For those of you who have just started an e-commerce business and realized that SEO is not optional, it can feel overwhelming. Search engine optimization often seems both technical and time-consuming — something you hardly have time for alongside running your store. But the first steps are simpler than you might think and can quickly deliver results.
Google uses a huge number of factors, along with machine learning algorithms, to build its search results. Fortunately, you don’t need to master all of them to establish a solid SEO foundation. A few straightforward steps can make a big difference. Here’s a step-by-step list of how you can start working with SEO yourself.
1. Get Google Analytics and Google Search Console
The very first step in your SEO work is to set up tracking if you haven’t already. Google Analytics is essential for measuring the results of your efforts, while Search Console helps you see whether Google can properly read all the content on your site. You can find both here — start with Google Analytics, as you can use that verification to connect Search Console:
2. Choose keywords
Step two is to identify the keywords you want to work with. For a product, this is often relatively simple — it’s usually the product’s name, perhaps combined with size, color, or phrases like “Buy” or “Online.” For a category, it can be a bit trickier: should you aim to rank for “Moped parts” or “Moped accessories”? My favorite tool for this is Google’s Keyword Planner, where you can find information about how many people search for each word or combination of words.
3. Write headings and titles
Once you’ve decided which keywords you want your pages to rank for, it’s time to start optimizing the pages for those terms. Think of it as making sure every single page gets its share of attention. On a store or site with lots of products and pages, this can be nearly impossible to do manually — in that case, you’ll need to automate parts of the process. Most CMS platforms today have built-in functions for this. The title is a tag in the page’s “head” section, and it’s often what appears as the clickable link in search results. You can also see it in your browser tab. For example, the title of this page is “How to Get Started with SEO – Brath.se.”
The heading is the largest title on your page and should ideally be marked with an <H1> tag in the code. It’s not strictly necessary at this stage, but as you move forward, it’s a good idea to pay attention to it.
- How to write a good title
- How to write headings for a search engine
4. Make sure Google can find all the pages on your site
One common problem Google faces is discovering all the pages on a site. In general, the search engine sends out its crawler, which works in the same way a human would by clicking through all the links on your site, hoping to find as many pages as possible. The crawler is a busy little thing with limited time — what’s called a crawl budget — which means it often (usually) gives up before it has found everything. The crawl budget is influenced by several factors, including how fresh your content is.
The point is to make life as easy as possible for the crawler. The first step is to make sure every page on your site can be reached by clicking through links, for example via the navigation menu. To help even more, you can create an XML sitemap (something most platforms can generate automatically today). Once created, upload the sitemap to Google Search Console, which you should already have set up.
- How to create an XML sitemap
5. Unique and comprehensive text
Google doesn’t like duplicates. There’s no reason for the search engine to display two identical pages in the search results, and since it primarily reads text, unique content is what really matters. Achieving good rankings with copied text is much harder than doing it with original content.
This can create problems: if you have a lot of products in your webshop and you’ve copied the descriptions from your supplier, many others will have exactly the same text. If you also have a large number of products, writing unique text for all of them may feel impossible. In that case, it can be better to focus on your most important pages — the homepage and category pages are good places to start. Make sure these have unique, static text, and don’t forget to include the keyword you’ve chosen for the page, but don’t stuff the text with it.
- Duplicate content is a big problem for e-commerce
- How to write text optimized for search engines
- How long should an SEO text be?
6. Build authority
What set Google apart from other search engines when it became popular was that it measured factors beyond just the page itself. It looked at how often other sites referred to it. In the world of search engines, this takes the form of links — the more and the more trustworthy the sites linking to your site are, the more credible you should appear.
Often, building your site’s authority through links is the hardest part of the job when you’re running a new website or e-commerce store. A good start can be to approach your suppliers and ask them to link to you. Many suppliers link to resellers and partners, and these are often the kinds of links that can give your site solid trust.
Our recommendation is to be a bit cautious as a beginner and not try to maximize the number of links at all costs. If you’re not 100% sure what you’re doing, it’s better to proceed carefully.
- How to work with links
- What is Pagerank
- Pagerank on Wikipedia
- 3 super-effective link methods you use at your own risk
- Risks with search engine optimization
Want to dive deeper?
If you’ve worked through the first 6 steps here and want to go further, I recommend our SEO basics course. Here you’ll get deeper explanations and prepare to take the next step in your own SEO journey.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.