How Should an Ecommerce Business Do SEO?

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The full article contains 4,315 Chinese characters and takes about 11 minutes to read.

After speaking with the people responsible for roughly a hundred ecommerce websites in China and overseas, I noticed a particularly interesting pattern:

Most China-based sites still rely mainly on advertising and influencers. Their margins are very low, and some are close to operating at a loss.

Most overseas companies, by contrast, prioritize organic traffic and use advertising tests to support their organic acquisition work.

1. Why Does This Pattern Exist?

Why does this unusual pattern exist? I think it can be traced mainly to four factors.

There Are Too Few Experienced SEO Practitioners in China

I know that many large companies operating standalone sites for overseas markets struggle to recruit suitable SEO staff. Some do not even know which standards to use when hiring.

At root, the problem is that experienced practitioners remain relatively scarce in China.

I previously wrote an article about hiring SEO professionals. Read it if that is relevant to you.

The Understanding of SEO Is Incomplete

Many people know SEO can be valuable, but they also think it is exceptionally difficult. They ask: "We bought hundreds of high-quality backlinks and invested RMB 300,000, so why have we still seen no result?"

"I have already written a huge number of articles. Why do they have no rankings, or why can the rankings not improve?"

"I have already done extensive on-page optimization. Why is traffic still not increasing?"

Why do these problems arise? The underlying issue is still an incomplete understanding of SEO.

SEO is not a collection of disconnected actions. Practitioners, and even business owners, need to understand it as a systematic way of working.

That understanding also helps you avoid excessive anxiety when changes occur in SEO performance.

People Lose Patience and Give Up

At any given time, more people are probably abandoning SEO than beginning it.

Why?

New ecommerce sites are taking longer to establish themselves. Google already has many websites of this kind, so it needs time to assess yours.

We commonly call this assessment period the sandbox.

Many people give up during this period. They feel that they have invested heavily but still have no traffic.

At that point, either the owner abandons the effort or the team loses motivation.

I remember one owner saying that everyone in the company had prepared themselves for slow results before starting SEO. When the sandbox period actually arrived, however, half the team still left.

They Chase Speed

A fixation on speed is a poor fit for SEO. Every part of the work requires care; otherwise, why would Google reward the site with unpaid traffic?

The author estimates that ranking on the first page for a commercial keyword with monthly search volume above 10,000 could save roughly RMB 100,000 in advertising costs each month.

The more qualified traffic a ranking attracts, the greater its potential value.

One expression of this impatience is simply giving up on SEO.

Another is building navigation without keyword research and treating it casually, then activating every advertising channel in pursuit of the fastest possible result.

Some supposed experts arrive at a company, make a burst of changes and send traffic soaring. The owner is delighted.

But owners may not know whether those actions are compliant or supported by evidence.

The result can look like the example below:

Traffic risk on black-hat and grey-hat sites

2. Why Should an Ecommerce Website Invest in SEO?

As noted above, SEO can help an ecommerce website reduce advertising costs and attract better traffic.

Recently, several people have complained to me that advertising has become too expensive. They spend tens of yuan on a single click and still see no conversion.

If your SEO performs well, this problem becomes less severe.

What other benefits are there?

I recommend that ecommerce websites begin SEO as early as possible.

I often say that the age and history of a site are also factors Google can consider. Time does not lie.

The earlier you begin SEO, therefore, the harder it may become for competitors to overtake your site later.

In that sense, organic search traffic can create a natural moat for the business.

Users who arrive through organic search may also bring a stronger initial level of trust.

You will often find that these visitors stay longer and have a lower bounce rate.

Their conversion rate may also be considerably higher than traffic from other channels.

If your organic traffic is not converting well at present, reconsider the results of your keyword research.

Finally, SEO tends to start slowly but can become stable.

A website that consistently follows legitimate optimization practices should improve over time.

Once its traffic has stabilized, it is less likely to collapse without warning.

Advertising behaves differently: if you stop buying ads today, the traffic may disappear tomorrow. Anyone who has had an advertising account suspended understands that pain.

3. How Should an Ecommerce Business Do SEO?

How should an ecommerce business do SEO?

There is no single standard that applies to every website.

I use a different strategy for each company.

At a broad level, however, you need to understand SEO fundamentals, on-page SEO, technical SEO and off-page SEO, among other areas.

For a broader view of those skills, see our SEO training curriculum.

Once you review the full scope, you will see that SEO is one of the most complex forms of marketing.

It is no exaggeration to say that each area can take months to learn.

Becoming proficient requires several times that investment.

I will not dwell on the time cost here.

Instead, let us briefly review the main steps in ecommerce SEO.

Step 1: Conduct Keyword Research

Should the research begin with the product, or should you look only at keywords?

How do you find useful terms?

How do you find the strongest keywords used by competitors?

How should you classify the terms and assign them across the website?

I have already covered the systematic process in our keyword research program, so I will not repeat it here.

By the way, thank you to the students in that program. Seventy percent of you returned for my Google SEO 2.0 course. Thank you for the trust; I look forward to taking the next steps with you.

Step 2: Conduct Competitor Analysis

We also cover this step in the keyword research program.

It is fairly complex. Put simply, competitor data helps us decide which terms offer a realistic opportunity and identify the type of search results Google is showing, so we do not waste effort.

Step 3: Build the Website

This is the correct point at which to begin building the website. The resulting site is then based on SEO evidence.

Many people build a website before conducting keyword research. What exactly have they built?

A site intended only to run ads?

Step 4: Optimize the Pages

This is ongoing work, and it should begin before the website launches.

Students in my independent-site lead-generation program build their sites and complete the on-page work at the same time.

This approach has worked well in those projects, producing substantial visibility as soon as the sites launched. I strongly recommend doing the work in this order.

I was once asked the following question:

Q: "My competitor fails almost every item on your optimization checklist. Why can it still rank first? Does that mean on-page SEO is unimportant?"

A: First, the checklist is only a reference. Google uses many ranking factors, so we cannot judge a site from the checklist alone.

Nor should every item be followed mechanically. Different pages and niches require different priorities.

You may therefore be seeing only the competitor's weak surface presentation.

If the site has ranked consistently for a long time, there will be reasons for that performance. Examine it from several other angles.

I also want to emphasize that no matter how poor the SEO of a first-page competitor appears, you should still maintain your own optimization standards.

This is not busywork. SEO results often depend on getting many small details right before Google develops greater confidence in the page.

Step 5: Address Technical SEO

At its core, technical SEO resolves issues that affect how Googlebot crawls a site.

If Google cannot reach your pages, or cannot crawl them efficiently, their ranking or the speed at which they rank may be affected.

This area deserves particular attention on ecommerce websites with more than 1,000 pages.

Step 6: Work on Off-Page SEO

Yes, off-page work comes last.

It is an accelerator. If the work on the website itself is poor, off-page activity has limited value.

Anyone who has worked on external promotion knows how difficult the questions can be: where to find opportunities, where to place links, where to buy them and which options carry risk.

The central principle is simple: keep the pattern natural.

Step 7: Analyze the Data

Finally, you need to analyze and track the data.

Keep timely records of which methods work best in your field, what changes you made and which actions had a negative effect on a page.

There are too many details to cover here; you need to learn from your own results.

Step 8: Consider Other Advanced Tactics

These advanced tactics do not suit every ecommerce website. If even one genuinely fits your site, however, it may be enough to give you an advantage in SEO.

This material belongs to the advanced part of our Google SEO training and will be covered there.

4. Common Questions from Ecommerce Website Readers

Students frequently ask me several questions. Many readers probably have the same concerns.

Q1: My Website Was Built Without Keyword Research. How Can I Fix It?

This is a very good question.

Most of you probably already have a website.

If the site was built without keyword research but already ranks well, conduct a content-gap analysis and fill the missing coverage.

If the site has little traffic, conduct the keyword research again from the beginning.

Use the findings to rebuild the site structure, then handle the SEO requirements of the redesign correctly.

Q2: If the Results Are Weak, Does That Mean SEO Does Not Work?

This is another common question.

Some readers have already begun SEO and invested substantial time and effort.

Yet Google seems not to like the site and simply will not rank it.

This is difficult to answer in general. Every site and niche is different, so Google's response to the work will also differ.

If you encounter this situation, I recommend conducting competitor analysis first and then a content-gap analysis to identify the differences between your site and its competitors.

Only then can you determine the right optimization direction.

Q3: Why Has Our Blog Produced No Results After We Spent So Much on It?

Before answering, ask yourself several questions.

What evidence did you use to choose each topic?

After choosing a topic, did you test how Google responded?

Does the topic belong in your planned marketing funnel?

How much SEO work have you done for the content-marketing program itself?

If you can answer all of those questions but still see no result, it may simply be too early. Continue to wait and observe.

Q4: I Have Made No Progress with Backlinks. What Should I Do?

Making no progress with backlinks is normal.

If you are not buying links and are conducting outreach yourself, luck also affects whether you earn a placement.

You simply need to test several methods of acquiring relevant links.

If you do not know the alternatives, I cover them in the Google SEO 2.0 course. These methods can help you avoid years of unnecessary detours in link building.

Final Thoughts

I hope more people recognize that Google SEO is not inherently difficult.

If you remain committed to sound methods and a people-first user experience, you can improve the site's prospects of earning Google's trust.