It’s been a tough time for ecommerce brands, with the combined economic shocks of high inflation and the cost of living crisis impacting both overheads and consumer buying power.

It’s also been a year of change in the organic SEO landscape, all of which translates to tricky terrain for brands to navigate.

With this in mind, we thought we’d ask our expert SEO team what they thought about the last 12 months, and what to have on your radar. Check out the advice Marie Turner, Amanda Beales and Kevin Gibbons have for ecommerce brands heading into 2025.

1. Focus on high conversion rate keywords

We’ve seen massive changes to ecommerce SEO in the last 12 months, and that’s on top of it having been a tough year for the sector as a result of continuing cost of living pressures.

The biggest change in 2024 has been the insertion of AI results into the search results pages (SERPs) for a lot of informational keywords—but we expect AI results to be introduced to Google Shopping at some point in 2025. This might offer some benefits for the consumer, but as brands we’re going to lose some traffic to these AI answers.

To counteract this shift we need to remember traditional marketing principles—and it’s an approach we’re taking with all of our clients.

You need to understand your niche, get to know your customers really well, and make sure you answer their questions and expectations when they search.

We’ve also seen that product pages are becoming more important, so we’re looking at very niche categories with keywords that have lower search volumes, but that convert at a much higher rate.

2. Product page optimisation has never been more important

The ability to shop directly in the SERPs isn’t necessarily new, but as the user experience has improved we’ve seen that more and more consumers are taking this route. The top ten results for 85% of apparel-related searches have organic product tiles in them now, and retailers are taking the bulk of this traffic.

This means your product listings need to be ready to be served up in the SERPs.

To capture this traffic, marking up structured data within the different elements of your product pages is essential, for example optimising product titles and product images, and emphasising any unique features of your products or service

3. You need a faceted navigation strategy

Faceted navigation has been really important to ecommerce websites for a long time, that is, being able to index specific filters and answer niche queries.

Google has recently been doing a lot of work to surface product pages in the SERPs more frequently and if, as we expect, they introduce AI results to Shopping soon, an optimised faceted navigation strategy will be even more important. Getting this in place now will allow you to steal a march on the competition in terms of being indexed for niche keywords.

4. Solve for consumers at every stage of the customer journey

Don’t just optimise your bottom of funnel touchpoints, but instead get to know your customer and what they expect and search for at each stage of the customer journey.

Think about their specific interests and what content you can create that engages them, answers their questions or educates them on something new. Taking this full funnel approach, from awareness to consideration to conversion, will allow you to maximise revenue.

5. Download the Sportswear and Athleisure Ecommerce SEO report

Finally, if you’re a sportswear and athleisure retailer, make sure you check out our free industry report. We explored this growing sector and analysed the top performers in organic search, as well as the strategies they’re adopting.

It had been our expectation that more niche branded sites would perform better, because that’s what Google had rewarded historically. However, we found that the more generalist sites had the biggest share of voice over the last 12 months.

We also found out that user satisfaction was higher online than shopping in store (56% versus 44%), demonstrating the value of investing in improving and streamlining the online shopping journey.

At the start of March, Paul Martin (Global Retail Lead & UK Head of Retail at KPMG) kindly joined me for a video interview to talk about the trends of the UK retail sector since we last discussed the topic in early 2022. In this interview, Paul and I looked back at how the UK retail sector fared in 2022, amid a number of unique market challenges. We also discussed the main category movements witnessed so far in 2023, and provided a forecast for the next 12 months of trading!

We’re delighted to announce that on 10th March next year, we are running a 1-day eCommerce SEO conference in London!

This will be hosted at the stunning Ham Yard Hotel, and we’ve been working very hard to secure what is an incredible line-up of 15 speakers, 5 breakout session leaders, 4 moderators, 1 emcee and a partridge in a pear tree…

I genuinely believe we’ve curated the conference line-up of our dreams, and we’re very proud to share this with you.

Keynote speakers:

• Rory Sutherland: I first saw Rory speak live at an A4U Affiliate Marketing event about 12 years ago. I’m showing my age a little here… At the time, it was the best talk I’ve even seen live, he was captivating. It still hasn’t been topped yet!