SEO Tips for Nigerian eCommerce Shops – Improve Visibility in Google

In the first post of this series, I looked at how to learn SEO in Nigeria. The focus of that  blog post was to optimise website traffic for information sites, blogs and other non-eCommerce sites. In this particular article, I will look specifically at optimising an eCommerce website.  

Though most of the steps to optimising an ecommerce website and a regular website are the same, special attention needs to be paid to ecommerce specific website structure and other factors that can guarantee your ecommerce website success attracting organic traffic from search engines.

You will also find out that SEO terms and abbreviations used in ecommerce site optimization are quite similar to everyday SEO terms. Before we get into how to optimise an ecommerce website, let’s consider some of the popular ecommerce platforms out there, and how easy or difficult they are to optimise. 

Popular eCommerce App and Platforms for Nigeria Sites

• WooComerce  – The most SEO friendly eCommerce app in the world. It comes as a WordPress plugin you can modify exactly as you like. It is  a free plugin, but you may have to pay for some premium features.
• Shopify – This is arguably the most SEO friendly eCommerce platform in the category of hosted ecommerce solutions. It is available on subscription and you may have to pay in foreign currency. 
• BigCommerce  –  An open source solution like WooCommerce

Marketplace eCommerce Platforms

Marketplace style eCommerce platforms listed below are probably the best SEO optimised eCommerce sites in the world. Some of them are not open to Nigerian entrepreneurs, however there is a lot to be learned from them, when it comes to doing SEO on an eCommerce website. 

• Jumia
• Jiji
• Selar
• Bumpa
• Etsy
• Amazon
• eBay

Now the Heavy Duty eCommerce SEO Part of This Post

Now that we have identified some of the ecommerce platforms and apps available to Nigerian entrepreneurs and the best and most SEO friendly. How do you actually conduct SEO on the particular platform your client chooses?  Optimising a shop on store for Google visibility is remarkably similar to doing it on any website.

By this I mean you have to do keyword research, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. However there are additional steps such as having a well structured navigation and content structure, categorising your products and the items under each category.  In eCommerce, most organic traffic actually goes to the category rather than the product page.  This falls under the on-page SEO category. 

“Most traffic to an eCommerce site (approx 80% comes from category pages, not product pages.”

An Example eCommerce Site SEO Structure

Home

│

├── Category (example : bakery)

│     ├── Subcategory  (example: sourdough bread)

│     │      ├── Product page (example: sourdough baguette)

│     │      ├── Product page  (example : whole grain baguette)

│

├── Blog

│     ├── Buying guide (example best bread for family feast)

│     ├── Product comparisons 

Important things to pay attention to when optimising your Nigerian ecommerce sites includes: 

✔ Using a simple category hierarchy
✔ Keep URLs short and descriptive
✔ Use breadcrumb navigation, helps SEO and site navigation
✔ Avoid deep pages, these are pages that are more than 3 clicks from the homepage.
✔ Organise products logically, for example birthday cakes should be under cakes category

✔ Use SEO-friendly URLs for example bakery-bread-sourdough
✔ Include the main keyword in the URL as indicated in above example
✔ Hyphens are preferred to  underscores for example bread-sourdough instead of bread_sourdough

What Keywords Best Describe my Products?

Now that you have your page structure sorted, what keywords should you use to describe your ecommerce site category, sub categories and pages? That is where keyword research comes in continuing my bakery and baked products example. You want to research the best keywords to use for your product.

This can easily be done by going to Bing or Google, of course you can use tools, but tools can be cumbersome, most of them tend to be slightly behind a live search engine such as Bing in consumer search intent. 

When doing SEO for a very competitive keyword,  long-tail buying keywords are the metaphoric low hanging fruits you can pluck easily.  You also want to identify the most successful ecommerce sites in your niche, analyse their keywords and incorporate it into your own keyword planning.  

High-intent search terms such as buy, cheap, best, cheapest in Lagos, best in Kano etc are potentially quite useful. Once you have identified the keywords, use them in clusters on  product category pages. 

eCommerce Category Page SEO

As we established earlier, category pages often rank for high volume keywords and bring the highest number of traffic to a Nigerian ecommerce site. To get the most out of your ecommerce category pages, you should pay attention to the following:

✔ Use keyword rich content of 300 words or more to describe the category
✔ On the top of the category page, optimise H1 heading to draw attention
✔ Use keyword as many keyword variations as possible
✔ Add great internal links to products, remembering the 3 click rule
✔ Definitely add an  FAQ section
✔ Add filters such as loaf size of the bread you are selling and style for example Agege bread.

Image SEO for a Nigerian eCommerce site

Images bring their own traffic, which is different from general search traffic. This is potentially another low hanging fruit that can elevate your store about competition. Take the time to do the following to each image on your product category and product pages. 

✔ Compress images (help them to load quickly)
✔ Use descriptive filenames, for example agege-bread-large-freshly-baked
✔ Add keyword alt text help the visually impaired
✔ Use WebP format as opposed to PNG or JPEG
✔ Lazy load images for better category or page performance

Internal Linking to Spread SEO Juice

Even before bothering about link building, if you structure your internal linking well, you make your ecommerce site more user friendly, you will also be passing link juice from one page to the other. So in your internal linking strategy, you want to link product pages to related products, from your blog, ink blog posts to product pages and products. link category pages to subcategories and use some keyword-rich anchor text in all your internal links. 

Getting Technical on eCommerce SEO

Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl your ecommerce website, identify your products accurately and serve them to interested search engines users. Here are some important technical stuff you should look at.  

Create XML sitemap and submit sitemap to Google Search Console. Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content. Google console will let you know if it finds errors on your site, fix crawl errors as soon as you are made aware. You must enable HTTPS, so that transactions on your site are secure.

Structured Data Schema Uniquely eCommerce SEO

This is one of SEO stuff that is unique for eCommerce website Schema helps search engines to understand product pages.A well structured schema will enable Google or Bing to display rich snippets about your products on their search result pages  Some info you need to add to product schema including: Product name,  Price, Availability, Reviews and Rating

Knowing How Your eCommerce Site is Performing with Analytics and Tracking

Tracking the performance of your Nigerian eCommerce site is crucial. It enables you to know what is working and what is not working. As a minimum, you want to know which product get the most traffic and which does not. 

You also want to know what pages have a high bounce rate, so that you can remedy the situation.  In whatever analytics and tracking app you use, you want to monitor organic traffic, track keyword rankings, analyse product conversions, monitor bounce rate.  

You will also find useful information you do not expect, such as finding out that most traffic to a supposedly Nigeria website is actually coming from the UK.  This may alert you to the possibility of expanding your delivery to the UK. 

Final Valuable Tips on SEO for Nigerian eCommerce Sites

• Most traffic to an eCommerce site (approx 80% comes from category pages, not product pages.
• The more products your site has, the more likely your site is to rank better in search engines. 
• Trust is very important in eCommerce sites. Get as many 3rd party certification as possible
• External ranting of your product on sites such as trustpilot is a surefire way to rank higher
• Awards, even mickey mouse awards can help your site rank higher.
• Keyword research is absolutely key to your site success. 
• SEO-friendly URLs are extremely helpful. 
• Images compressed with descriptive  alt text
• Think of mobile users, most people use their mobile device to buy stuff.
• Fast loading site
• Google Search Console setup
• Google analytics or Microsoft clarity to monitor your traffic

When All is Said & Done on SEO for Nigerian eCommerce Site

This post is by no means an authoritative post on improving SEO visibility for a Nigerian ecommerce site, it’s just to wet your appetite. If you want to know more,, so that your online store can compete, you should consider our consultancy services, just get in touch with us to enquire.   

If on the other hand, you want to learn to be an SEO professional, you should consider enrolling on one of  our SEO courses and consider joining an SEO community. Search engine optimization is a fast changing industry. Membership of a community can help you stay one step ahead of the competition.