How to Increase Organic Traffic on an Ecommerce Website

Hey fellow ecommerce site owners! Looking to gain more organic search visibility and traffic to your online store? You came to the right place!

Driving targeted organic traffic takes work, but it’s one of the most cost-effective strategies for fueling ecommerce growth. In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through proven tactics to increase organic search traffic to your ecommerce site in 2023.

Let’s dive right in!

Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

The foundation of any good SEO strategy is identifying the terms and phrases your potential customers are searching for. This allows you to create optimized content around those keywords.

Here’s a process for ecommerce keyword research:

• Brainstorm a wide list of product terms, category terms, branded keywords, commercial queries, etc.
• Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze search volume and competitiveness for keywords.
• Filter for profitable keywords with sufficient search volume and reasonable ability to rank.
• Organize keywords by theme in a spreadsheet to identify content gaps.
• Prioritize 10-20 core keywords to focus your SEO efforts on.

Ongoing keyword research reveals new optimization opportunities as you expand your ecommerce catalog and consumer search trends evolve.

Create Optimized Category and Product Pages

Once you’ve identified your core product and category keywords, create dedicated pages targeting each one.

For example, outdoor retailer Backcountry has category pages for “Hiking Gear”, “Camping Gear” etc as well as individual product pages.

Tips for category and product SEO:

• Include the target keyword in the page URL, title tag, first paragraph, and H1/H2 headers.
• Write long-form content describing the category/product features, benefits, and buyer’s guide information. Minimum 300 words.
• Optimize page speed – compress images, minify code, leverage caching, etc. Faster load times improve SEO.
• Link internally between related category and product pages to establish topical relevance.

Each page acts as a optimized landing point for its keyword, establishing your site as an authority.

Produce Link-Worthy Informational Content

Beyond just your core product/category pages, create link-worthy informational content targeting searches your audience may be conducting before purchase.

For example, an outdoor retailer could create guides like “How to Choose Hiking Boots” or “Beginner Backpacking Gear Checklist”.

This valuable content earns organic traffic, builds trust, and primes visitors for purchase down the funnel.

Make sure to link out to relevant products/categories as natural recommendations within these informational articles.

Refresh Old Content to Keep It Ranking

Don’t just produce new content. Revisit and update existing category pages, product descriptions, guides, and other content on a regular basis.

This recurring refresh keeps the content from becoming stale and prevents it from dropping in rankings, while making improvements.

Add new supporting data, rankings, comparisons, media, and information that’s emerged since first publishing it.

Create Content for Buyer Keywords

In your keyword research, identify search terms in the latter stages of the buyer’s journey like:

• “Where to buy [product]”
• “[product] coupon codes”
• “[product] best price”
• “[brand] deals”

Optimizing for these commercial queries captures motivated shoppers ready to purchase, increasing conversion rates.

Optimize Site Architecture

In addition to on-page optimization, make sure your overall site architecture follows SEO best practices.

Tips for site architecture:

• Use simple descriptive category and product URLs vs overly dynamic URLs.
• Implement site search allowing visitors to easily find what they need.
• Ensure a mobile-friendly responsive design and consistent site-wide navigation.
• Include footer navigation links to most important category and product pages.
• Implement site speed optimizations like caching and image compression.

Proper site architecture improves crawlability and navigability for search engines and visitors.

Earn High Quality Backlinks

The more reputable websites linking back to your ecommerce site, the stronger its domain authority in Google’s eyes. This boosts rankings.

Tactics to earn quality backlinks:

• Produce resources worth linking to, like detailed buying guides.
• Reach out to similar online stores to share content and links.
• Pitch contributing expert guest posts to high-authority sites related to your products.
• Network with bloggers and influencers to share your content and site.

Focus on backlinks from sites with topical relevance to convey your niche authority.

Leverage Schema Markup

Implement schema markup like product schema, breadcrumbs, FAQ schema, review schema and more across your site.

This structured data makes your products, organization, and content more understandable to search engines.

Make sure to test markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Monitor Your Site Health

Keep a pulse on your overall site health and SEO metrics using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Key data to monitor:

• Indexation of new content
• Crawl errors to address
• Ranking movements for target keywords
• Top landing pages and traffic sources
• Page speed metrics

Continuously optimize and improve based on this data.

Promote Your Content

Don’t just optimize your content for SEO. Actively promote newly published content across social media, email, PPC ads, and other channels to amplify its reach.

The greater exposure will lead to more engagement, shares, and backlinks – fueling organic growth.

Wrapping Up

There you have it – a comprehensive organic traffic growth strategy tailored for ecommerce sites!

The key takeaways:

• Research buyer keywords
• Create targeted category and product pages
• Produce informative content
• Refresh old content
• Optimize site architecture
• Earn backlinks
• Monitor your site’s health

Apply these tactics diligently and you will see measurable growth in organic search traffic, lower cost per acquisition, and higher ROI from the free traffic.

Feel free to reach out if you need help implementing any of these tips for your ecommerce store!

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some common organic ecommerce SEO questions: