6 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices To Drive Site Traffic in 2024 – Shopify
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According to an Ahrefs report, 96.55% of websites don’t actually get any organic traffic via Google. The key to being the other 3.45%—a business that shows up at the top of Google search results pages (SERPs)—is to leverage tried-and-true search engine optimization (SEO) tactics.
So let’s look at some of the latest ecommerce SEO best practices and expert tips that will help you maximize views––and potential conversions––for your online store.
If you’re unsure where to begin or what to do, start here with your no-frills, straightforward ecommerce SEO to-do list.
📚 Read more: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO
Some of the top ecommerce SEO best practices to keep in mind in 2025 include choosing the right keywords and developing content to target those resources. Learn more about those best practices and more below.
Keyword research will uncover the words that people enter into Google when seeking a brand or product like yours. Once you uncover those keywords (also known as search terms), you’ll incorporate them into your website to help different pages rank as high as possible in Google search results.
A keyword research tool will help you identify the best keywords for your business to target. Ubersuggest is a free tool with upgrade options, as is the Moz Keyword Explorer. While Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free version, the $99 per month option provides everything you need to search for keywords and track your rankings.
Once you’ve chosen a tool, you’ll identify the words people most often search for when they’re looking to buy a product that you sell.
An easy way to do that is to search your product on Google. Find which business is ranking at the top of results and then plug it into a tool, see what keywords they rank for, and implement a similar strategy. For example, searching for “rosette shaped succulents for sale” generates search results where the brand Succulents Box ranks first.
📚 Learn more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide
There are a multitude of reasons why someone searches for something online. Each reason is known as a particular type of search intent. What you’re looking for are the people searching with intent to buy. For example, someone might Google “prickly pear cactus” because they’re looking for photos of one, or they might do so because they want to purchase one for their garden.
To uncover the keywords that actually have purchase intent behind them, you need to look at what keywords Google ranks product and collection website pages for. If Google is ranking product and collection pages for that keyword, then you know it’s buying intent.
For example, the keyword “prickly pear cactus” generates images, a definition explaining what they are, and care instructions. A search for the keyword “prickly pear cactus for sale,” on the other hand, yields collection pages. So, that’s the keyword with purchase intent behind it, and the keyword you’d need to target.
Now that you’ve uncovered a set of keywords aligned to the different products you sell, you’ll need to place them strategically on different pages on your website and build content around them.
That means placing keywords in:
You can do all of this in the back end editing section of your ecommerce website. While it’s important to ensure your keywords are strategically placed, avoid overuse—a practice known as keyword stuffing. In other words, when you’re incorporating keywords, make sure they don’t impact the flow or readability of your content.
Here’s how keywords might translate across different parts of your ecommerce store:
A meta title is the title of your page that shows up on the result page of a search engine like Google. Optimizing your meta titles by adding keywords to them is a low-effort, high-reward SEO fix you can make to your site.
People often say you don’t see SEO results for six months, but there are times when the biggest jump in results are from the first month just because the meta title is so important.
You should be able to set a meta title for any page on your website on the back end of the ecommerce platform you use. On Shopify, within your admin dashboard, navigate to the page you need to edit in the sidebar and scroll down to the “search engine listing preview” at the bottom of the page.
It looks like this:
For example, Succulents Box ranks on the first SERP for the term “tulip prickly pear cactus for sale.” The meta title for the page that ranks is “Tulip Prickly Pear Cactus | Succulent Care Instruction.” The brand likely added “succulent care instruction” to capture the people looking for how to care for the succulent in addition to those looking to purchase one.
Similar to adding the keywords you’re targeting to meta titles, an SEO best practice is to add that keyword to the corresponding meta description as well.
📄 Learn more: How To Write Meta Descriptions: Tips and Examples 2025
Link building involves reaching out to different brands and publications online and seeing if they will link to a page on your website from their website. The more backlinks you have, the more credible you are to Google, since the search engine rewards that credibility with a higher position in search results. In short: If a lot of other folks trust your content and see it as worthy of a link, Google will as well.
Building backlinks to your website is an important ecommerce SEO best practice. There are tons of ways to do this, so perusing a list of link building ideas is a great way to get started.
Cultivating relationships with other brands is one of the most powerful backlink building strategies—as long as you create top-notch content that’s worth linking to.
This is where creating content for a blog comes in. While other brands might not want to link to a collection page that shows a list of the products you have for sale, they may get excited about a helpful blog post. For example, they’ll be more likely to link to a blog post that shares succulent care tips than they are a collection page of succulents. You’ll also want to link to your collection and/or product pages from that blog post, which can help pass along those link signals.
Link building requires outreach and relationship building, but internal linking involves creating links between pages. That means linking to one of your blog posts from a different blog post or linking to a collection page from a relevant blog post. Both types of links are effective in helping pages rank.
Setting up Google Merchant Center and syncing your product feed with your store is an essential step you’ll need to take in order to rank organic product listings on Google. This will allow your listings to show up in Google Organic Product Grids, which have started to take up prime real estate in search results.
Here’s how to do it.
A product page features a singular product, like a blue candle cactus. A collection page shows all of the products in a category, like all plants within the cactus family. While it’s challenging to get product pages on page one, collection pages are much easier to rank.
Google tends to prefer ranking collection pages for more generic non-branded queries, like “indoor succulents.” This is because collection pages provide searchers with more options. Product pages often rank for more specific queries, like “ruby glow succulent.”
The collection pages can respond really well to links, so it’s better to spend your resources ranking those. Because there’s so much you can do SEO-wise, if you’re doing it yourself, focus your energy on helping collection pages show up in search results rather than product pages, which can become a dead end.
For example, Urban Americana, a vintage midcentury modern shop in Long Beach, California, has found success with this ecommerce SEO best practice. Its collection page for all midcentury modern furniture ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword “vintage mid century modern furniture.”
A big benefit of ranking a collection versus a product page is that shoppers can see your entire inventory for a certain category. It gives them more options, rather than sending them to a single product page where they have only one choice.
💡 It’s essential to link to collection pages in the main navigation of your online store. If you have too many collections to link to them all in the main navigation, then link to related collections that are not featured in the nav from collections that are featured in the nav. This is sort of like creating sub-collections or child collections.
Creating a blog is an important part of an ecommerce SEO strategy, but not for the reasons you might think. Rather than thinking about blog traffic as something that drives sales, the real benefit of having a blog is that it creates something called topical relevance.
Google likes ranking sites that are authoritative in their space. That could mean having a really good link profile. It could also mean having very high quality content that answers all the questions people have about a particular product.
For example, plant shop Succulents Box creates short pieces of content around informational keywords that relate to succulent care, such as:
Once you create these pieces of content, add an internal link from each blog post to the corresponding collection. For example, you might link the article about growing succulents in sand to a collection page of succulents that thrive in sandy soil.
By doing that, you create that layer of relevancy and those blogs help the collection pages rank.
A blog post doesn’t need to be a long, in-depth piece of writing. In fact, shorter, more-specific pieces can perform better. Google likes granular content. Instead of creating an ultimate guide and ranking for all these keywords, it’s actually easier and more effective to create separate articles for each subject, so that your article is hyper focused on one topic.
That means ditching the ultimate guide to succulent care, for example, and opting for articles that tackle smaller sub-topics—a practice known in the SEO world as targeting long-tail keywords. Succulents Box, for example, publishes short blog posts about caring for specific varieties of succulents:
✅ Check all the boxes: Want to Rank Your Store? Get On Page One With This SEO Checklist
There are many advantages to creating an intentional ecommerce SEO strategy, including:
Providing more predictable and cost-effective traffic. SEO can have a strong impact on your revenue, brand awareness, and brand trust if you take the time to invest in it. While paid ads can seem more immediate, they’re extremely expensive and unreliable, and when you stop paying for them, you’ll stop seeing traffic and conversions. SEO is a much more stable way to send shoppers who have a high intent to purchase to your website. It’s a reliable, steady traffic source that will create a much stronger foundation for your business long term.
📙 Get the in-depth overview: What is SEO Marketing and How Does it Work?
To optimize SEO for ecommerce:
SEO for ecommerce involves optimizing your online store to help search engines find, index, and rank it effectively. This includes refining product and category page content, ensuring mobile responsiveness, using relevant keywords, building backlinks, optimizing multimedia, and measuring performance regularly to refine strategies.
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