Effective SEO Tactics For Ecommerce Sites

Core Web Vitals should matter to not just SEO experts, but anyone interested in scaling D2C Often your product is great, and your ads are getting people to your site, but good chunk of them bounce before even seeing the second image Or worse, your D2C site ranks below third-rate aggregators on Google despite having a better brand, better product, and better reviews on keywords you should own One big reason could be that your site experience sucks. And that’s exactly what Core Web Vitals is trying to measure. These aren’t vanity metrics. They’re Google’s way of telling you that your user experience is frustrating. And we won’t reward it with visibility Here’s what Core Web Vitals actually mean (without jargon): •LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) = How long your main visual/image takes to load. If it’s >2.5s, it’s a problem •CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) = Does the screen jump around while loading? If buttons shift while the user tries to click, it’s hurting conversions •INP (Interaction to Next Paint) = How fast your site reacts to taps/clicks. If there’s a delay when they hit “Add to Cart”-bad news. Think of it this way: •LCP = First impression •CLS = Does the page feel stable? •INP = Is it snappy? Why should founders/CMOs care? Because these metrics directly affect 3 things: 1. Organic traffic (SEO): Google demotes slow and clunky sites. Doesn’t matter how good your content or backlinks are 2. Conversion rate: People bounce when images load late, or buttons move as they click 3. Ad ROAS: Your performance marketing team is paying to drive traffic to a broken experience. You lose money before the user even evaluates the product How to check your Core Web Vitals: Free Tools: •PageSpeed Insights •Lighthouse Ideal Benchmarks in my opinion: •LCP < 2.5s •CLS < 0.1 •INP < 200ms If you are doing everything else right- good products, good marketing, good creatives etc, don’t let slow LCP and messy CLS undo your good work

7 out of 10 brands I audit struggle with one major issue. 60%+ users leave from the product page. Often due to: - just browsing / price - lack of trust in the brand - lack of clarity about the product Now, you can find the exact reason by running an on-page survey (using a tool like Hotjar). But, you can solve each of these. As a result, increase that add-to-cart rate. And overall conversions. In this example, I've made changes that help you make your product and its benefits clear and increase the conversion rate. Below are the 8 changes I recommend - 1. Have a super clear product name. This is missed more often than you realize. Show it to 5 people and see if they understand what's the product. 2. Highlight the key benefits - in short. This is most relevant for the food and personal care segment. Use icons or bullets for this - so it gets called out. 3. Make sure the price is easy to find. Ideally in the first fold and placed close to the product name. 4. Use images that create a strong first impression visually but also convey useful information like ingredients (as in this case) or benefits, features. 5. Talk about why is your product effective. People don't buy only benefits, they want to learn how it works. 6. Highlight sizes clearly. Avoid just having the measurement like (litre, kg, oz), instead give it a more human touch like 'travel pack', 'medium'. 7. Make the monthly subscribe section prominent (not only a checkbox). This section has the power to increase your monthly revenue. So make sure it highlights the benefits of subscribing. 8. Optimize the area around the add to cart with key service USPs like money back guarantee. 9. Cross-sell close to the add-to-cart CTA. That's when the user is in the purchase mindset. Make sure they can add it to cart directly from there. Most of these sound straightforward. But are often missed. Use this checklist for your PDP. Let me know in the comments how many of the 9 points it meets.

My SEO agency manages some of the top brands internationally. After thousands of audits, these 5 traffic-killers show up across every niche. Here’s how to fix them for quick ranking gains: 1. Broken or Flat Site Structures • Rebuild your main navigation with logical page groupings • Add subcategories based on real search behavior and tags • Create individual landing pages for each core service or product • Add breadcrumb trails to help both users and crawlers • Keep footer links focused and minimal to reduce crawl dilution 2. Strengthen Internal Linking to Avoid Orphan Pages • Map out all your URLs and find pages with zero internal links • Link from high-traffic blog posts to pages you want to rank • Add contextual links within paragraphs, not just footers or menus • Merge duplicate pages that dilute link equity across similar topics • Use descriptive anchor text that includes keywords naturally 3. Refresh Thin or Spammy Pages with Specific Content Additions • Use custom fields to add product specs, how-tos, or comparison points • Replace short service blurbs with expanded answers to buyer questions • Add FAQs, CTAs, and visuals like icons and tables for clarity • Prune outdated or AI-written content that adds no value • Schedule quarterly audits to review and update old posts 4. Improve Metadata and Sitemap Accuracy • Rewrite title tags to match search intent while encouraging clicks • Group blog content into categories and reflect this in your sitemap • Switch to a dynamic sitemap that updates when pages are added • Submit your sitemap in GSC and cross-reference it with robots.txt • Remove broken or spammy URLs that waste crawl budget 5. EEAT Pages and Signals That Actually Move the Needle • Publish a detailed About page that tells your brand’s story • Add a dedicated Reviews page with real testimonials and UGC • Link out to relevant authority sources to build trust • Show author credentials and publishing dates on blog posts • Create branded social profiles and link them on the site

Pumped to announce that we've grown our SEO from 0 to 140K daily clicks and 100% health in under 12 Months! - here's the 5 things I learned while doing this. These aren't obvious - and it was a LOT of work to scale at this pace. It's also extra hard because you can't tell what's working immediately/vs what's not. 1- We strategically go after the bottom 99% - not the top 1%. Unlike alllll of our competitors who are chasing just the top 50 merchants - we came up with an insane strategy to build auto crawlers that figured out the bottom 99% of sites we want to target, and we went hard on those. Now, whenever a new niche product blows up (pretty much every other day thanks to tiktok) - we are already ranked super high for it. This was a huuge amount of work though, I get PTSD thinking about the amount of script automation we had to do for this last year. 2 - Leverage your existing partnerships to drive Authority! We tapped into our hundreds of partner merchants to do partnered backlinks to us that actually drove value (users would click on merchant partners to generate their own personalized codes via our site). These are backlinks from massive, trusted sites, that all fit the keywords we were going for. Growth was explosive as soon as we did this. If you don’t look like an expert on a subject, Google won’t rank you like one. 3- Steal Competitor Keywords Hiding in “People Also Ask” - Most people only look at competitor keywords in tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. But Google literally tells you what related questions people are searching for in the “People Also Ask” box. Scrape these, create better answers, and optimize your pages to rank for them. It sounds obvious but so many people don't do this - those are the the phrases that people are actually searching for! You don't need to guess. 4- Make it easy af for the crawler to parse you. No fancy GUIs. Optimize for Zero-Click Searches (Featured Snippets & FAQs). Google is stealing clicks with zero-click results—so take advantage of it. Structure content in clear, skimmable sections with FAQ-style answers. Get rid of fancier react components and just use <h2> and <h3> headers (trust me on this), bullet points, and concise answers to capture featured snippets. Make it easy af for the crawler to parse you. 5 - Internal links go hard - Most people obsess over backlinks but forget how powerful internal linking is for SEO. We built internal link maps that ensure every page passes authority to other relevant pages, keeping users (and crawlers) flowing through our ecosystem. ALSO - people forget but you actually lowkey NEED this so that the crawlers won't consider any of your pages orphaned. Every time we launch a new page, we find 3-5 existing pages to link to (all automated using clustering). This speeds up indexing, distributes link equity, and makes Google really understand what your site is about. If you're not actively managing internal links, you're leaving rankings (and money) on the table.

Search intent is NOT a one-time thing you figure out and forget. It changes constantly. What worked last year might NOT work today. For example, let's assume Google was ranking mostly listicle blogs for the keyword "best mobile phones under 20,000". Then suddenly, the algorithms realize that e-commerce category pages (collection pages) satisfy user intent much better. They start prioritizing these pages instead. In this scenario it doesn't matter: - How perfect your on-page SEO is - How EASY the keyword seems - How many backlinks you build If you're still trying to rank a listicle blog, you're fighting a losing battle. Something very similar happened to one of our clients. We noticed that 5 pages that we had deployed about 6 months ago were NOT ranking for any target keywords. This was unusual because all other pages for this client were ranking exactly as projected. Here's how we tackled this situation: 1. Analyzed the SERPs thoroughly to understand how the landscape had shifted 2. Discovered our content type wasn't aligned with current search intent 3. Identified that our content format needed adjustment 4. Developed a completely new angle to rework on the content. Once we implemented these changes and boom within a week it started showing up on the first and second page (check screenshot). Now we wait and will start a link building campaign for it. The bottom line is that there's no room for set-and-forget strategies in today's search environment. You need to give searches what they want, the way they want. If you fail to do that, your chances of ranking are slim to none. How has your experience with search intent shifts been?

Not all metrics matter. The smart clients know which ones do Lately, I have been reflecting on how differently our best clients view marketing performance. They rarely ask us about vanity metrics. No obsession over clicks, likes, or traffic went up by 20%. Instead, they ask: ↳ "How much pipeline did this campaign generate?" ↳ "Are we reducing CAC quarter over quarter?" ↳ "What is our ROI from this SEO effort?" ↳ "Is this campaign actually contributing to revenue?" It is refreshing. And a little rare. Because most marketers still present success using metrics that sound good in a report, but don't move the business forward. At Marastu® we have learned to speak the language of revenue. And that's what sets our partnerships apart, we care about what actually matters. Here is the truth: The clients who ask the right questions get the best outcomes. If you are a marketer, start thinking beyond execution. Learn to tie every tactic back to revenue, cost-efficiency, and growth. That is how you stay relevant. That is how you lead.

I spoke with a D2C brand that had skyrocketed its organic traffic yet their daily orders were still flat. They came to me expecting a quick SEO fix. But as I dug deeper, I realized what they needed was a strategic framework —an integrated set of choices that would drive not just visitors, but profitable orders. Initial Situation: ➜ 10x increase in daily clicks (from almost nothing to 2,000/day) ➜ Average Order Value (AOV) surprisingly low ➜ Order volume: virtually unchanged despite the traffic surge Problem Identification: Why wasn’t all that new traffic turning into sales? The brand had invested in SEO, yes—but without aligning content strategy with top-selling SKUs, profit margins, demographics, and their unique value proposition. ❌ They chased visibility, not viability. Process (Our Discovery Call): I asked questions like: ➜ Top-selling SKUs? ➜ High-margin categories? ➜ Core audience and demographics? ➜ Product Differentiators vs. competition? ➜ Customer repeat purchase cycles? By understanding these, I identified where intent-rich opportunities matched their strongest business levers. What We Did Next (The Proposal): I presented a tailored SEO program that went beyond “just more traffic.” It focused on: a) Where we choose to play: Pinpointing search opportunities that have a short time to value of results. b) How we choose to win: Mapping keywords to product categories with favourable Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty (KD), and Average Order Value. I presented them a scatter chart of commercial-intent keywords plotted by: ➜ Search Volume ➜ Keyword Difficulty ➜ Potential AOV Impact This instantly clarified the path forward. Instead of random traffic, we were going after the right traffic. The prospect’s reaction? He said no previous proposal had offered this level of strategic clarity. It’s easy to chase vanity metrics (traffic, rankings, clicks), but without aligning your SEO strategy to business goals, you’ll never see the revenue catch up. Stop treating SEO as a game of traffic. ➡️ Treat it as a strategic tool that positions you in front of high-intent audiences. ➡️ It’s not about playing everywhere—it’s about winning in the right places. If you’re looking to make strategic choices—on Google, Bing, or next-gen platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude —and you want to translate visibility into growth, let’s talk. I’d be excited to help you map your SEO opportunities to real business outcomes.

Many of you may not be familiar with the details of Amazon COSMO. As early adopters of these evolving trends, sharing more insights. ➡️What Is COSMO? COSMO (Common Sense Knowledge Generation) goes beyond traditional keyword-based search. It deciphers the why behind purchases. For example: Someone buys a memory foam pillow not just because it's "comfortable," but because they suffer from neck pain and need support for better sleep quality. By tapping into deeper customer intent, COSMO makes Amazon smarter at connecting products with real needs, improving search relevance, and delivering personalized shopping experiences. ➡️For sellers, COSMO means: ✅Listings need to be optimized for intent, not just keywords. ✅Backend attributes and product information (titles, descriptions) must align with customer search behaviour. ✅PPC strategies must shift from volume-focused targeting to intent-driven campaigns. COSMO rewards those who optimize listings and advertising strategies for genuine customer intent. ➡️What We’re Seeing Already ✅Mobile search results now push filters more prominently, creating a different shopping experience from desktop. This trend is just the beginning of COSMO’s impact. ✅Amazon’s relevance scoring now bridges gaps between search intent and product information. Products optimized for intent will rank higher organically. ➡️How to Stay Ahead of COSMO ✅Optimize Product Listings: Align titles, descriptions, and attributes with customer intent. Close semantic gaps by understanding the reasons behind customer searches. ✅Adjust PPC Strategies: Focus on ads that match search intent, not just high-volume keywords. Leverage COSMO’s insights to discover new, relevant keywords. ✅Monitor Search Trends: Use SQP and other Amazon reports to track changes in search behaviour. Adapt daily to refine your strategy and outpace competitors. ➡️What This Means for PPC Ranking PPC ranking for keywords may become obsolete, and COSMO will make ad spending more efficient in the long run. #amazon #amazonadvertising #amazonads

Amazon quietly rolled out this update a few weeks ago but it’s making a loud impact on ACoS. 🎯 🆕 Sponsored Products now lets you adjust bids based on distinguished target audiences. So, you’re not bidding on just keywords anymore. You’re adjusting bids for people who : = are ‘New to Brand Shoppers’ = have ‘Purchased Brand’s Products’ = have ‘Clicked or Added brand’s products to cart’ And that means one thing. It enables a more intelligent full-funnel approach where you’re not just catching attention at the awareness stage, but actively guiding high-intent shoppers from consideration all the way to the purchase point. Here’s how we’re building strategy around it: (1) New to Brand shoppers: Target them in those campaigns with low ASP products. They will have higher chances of buying your product and once they do convert, you’ve moved them down the funnel. (2) Returning brand engagers: Think cross-selling. Example - if they’ve bought leggings, then adding them to the gym t-shirt campaign would help stay top of their mind. The idea is to show your brand on their searches ‘always’, capturing their attention and becoming their ‘default’ choice. The entire update is more of a ‘subconscious play’ to efficiently re-wire your audience’s brain into choosing ‘you.’ Shoppers don’t realise they’re being remarketed to but they do start recognising your brand more often. While the Sponsored Display inventory is limited, with this new capability within Sponsored Products, you can retarget by blending more seamlessly into the shoppers experience and get wider reach without being aggressive. We’ve been experimenting with this since launch and the results are already showing: = ACoS dropped by 3% in just the first month. = Order volumes increased by 17%, largely from returning buyers If you’ve tested this feature yet, drop what you’ve observed in the comments.