Experts panel

This article has been written and edited by SEO & content specialists and reviewed by field experts.

Last update: May ’24.

Jelle Casper van Santen 1st degree connection1st Business Process Consultant

Jelle van Santen (article author)

Data Analyst and Content Marketing Specialist

 

 

Artur Perrella Glukhovskyy - Start up SEO Specialist

Artur Perrella Glukhovskyy 

Getting early stage startups traffic on Google | SEO Copywriter | SEO & Generative AI expert

 

Jairo Guerrero - SaaS & Ecommerce SEO Specialist

Jairo Guerrero

Helping CEOs With Their SEO | Growing Websites Traffic x10 With 90-Day Content Sprints | Achieved +5M Revenue With SaaS & eCommerce SEO Campaigns | Trained +100 Companies | SEO Capitan & Founder @ Phanum

 

 

We have tested and used all of these tools with our clients (or for ourselves). We are giving away the main insights about each tool/platform to help you to make a choice based on experience.

These 6 SEO tools will help you get
#1 rankings in Google

This is the most helpful, condensed and practical list of SEO tools that you can have to boost your eCommerce.

Ok, that maybe it is just me saying it BUT the reason I created this guide with only 6 SEO tools is because they are the ones I used so far to help dozens of eCommerce businesses to achieve growth. Like these:

seo-growth-ecommerce-phanum

Ecommerce organic growth x100 – Case study

Double traffic from SEO - Ecommerce case study - Jairo Guerrero - Phanum

Double traffic from SEO – Ecommerce case study

SEO Case Study – eCommerce – Phanum

Basically I am giving away my recipe but remember, it is the chef who still needs to cook it.

Let’s get started.

Table of contents

Why using SEO tools for eCommerce?
Benefits of SEO tools for webshops
When using SEO tools for webshops?
The 6 Best Tools for eCommerce SEO
   #1 Verbolia
   #2 Google Search Console
   #3 SERanking
   #4 AnswerThePublic
   #5 ScreamingFrog
   #6 Jasper
 Final thoughts

 

Why using SEO tools for eCommerce?

With SEO tools you can perform tasks easier and faster, for example:

  • to test your eCommerce site’s speed,
  • to do keyword research and prioritization,
  • to analyze your competitors
  • to generate more relevant content

In order to improve your rankings organically in search engines, you need tools that will help you understand all the data. And with relevant data, you should be able to make decisions based on facts instead of guesswork.

eCommerce sites (webshop, online stores) should drive as much traffic to their online store as possible. The larger your audience, the more sales you will make.

The main important channels where you can build your audience are:

Paid channels for webshops

Organic channels for webshops

  • Organic search, as well as know as SEO.
  • Social media.
  • And why not, Branding. Even though this is not a channel but a … philosophy.

These two [branding and SEO] make your business sustainable.

Branding is the part that you should take care as a business owner and Organic search is where Phanum can help. Or you can do effectively by yourself using the tools that we show you in this article.

Focus on SEO means that eCommerce businesses want their pages (whether it be a category or product page) to rank as high as possible for search terms that are relevant to their sales.

However, to rank highly in the search rankings, you need to have some understanding of SEO and all the SEO tools that are out there.

seo-vs-ppc

SEO vs PPC results. Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-vs-ppc/

While these SEO tools do provide a tremendous amount of value, they only work if you know how to use them properly and for what purposes. These tools can make your SEO process a lot easier and therefore we do recommend using relevant tools. For example, most of the tools I mention in this article can be used when you perform an eCommerce site audit.

Benefits of using SEO tools for webshops

1. Time-effective Marketing strategy 

2. Decision-making based on data instead of gut-feeling

3. Easier to monitor your progress

The main benefits of using these tools are that you will be able to analyse important statistics much better and spot opportunities to grow your eCommerce business. Without these tools, you wouldn’t be able to tell what to improve exactly and only base your improvements on guesswork. Also having much data available allows to create content fast and effectively which is fundamental for a good SEO strategy.

 

The Best 6 Tools for eCommerce SEO

This is not only a SEO tool list, these tools are the ones we use at Phanum to grow businesses with SEO exponentially. Like this SEO Case Study – eCommerce – Phanum. Let’s check them out.

#1 – Verbolia.com to dominate long-tail eCommerce

Verbolia - Long tail SEO Tool for eCommerce

Verbolia solution is amazing for eCommerce. Period. It allows you to launch as many category pages as keywords you want. Every eCommerce should be using it.

Verbolia allows you to create automatically thousands of high commercial intent pages. It would take ages to do it manually. It works like this:

1 – Add your product feed in the tool.

2 – Drop your money keywords.

3 – Verbolia will create the ecommerce category pages in seconds. Thousands of them.

It is meant to target long-tail keywords, which are mostly under used in eCommerce. Verbolia even allows you to calculate how much revenue you could win with this long-tail approach: SEO long-tail wins.

Some of Verbolia’s clients are:

No wonder. This tool basically helps you to dominate organically what you will have to otherwise have to buy through Google Ads.

If you are a big eCommerce retailer, try Verbolia.

 

#2 – Use Google Search Console to monitor your webshop’s visibility

Google Search Console - SEO tool - Phanum

The best free tool to improve your organic search rankings is the Google Search Console. Well, it is the best tool for SEOs.

You can use this tool for various specific needs such as analyzing the health of your URLs and seeing if every relevant page is indexed.

The Google Search Console will give you insights into what queries and keywords your pages rank for and how often they are seen by users.

The GSC data gives you a huge amount of insights and information, on which you can build your SEO strategy. We recommend using this tool because it is free and there is extensive documentation and free courses on how to use it.

For Advance SEO Pros

If you really want to squeeze the data from the Google Search Console, consider using the GSC API. The GSC tool as we use it, only gives 1000 rows of data.

This is terrible for data analysis because for large websites you might be missing 40% – 60% of the data (I made a few tests and for a 16-month overview, the GSC was giving me half of the impressions with only 1000 rows of data).

Python SEO: To access the GSC API you have to know programming (any SEO has to know programming in my opinion).

We recommend the Data SEO Academy by Alan Preiti to learn in-depth Python for SEO: You not only learn Python but you learn it for SEO. (It is only in Spanish but I am talking Alan, the Professor, so he makes the program in English too).

 

#3 – Use SERanking to do keyword research and analyze your competitors

SERanking SEO Tool Example - Phanum

SERanking is a powerful all-in-one SEO tool that we use for multiple purposes because it:

  • Tracks the performance of pages in search engines so that you know what pages to improve
  • Analyses your competitors so that you can find content gaps
  • Allows you to do keyword research so that you know what keywords you should try to rank for

While SERanking is a paid tool, it is definitely worth it in my opinion, as it gives you a lot of quantitative insights which you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.

They recently launched the most useful tool for content creation: THE CONTENT EDITOR.

I am using capital letter there because it has helped me to deploy high-quality articles at speed. It is not a tool to just create non-sense AI content. It is a tool that allows writers to be x2 faster in creating content.

Here are some of the features I love about the content editor. It uses AI 🙂

Select the outline using competitors data

Improve easily the content quality

Get real-time score of you article progress

se-ranking-article-score

Never forget to add relevant terms (keywords) or links (internal or external)

Speed up the writing process with your AI writer

Select the heading of your article, add your keywords and click generate.

Writers block? What is that?

Alternatives for SERanking are Ahrefs or Moz, but they are priced at a higher price point.

SERanking gives eCommerce stores almost everything they need from an all-in-one tool, and there are only a few upsides to paying more for a similar tool with more features. Therefore, we do recommend using SERanking.

 

#4 – Use AnswerThePublic to discover the most relevant topics to write about

AnswerThePublic - SEO Tool - Phanum

In order to discover the most relevant content to write for a certain keyword, you should use AnswerThePublic.

AnswerThePublic collects all the short- and long-tail queries that users type into Google and displays them in such a way that you quickly understand what people want to know about a certain topic.

It is the best tool to find both short-tail and long-tail keyword combinations. Also includes alphabeticals and most related searches. You cannot miss anything n with this tool.

The latest updates, after Neil Patel purchased the SEO tool, have added more accurate data on search volume (which was not available before) and PPC prices.

Again, you cannot miss AnswerThePublic when it comes topic ideation and research.

For example, you can use this tool to discover how and in what context users type in a keyword. Do they want to buy a product? Do they want to find only information about it? Or do they want to compare it to another product?

This tool will give you very good insights into users’ search behavior and the search intent for each keyword.

 

Results example from AnswerThePublic - SEO Tool

You can easily check the SERPs by clicking on any of the queries shown on the results page.

AnswerThePublic will give you insights and information about new content ideas so that you can write useful information which people will be searching for.

Ultimately search engines will find this information valuable to their users, and display your pages higher in the search results. Because Google’s main priority is to display to users the information they want to find.

Alsoasked is a good alternative, however, it is less user-friendly and we prefer AnswerThePublic as it displays the right information in a much more efficient manner. Note that AnswerThePublic uses the autocomplete data and Alsoasked uses ‘people also asked’ data which are different data sources. We tend to see AnswerThePublic give more direct topics to your research and Alsoasked helps you to expand the topic research.

 

#5 – Use ScreamingFrog to find technical issues

The ScreamingFrog basically crawls your website like Google would do. Then you can spot absolutely any issues: from architecture to content to loading issues…

You can analyze everything with the ScreamingFrog. I love it. I could not do SEO efficiently without it. Either any fellow SEO does use it.

screaming-frog-preview

In order to test your URLs and see what to improve on your pages in terms of technical issues, you can best use ScreamingFrog. This tool will crawl your entire webshop in a short amount of time, and highlight specific errors for URLs.

By fixing these errors you will improve the “health” of your URLs and this ultimately improves your site’s performance and speed. This is very valuable to Google and will you will get lower rankings if there are (too many) technical issues on a page.

ScreamingFrog is free to use for up to 500 pages per website, after which you have to pay a fee for using it. Alternatives for ScreamingFrog are Netpeak Spider or Spotibo.

 

#6 – Use Jasper to never experience a writer’s block again

Jasper.ai SEO tool - Phanum

An AI writing assistant (Jasper) that can help your create content faster

eCommerce websites can have a huge number of pages with a lot of written content. To speed up the content generation process, you should use an AI content writer, such as Jasper. Nowadays AI-powered tools can write content on their own, in different languages about many different topics. So I am almost certain that Jasper can also write about your products and product categories.

Jasper works by typing in a certain keyword or sentence, after which Jasper will write content about the keyword automatically. While this may sound like the ultimate hack to have unique content on each page, you should be careful using it.

Sometimes the content that Jasper produces can include spelling mistakes. Or the keyword that you gave as input doesn’t result in a text which makes sense. This tool should therefore be seen as an assistant during the content writing process when you don’t have any inspiration, rather than a substitute for a human content writer.

AI writing tools will speed up the writing process because they will prevent you from having a “writer’s block”. Ultimately this tool will help you to generate content and keywords faster for your eCommerce blogs, product, and category pages.

Alternatives that you can use are Rytr or SUUS.AI, but we have found that Jasper is the most powerful out of them all.

Not forget to mention Chat GPT, but I think you might had already enough of it.

Examples of how to use SEO tools

I actually created a Google Sheet template where you can create a high-quality SEO briefing in minutes using these tools. Steal the template here: GPT for Sheets – SEO Use Case – Content Briefing Template.

As we mentioned before, tools can help you do be more effective and execute your marketing strategy faster. These are some examples of how to use an SEO tool:

SEO Tools to test your eCommerce site’s speed

Search engines prioritize pages in the rankings that load fast, if your pages are not optimized and have slow loading times, they will be severely penalized by the search engines. Testing your site’s speed and making sure the loading times are short is key! Pus your site to test with these 2 SEO tools:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Gtmetrix Website Test

To do keyword research and prioritization

To increase the amount of traffic to your website, you will need to use the right keywords for products and have as many relevant keywords as possible on your site. To discover all the right keywords, you should definitely use a keyword research tool to understand which ones to use – and which ones to drop. Never forget the search intent: analyze manually what are the results for your keywords to see if you will fit in the results.

To analyze your competitors

In order to rank higher than your competitors, you need to know how well your competitors are optimized for search engines. It is much better to outperform all your competitors’ pages slightly than to have only a few pages that are much better than your competitors. To understand your competitors, you, therefore, need to have a competitor analysis tool.

To generate more relevant content

Ultimately, you need to improve and generate new content so that your pages become more relevant to users and search engines. However, this often takes a lot of time, effort, and energy. To speed up your processes you need to make use of the latest content generations tools to optimize your content generation process.

Final thoughts

These 6 SEO tools give eCommerce stores the power to analyze data, to spot opportunities for growth in a structured manner. Instead of relying on gut feeling and possibly spending time working on the wrong parts of your eCommerce store.

I hope that you now know a little more about which SEO tools may be helpful for increasing the rankings of your eCommerce site.

If you found this interesting you may find our article on how to perform an eCommerce SEO audit to boost your organic growth in 14 practical steps.

Or maybe you will find our guide on how to improve eCommerce product page SEO an interesting read.

 

If you have made it this far through the blog…

Chances are that you are seriously looking to improve your SEO game. That’s great we are here for it!

Phanum team

If you are looking to improve your SEO and be Top-3 of Google (just like this article is top 3, that is why you are here), then  Book a meeting with us, let’s talk SEO!. Chances are high that you can become Top 3 with our help 🙂

 

Who wrote this article?

This article has been written with much love and care by Jelle Casper van Santen and SEO Strategist: Jairo Guerrero.

Thank you for reading.

Cover Image by Freepik