How startups can use Amazon’s SEO best practices to dominate new shopping verticals

Eli SchwartzContributorShare on TwitterEli Schwartz is currently a growth advisor and the former Director of Growth at SurveyMonkey where he led the SEO strategy. Eli has been a columnist on the Huffington Post, the Y Combinator blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and numerous other publications.

Amazon dominates the top ranking positions of Google for tens of thousands of ecommerce queries, but there are plenty of products in newer shopping categories where Amazon has not yet achieved SEO supremacy. Retailers in nascent verticals have an opportunity to follow Amazon's SEO playbook and become the default ranking ecommerce website.

Achieving this success can be done purely by focusing on on-page SEO without the need to build a brand and a backlink portfolio that rivals Amazon.

For those unfamiliar with mechanisms of SEO, there are essentially two streams of SEO tactics

1. On-page SEO - This is anything to do with optimizing an actual page or website for maximum SEO visibility. Within this bucket will fall efforts such as the content of a page, metadata, internal links, URL/folder names, and even things like images.
2. Off-page SEO - A key component of Google's algorithm is the quality and sometimes quantity of the links from external sites that point to a page or website. At a high level the better backlinks a page or website has the more authority the page has to rank in search.

On-page SEO teardown

Delving into just their on-page SEO, their tactics can be divided into four distinct areas which we will go through in detail.

1. Content
2. SEO site architecture
3. Cross-linking
4. Page layout

If you are following along with this process, make sure to log out of your Amazon account or open up an incognito window. Google only views the logged out version of the site, so all of Amazon's SEO efforts are focused there.