Going live with an e-commerce website can feel as if you’ve crossed the finish line. Your e-commerce shop is fully-designed; your goods are up for sale; the payment methods are all set up; and your domain name is online. Weeks go by and your website receives a surprisingly low amount of organic traffic. One of the most common issues faced by young e-commerce websites is the fact that being live does not mean getting found in search engines.
Visibility of your website depends upon how easy it is for the search engines to discover, crawl, comprehend and index your website—and if your website contains answers to questions of people who use search engines. The problems might arise for various reasons including technical faults, poor content of products, bad website architecture, duplicate content, lack of trust of the website, etc.
But there’s always good news. Many visibility problems might be revealed systematically rather than by just publishing more content or acquiring backlinks.
A site that is live is reachable by way of its URL. That does not mean the site is visible. For a page to be visited via organic search, it needs to be found by the search engines, crawled, understood, indexed, and finally deemed relevant for certain searches.
This means an ecommerce site that is wonderfully built may not be very visible due to the fact that its structure or the content is weak. Consider it a sequence:
Finding → Crawling → Indexing → Relevance → Visibility → Click-throughs
The next step is checking whether the important pages are indexed by Google at all. There may be hundreds or even thousands of pages on an ecommerce website, including product pages, category pages, filters, search pages, pagination URLs, and many more.
Not all pages should be indexed. In fact, indexing all possible variations would just add extra complexity to the matter. The point is to check whether the pages that you need to be indexed from a commercial perspective are technically crawlable and indexable. The following are ways to check whether important pages are blocked:
Google Search Console can be used to find such problems.
Links and website structure are used by search engines to understand how pages are related to each other. One typical ecommerce mistake is to create product pages without structuring them properly into a hierarchy.
Instead of simply creating:
Homepage → Product,
a more complex store could consider:
Homepage → Category → Subcategory → Product.
This would make things clearer both for shoppers and for search engines.In addition, proper structure may help distribute internal links on the website.
Quite a few online shops use vendor copies or very brief product copy. This results in poor search optimization.
When many different web pages sell the same products and have the same description of them, posting another similar copy will hardly provide a strong reason for your page to be noticeable.
A good product page needs to give the shopper enough relevant information about the product and enable him/her to decide to buy it. It might include such information as:
The idea isn’t to make product descriptions unnecessarily lengthy. It is to make them truly useful.
Many companies tend to concentrate all their efforts into SEO on product pages only. However, category pages can become good landing pages since they are able to catch a wider commercial search term.
For instance, a fashion shop will have product pages dedicated to various dresses, whereas a category page is going to catch a wide phrase like “women’s summer dresses.” A good category page should provide product list, additional informative content, proper navigation, internal linking, as well as the information concerning the particular category.
The second reason for ecommerce websites’ invisibility is their choice of keywords. A company can build its webpage optimization around a term that gets little search traffic—either due to lack of interest or because of being too competitive at this stage of the website development. Keywords should be selected based on the following criteria:
Search intent: What does the person want to do?
Product fit: Does the store meet the user’s needs?
Competitiveness: Will it be hard to compete for the search?
Business fit: Can the search help to attract relevant visitors?
A developing ecommerce site can gain visibility through various keyword searches including broad categories, specific products, and long-tail queries.
Mobile usability is important for online stores as customers become more active using their smartphones to connect with stores. Even if a website works on mobile phones, it might still be difficult to use. Examples of usability problems include:
SEO shouldn’t be considered separately from usability. Even if a page attracts visitors, it could still do badly from the business point of view.
Ecommerce sites with a large catalog typically feature high-resolution product pictures, third-party scripts, tracking tools, promotions, and a lot of other elements. These could lead to a slow page speed when they are not optimized for maximum efficiency.
This aspect of technical SEO should be taken into consideration during the development of an ecommerce site rather than being left for the end. There are also Core Web Vitals provided by Google to serve as user-centric performance metrics.
Internal links assist with creating connections between pages on your ecommerce website. Take, for example, an online store offering running equipment. A page that sells running shoes can link users to other categories, products or educational content related to these running shoes. As you see, it makes good sense not only from customers’ point of view, but from search engines’ perspectives too.
In the past you probably created blog posts independently from your store, just like separate sources of traffic. But now you should think about linking these blog posts to product or category pages.
Technical SEO and good-quality content are crucial, but it is not possible to get immediate rankings through all of them.A fresh ecommerce website has no past record, whereas its competitors already have lots of valuable content, links, brand authority, and experience of getting discovered via search.
This doesn’t mean that the new store won’t be able to compete with others. It just shows what one should expect. One needs to focus on getting ranked for particular keywords and not attempt everything straight away.It is best to start with those keywords related to the areas in which the business is experienced and expert.
In situations where the website has low traffic, one tends to write dozens of blog articles. However, content alone does not address any technical issues, poor product pages, bad navigation, or ambiguous search intent.
The following questions are what need to be asked before writing any content:
These questions tend to be more important than asking how many blog articles to write.
SEO considerations should be part of the decision-making process of choosing an ecommerce platform, not after building a website.An appropriate ecommerce platform must provide companies adequate control over page structure, titles, descriptions, URL structure, content, navigation, mobile usability, and all other SEO-oriented parameters.
An appropriate platform also needs to address all ecommerce-related operational issues. SEO management is difficult when product data, stock, store management, analysis, and marketing efforts are all disconnected.
Idiocom itself should be considered an ecommerce growth platform rather than merely an ecommerce website builder tool. The ecosystem of Idiocom includes storefront creation, product and catalog management, inventory, order management, marketing, analytics, and intelligent catalog management powered by artificial intelligence.
It’s important since the visibility of your ecommerce store through search engines is highly related to how you manage your store and your catalog on it. Your store requires a good customer-facing experience, organized product information, scalable catalog management, and usage of data to measure the performance of your site.
Idiocom can provide a technological base for these processes, while all the rest should be done by a business owner itself.
When your ecommerce site is live but not getting much organic traffic, consider these aspects first:
Accessibility: Are the search engines able to crawl and index the pages that really matter?
Site structure: Is there proper hierarchy of categories, subcategories, products and content?
Product pages: Are the pages valuable and differentiated enough?
Category optimization: Are the key category pages optimized for commercial intent?
Mobile usability: Is the website easy to use and buy from on mobile devices?
Performance: Are the slow pages or large files causing friction?
Internal linking: Are the users and search engines able to navigate through the related pages?
Search intent: Are the pages able to satisfy the user intent that they target?
Authority: Has the website gained enough time and effort to build authority in the market?
Just because you’ve launched an ecommerce website doesn’t mean that it is going to be searchable. Organic visibility is dependent on technical accessibility, useful content, good architecture, search intent, user experience, internal linking, performance, and ultimately authority building.
Don’t jump right into creating more content or more keywords if your site is live but is not showing up in search results. Instead, figure out first where the search process is failing. Construct your technical foundation properly, create truly useful product and category pages, connect your content and catalog in a smart way, and utilize analytics to find out where the improvement is necessary.
SEO is most effective for growing ecommerce businesses when it becomes part of the whole ecommerce system rather than a standalone marketing function performed after launching the business.
Why isn’t my ecommerce site showing up on Google?
Reasons may vary from technical SEO, indexing issues, poor site architecture, lack of content, misalignment of search intent, tough competition, or lack of authority. Start with checking Google Search Console and your crucial URLs.
How long does ecommerce SEO need to get results?
There is no single answer. It all depends on the competition, website’s past, its current state, content, authority, and how effective the chosen SEO approach is. Younger sites should not expect quick results but SEO work.
Is it necessary to index all product pages?
No. An ecommerce website can have plenty of URLs that bring little or no value. The key is to make sure only important pages are indexable.
Do I need product descriptions for my ecommerce SEO?
Yes, useful product content will help search engines understand the page and customers make decisions about purchase. Descriptions should be accurate, relevant, clear, and informative rather than repetitive and stuffed with keywords.
