Ecommerce SEO Specialists

We work on popular platforms which include BigCommerce and Shopify.
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Ecommerce Brands we Work With

Brand and Ecommerce

Oi - Organic Initiative, exists to remove plastic, synthetics, and toxins from our bodies and the environment, one step at a time.

Brand and Ecommerce

Australasia's trusted experts on baby sleep advice & products since 2006.

Ecommerce

Birdsnest's mission is to help you find the perfect outfit that makes you feel amazing - inside and out.

We Specialise in Ecommerce SEO

Understand your Web Analytics and make fact based decisions on your data.

We specialise in growing eCommerce businesses. We understand the complexities and challenges involved with Ecommerce Digital Marketing and excel at achieving impressive business success in Google Ads, Search Engine Optimisation, Display Marketing, Retargeting, and Conversion Rate Optimisation. We work with Bigcommerce, Shopify, WordPress, and custom-built sites.
We ensure our Ecommerce clients are being found online by their target audience and that audience is converting.
We set up extensive eCommerce and goal tracking so you can understand exactly who is visiting your website, what they are doing on your website and what they are purchasing.
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Contents of this page:

What is eCommerce SEO?

Ecommerce, also known as electronic commerce refers to the buying and selling of goods or services online. It is often referred to as the sale of physical products online. It can also describe any kind of commercial transaction that occurs over the internet. Ecommerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services. An eCommerce site is powerful as it makes products easier to discover and purchase online. Whether you’re starting your own business, want to grow your customers, or want to create a side hustle, an eCommerce site is the way to go. If you’ve got an eCommerce site then you need to know about eCommerce SEO.

 

Ecommerce SEO usually involves optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure, and navigational structure for search and user experience. Each product you sell should have a dedicated page designed to draw traffic from search engines. This is what makes your online store more visible in search engine results such as Google. So when a potential customer searches for products, eCommerce SEO is important to help you rank highly as possible in search results. The higher you rank, the more traffic your site will get which means higher revenue.

The role SEO plays in eCommerce stores

SEO plays an important role when it comes to eCommerce businesses. This is because online businesses rely on their ability to attract new customers onto their site. Traffic from organic search is essential to increase traffic onto your site and in turn increase revenue. SEO helps drive brand awareness and reputation. If your site appears at the top of Google search results potential customers will trust and value it. Which means they would be more likely to buy from it. It will also attract new customers who may not have heard of your brand before.

 

SEO also helps understand potential customers. Keyword data provides a window into shoppers’ desires. This is used to optimise your site’s usability and potential. Sites that fill that desire quickly are more likely to make the sale. SEO is an investment in long-term performance. Unlike advertising, its value does not stop when the campaign ends. Ecommerce SEO involves everything from optimizing your headlines, product descriptions, metadata, internal link structure to user experience. When selling online, each product you sell should have a page that’s dedicated to it and designed to draw traffic from search engines. Therefore, Ecommerce SEO helps you reach an audience without paying for ads.

 

What do consumers do when they need a product or service? Many perform Google searches. They’re looking for options, tips, comparisons, and other information to help them make informed decisions.

 

If your website doesn’t appear in the SERPs, you lose critical access to qualified and interested eCommerce customers. Your products might have a space on the web, but are they findable?

 

That’s where eCommerce SEO comes in. It provides you with a way to reach your target audience without paying for ads. Once you get people to your site, you can delight them with your high-quality products, intriguing copy, and motivating calls to action.

 

If you only optimize your website for people, you do your company a disservice. SEO for eCommerce stores addresses the first hurdle to acquiring new customers: getting people to your site!

What are the common eCommerce platforms that we use and why do we use them?

Shopify SEO

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify is a user-friendly platform to build your eCommerce business. It is one of the most popular eCommerce solutions, with over a million active users. You can use it to sell physical or digital products. The site offers a range of themes that you can customise to create your own brand online. It’s easy to use for those without coding knowledge or design skills. Shopify runs on its own servers which means you don’t need to buy web hosting or install any additional software.

 

Shopify SEO simply means SEO improvements that are more unique to Shopify than other sites. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect URLs, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. It’s one thing to create an awesome site-it’s a whole different thing to attract organic site traffic through SEO.

 

You need to think about SEO differently where eCommerce is concerned. Although the fundamentals are the same, getting a page to rank well is different from getting a product to rank well. Shopify structures its SEO around this fact, which makes it terrific for that purpose. Shopify has strong SEO functionality and anything Shopify doesn’t provide themselves can be found in the app store. The interface is user-friendly and provides everything your site needs to compete in search. Shopify comes with an SEO-ready site structure.

Bigcommerce SEO

What is Bigcommerce SEO?

BigCommerce is another top eCommerce platform that allows you to create an online store. All tools come built-in, which means you don’t need to rely on multiple apps. In the BigCommerce control panel, there are areas to enter content specifically for SEO purposes. This is great for helping shoppers discover your products for example on Google search. Page titles and descriptions can be filled in for content pages, category pages, product pages, blog posts, and brands. BigCommerce has fantastic SEO features and plugins to support it.

Disadvantages of using Bigcommerce from an SEO Perspective

bigcommerce logo

Managing Redirects for SEO

Bigcommerce doesn’t give you enough flexibility over creating and managing redirects. It does give you the option to import and export bulk redirects but no control over organising redirects. It also doesn’t display an error message when you load incorrect redirects. This is a major issue when you are dealing with 1000+ URLs. There isn’t an option to create regex redirects which is another disadvantage when managing huge migration projects.

XML Sitemap

Bigcommerce creates an automated sitemap for your website which is pretty cool but the sitemap is limited to 50,000 URLs. Actually, even Google only accepts 50,000 URLs in a sitemap. Bigcommerce doesn’t have the ability to modify sitemap URL or create custom sitemaps. If you have over 50,000 products on your Bigcommerce website you will definitely lose out. Having 1000s of URLs on your sitemap can slow it down which is not desirable.

 

Not having the option to customise your sitemap is a big flaw with BIgcommerce’s SEO functionalities.

 

Note: We do have a solution for this specific sitemap issue with Bigcommerce and have provided a workaround for other eCommerce stores. Get in touch for more info.

WooCommerce/WordPress SEO

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It’s the merging of an outstanding content management system and eCommerce. It easily lets you customize your store and build custom extensions. Features such as payment and shipping are simple and most features are included with the plugin.

Is WordPress a good choice for an eCommerce store?

WooCommerce is SEO friendly. It’s built using code optimized for SEO. SEO-friendly means it has features built-in that will help you optimize your product pages for search engines. However, it’s up to you to optimize the content you add to your online store. WooCommerece is great due to its integration with WordPress and all of the plugins that are available. For people to find your products in search engines, you need to optimize your product pages. You can do this with the WordPress editor by editing body content, URLs, meta descriptions, alt tags, and other page elements to optimize product pages. It’s important to remember that WooCommerce SEO is an on-going process. Expecting to optimize your store’s WooCommerce SEO for all the ranking criteria at once isn’t practical, instead targeting the different ranking signals in the order of importance is a better strategy.
With plugins like Yoast SEO, which we’ll talk about more later, WooCommerce and WordPress can give you an even bigger SEO boost than Shopify’s SEO features. You just have to be willing to put more work into customization.
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, which means you need to improve your overall WordPress SEO setup before you can move on to WooCommerce specific SEO tweaks.
WooCommerce is very SEO friendly out of the box. It runs on top of WordPress which itself is standard compliant and good for SEO. However, you can definitely use plugins and techniques to further improve WooCommerce product SEO.

When you start an online store with WooCommerce, it is up to you to add things like themes, products, descriptions, images, and other content to your store. You’re responsible for optimizing all additional content that you add.

WooCommerce SEO is an ongoing process, and you will need to keep it up to steadily see growth in your search engine traffic/sales.

How to Analyse your Store Performance?

Ecommerce tracking helps you understand the performance of your website landing pages and return-on-investment from marketing campaigns. Through the data you can get information on what products sell well, the revenue per transaction, how long it takes customers to make the decision to purchase. Overall, you can use this data to make predictions about revenue and what else you can do to increase sales.
Tracking sales accurately from multiple channels such as Google ads, Facebook ads can help you understand where your revenue is coming from and where you should spend your marketing budget.

What insights can I gain with eCommerce tracking?

Whether marketing is working

The insights can give you a look into whether your marketing efforts are working. You can see where the traffic is coming from and how much it is worth. If you are sending potential customers email, it can show which emails lead to an actual purchase. Seeing where the sales came from can give you an idea of what more you can do to get sales and the gaps in your existing marketing plan.

Individual Product Performance

With all eCommerce sites, tracking product performance is imperative. Knowing how specific products are doing can help you determine from a business standpoint, what products you might want to pull from the site or put more marketing dollars behind.

Sales/Revenue

With eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can figure out sources of your company’s sales such as organic, direct, or e-blast efforts. You can also import Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords Conversion Tracking to further track ad clicks and analyze your website data. You can get information on the number of transactions, total revenue, your average order value and figure out what your best selling products are. Ecommerce tracking gives you the ability to look at the bigger picture.

Frequently Asked Questions about Ecommerce SEO

1. How to handle deleted products on e-commerce sites?

When dealing with deleted product pages you need to consider the ramifications of what happens if we 301 redirect or 410 redirect that specific product page. Creating a 301 redirect to a similar product may confuse the user who was looking for a specific product but landed elsewhere. This would result in them dropping from your site and searching for another site. This would be the case if we decide to 410 the page due to low SEO value.

authentic digital recommend you clearly ‘noindex’ the page and provide internal links leading to similar products or a relevant category. This is proven to improve conversion rate and doesn’t affect your website crawl budget.

2. Which platform do you recommend for an eCommerce store?

Overall, Shopify is easier to use and a better all-round eCommerce platform. BigCommerce may take longer to wrap your head around however it’s still great for large growing businesses. Shopify works for online stores of all shapes and sizes. From small stores to big brands, Shopify is for you. It also has a range of features and apps for a variety of purposes. If you have no prior experience with setting up websites or designing, Shopify will sort it all out for you.

3. Do I need multiple sitemaps for my eCommerce store?

The main reason why authentic digital recommend multiple sitemaps is that sitemaps are efficient in classifying and categorising content on the website. Submitting individual sitemaps for products, collections, and so on would make it easier to debug faulty URLs on search console. Another advantage is if you decide to use manually created sitemaps having individual sitemaps can make it easier. For example, when a new product is added or deleted you would only have to edit that particular sitemap.

4. Unique description for each product?

A product description is the copy that explains what a product is and why people should purchase it. The purpose of this is to inform customers with important information about the features and benefits of the product so they’re motivated to buy. The best product descriptions address your target audience directly and personally. Take into consideration how you’d speak to your customer if you were selling the product in-store, make sure to highlight the benefits of each feature.

5. Should I run Google shopping or Facebook ads?

Google Shopping campaigns are a better way of capturing high-intent customers who are ready to buy. Whereas, Facebook Ads have better targeting opportunities to create awareness and interest in your brand or a product. If your focus is on making quick sales then Google Ads may be the better choice. If you’re looking to expand brand recognition or reach a wider audience then Facebook Ads may be the better option for you. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are both great options for advertising. They both work well if used together. Make sure you track the campaign results so you know which channel performs better for your business.
Products that don’t require a sales pitch could benefit from Google ads whereas products that require convincing are better suited for Facebook.

6. Setting up a Google merchant centre feed for free organic shopping ads

Listings for participating retailers are eligible to appear in these results at no cost to them. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Shopping tab. For businesses, this means you can make your products discoverable in free listings by opting your existing product feeds into the surfaces across Google program. For new users of Merchant Center who are interested in joining this program, you can opt into surfaces across Google during the Merchant Center sign up process and start creating your product feed.

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