SEO for web shops:
3 tips for 2024

#1 Optimal webshop structure for Google

SEO always starts with keyword research, including the technique of a web shop. You want to know which terms are most used in Google for your products, and how competitive these terms are to rank for. With keyword research, you analyze which keywords your products can be linked to. Then you look at which products can be matched and possibly also found as a category. It is important that the URLs and titles of category and shop pages contain the keyword and are as short as possible. Elements in which the keywords should appear are:

• Menu and Footer links
• Internal links on the website
• Page titles and URLs.
• On-page content
• Breadcrumbs

#2 Start with low-hanging fruit

Optimizing your webshop for less competitive keywords is often the right choice for new or small webshops. Because the level of competition is lower, it is easier to achieve good positions.

If you followed the previous tip about a good SEO structure, you have a number of subcategory pages with niche products. These pages often contain products that meet specific searches such as: 'white men's shoes large sizes' (long-tail keywords). Because the searches are so specific, there is often a lower level of competition on these search terms. Identify these product pages, and start on-page optimizations for organic findability here.

By gradually optimizing for long-tail keywords, the Google algorithm notices that your content authority is getting stronger. For example, for the keyword "men's shoes" (short-tail) from the previous example. Thus, if a number of subcategories are optimized, you might consider optimizing a category page. Just be aware that becoming findable on category pages is trickier, and probably requires link building (buying in external links).

#3 Focus on the crawlability of your shop

Good crawlability (search engine readability) is crucial for web shops, as they often contain many product pages that are regularly updated or changed. Unlike normal websites, where content can be relatively static. Because of the dynamic nature of Web shops, you want to make sure that important pages are not snowed under during indexing (Google's placement of your pages in search results). This can result in missed opportunities in traffic and sales.

The following SEO activities can improve the readability of your website:

• Submit an XML sitemap. This is a roadmap of your shop, how it should be read by Google. For this, follow Google's best-practice recommendations.
  
  
• Setting the Robots.txt properly. This is a file that gives general instructions to Google as to which pages are allowed to be indexed, and which are not. You can read how to do this optimally here.
  
  
• Properly set the robots and canonical meta tags of individual pages. Some instructions for indexing are better set not universally in the robots.txt, but page-specifically. Especially for web shops with a lot of pagination and filters in their offerings, this can provide an immediate improvement in the visibility important pages.

A useful tip for gaining insights about the readability and indexing of your webshop is to set up Google Search Console. Here you can see which pages have been indexed and crawled, and which problems Google might encounter when reading your webshop. Recommendations are also given as to what you can do to solve these problems and prevent them in the future.