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Ecommerce merchants can use SEO management to strategically increase the visibility of their online stores.
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The process of improving where your website appears on a page of search results is called search engine optimization (SEO), and it can have a huge impact on how many potential customers you reach online.
Put yourself in a consumer’s shoes. Imagine you want to purchase a new e-bike but don’t know what features to look for or where to shop. You’d probably turn to Google Search or Microsoft Bing to research e-bikes and make an informed decision. The articles reviewing specific bikes and sellers that appear higher in your search results have a better chance of grabbing your attention and ultimately influencing your purchase.
Proper SEO management takes time and attention, but it’s well worth the effort to drive more traffic to your ecommerce store. Keep reading to learn some SEO management best practices and explore a list of SEO tools you can use to better manage your own site’s visibility.
SEO management is the process of developing, implementing, and overseeing strategies that improve your website’s placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). For ecommerce merchants, SEO management is your roadmap to increased online visibility—using proven techniques like keyword optimization and backlinks to attract more traffic from search engine queries.
SEO management covers a range of different SEO practices, including the following:
On-page SEO involves optimizing web page content through strategies like keyword research, metadata optimization, and internal link building.
Off-page SEO focuses on ways to increase your website’s reputation and ranking through strategies like acquiring backlinks (when other sites link back to yours).
Blog SEO is a content marketing strategy that involves writing helpful blog posts that rank for search queries relevant to your business. While your product pages might rank for transactional keywords like “lightweight carbon e-bike,” your blog articles might rank for informational keywords like “e-bike battery life.”
Technical SEO is the process of improving a website’s structure, load speed, security, and optimization for mobile devices.
Local SEO—which primarily applies to businesses with a physical presence—is the practice of improving rankings for searches related to a specific area (e.g., “fabric store near me” or “barber shop Louisville”) through methods like using local keywords and creating a Google Business Profile.
International SEO involves optimizing your website to cater to users in different areas where your business operates by using dedicated URLs for different countries and translating your website copy into different languages.
When it comes to managing SEO, you can handle it yourself, hire an in-house SEO manager, or outsource your SEO management to an external resource like a freelancer or marketing agency. Regardless of your approach, effective SEO management includes tasks like competitor analysis, keyword research, link building, and monitoring performance.
Here are some best practices to follow when handling SEO management for your own site:
You’ve invested time and effort into creating quality content for your website, but your work doesn’t stop once you hit Publish. Keeping your content current and relevant is crucial for maintaining strong search rankings and providing value to your customers.
There are two approaches to content updates. First, monitor page performance for any sudden drops in rankings or traffic. If a previously successful page starts losing visibility, it likely needs a refresh. Check what new competitors might be outranking you with more comprehensive or current content, and ensure your page still follows Google’s best practices.
The second approach is proactive content monitoring. Pages with outdated statistics, discontinued products, or references to brands that no longer exist will benefit from updates. Refreshing this content before rankings decline is always the better strategy.
Google does advise that you avoid a couple of things when maintaining your content library:
Don’t update the published date without actually updating the page content.
Don’t needlessly add or remove content just to make it appear fresh.
Your initial competitor analysis was just the starting point. Successful SEO management means continuously monitoring your competition as they publish new content and target new keywords. You’ll also want to stay on top of trending topics in your industry to capture spikes in search traffic.
As you spot these opportunities, create new content or enhance existing pages to fill the gaps. For example, if you sell handcrafted items online, you might notice increased searches for a specific lacemaking technique. Creating a comprehensive how-to guide with helpful visuals can organically drive qualified traffic from those searches directly to your store.
Building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and valuable. These links not only generate direct referral traffic but also help improve your search rankings.
Start with a backlink audit using SEO tools like Ahrefs’s Backlink Checker or SEOptimer’s Backlink Checker to see who’s currently linking to your website. Tools like Semrush’s Backlink Gap can help you discover new link opportunities from relevant publications in your industry.
Next, focus on creating “link magnets”—valuable content that other websites naturally want to reference. Proprietary research, original surveys, and industry studies tend to attract backlinks. For instance, if you sell sleep products, conducting a survey about sleep habits could earn citations from health and wellness websites.
Other strategies that can increase your odds of earning backlinks include guest blogging, contributing expert insights to industry publications, monitoring current events in your field to anticipate content needs, and offering to be a source for journalists and writers.
With free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can analyze the state of your website’s technical SEO. Google Search Console can help you identify website errors, indexing issues, and potential security problems with your site.
Organizing and optimizing your website’s technical SEO can improve the user experience (UX) while making it easier for search engines to index and rank your pages at the same time. To improve your website’s functionality, focus on improving four key elements of your technical SEO:
Site architecture. Ecommerce merchants can improve their site structure by using a consistent URL structure and organizing their site with a clear internal linking structure.
Site speed. You can improve the loading speed of your site by optimizing images, removing unnecessary plug-ins or apps, and hosting with a reliable platform like Shopify.
Mobile-friendliness. Optimize your website for mobile devices by using a responsive page design or template that can recognize mobile visitors and cater to their experience, versus simply serving them a desktop version of your website.
Security. You can increase the security of your site through some basic best practices, such as ensuring your website has an SSL certificate that authenticates your website’s identity and creates an encrypted connection between it and a website visitor.
You’ll also want to continually optimize your ecommerce website’s metadata—an HTML format that helps website users and search engine algorithms better understand your content. Focus on using clear phrases and relevant keywords in your web page title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and alt text for images on your web pages.
See and respond to customer needs
Download this free target persona journey map to plot customer needs. Use the map to optimize your website, plan marketing content, and motivate shoppers to hit the buy button.
Use an SEO tool to monitor quantifiable metrics to gauge your site’s performance and progress against goals. Here are a few of the most relevant KPIs for SEO management:
Average position. This metric tracks how your pages rank on average for specific keywords.
Impressions. This is the number of times your pages appear in search results for relevant queries.
Search visibility. This percentage represents how much your website appears for specific keywords compared to competitors.
Organic CTR. Organic click-through rate measures how many users who see your listing actually click through to your site.
Traffic from organic search. This measures all traffic coming to your site from organic search.
Use a combination of free and paid SEO tools to generate a comprehensive SEO report—a document that collects insights and data about your ecommerce website’s search engine performance. Compile your performance metrics and organize them to analyze seven key areas:
Google SEO rankings. Track your website’s performance in relation to Google’s ranking factors.
Backlink profile. Cover link-building metrics about referring domains, acquired links, and the quality of links based on domain authority.
Website analytics. Measure factors like site speed and top landing pages to better understand your site’s structure and technical SEO.
Local SEO performance. If your business has a brick-and-mortar storefront, analyze local keywords and performance on local search queries related to your industry and localized area.
On-page optimization. On-page SEO reports cover key aspects of your website, like metadata optimization and content quality.
Referral traffic and engagement. Evaluate analytics related to user behavior, engagement, and referral traffic to better understand your website visitors.
Keyword performance. Finally, collect data about keyword performance using KPIs like keyword rankings, keyword difficulty, and CTR.
Here are some of the best SEO tools you can use to improve SEO on your ecommerce website.
Surfer SEO is an all-in-one SEO platform that includes keyword research, content editing, and SERP analysis features. After you provide a target keyword or content to analyze, Surfer SEO scans top-ranking pages and suggests keywords based on relevant metrics. The platform also offers an AI-powered content tool that can generate outlines to help you jumpstart your content-creation process.
Pricing: When you opt for annual billing, Surfer SEO’s paid plans start at $79 per month to track 200 pages across your website, optimize 360 articles, and collaborate with up to five team members, among other features.
Ahrefs is another all-in-one SEO platform with broader focus than Surfer SEO. While Surfer specializes in content optimization tools, Ahrefs excels at backlink analysis and comprehensive site auditing. The platform offers a backlink checker tool and uses AI for rank tracking and detailed site audits.
Pricing: Annual billing for Ahrefs starts at $108 per month for one user to track 750 keywords and use 100,000 page crawling credits, among other features.
SEOptimer specializes in SEO auditing and reporting for website owners. You can use SEOptimer to diagnose issues with site structure, metadata, and mobile-friendliness. This tool uses a site crawler tool similar to what search engines use, helping you understand which on-page and technical SEO areas need attention.
Pricing: When billed annually, SEOptimer’s first tier costs $21.75 per month for site crawling, ranking tracking, and action recommendations for your website.
Semrush is an AI-powered marketing tool that covers both SEO management tasks like rank tracking and competitor analysis, plus pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. While Surfer SEO focuses on content optimization and Ahrefs emphasizes backlinks, Semrush offers a broader suite of tools with robust reporting features, including direct integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Pricing: Annually, Semrush’s paid plans start at $117.33 per month for keyword research, competitor analysis, and site auditing.
SE Ranking helps you monitor SEO performance with keyword research and optimization tools alongside backlink monitoring features. Unlike more comprehensive tools, like Semrush or Surfer SEO, SE Ranking focuses on local SEO with tools designed to monitor and optimize local listings and search queries.
Pricing: When you choose annual billing, paid tiers start at $52 per month for one seat, 500 tracked keywords, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and backlink monitoring, among other features.
SEO managers create, audit, and optimize web pages to improve website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) using strategies like keyword optimization and link building.
Hiring an SEO manager, freelancer, or agency can cost anywhere from $500 per month to more than $10,000 per month, depending on the scope of work, though you can manage SEO for your own website using free tools like Google Search Console or paid SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Surfer SEO.
Search engines use algorithms to scan, index, and rank web pages based on factors such as content quality, keyword usage, site speed, backlinks, and domain reputation.
There is a range of worthwhile SEO tools, including paid tools such as Surfer SEO, Ahrefs, and Semrush, as well as free tools like Google Search Console. The best choice depends on your specific needs, budget, and level of SEO expertise.
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