Best Practices and Routines — Top Tips For Every E-Commerce Website

1. Periodic SEO analysis: SEO is not static, nor is your e-commerce website. Your site and code will change. A developer may, with the best intent at heart, fix one problem but create another. Use a strategic SEO framework to ensure that everything is in sync with your economic and strategic goals.

2. Use Google Webmaster Tools: This free tool helps webmasters find and fix vexing SEO problems. Establish a routine in which you:

• Look for 404 errors, soft 404′s and other problems
• See how your website, products and pages are performing on the SERPs
• Notice popular keywords and phrases, popular pages and more

I recommend integrating Google Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords and Google Analytics to get access to valuable information for free.

3. Take action: Just monitoring data isn’t enough. You must identify the actionable items to keep improving. Know what to look for and why. Spot problems with indexing, duplicate content, manual penalties from Google and more. Fix the problems promptly.

4. Invest in SEO tools: Tools like Moz, Search Metrics, Raven SEO Tools, Deep Crawl and others help you to identify problems and offer suggestions to fix them. Set up actionable reporting. Establish routines to address problems. Each tool has unique advantages. As a consultant, I recommend using a combination of tools for e-commerce SEO.

5. Do manual (sample) testing: Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify problems with pages and sections of your e-commerce website. Pick one product segment that is important to you and perform an analysis within specific categories and subcategories. Often you’ll track down site-wide problems caused by your CMS that can be quickly fixed.

6. Data analysis is the new gold: Everything you do can be done better, but you don’t have the resources to do it all. You need analysis to help prioritize areas for improvement. Build dashboards containing actionable information.

7. Take the mobile revolution seriously: Mobile devices are growing fast. Delays in developing your mobile site can kill your online business. What experience are you giving mobile users and how can you improve?

It’s not possible to cover everything about SEO for e-commerce sites in one article. The advice above has helped many e-commerce websites increase sales and revenue by large multiples, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.

If you have any more tips or advice you think our other readers should know about, please add them as a comment to this post. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.