E-Commerce SEO Services

E-Commerce SEO Services

Working with a dedicated SEO service provider is a smart way to extend your online store's marketing budget. This can be through an SEO agency or a single SEO consultant, who can advise on strategy while your in-house resource execute and stay focused on day-to-day priorities, such as an upcoming SEO migration, or optimising pages whose peak season is around the corner.

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Whatever the case, an e-commerce website requires e-commerce skillset and expertise, so making use of an external expert for your site makes perfect sense. When it comes to this North West SEO has ten years experience in helping online businesses in all sectors grow their revenue.

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How North West Can Help E-Commerce Businesses

North West SEO can assist you with growing your online store's organic presence. We are used to helping businesses of all sizes and budget types, and can create a plan that works for you.

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North West SEO Project Options

Our aim is to help businesses at a scale that they are comfortable with, that suits their existing 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.

• 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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Arrange your discovery call today to talk through your SEO requirements.

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Do Online Retailers Need SEO Services?

North West SEO can assist you with growing your online store's organic presence.

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E-Commerce SEO Services

North West SEO can assist you with growing your online store's organic presence. 

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E-Commerce SEO Explained

E-commerce is an online retail-focused business strategy where customers find goods on your website, checkout and pay for those goods to be shipped to their address or pickup location. In the B2C world, it is the most common way of engaging with customers, along side content publishing like news and blog sites and lead generation. It differs from content publishing due to the fact the publishers rely on ad revenue to stay in business. It differs from lead-gen because you take payment directly from the customer, as opposed to being paid to deliver the customer to the service provider. 

 

Additionally, e-commerce stands out by having PLPs and PDPs, or else category pages and product pages. Optimising the two kinds of pages is essential to your e-commerce business’ success, so an experienced SEO consultant is often needed to take a web store to the next level.

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PLP vs PDP

A PLP is a Product Listing Page, and a PDP is a Product Description Page. A PLP is a category page that lists all the products within that category (think ‘handbags’ with all the individual handbag products listed in a grid). If you select a product, you will be taken to the PDP, the product description page with all the individual specifications and information on that product; size, materials, images, performance.

 

Getting the SEO right ensures your PLPs rank for the right terms and your PDPs rank for the right terms, and that multiple categories don’t conflict with one another. To ensure this, make use of the marketing funnel.

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The Marketing Funnel Explained

The marketing funnel explains every customers journey up until they make their purchase - hopefully from you. We won't go into depth here, but we'll simply give insight into how to cater to your prospective customers.

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Top of the funnel

This is informational - customers are researching the product; what brands they can choose from, which product type is right for them. For instance, they have decide they want to take up running, but now must decide which running shoe is right for them. This informational content is non-transactional, so your PLPs and PDPs will not successfully answer these queries - but your blogs and guides will.

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Middle of the funnel

At this stage, customers know broadly what they need and what their budget is, but need to decide on specific details - do they spend more and get Nike, or do they go budget on Decathlon's reasonably-priced shoes? Alternatively, they are deciding between different retailers. Generally, your PLPs and PDPs start doing their thing here. They give details to customers to inform them and get them ready to buy.

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Bottom of the funnel

These queries are very specific, and low volume, but at this stage the buyer is very ready to make a transaction. They are searching manufacturer numbers, retailer SKUs, looking for voucher codes, and discounts and deals. A click from these queries will result in a high purchase rate, if the online store satisfies the user. Your PDPs are needed here.

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PLP SEO In Detail

PLPs or category pages handle middle of the funnel queries, such as general product terms. Think 'engagement rings' for a jewellery retailer, or 'solitaire engagement rings', a more specific term, but with more qualified traffic. PLPs can be as granular or as long-tail as you need them to be (eg. 'white gold solitaire engagement rings' or 'white gold lab-grown-diamond solitaire engagement rings'), but online stores need to balance:

• Having the topical authority,

• Having enough products to justify the category

• Customer demand (search volume)

• Not cannibalising another page

 

If a granular category has several hundred searches a month, the category can be worth pursuing, however being competitive on page one will mean being acknowledged by search engines as being an expert in the field (a reputable jewellery store that), so long as for whatever reason search engines aren't preferring a more broad keyword-focused page for that granular query. If the demand is right, having a low inventory of products will likely hinder chances at page one, in which case speak with suppliers to bring in additional options for that category if this makes business sense.

 

A PLP with 2 products is not good experience for shoppers, so your focus would need to be on the higher level pages.

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Keyword research

If the demand is there, and your product range can satisfy most users, then ensuring you are targeting the correct keyword is paramount. Are you creating a page for 'trainers' (UK and British English) or 'sneakers' (USA)? The focus keyword will depend on your target market. For B2B businesses, knowing your SME (UK) from your SMB (US) will define which location you rank for.

 

Additionally, every category page must have a focus keyword. Accidentally replicating PLPs  

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Technical SEO Considerations for PLPs

Getting the technical SEO aspect of your PLPs is essential, especially when you have an e-commerce website with thousands of PLPs, let alone PDPs. Internal linking, load speed and canonicals all matter here. For instance, a PLP with only a handful of products may make sense for a user journey point of view, but it is unlikely Google will choose to rank this over a related PLP with more products, so you'd need to ensure the canonical URL is for the page Google will prefer. Schema markup is another aspect of technical SEO that needs to be filled as in-depth as possible. Images need to be optimised for fast loading too.

 

Whether filter URLs and parameters are indexed depends on your CMS and its capabilities, but generally, only index these if there's enough products to justify it. Some online retailers make do with filter URLs being un-indexable, and that's okay too. Using canonical URLs, we are able to provide hints to Google about how we want any URL treated, such is the magic of technical SEO.   

 

PDP SEO In Detail

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Keyword research

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Technical SEO Considerations

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AI Chatbots and E-commerce

AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are becoming increasingly important source of referral traffic, but also a large source of draining websites of clicks. So where do e-commerce businesses stand?

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By and large, SERP rankings correlate with AI citations, both on Google and Bing. The amount of queries you can answer - by way of in-depth PDPs and detailed content across your site will affect how often you get cited in a response.

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Additional SEO Strategies for E-commerce

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Top of funnel content: Lists and Guides

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Lists

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Guides

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Internal links

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Backlinks

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Schema

Schema markup is essential to organic channel success. These snippets of code tell search engines everything technical they need to know about your business and the products you sell - provided you fill them in (or do this automatically through your CMS).

 

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