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In the fiercely competitive world of organic search, businesses are investing heavily in SEO to contend with Google’s ever-frequent updates. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the ecommerce sector, where companies strive for organic rankings against the backdrop of budgetary constraints, competition from established brands, and fluctuating algorithms. As an SEO company, this is a challenge we know only too well.
So, we decided to publish a comprehensive whitepaper on SEO trends and insights for UK ecommerce businesses, analysing over 20,000 sites to identify key SEO strategies for growth as well as priority areas for 2024. Aimed at SEO experts, marketing leaders, and business founders, it offers an actionable blueprint to enhance organic visibility and growth, drawing from a comprehensive analysis of ecommerce domains.
This piece is a summary of our study. For a more in-depth dive into ecommerce SEO trends and actionable key takeaways, download our ecommerce whitepaper today.
1. 60% of Ecommerce websites fail a basic Google Lighthouse speed and performance test.
a. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) issues are by far the biggest contributors to poor Ecommerce performance
2. The biggest Ecommerce brands are using digital PR to acquire top-tier backlinks, whereas smaller brands are less likely to have such links in their backlink profiles.
3. The average number of organic keywords that an Ecommerce website ranks for is 7,748.
4. The average organic traffic generated each month by Ecommerce websites is 38,486.
Technical SEO ensures websites align with modern search engines’ technical requirements to efficiently crawl, index, and rank. This includes optimising page speed, performance, and canonical tags for sites.
Strong technical foundations are vital for SEO strategies, as issues can lead to a page not being indexed by Google.
Technical SEO Metrics Analysis
Our analysis assessed key aspects of how the average ecommerce website is doing when it comes to technical optimisation of their website.
Metrics we used to analyse sites include:
The average ecommerce website falls short on speed and performance metrics
Our research revealed that the typical ecommerce website often lacks in areas such as speed, performance, accessibility and adherence to fundamental SEO principles. A significant number of ecommerce sites failed Google Lighthouse speed and performance tests, with only a tiny percentage passing.
Notably, ecommerce websites in the electronics space had the best Lighthouse pass rate (2.8%), but websites in the Home space had the lowest Lighthouse fail rate (56.2%).
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Issues
As part of our Lighthouse tests, we pulled out metrics on pass/fail rates across the key criteria that the tool looks at in its assessment. We found that Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) issues are by far the biggest contributor to poor ecommerce website speed and performance, with a surprisingly high number of sites not meeting LCP standards.
Ensuring Above Average LCP Metrics
To improve LCP, site owners and technical SEOs should minimise resource delays and optimise LCP resource discovery for when the page loads.
Utilising Canonical Tags
Part of our research focused on how many ecommerce pages lacked canonical tags—something which would lead to potential keyword cannibalisation and inefficient indexing. Canonical tags help search engines identify the ‘original’ version of a page, which is crucial for avoiding duplicate content issues.
Canonical Tags Best Practices
Best practices for canonical tags include redirecting duplicate URLs, adding rel=’canonical’ link elements, and including only canonical versions in XML sitemaps.
UX Issues in Ecommerce Websites
Many ecommerce sites, both big and small, struggle with UX issues. On the whole, due to their superior budgets, the top brands show signs of greater UX investment, but even they run into problems. Effective UX involves intuitive navigation, mobile optimisation, minimal layout shifts, and clear CTAs.
Link Integrity in Ecommerce Sites
Broken or outdated links are a common barrier to ranking high on the SERPs. Proper link management is essential for user experience and SEO, aiding in site discovery and indexing. Having broken links misleads users and diminishes SEO effectiveness.
Case Study: Addressing Canonical Tags
As an ecommerce SEO company, we partner with plenty of clients, both household names and up-and-coming start-ups, to take their businesses to the next level. Before working with Reboot, Click4Reg.co.uk faced major issues with canonical tags and indexing across thousands of URLs.
This led to Google crawling and, subsequently, indexing thin and duplicate content across the site, negatively impacting the site’s visibility and preventing Google from efficiently crawling and indexing the highest quality content on their site. By Implementing canonical tags across numerous duplicate URLs, we noticeably improved their search rankings.
Onsite SEO optimises website content for target keywords. It also involves editing title tags, headings, meta descriptions, and page content. This strategy is crucial for achieving higher visibility in organic search results and has broader benefits across various marketing channels.
Analysis of Onsite SEO Metrics
Our assessment of ecommerce websites focused on:
Our data suggests that the average ecommerce website would benefit from additional time and resources being dedicated to onsite optimisation. For example, an ecommerce site should look to have an optimal title tag which clearly describes the page, primary and long-tail keywords, as well as featuring a Call to Action (CTA). A well-crafted title tag can also enhance click-through rates.
Content Quality and UGC Utilisation
Our study found that of the sites we crawled, nearly all had high-quality content, with very few scoring ‘Hard’ or ‘Fairly Hard’ on the Fleisch Kincaid readability scale. The sites that didn’t perform strongly generally lacked user reviews and Q&A. UGC, done correctly, adds unique relevant content, helping meet user intent and improve SEO.
Duplicate Content and Thin Content Issues
Duplicate content was fairly common amongst ecommerce websites in all three bands of organic visibility that we looked at. Larger ecommerce sites often face more duplicate content issues due to bulk product uploads with identical descriptions supplied by manufacturers.
One of our clients, OnBuy.com, was dogged by the problem of duplicate content. To address this, we began to use sections of dynamic content to dilute the amount of content duplication on a given page.
Onsite Optimisation Gaps
All low-performing ecommerce sites needed basic onsite optimisation, like improvements to the title tag and H1s. Even some of the largest ecommerce sites would benefit from taking a look over our SEO whitepaper, as many of them could benefit from refining their onsite elements. One of the most common shortfalls was a lack of internal linking, with over eight in 10 sites not getting the most out of internal linking.
Case Study: Showerstoyou.co.uk
We helped Showerstoyou.co.uk enhance their site with UGC to compete in the home and bathroom market. Integrating product reviews and Q&A sections into the brand’s product and offering led to increased organic visibility and search ranking improvements.
Off-site SEO focuses on enhancing external signals to boost SEO rankings, primarily through link building. This includes analysing how unique the referring domains are, the authority and trustworthiness of linking sites, relevance to linked content, anchor text, and the rate of link acquisition and loss. Despite Google’s evolving ranking criteria, a strong backlinks profile remains crucial.
Analysis of Backlink Profiles
Our study encompassed over two million backlinks from 98 Ecommerce websites, focusing on:
Key Findings in Backlink Analysis
The average Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) across the links we analysed was 28, indicating diverse link authority levels. We noted a 78% average for dofollow links, which is crucial as Google considers these for passing link equity.
Digital PR in Link Building
Digital PR is a crucial aspect of any site’s link-building strategy. A significant proportion of ecommerce sites use digital PR for backlinks, with many seeing the benefits of the strategy. Using digital PR for link building is more common among larger ecommerce sites, compared to the less visible small to medium domains.
Reactive PR and Expert Comments
More than half of ecommerce sites add expert comments to their sites as well as reactive PR. Even though this is a faster strategy, it often results in slightly lower DR backlinks (average DR of 35) compared to digital PR.
Industry-Specific Trends
In the clothing niche, all top-performing domains engaged in digital PR, capitalising on their larger budgets for diverse strategies. Contrastingly, in the jewellery sector, traditional PR was more prevalent, with fewer instances of digital PR-driven backlinks.
Strategies for Different Ecommerce Sectors
Middle-tier brands in various sectors showed a gap in employing these link-building strategies, indicating an opportunity for growth through increased digital PR efforts.
Brands to Look At For Digital PR and Link-Building Inspiration
Regardless of the size of the brand, the calibre of publications you can acquire links from with digital PR is pretty much the same.
Below we have listed some of the top-performing domains we looked at when it came to off-site SEO and link building:
We also found a smaller sample of medium-sized ecommerce domains which stood out for their link-building efforts:
Case Study: MattressOnline.co.uk
Through our assistance on digital PR, including data-driven campaigns and expert commentary, we secured MattressOnline.co.uk over 50 high-DR backlinks with an average Ahrefs Domain Rating of 60, significantly enhancing their online visibility.
Our analysis began with acquiring data feeds from BuiltWith, covering UK Ecommerce stores across various sectors like Home, Beauty, and Electronics. We refined this data to focus on active websites, indicated by a 200 OK response.
APIs Usage
We utilised the Semrush API to gather organic visibility metrics for each domain, including monthly UK organic traffic, traffic cost estimates, and rankings for organic keywords. The Google Pagespeed API provided speed and performance data for these domains.
Screaming Frog Integration
To analyse technical and onsite SEO, we automated Screaming Frog crawls using a Python script. This allowed us to examine up to 100 URLs per domain, focusing on elements such as page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and broken links.
Manual SEO Audits
Additionally, we conducted 150 manual SEO audits by our SEO manager and director, evaluating a range of Ecommerce websites with varying levels of organic traffic. These audits offered deeper insights into nuanced SEO optimisations and strategies, including the use of UGC and internal link optimisation.
Off-Site SEO & Link Building Analysis
For a comprehensive view of off-site strategies, we analysed over 2 million backlinks from our manual audits. This involved identifying common anchor texts and reviewing digital PR and expert quote links, which helped us discern specific link-building strategies across industries and websites.
Read all about the SEO insights and trends ecommerce brands should take note of, and best practices in our ecommerce whitepaper.
