

Additionally, search engines like Bing are more literal than Google, so having this mark-up facilitates its understanding of your page, driving traffic from non-Google Search organic searches.

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Buying guides and category content

In order to facilitate top-of-the-funnel traffic, we will work with you to create in-depth buying guides and well optimised category content. This ensures your brand is present with customers that are still in the research phase of their buying journey and will be more malleable to your online store when they are ready to make their purchase. We will  assist with all keyword research and competitor analysis required for these projects to ensure any buying guides or PLPs that go live are in the strongest position to win rankings in the SERPS and citations in AI chatbots.

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How SEO Can Increase Conversions Rate and AOV 

​Visibility and traffic to your site is great, but it's meaningless if users are not adding products to their basket and purchasing. In our experience, working to improve conversion rate for a PDP is also work that should improve rankings. Ultimately, we must do work that improves the experience of the online shopper, and reduce any point of friction that might prevent them from making a purchase. PDPs need to answer all incidental questions - not just about the product, but about the buying experience. These are trust signals that reduce friction in making a purchase decision. Anything from indicating 'click and collect' and delivery and returns information, to showcasing payments in instalments (Klarna, PayPal Pay In 3, etc) or any applicable discount codes. By having PDPs and PLPs that show you understand user pain points, your on-page signals will be stronger, your reviews will be more positive, and work that is tangential to direct SEO will aid search engines and generative AI chatbots to return your brand in results more often.​

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Additionally, by prioritising higher ticket products in any workflow, we can aim to have higher revenue products improve rankings earlier in the campaign, increasing your businesses AOV.

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Speak with North West SEO to see how we can help your e-commerce website improve in organic performance.

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​​​AI Chatbots and E-Commerce (GEO)

Until agentic AI really takes off and purchases can happen within LLMs, AI chatbots are excellent 'keyword discovery' tools, and that's how we treat them at North West SEO.

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That means, prompts about any problem - from looking for an outfit to wear, to how to solve an issue in the garden - will inform searchers of the keyword they're thinking of, but don't have a name for. Consider a real scenario: "My neighbours have trimmed their hedge that separates out gardens, and I have lost all privacy. Give me some suggestions to get privacy back, such as plants or fencing".

 

In this scenario, the prompter knows they want privacy and want to achieve it easily. The AI tool (Gemini in this case) recognised the issue and suggested hedge plants worth considering, but also bamboo screening as a convenient method of blocking the view into/from the neighbour's garden. From there the user can focus their research on the solution that best suits them - while they had considered hedges and plants, and considered a fence, they were unaware of a screening solution that turned out to be a better fit due to the dense network of roots in the soil.

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The same logic applies to SEO for e-commerce and where AI tools fit in. By ensuring we have content that showcases solutions for the product you're selling, then we can encourage the generative AI tool to recommend your top-level solutions, and encourage users to journey to the bottom of the funnel and purchase from you.

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This requires a strategy of comprehensive content, but also technical aspects such as schema markup need to be as impactful as possible. 

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Our E-Commerce SEO Process

Our SEO process aims to provide you with SEO support at a scale that suits you.

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Discovery call - we'll initially have a free discovery call with you to understand what it is you need and how best we can help

Roadmap - we'll then draft a roadmap and initial quote for our services. If you need 1,-, 3- or 12-month SEO support the road map will illustrate what that will look like.

Execution - once we agree on the scale and scope of work, we will get to work optimising your site.

Support - we don't guarantee results, but we guarantee we'll try. That means we make ourselves available after handover of work for any ongoing support regarding the project and to offer SEO advice. We offer a free re-write if needed, but we can make small adjustments at no charge (at our discretion).

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North West SEO Project Options

Our aim is to help businesses at a scale that they are comfortable with, with SEO prices that suit their budget. That's why we've created a three tier project system, so that you can get the level of support that you need, in a way that does a meaningful amount of work. We can work on an ad-hoc basis, or on a retainer basis, whatever works for you.

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• Page-by-page: You tell us the pages you want to work on, and we will get them optimised. We will offer you a 3-month period of support to ensure that any SEO work done to these pages has a lasting impact.

• Project-by-project: for product launches, sudden ranking drops, sudden traffic drops, algorithm update recovery, SEO migration recovery and much more, a ad-hoc project may be best for you. Again, this is offered with a 3-month support period to ensure work is done in a manner that has impact.

• Whole website:  Our retainer service, we will audit your entire site, and work on it in any way we can, with priority tasks set by you.

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With this in mind, we offer two systems that are designed to work alongside your resources. We can offer SEO consulting services for your e-commerce businesses, or SEO management. Our expertise is the same, but these systems differ based on where the execution of the strategy happens. 

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1. E-Commerce SEO Consulting

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Our SEO consulting service is aimed at fully functional in-house marketing teams and with this SEO is 'done with you'. We will provide strategies, ideas, briefs and fix lists and your team of devs, content writers and SEO executive action these. We will conduct audits and analysis and provide your team with plan of action.

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With this system, we are as seasoned set of eyes you didn't have before and an extension of your existing SEO Manager or Head of SEO.

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2. Full-Campaign SEO Management​

For e-commerce businesses with no dedicated SEO practitioners, our SEO management model is designed to be 'done for you'. In this system, we will handle your entire organic strategy from start to finish. We will require access to your CMS and we from there we will audit and devise a strategy and then we will execute it.

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3. One-Off Projects

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We provide SEO services on a one-off basis for business owners that are undergoing major projects and need additional resource, or for those that want to see if working with an SEO consultant is the right move for their online store. This provides a low-risk but scalable option to get started on your SEO expert hiring journey.

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This ad-hoc SEO service is designed to provide you additional resource for a migration you undertaking, for recovering traffic after an algorithm update, or simply when launching a new product range.

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North West SEO Online Retail Experience

Our experience in SEO runs across multiple industries, and we've worked on e-commerce sites with 100,000 SKUs, working on everything from PDPs and PLPs to bulk updating titles and descriptions. Read our case studies to learn more.

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Who Is North West SEO?

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North West SEO is an SEO service formed by Pana Markides in Bolton, Greater Manchester. North West SEO has ten years experience in SEO in in-house roles and also agency driving sales-generating organic traffic to websites in e-commerce, to lead generating websites in the energy sector, in the automotive world and many other sectors too.

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Our experience makes us efficient at solving problems such as traffic dropping to your website, rankings falling, algorithm update recovery and post-migration issues. We are not just here for our clients during the good times.

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E-Commerce SEO FAQs

What e-commerce platforms and CMS do you work with?

We have a history of working with all major CMS platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Wix and a fast learning curve for new ones. In fact, every website has a different set up, and we quickly identify the quirks and considerations of our clients' websites and work with the systems they have in-place and do our best to achieve success. It could be the CMS is set so all new pages default into the top-nav, it could be that security measures mean only absolute URLs can be used in internal links otherwise the page fails to update. ​

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How do you use AI in your SEO workflow?

AI has become a valuable too enhance an experts capabilities, and is less useful in giving expertise to someone with no experience, so we are constantly exploring new ways to use AI platforms to improve our process, and not replace the SEO. To this end, we use AI tools, predominantly Gemini for content and topic research and heading suggestions, and when creating pages, all content is written by hand. If brand guidelines mean keeping to a certain style, we will use generative AI to edit in that style without changing the substance.

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Where online retailers have large quantities of un-optimised products we can bulk generate titles, descriptions and product copy based off of any specifications we have, but those will be checked and edited. The aim is to speed up a task, not take over the entire task.

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How do you handle large scale SEO optimisations?

For larger sites, our process is to work section by section, prioritising seasonality and revenue.​ As an example, for a clothing retailer, if jackets are highly profitable and high revenue, then they are a high priority, but we will not work on these pages in the winter, we will work on them in the summer so that rankings can mature and be at their highest by the time their peak season arrives.

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Ideally, for larger sites we would liaise with in-house teams to ensure developers are taking on internal links fixes in bulk, canonical fixes in bulk.

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Can you guarantee results?

No, we cannot guarantee results such as specific rankings for specific keywords. What we can guarantee is a specific set of deliverables, such as work handed over. We work based on a pre-agreed set of output, and we will deliver those, but no SEO can guarantee rankings or traffic.

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How much does e-commerce SEO cost?

Our SEO services are designed to scale with your needs, so the cost depends on the amount of work you need. However, to ensure a predictable quote, we use a daily rate of £250 per day, and in our discovery call we will assess how much work you need per month - we can start at a minimum of a day a month.

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How long does e-commerce SEO take?

There is no set time period for SEO, but as a guide, for any new SEO strategy to set in it's well worth budgeting for a year to assess the results. That said depending on productivity, you should be able to see green shoots within three months or at the next Google update, when rankings are generally given a shake-up and improvements tends to start having an effect if they hadn't had an effect yet.

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What's the difference between SEO and Organic Traffic channel for an e-commerce website?

There are many terms used across the digital marketing sphere, that include SEO, GEO and organic, so there may need to be some de-mystification for these terms, and where North West SEO occupies. SEO is a useful short-hand to describe the general process of optimising websites for search engines, both on- and off-page, including technical optimisations. GEO is a newer term that has captured the vocabulary of CMOs everywhere, leading to lots of confusion in the SEO world, but focuses on traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT. GEO is essentially the same work as SEO, but the focus is more on the tasks that improve citations in generative AI, not rankings in SERPs. Given generative AI uses search engine indexes, there is a lot of overlap.

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North West SEO prefers to focus on the wider organic traffic channel, that is to say unpaid traffic from sources that include search engines and chatbots. As it happens, chatbots like ChatGPT use search engine indexes already, so good SEO is good GEO, and it's all organic traffic anyways.

 

To make it abundantly clear:

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Organic traffic = Search + LLM referrals (+ organic social, but usually this is a separate specialist).

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Our SEO strategy will aim to increase visibility and sales-generating traffic from search engines and LLMs.

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Get in touch with North West SEO to increase organic performance for your e-commerce site.