A solid ecommerce SEO strategy is a must-have for any successful online store, but simply optimizing your website for search engines is just the beginning.
In this article, we talk about the emerging SEO trends for ecommerce that you need to know about to achieve success in 2022 and beyond.
The State of SEO in 2022
SEO is essential to ecommerce because it attracts quality customers and keeps them browsing on your website. A good site experience—combined with sound technical SEO—helps your site rank higher, drive more traffic, and convert website visitors into loyal customers.
As ecommerce adoption increases, the commercial marketplace will be more challenging and competitive than ever. A user-friendly, search-optimized website makes it easy for shoppers to explore your site and locate exactly what they need. If visitors spend more time exploring your site, it sends a positive signal to search engines that your site fulfills the needs of searchers. As a result, you’ll rank higher in search results and have a continuous flow of traffic to your business, which provides more opportunities for you to increase conversions and boost customer loyalty.
If you’re already implementing the right SEO tactics and not getting the results that you expect, consider these SEO trends and how they can inform your ecommerce search engine optimization strategy.
1. Using Ultra-Relevant Keywords
The keyword research process starts with determining what your target customers are looking for and how you might be able to provide them value. Keyword research is an important part of developing an ecommerce SEO strategy and driving more direct sales and traffic to your site.
To conduct keyword research, you’ll want to use SEO and analytics tools to discover the topics and keywords that your prospective customers are putting into search engines. Then you’ll focus on creating quality content tailored toward those topics and keywords to increase organic website traffic and average time spent on your site.
2. Focusing On User Intent
This year, online sellers need to increase their focus on user intent. This is all about catering to those searching on the web and providing the specific answers to searchers’ questions.
To prioritize user intent, you’ll want to create your content according to what users need. For example, if you're a jewelry seller and a visitor is searching for how to accessorize necklaces, you might want to provide a step-by-step guide or a video format as opposed to a “list” blog or a content that is product-focused. Matching keywords with user intent will allow you to bring in more traffic, ensure visitors stay longer on your site, and build trust with your target audience.
3. Creating Unique Content
High-quality, relevant content is one of the best ways to keep prospective customers invested in your website. By creating informative content for your products or crafting compelling content that answers common customer queries, you set your brand apart as a source of authority. This is key to building brand awareness and recognition, as well as increasing your search visibility and opening up opportunities to rank for high-value keywords.
What kind of unique content do you need? Think blogs and lifestyle images, descriptive product descriptions and guides, and interactive content like quizzes and forms.
4. Publishing Content for Video and Voice Search
Videos help increase dwell time on your site, signaling to search engines that you have good and relevant content. Also, if visitors search specifically for a video addressing their search query, your online store has a chance to appear in search results.
According to HubSpot, 41% of marketers who use voice search tactics plan to increase their investments this year. To have solid voice search optimization on your store, you should optimize titles and subheadings, create FAQs, use conversational keywords, and leverage specific but highly targeted long-tail keywords.
5. Keeping Duplicate Content in Check
If your ecommerce website offers faceted product search, there’s a chance that you may have duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content can be a disaster for SEO by confusing search engines and impacting your crawl budget.
To protect your site’s ability to rank yet still provide a user-friendly on-site search experience, make sure you have your faceted search set up correctly.
6. Investing in Social Proof
Word of mouth continues to be a compelling form of marketing—prospective customers want to see peer reviews, detailed testimonials, case studies, and other forms of social proof.
If you have user-generated content, put it to use on your site! Reach out to your customers and offer incentives for their reviews, feedback, and social media interactions. Social proof is essential to increasing sales and building trust between you and your customers. It can also increase the SEO strength of each product page and make you stand out from competitors who are not leveraging social proof.
7. Prioritizing the User Experience
The modern shopper is accustomed to getting exactly what they’re looking for within seconds of landing on a page, and this continues to hold true in 2022. Implementing SEO best practices across your site may help bring in traffic, but without a fully optimized site to manage your visitors, that traffic isn’t going to translate to sales.
SEO in 2022 will depend significantly on website optimization and page experience. If you want to keep visitors around, your user experience needs to be accessible, fast, and user-friendly. Optimize images, enable browsing and navigation, and focus your efforts around guidelines like Google’s Core Web Vitals.
8. Thinking Like a Mobile Shopper
People are increasingly using their mobile devices to search for, discover, and purchase products online. If you want to rank competitively in 2022, you will need to provide an online shopping experience that works seamlessly on mobile devices.
The mobile-friendliness of your ecommerce site plays a significant role in your ranking on major search engines. How can you tell if your ecommerce website is mobile-friendly? You can start with this test from Google. Then, use our guide to enhancing your site for mobile shoppers to ensure that you’re creating the most mobile-friendly experience possible.
Next Steps: Consider SEO Trends Alongside Ecommerce Best Practices
Your online experience matters more than ever. Merchants who are able to look beyond technical SEO and combine their search efforts with ecommerce best practices will be the ones that succeed.
Once you’ve optimized your website for searchability, you'll want to make sure it’s set up to maximize the value of every visit. Focus your efforts on creating an appealing and easy-to-navigate storefront, guiding users through product discovery and product selection, and leveraging upselling and cross-selling techniques to boost order values.
Not sure where to start? We recommend conducting a website assessment to evaluate your online store’s performance and discover areas that need improvement:
