This is short presentation of our eBook. No tons of theory, only practical patterns and ready-to-use SEO hints that work! How to create an effective keywords list How to analyze competitors’ experience and use it to build your own successful SEO strategy Why 2nd ranked in the Google site gets more clicks than the 1st one. How to organize site’s structure to be both users and search engines friendly What content will help you to reach your goals What are titles, description, links and URLs and how to optimize them To download the full eBook visit https://www.mavenecommerce.com/ebooks/seo-for-ecommerce/

1. An easy guide to build your winning
SEO strategy in few steps

3. WHAT IS SEO AND WHY YOU NEED IT
• Basically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is
focused on growing online visibility in non-paid
search engines results.
• SEO combines many elements, both technical and
creative, required to improve website positions,
drive traffic and increase brand awareness.

4. • Search engines hold huge market share. Of
course, social media and other sources can
generate a lot of traffic, but the majority of it is
driven by search engines like Google, Yahoo and
Bing.
• It’s cost efficient. Although SEO specialists still
argue about the ease of calculating ROI of SEO
activities, everyone agrees that SEO provides
fairly good ROI.
• The rise of mobile optimization. Traffic from mobile
devices already exceeds traffic from traditional
desktop devices. This opens a whole new area for
SEO improvements and experiments.

5. KEYWORD RESEARCH
Discovering the right keywords is the first step to efficient SEO. To get the
starting keyword ideas try to answer these questions:
• What are people searching for to find your products/services?
• How the products are described on the website?
• How people describe your products both online and offline?
• How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products?
• How people naturally link out to you (i.e. anchor text of the incoming
links)?
• How competitors describe their products?
After answering these questions go to keyword research tools like AdWords
Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest.org

6. COMPETITORS’ RESEARCH
The main questions you want to know about your competitors
are:
• What keywords are my competitors going for?
• What links they build and how they build them?
• What their sites’ structure look like?
• What positively distinguish you from your competitors?
Tools to use:
• Ahrefs.com
• Majestic.com
• Semrush.com
• SEO Spider

7. TECHNICAL SEO/ON-SITE
On-site SEO refers to any kind of optimization for search engines
within your website or webpage. Technical SEO is basically any
SEO that is done aside content. There are no unimportant things
about SEO,all the elements must be checked up:
• Titles
• Descriptions
• Content
• Non-text content
• Headers
• Internal links
• URL structure

8. Title tags
Title tags tell users and search engines about the topic of specific
page. The page title is one of the most important objects
evaluated by search engines in order to determine what is on a
web page. The best practices for title tags are:
• Title tags should be under 512 pixels in width (55–60
characters)
• Use your keywords in the beginning
• Make your title tags readable
• If you use brand name in your titles, place it at the end of the
title tag
• All title tags should be unique

9. Meta Description
Nowadays the main purpose of description is to make people
click on your website on SERP (Search Engine Result Page). In its
turn, high CTR (click through rate) positively affects website
rankings. The best practices for Meta Descriptions:
• - Search results will display approximately 160 characters, so
keep it within this range.
• - Descriptions should be unique and include some of your
keywords. Keep keywords near the front.
• - Try to write conversational and compelling description that
will invite potential customers to check out your page.

10. Text Content
While it’s important to optimize your content for search engines
by including relevant keywords, don’t forget that you are writing
it for users. Try to think as your potential customers. What are
they looking for? What answers do they expect to receive? What
they plan to do with your product? Answer these questions in
relevant and well written segment of content; add keyword or
two and you’ll receive an optimized and SEO friendly piece of
content. Few rules to follow:
• Never copy and paste
• Use variety of content types
• Keep it fresh and up-to-date.

11. Non-text content
Despite the fact that search engines are quite smart, they can’t
see images, watch the video or listen audit files. So if you want
them to understand your content, you should describe it. Best
non-text content practices:Make sure that all your images on
have an alternative text (alt text). Alt text can influence your
ranking in web and image search so using keywords in alt text
but remember to keep it relevant to the image and to the rest of
the page.
• Try to avoid these elements, and make sure to add text to the
page if you want to use Flash or Java objects anyway.

12. Header Tags
Key points:
• The H1 to H6 tags are used to define HTML headings.
• H1 defines the most important heading while H6 defines the
least important one.
• Headers are used to help search engines understand what
page content is about and which information is more or less
important.
• As H1 is the most important and widely used, it’s essential to
make it descriptive and include keyword.

13. Internal linking
Internal links are links that point from one page to another
within one domain. Proper use of internal linking is extremely
important as it:
• helps to spread link juice
• helps customers to navigate through a website
• helps to establish an information hierarchy (distribute Page
Power properly)
Best internal linking practices include:
• 1. Use relevant keywords
• 2. Don’t stuff your pages with huge amount of internal links
• 3. Don’t add a lot of links with the same anchor text

14. Site Structure
Proper site architecture can significantly improve your website’s
usability, rankings, and conversions. The best practice is to create
flat architecture. Creating a flat architecture allows to pass your
link juice to your product pages via internal links. Key points for
creating great site architecture:
• Avoid infinite scroll issues
• Use SEO friendly and meaningful URLs
• Add Sitemap
• Use micro formats
• Use 301 and 302 redirects if needed
• Create 404 page
• Avoid duplicated content issues

15. OFFSITE SEO
Offsite SEO is mostly about building links to your store. Search
engines treat each incoming link as an indicator of quality and
popularity. The main idea is that third parties wouldn’t link to you
if they didn’t find it valuable. And while every vote counts, not all
links have the same value. Your goal is to build up as many high-
quality backlinks as possible. Key points to follow in linkbuilding:
• Never ever try to game search engines!
• Make sure your content is easy to distribute through social
media
• Focus on quality, not quantity of links

16. TRACKING, MEASURING
AND REPORTING
Search Engine Optimization is a never ending process on
constant analysis and improvements. There are few reasons
for that to be true.
• First, search engines (like Google) change their algorithms
from time to time. In order to dominate SERPs, you need to
adjust to search engines algorithms.
• Second, market is changing all the time. What works today,
may not work tomorrow.
• Third, competitors don’t sleep. If your competitors are
constantly improving their marketing strategy and you
don’t – your business will go down.
• Forth, consumer needs are changing all the time. Meeting
customers’ needs is what makes business succeed.

17. Main eCommerce KPIs to Track
• Total Sales per marketing channel (annually, quarterly, monthly,
weekly, daily, hourly, etc.)
• Total Number of online orders per marketing channel
• Total Revenue per marketing channel
• Top-selling products; profit margins for each
• Conversion rate and revenue attributed to target keyphrases /
categories
• Average order size
• Average profit margin
• Average conversion rate
• Average per visit value
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• New customer order value vs. returning customer order value

18. CONCLUSION
Although SEO seems to be a complex discipline, everyone can do basic
optimization after some reading. SEO is like a Poker; it takes few
minutes to learn the rules and whole life to become a master. The two
key points to follow in SEO are:
• Never try to game search engines
• SEO is evolving all the time. Adjust to it.
To succeed in SEO you need to think as a customer. Optimization for
the sake of optimization doesn’t work anymore. Optimization for
customers rules the world now and SEO isn’t an exception.If you need
any assistance with Search Engine Optimization of your ecommerce
website, Maven eCommerce is always here to help. We have been
developing and promoting ecommerce projects for more than five
years already. Don’t hesitate to ask us any questions regarding SEO,
Marketing or Magento. Our managers will gladly assist you in solving
any issue. Feel free to contact us by email
contacts@mavenecommerce.com