eCommerce SEO: A Beginners Guide for Rental Businesses

For any rental business owner, getting more traffic to their online store is among their top priorities. You might have done some research about SEO, but it always seemed too time-consuming. After all, it can bring you free, consistent, high-quality traffic if you get it right. Once you get past the excessive industry jargon, it’s not as hard as it seems.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the marketing process of generating more organic traffic from search engines like Google to your online store. For example, whenever you search for something on Google, you’re taken to a search engine results page (SERP). Below the paid ad results, you’ll usually find ten organic results.

What is the goal of eCommerce SEO?

The goal of SEO is to get your product pages into the top 10 organic search results. Of course, there are more pages of results, but the further away from this first page your website is, the less traffic you’ll generate. A 2013 study found that only 4.8% of people click past the first page of results, and only 0.78% click on a link.

According to Backlinko, 75.1% of people click on the first three links in search results. Of course, this is explained by positioning, but search results can be pretty confusing. You will see a list of links and shopping ads, text ads, featured snippets, top stories, and related questions.

So, your rental website must appear as high on the first page of search results for relevant keywords as possible. In this guide, we will break down all the essential steps you’ll need to take to get started with eCommerce SEO for your rental business.

How to get started with eCommerce SEO

Getting started with search engine optimization requires some direction as there’s a lot of information out there. However, this guide is written to give you a basic introduction to SEO with actionable steps you can take to get started today.

1. Keyword research

The first step is to identify the keywords that make up the search terms that your potential customers will be using. The best way to do this is keyword research which can be done in a variety of ways. There are websites dedicated to serving you keyword suggestions, but you can also find them at the bottom of most Google results pages.

Google’s related search suggestions can be found at the bottom of search results. Let’s take “bike rental nevada” for example:

You’ll find suggestions like “las vegas bike rental,” but you’ll want to be chasing more detailed recommendations. In our example, these would be “las vegas road bike rental” and “electric bike rental las vegas strip.” Both show classic signs or user intent because they’re not simple search terms.

There are also keyword research tools like Ahrefs, which provides a subscription service that can monitor, suggest and track keywords for your rental website. Its keyword explorer tool will show you if anyone is searching terms relating to your business. It can also let you see what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

To narrow down your results, you need to know what kind of keywords you’re looking for, and the key is high volume and intent keywords with low competition. To determine this, you can sign up for a free Google Ads account and use their keyword planning tool or get more in-depth insights with a paid keyword research tool subscription.

2. Site structure

Something that is often overlooked when it comes to eCommerce SEO is how pages are organized on a rental website. Not only does it affect your search rankings, but it can also have an impact on user experience. Essentially, you want to make it easy for both search engines and potential customers to find the right pages on your online store.

Of course, this can be pretty complicated if you offer many different products, but there’s something that will make this easier. The answer is simplicity. Many websites are complex and meticulously organized into categories and sub-categories. However, your website needs to be as easy to navigate as possible.

The key to site structure is to have as few clicks from your home page to your product pages as possible. The further potential customers have to go from your home page to do what they want, the less likely they are to make a purchase decision. This also affects how search engines index your website, and the further from the home page a page is, the less relevant it appears.

3. On-page SEO

Now you understand keyword research and site structure, it’s the to get started with on-page SEO. This includes all the content on your website, which needs to be optimized to be the most relevant for your chosen search terms. There are a few things that go into this, which are described below:

• Your website’s sitemap.xml - This is usually generated by your website builder and is what Google uses to map out your website.
• Title tags and meta descriptions - These are what you title your pages and the brief description that appears in search results.
• Alt text for images - The short description of an image in the file properties. Search engines use this to decode what an image is since they can’t see it.
• File names - The name of the files you upload to your website.
• URLs for pages, blog posts, and products - This is how your pages appear in the address bar of internet browsers.

Each of these needs to be optimized with the keywords you are targeting for your rental website. In addition, they should include keywords that are relevant to each page and should contain use intent. This will help your pages rank higher in search results as they are more relevant to what users are searching.

A beginners guide to eCommerce SEO

Of course, a lot more goes into eCommerce SEO, and it can get quite technical. From link building to content marketing and more, but you don’t need to get started with these until you have the fundamentals right. The steps described in this guide should set your website on the right path and take some time to optimize, so you should have plenty to do.