Your eCommerce business has plenty to offer in terms of products and customer service, but when it comes to search engine visibility, it can be hard to stay afloat.
Fortunately, there are ways you can tackle the problem and make sure your shop will show up at the top of the results list when someone searches for what you sell.
In this posts series, we're gonna teach you how to build a roadmap for organic traffic and get to 7-figures from an e-commerce standpoint.
Today I'm going to give you an insight into some of my personal strategies that I've sort of patched together over time as I've been learning SEO.
I now call it the eCommerce SEO formula and it's my organic traffic roadmap to 7-figures because that's exactly what I did.
A Brief History
I founded my first eCommerce store in 2017 and I was still trying to figure out what dropshipping is and what the paid traffic is and so on.
SEO wasn't even on my radar at that stage.
2018 was the first full year of the store being open and I did approximately 300k in sales and I spent 100k between google AdWords, google shopping and Facebook ads.
No organic traffic at the time because when you're studying drop shipping they don't even tell you what SEO is because it's a slow burn reward.
In 2019, I got banned from AdWords and beyond Facebook in the same week.
At the very beginning of June and all my traffic went away and it was absolutely devastating because I was about to quit my job and do this full-time and all my traffic went away and I figured out I'm gonna have to try and find a new source of traffic not being able to run ads on the all major platforms
So I started learning about eCommerce SEO and I found a home with SEO basically by stalking affiliate marketers.
I was listening to podcasts and webinars and I was joining Facebook groups for affiliate marketers.
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I was learning from them about how they get onto pages, how they write content, how they get backlinks and how they internally link from one piece of content to another, etc.
I was just absorbing all of these things and I started applying them.
2019 I had like three blog posts and I was doing everything I could to get them to rank at the top of page one. I started getting traffic and I closed the year a lot stronger than I started.
While I was running paid ads my traffic was up in my sales world.
Then in 2020, I had a full year where it was just SEO traffic and I distorted 3.1 million in sales and I didn't have any expenses for running ads that year.
Because it was just all from content marketing. It was a massive success for me.
I went from thinking I was going to have to rethink my whole business and maybe close the store to just going all-in with SEO.
What I wanted to do is spend some time today and show you some of the strategies that I have done and they are eCommerce specific because that's my wheelhouse.
And some of the SEO strategies will look familiar because I am assuming that you're not a beginner.
Bear in mind that what I'm doing is all geared towards e-commerce.
E-commerce SEO Strategy
I was stalking affiliate marketers and trying to understand what they did and there was one very big distinct difference between what I was looking at and what I needed to do for e-commerce.
Basically, it was the intentional linking.
What we're looking at here on the left is the affiliate marketing method and what we have here is a tall rectangle that's the skyscraper piece of content.
That's the pillar piece, the main piece of content that we're going to try to rank and then all of the smaller blue squares they're all supporting pieces of content under the same topic.
It's a cluster content.
It's a one-piece of skyscraper content with a bunch of cluster content.
What I noticed was affiliate marketers were all linking to the skyscraper because the intention is to make that the obvious choice for google when Google is trying to understand if you have got 50 pieces of content all targeting the same keyword.
How do they know which one to rank well?
If 49 of them are linking all to 1 then google understands that that's the most relevant piece of content on that topic and then that's the one it ranks.
That's basically the purpose behind the secondary or cluster piece of content which is a bit more superficial in content and in-depth information. But there the purpose is to refer to the skyscraper piece of content.
But the one thing that was very prevalent in all of these methods that i was studying by affiliate marketers was they were also almost randomly linking among themselves.
Because a very strong powerful signal to google is also time on site.
So you would go from one piece of content and the visitor could then travel to another piece of cluster content and another piece and maybe eventually land on the skyscraper.
The importance was to keep people going further down the rabbit hole and clicking through and not clicking back to the search results page in google.
Time on-page is very important for affiliate marketers.
While for e-commerce you could get lots of traffic and get people on your website but if they never make it to a product page or a checkout page you're broke and you don't have a business, you have a blog.
So I had to try to figure out a way just to be more intentional with those internal links and that's what I did.
One big difference that I made was then going from random or almost seemingly random internal links just for the sake of keeping people on the site to being a lot more intentional about one link preferably.
Only one link from the cluster piece of content to the skyscraper and that way all the information signals going to google are very clear.
And the traffic to those secondary pieces of content, it's very intentional. Where we want them to go, what the call to action is
So that is the biggest tweak that I made.
My e-commerce store is a one-product store. So I've got one major piece of skyscraper content and then basically everything else acts as the cluster content for that one product niche.
Lots of people in e-commerce I've come across are in, for example, home gym equipment or wellness, etc.
And they've got multiple niches within a niche.
For example, if some of the stores I help are in like the exercise equipment and one niche could be just treadmills or exercise bikes or stair climbers.
So each one of those is better to be addressed with its own cluster.
This is kind of what the setup would look like if you have a broad new store with multiple categories like for example home equipment.
So if you have a treadmill category, you would write skyscrapers about treadmills and then all of the supporting cluster content would be on the topic of treadmills. And they would all link only exclusively to the skyscraper piece on treadmills.
It wouldn't be a great idea to start linking into a different cluster of content.
If the second piece of the second category is like rowing machines for example.
The skyscraper piece would be on rowing machines and then its personal cluster would be exclusively about rowing machines and there would be no linking outside of a cluster.
And then you would just do that for every category that your niche has.
For e-commerce, the skyscraper is a fantastic way to get on page one for a few reasons.
Maybe it's also because when people are shopping or researching products they really like those pieces of content like listicles, for example, the best x for y.
Like best treadmills for small apartments or the best treadmills for 2022, for example.
Those are the sort of pieces of content that get clicked a lot because it reduces the research for people.
Because they want the information quickly and they want to be able to make a decision based on the little amount of time spent doing the research.
And what we find is that the e-commerce stores rank pretty well for those types of content.
This is how I approach it and this is how I recommend everybody in e-commerce to approach it.
Starting with skyscraper content.
It doesn't involve an insane amount of keyword research because if you're in E-commerce and you know what your niche is, for example, the treadmill gym or a treadmill niche or a rowing machine.
You know that's your keyword. It's more like keyword reconnaissance, is what I call it. Because the research part is pretty much done.
Learn more about keyword research What Is Keyword Research? A Simple Answer
It's very simple, you can just enter the search term in google and just look at what shows up on page one.
You can even extend the research to page two and just see what type of content is ranking.
Because what you want to do is go and see how long the content is, what type of content is, etc.
Like is it informational, or
educational, or is it just a list of products with very little in-depth information?
Because if it's on page one, google thinks it's page one wordy. So you don't wanna try to reinvent the wheel you want to maybe mirror that style of content.
In many cases, free commerce content is a listicle. Like best or top product for “x”.
We try to find if that's the trend and we just try to do it bigger and better.
Bigger and better just doesn't mean more word count on the page because it also has to be very informational.
Basically, what we want to do is we want to try to make a piece of content that is so helpful that the person has made a decision and they don't need to click back onto google and read something else.
We try to have the buyer come to a buying decision there and then or at least be curious enough to click through to a product.
Because we're going to be linking to our product pages because then we're just getting them one step closer to the checkout.
That's how we would approach starting a skyscraper.
We will be going more in-depth with the skyscraper technique for eCommerce and other tips to SEO your eCommerce store in the next post of this series.
