Technical SEO for E-commerce: Where to Start?

Technical SEO for e-commerce is very important for a number of reasons.

There is a myth in digital marketing that we should address right at the beginning of this article: SEO is only for those who work with content.

In fact, this myth is so strong that, in many cases, SEO is seen as synonymous with blogs.

But that’s not quite the case. In fact, it’s not even close to being “the case.”

SEO has a direct impact on how easily users can find your brand in search engines. And these searches are not always related to content.

Today, let’s talk more about technical SEO for e-commerce.

First, we’ll understand in practice what its main function is — what exactly it does.

Then, we’ll take a closer look at the most basic points of SEO for e-commerce, and right after that, we’ll go through how the technical audit process works.

Ready to start?

What exactly does Technical SEO for E-commerce do?

SEO for e-commerce helps your site and products appear in searches that people make, especially on Google.

Of course, it applies to all other search engines as well.

The thing is, Google is the search engine with the most resources today — it not only lists websites in its search results but also provides snippets specifically tailored for e-commerce.

Because of the greater number of resources Google offers, technical SEO for e-commerce is crucial to ensuring maximum exposure in the search engine.

Below, we will talk more about how exactly SEO for e-commerce boosts your brand’s prominence on Google. Stay with me:

Knowledge Panel for Branded Search

Let’s start small: branded searches are those where the user searches directly for your brand name on Google.

In these cases, SEO is important to signal to Google that the brand is yours and to include your content in the Knowledge Panel.

Check this example to better understand what the Knowledge Panel is:

When someone searches for “Vans,” the Knowledge Panel displays information about the brand, pulling details from the best search result.

In the case of larger brands, like in this example, the Knowledge Panel might be built by other websites, such as Wikipedia.

But for smaller e-commerce sites, this Panel is built with the information you provide on your site — usually on a specific page for that purpose, such as “About Us.”

You can’t “activate” the Panel for your brand. You can only create good content, work on SEO properly, and wait for Google to build it as searches for your brand increase.

Greater Visibility in Google Shopping Ads

Those working with e-commerce need to focus on a specific type of Google Ads — Google Shopping ads.

You’ve probably seen these ads in searches for products on Google. Here’s an example:

Here, we can see that Vans is doing an excellent job both with technical SEO and paid media management.

Notice how the brand appears in two different formats: on Google Shopping, on the right, and in the regular search results.

This is not the standard Google Ads or Google Shopping experience. In fact, it’s quite common for brands with their own e-commerce sites to lose auctions for keywords related to their own products.

For example:

CASIO sells its watches on its own e-commerce website, so it’s expected that the sponsored Google Shopping results display CASIO’s site.

But that’s not the case here. CASIO doesn’t appear in any of the Google Shopping sponsored results.

Of course, the reason could simply be that they’re not running Google Shopping ads.

But regardless of that, there are many cases where marketplaces, import e-commerce sites, and other similar platforms run ads competing with the actual manufacturers of the products.

And if those manufacturers don’t manage technical SEO for e-commerce well, they’ll face greater difficulty in positioning their Google Shopping ads and winning auctions for each search.

Easier Display in Google Shopping Organic Results

In addition to Google Shopping ads that appear directly in the main SERP for each search, there are also organic results for this format.

The “Shopping” tab is right next to the main search tab and displays e-commerce results (with product images) rather than text-based results.

Here’s an example of a search there:

Notice how the Google Shopping tab has a variety of resources, allowing you to specify the shoe size and price range, along with images and ads.

The organic results here come from SEO for e-commerce. With a solid SEO strategy, you increase your chances of putting your brand and products front and center.

If you observe, the first result is from Converse when we search for “Converse All Star.” And in the top row of results, which is the most valuable, Converse’s website appears twice.

The same applies to the ads: Converse isn’t in the first position, but it appears twice.

Both the organic results and the ad positioning are linked to technical SEO for e-commerce.

The Potential to Appear in AI Search Engines

As the whole world has realized, AI is here to stay.

Many people imagined that it would be a “Google killer” — meaning users would prefer searching for topics via AI rather than using search engines.

Even though it hasn’t become the Google killer that many experts thought it would, AI is still growing and developing, and it has gained a lot of adoption.

Technical SEO for e-commerce helps you appear as a reference in AI searches for certain queries.

For example, instead of searching for the name of a product, I could search “when was the All Star model created by Converse?”

This is a search in Google itself, and it returned an AI-generated result. Notice that this is where Converse is failing — in its content.

With good technical SEO and quality content — which, don’t be mistaken, go hand in hand — you can influence AI to deliver a response sourced from your site.

And what’s more interesting is that your site will be listed right next to it. For more specific queries, a category page or even a product page could be added to the AI-generated result on Google.

🤿 Dive deeper: SEO for AI — how to do it?

The Basics of SEO for E-commerce

Before we move on to technical SEO, it’s important to recall some basic aspects of SEO for e-commerce.

SEO for e-commerce follows the main principles of general SEO, but it has some very specific needs.

The primary concern of SEO for e-commerce is to highlight products for the searches users conduct.

Therefore, it’s natural for SEO for e-commerce to focus mainly on this functionality — the most important being product descriptions, images, category descriptions, and some other points.

This is the most basic SEO, but not in the sense that it’s “easier” or “harder.” It can become highly technical, but also be incredibly simple.

The basics, in this case, refer to necessity. These points are crucial for e-commerce to perform well in search engines.

Here, we’ll focus on the following items:

• Product and category descriptions
• Keyword research
• URL structure (site architecture)
• Metadata
• Illustrative product images

Let’s dive deeper into each of these points now.

Product and Category Descriptions

This is the most basic point of SEO for e-commerce — product and category descriptions.

However, as we discussed earlier, although it is a “basic” point, we are not saying that it is an easy point to resolve.

In fact, like any content creation, product descriptions require time and a lot of research.

Every product in an e-commerce store must contain:

• Technical information
• Product description with its particularities and purposes
• Full product name in the title, including some technical information
• Product model
• Product color (or the ability to choose colors)
• Any other relevant information, not just for the product but for the overall shopping experience.

To create these product descriptions as effectively as possible, it is ideal to conduct keyword research beforehand.

Let’s talk about this below:

Keyword Research

In the introduction to this section, we provided a link about keyword research, which is definitely worth reading.

Basically, the product description needs to follow a keyword determined beforehand. This keyword is the term users type into search engines to find a product.

Imagine the following situation. You have two types of refrigerators for sale: frost-free and regular ones.

One of the keywords you will need to use for the description of the frost-free category is “geladeira frost free” (frost-free refrigerator). If you don’t use this keyword, you’ll have a much harder time presenting your product on search engines.

Now let’s dive deeper. Within the frost-free refrigerators, your e-commerce sells 3 different brands: Brastemp, Consul, and Bosch. All products need to have the brand in the title and throughout the description.

In this case, the main keyword becomes “geladeira frost free Brastemp” (Brastemp frost-free refrigerator), and secondary keywords would include “geladeira frost free” (frost-free refrigerator) and “geladeira Brastemp” (Brastemp refrigerator).

Within Brastemp’s frost-free refrigerators, you have variations in voltage, color, storage capacity, and other specific details.

So, the final title for one of your refrigerators would be “Geladeira frost free Brastemp 300L, 220V, cinza escovado, com dispenser de água e freezer de 50L”.

Here, the main keyword remains “Geladeira frost free Brastemp,” and the secondary keywords could be:

• Geladeira Brastemp (Brastemp refrigerator)
• Geladeira frost free (frost-free refrigerator)
• Geladeira 300L (300L refrigerator)
• Geladeira com freezer (refrigerator with freezer)
• Geladeira com dispenser (refrigerator with dispenser)

This keyword research is done using dedicated platforms like SemRush (paid) and Google Keyword Planner (free for Google Ads advertisers).

Competitor Research to Find Titles and Keywords

Just a quick addendum: keyword research can be done individually by typing descriptive terms for your products directly into search platforms and analyzing the results.

But a great way to find ideas and make sure you don’t miss any keywords is by researching your competitors.

Here’s a quick search using the points we’re working with here, from Brastemp refrigerators:

Notice that in our previous search, we didn’t include the keyword “geladeira duplex” (duplex refrigerator), using “geladeira com freezer” (refrigerator with freezer) instead.

This is a common mistake, but if we hadn’t done competitor research, this could have been missed, affecting your e-commerce’s product performance.

Always research competitor products before writing your title and description.

This prevents mistakes and makes the process easier overall.

Site Architecture (URL Structure) and Metadata

This might sound advanced, but it’s actually quite basic.

The architecture of your site is the way you organize your URLs. Let’s think about the refrigerators case again.

You have a homepage with all your products listed and specific category pages.

The homepage naturally has the default URL of your domain: www.geladeiras.com.br.

The category page should follow a hierarchy that includes the subdomain: www.geladeiras.com.br/brastemp.

On the product page itself, the URL should be www.geladeiras.com.br/brastemp/geladeira-frost-free-300L.

It’s a simple separation between domain/subdomain/page. This is the standard in website architecture.

Now think about a mistake: you have the domain and subdomain correctly set up, but when creating the product page, you created it within the main domain.

That is: www.geladeiras.com.br/geladeira-frost-free-300L.

If you already have a subdomain specifically for product categories, the logical way to structure the site architecture is by placing the page within the category.

Metadata includes the meta title of each page and its meta description. Every page on your site needs a unique title and description.

The title and description are used by Google to display results. Here’s an example of it being used correctly:

In this case, the meta title is “Chuck Taylor All Star Feminino” (Chuck Taylor All Star Women’s), and the meta description is the text below.

Now see an example of an error when configuring both:

Main mistakes:

• The meta title has more characters than Google supports.
• The meta description wasn’t set.
• Because the meta description wasn’t set, Google used the first lines of the content.

Due to an undefined architecture, the second example also has issues with displaying sitelinks. Only the price was displayed, while the All Star store example has 4 sitelinks displayed organically.

All of this is easily editable directly in WordPress or any platform you’re using to publish your site.

Product Images

The final basic SEO point we need to address is inserting images into products.

This point goes beyond SEO, actually, and also involves the user experience and CRO — Conversion Rate Optimization.

It’s essential to include as many images of the product as possible, but also consider these points:

• Use images converted to .webp, which are smaller and load faster. This helps avoid long loading times.
• Show all angles of the product.
• Include color variations in a menu. Don’t show photos of all colors at once; wait for your user to choose their preferred color.
• Provide the option for a zoom on the product, but not too much: remember, it’s in .webp format, which has low quality.

Technical SEO for E-commerce: Advanced Adjustments

The points we’ve covered so far are enough for you to start your SEO for e-commerce work.

In fact, these points are sufficient to achieve good results in Google searches, both organically and through ads, and in both the standard SERPs and Google Shopping.

But you can go further. There’s always room to go deeper in SEO. The more you dive in, the better your site will get, and the better your results will be.

The thing is, this much more technical aspect of SEO can sometimes be unnecessary. It’s important to conduct audits to understand the state of your SEO, but it’s not always necessary to go too deep and invest a lot in this task.

At least not naturally. While basic SEO is enough in many cases, there are still extremely competitive niches in today’s e-commerce.

In many cases, e-commerce businesses are directly competing with marketplaces, which have large SEO teams managing their sites.

In this section, I’ve outlined some points to help you dive neither too deep nor too shallow into technical SEO for e-commerce — but just the right amount.

Let’s go?

Conduct an SEO Audit with Screaming Frog

The first step for an advanced technical audit for e-commerce is to use Screaming Frog.

This is a simple program with a free version and reasonably priced plans that indicates all the errors that may be on your site. All of them.

Check out a demonstration video to understand better:

It’s interesting to note that the product name is SEO Spider, while Screaming Frog is just the brand name.

It’s interesting to notice because the name SEO Spider is exactly what the program does.

Google has always used crawlers to identify the content of your site and the technical information we discussed in the previous section.

What SEO Spider does is the same thing: it releases small crawlers on your site that will identify issues just like Google would.

However, with Google, the result is not disclosed — it only influences your position on the search engine.

Screaming Frog, on the other hand, provides a huge list of all these points, from the most important ones to those small details that hardly make an impact.

This is the first step to start with technical SEO for your site, and the most important one.

In fact, advanced users may not even need to continue reading this article. Screaming Frog will give you all the points of attention you need for your site. It’s totally possible to proceed just with the insights it provides.

Oh, important: up to now, the most technical thing we’ve covered was site architecture. Screaming Frog provides a complete breakdown of this hierarchy 😊🫰

Submit Your Sitemap to Google

The sitemap is an XML file that details the entire code of your site. When you submit it to Google, the crawlers can work more efficiently, and you have a better chance of ranking higher in search results.

Here’s something interesting: SemRush published part of its sitemap:

This sitemap is automatically created by your publishing platform, and you can access it at one of these two addresses:

• yoursite.com.br/sitemap.xml;
• yoursite.com.br/sitemap_index.xml;

Go to this page and download the entire file. The file will be generated as an .xml.

Next, go to Google Search Console and add this file under the “Indexing” tab:

Very simple. You just need to upload the file and click “Submit.” Done!

Go Beyond SEO for E-commerce: Think About the User Experience

SEO today is not what it used to be.

Fifteen years ago, SEO was almost a game — if you did everything Google asked, you’d rank in the best positions.

Nowadays, this game has changed due to the widespread popularity of e-commerce. Most websites already follow these main points, and what differentiates them is the user experience.

This experience happens in many different ways. But here, at the end of the article, I’d like to talk to you about customer service.

One of the most important points for user experience is providing immediate support for any questions customers might have.

And this is completely achievable with Leadster’s ShopBot.

With generative Artificial Intelligence, we’ve created a product capable of conducting real-time conversations with your visitors about the product they’re viewing or any product on the site.

It’s literally like accessing your e-commerce and asking the chatbot: “I need a Brastemp Frost Free 300L refrigerator. Can you recommend some models?”

Give it a try today by clicking the banner below. I’ll be waiting for you! Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article about e-commerce.