Why does your Shopee Store require SEO, and how to do it?

Shopee is one of the leading e-commerce platforms in South-East Asia. There are a lot of Shopee sellers on the platform, and the competition to stand out is cutthroat.

The key to more sales is ensuring that your customers can find you! The best way to ensure that is through Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a SEO. So, as a Shopee Seller, you must learn SEO basics.

The purpose of this blog post is to help you do that.

What is SEO, and how can it help you on Shopee?

SEO helps increase the rank and visibility of your product listing pages on Shopee’s search result pages when customers search for products. Oh, and 95% of all customers start their hunt for products using search, so SEO is a huge deal.

The main benefits of SEO are:

• It helps to increase the organic traffic of your store.
• Your product listings will appear in relevant search results, helping you connect your products to more customers.
• Good SEO helps you beat your competition on Shopee by ranking in more searches.
• More relevant traffic = More Sales.

SEO requires relevant keywords to work. Keywords are terms that customers add in the search bar to buy or view products. You have to optimize your product listing page with those search keywords to gain traffic and revenue.

For example, if you are a coffee seller and your customers search for “best arabica coffee”, then your Arabica Coffee Powder listing should appear in the search results.

How can you implement SEO for your Shopee product listings?

Keyword Research

The first step in SEO is recognizing which keywords your customers are using when searching for your products. This process is called Keyword Research, and it is one of the essential steps of Shopee SEO.

As a Shopee Seller, you should ask yourself a few questions before starting keyword research.

• Who is searching for my products?
• What aspects/features of my product are people looking for?
• Who are my competitors?

For example, if you are selling Premium Arabica Coffee-

1. Who -> Coffee Lovers, Baristas
2. What Aspects? -> Type of Roast, Aroma, Source of Beans
3. Competitors -> Nescafe, Lipton, Starbucks etc.

With the above information, you can brainstorm initial search terms like “Arabica Coffee Beans”, “Roasted Coffee Beans”, “Barista Special”, etc., that you think your customers would use to search for your product.

You can now use these broad terms and search for highly relevant keywords using Shopee’s AD Keyword Tool, Shopee Autocomplete and Ubersuggest. These tools will give you a list of keywords people are searching for while looking for your product.

You can even put your product category on Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Google will recommend other search terms, and they can also be good keyword ideas.

As you can see, there are many different ways to search for keywords. However, what’s most important is to find “relevant” keywords.

When you have found a relevant keyword, simply add it to a table/database for further processing; you can easily create a database using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets - similar to the one we made below:

When searching for keywords, you will realize that there can be hundreds of keywords for any product. So, how do you choose the best keywords for SEO?

Here are three key factors to remember when choosing a keyword for your Shopee product SEO titles:

Relevance

The most important factor about any keyword is that it accurately matches your product. If you're adding the keyword "Tea Powder" to the "Coffee listing", you will immediately lose rank due to customers skipping your listing in search as they are looking for Tea.

It might seem obvious but can be missed, so skip it if a keyword doesn't directly relate to your product.

High Purchase Intent

By understanding the mindset of your customers, you will realize that the way people search for products when they are in "research mode" is different compared to when they are in "purchase mode."

For Example, Research Intent -

"Best Black Coffee", or "Coffee for Children"

These searches may result in a sale, but the intention is to look at options.

Purchase Intent

"Black Coffee 500 grams", or "Nescafe Instant Coffee 3 in 1 Sachet"

The difference is that these searches are precise. The customer already knows what they want. They need to find the product, and if it meets their needs, they will purchase it.

When doing SEO, our goal is to use keywords in the "Purchase Intent" category to help show up in front of customers who are ready to buy!

High Traffic Potential

Traffic potential refers to how much traffic you will get if you successfully rank for that keyword. For this reason, you should aim to rank for a few keywords that have High Search Volume (which can be found in Shopee's AD Keyword tool).

So, before deciding on a keyword, follow these steps:

• Search for a range of different keywords related to your product on various tools
• Compare the keyword relevance, purchase intent and traffic potential
• Choose a relevant keyword with high purchase intent and traffic potential

How to use the Shopee Keyword tool to your advantage?

You can use any keyword tool to do thorough research, but it is necessary to run a search on Shopee itself.

The Shopee Ads Keyword tool is one of the best tools available to sellers. The tool helps sellers to bid on keywords for paid advertising. You can use it to research keywords and find their search traffic, keywords with high bid prices (over MYR1/SGD1), and it also suggests high intent!

So, once you have decided on the list of keywords from the above-given method, add them to the Shopee Keyword tool. The system will show the keyword search traffic for 30 days on the platform. Based on that, you can decide the best keywords you want to rank for, as these are the ones we will SEO optimize our listings for...

Product Titles + Descriptions

Once you have the final keyword list, the next step is to add them to your product titles and descriptions.

The product title's highest priority is because Shopee's algorithm heavily depends on the title to connect shoppers to the right products.

Create a good SEO title with ease by using a "Naming template."

Let me explain how:

General Title Format:

Brand Name - Product Identifier - Product Specification/Attributes - Details/Benefits/Where to Use

Example:

Raintree Singapore Laksa Cookies (Spicy / Savoury Flavour | Handmade - 72g ) - Tea Time Snacks, Great as Gifts

Here's a cheat sheet for different product types:

When writing these titles, it’s essential to keep the following things in mind:

1. Shopee Titles have a word limit of XX characters, so you can’t exceed it.
2. The title needs to be optimized for mobile search. The brand, product name, and the main keyword has to be at the start of the title because, on mobile, the rest of the title will be hidden.
3. It’s essential to format your title so that it is easy to read. It means capitalize your title using a simple tool such as this.
4. Use separators such as - or / to separate titles, don’t use connector words like “and” as they take up space.
5. Don’t repeat keywords in the title.
6. No Keyword Stuffing: Titles should be informative but also concise. Optimizing for SEO does not mean you should stuff them with so many keywords that they become hard to understand. It can have a negative effect as customers would see your product but fail to identify it.

After optimizing the product title, you should add the keywords that didn’t make it to the title into different sections of your description. There’s not much data on whether this helps with SEO, but it’s always better to add it if Shopee’s algorithm changes and focuses more on the keywords in the description.

Remember that adding keywords in the title and descriptions is essential as only then the Shopee algorithm will be able to trace them and show your listing on the search page.

Examples of Good SEO vs Bad SEO

Bad SEO

See how the title only mentions a product name and a 3-word description. This particular product was listed on the 14th page of Shopee search results under the keyword gloves.

Good SEO

See how the Shopee seller has added a long product name with keywords and quantity. What’s better is that the title also has keywords in the local language.

Bad Description

The description has no bullet points and is not formatted correctly. It hardly has any keywords and does not try to convince the customers to buy it.

Good Description

Just look at the in-detail description that this seller has written. It addresses all the points of the customers and clears any doubts. It also has keywords which will help it rank on the search page. On top of that, the formatting is on point.

Why work so hard?

SEO helps you rank and show up in front of the right visitors. It offers lots of free traffic because every time a shopper searches for a keyword that you have optimized for your product, it shows up on the Search page.

This is crucial for the long term growth and sales of your store.

One reason why some sellers don’t implement SEO is that, unlike other traffic drivers (like Shopee paid ads), SEO takes time to show its results, and that’s why;

Patience is the Key

You will have to optimize your existing listings and new listings consistently. Any strategy will take 3 to 4 months to show real traffic growth, but that traffic is organic and there to stay.

After the first SEO, you need to re-evaluate the traffic your listings are getting every month to see if there is an increase in traffic. You can then re-evaluate and change your strategy if the results aren’t as expected.

SEO is a long-term and continuous process; it is not some quick hack that can be done just once.

We hope this guide was helpful; all the best with your SEO endeavors.

Have you tried SEO for your Shopee store? Are your SEO strategies working as you expected?