Ecommerce skyrocketed into prominence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has only continued to grow in the half-decade since. According to the US Census Bureau, ecommerce spending in just Q4 2024 exceeded $300 billion. Customers want to shop without leaving their homes, and that means that your ecommerce business can have a reliable supply of new customers.

But these customers aren’t going to simply land on your lap. If you’re not getting your brand in front of prospects, they are going to go to someone else – like, say, your competitors. And in order to stand out from the crowd and truly maximize your growth, you need to get ahead of the ecommerce digital marketing game. You don’t just need a “pretty good” ecommerce marketing strategy; you need the best ecommerce marketing tactics and strategies you can find.

Fortunately, that’s where this blog post comes in. That’s where we’re here to help.

In this blog post, we’re going to examine 10 of the most successful online marketing strategies for ecommerce websites that we’ve seen work like a charm and drive explosive growth. These ecommerce marketing tactics are:

• Proven. We’re not just talking hypotheticals here. The ecommerce marketing strategies we’ll cover in this post have been derived from our agency’s most successful ecommerce digital marketing campaigns. We know these work, period.
• Actionable. These are designed to work for your business with a minimum of prior setup. Some require more planning than others, but for the most part, you could put these into practice today, if you really wanted.
• Flexible. No two businesses are the same or have the same needs — especially given the wealth of options for ecommerce marketing platforms out there. Nearly all of the strategies here will be platform-agnostic: Whether you’re using Google Ads, marketing on Facebook, focusing on SEO and content marketing, or something else, you’ll be able to put these to use.
• Complementary. Why use one top ecommerce marketing strategy when you could use two or three? You can use as many of these best ecommerce marketing strategies as makes sense for your business.

Well, that’s enough introduction, don’t you think? You’re not here for the intro, you’re here for your next ecommerce marketing plan. So let’s dive into it.

Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: #1 Elevate Your Ecommerce SEO

Step 1: Ecommerce SEO Audit

The best ecommerce SEO strategy starts with an honest assessment of where you currently stand in the search results. Much like stepping on the scale before you begin a diet, you need to understand where you currently are to decide where you want to go.

An ecommerce SEO audit examines how your site ranks for the search terms most relevant to your business. It identifies your “domain authority,” which is how sites like Google assess your trustworthiness and expertise. It assesses your site architecture and if search engines might find your site clunky or hard to navigate.

The best audits will also include a competitor analysis and assess where they rank for these same keywords to best position your business for success.

There are great tools for performing an ecommerce SEO audit, like Moz and SEMRush Site Audit.

Step 2: Overhaul Technical SEO

It’s one thing to make sure that product pages are using the correct phrases, but technical SEO for ecommerce websites tends to be much less commonly understood. Common technical SEO issues include:

• Slow load times. Is your website performing poorly, which might cause some visitors to bounce away before they even fully load?
• Broken links. Did you forget to change existing links when you renamed previous URLs? If search engines keep hitting dead ends, they’ll penalize your search ranking.
• Duplicate content. Whether it’s duplicated tags, meta descriptions, or on-page content, search engines don’t like to see it!
• Security issues. Does your site have HTTPS pages that link to HTTP ones? That’s a no-no.

Fixing technical issues like these (and many others) will improve your site’s SEO health dramatically. Technical SEO for ecommerce is often overlooked, but is no less critical than any others.

Step 3: Ecommerce Keyword Research

Your ecommerce SEO audit assessed how you were doing in all the keywords you were currently targeting… but what about the ones you aren’t? Targeting new keywords and search terms is a great way to grow your audience with zero ad spend. In order to know what new phrases you should be targeting, you need to do comprehensive ecommerce keyword research.

Thankfully, there are sites like SEMrush and AHREFs that make this process very intuitive. Try to think like a customer: How would someone searching for your products start their search on Google or Bing? What questions would they ask? Think like a consumer, and your ecommerce keyword research will be even more effective.

Step 4: Streamline On-Page SEO

When we say “on-page SEO for ecommerce,” we mean exactly what it says on the tin: How does a search engine assess each individual page on your site? Is the product clear? Do the algorithms understand what it’s about, so that they can deliver it to your target audience?

The best on-page SEO for ecommerce involves optimizing things like the following:

• Meta descriptions. Your meta descriptions should always include primary keywords (even secondary keywords, if you can fit them) while being around 150 characters. Don’t reuse descriptions from page to page.
• Images. Images should never be too large (this reduces page load times, which negatively impacts technical SEO); try to keep them under 1-2 MB. File names and alt-text should always include keywords you’re trying to target. Which do you think search engines will prefer, a file named img43_070820.jpg, or an image named mothers-day-chocolate-collection2025.jpg?
• Page copy. Is the content on your page original? Does it contain all the keywords that you’re targeting — while still being intelligible and making sense, not just being “keyword stuffed”? Make sure that your content is substantial; pages that are too short tend to get dinged by search engines.

On-page SEO for ecommerce sites is critically important, and this is likely where the bulk of your time and effort will be spent.

Step 5: Build Off-Page SEO

At first glance, this might not make any sense. How can off-page SEO for ecommerce even be a thing? You can only control SEO on your own website, right?

That’s true, but don’t forget that the World Wide Web is still a web. When other sites link to you, this indicates to search engines like Google that your site is trustworthy and authoritative, and your SEO will improve as a result.

Off-page SEO for ecommerce sites tends to involve various link building strategies. You can create blog posts and hope others find them insightful (more on this later), create premium content like ebooks, infographics and more. You can ask your distributors, suppliers, or other partners to link back to you. Is a blogger linking to one of your competitors? Why not offer a link to one of your own pages instead?

When your ecommerce SEO strategy strengthens the strands of the world wide web that link to your site, you’ll be rewarded by better search positioning.

AI Tip: SEO for Ecommerce

AI tools like Clearscope or SurferSEO can help you ensure your continent is primed for search engines, so make use of them wherever possible.

Also, keep in mind that in 2025, you aren’t just competing against other ecommerce brands for spots on SERPs; you are competing against the search engines’ AI summaries and tools themselves. Consider creating content like “5 Best [Insert Item You Sell]” that discusses your products alongside your competitors, which can help you rank for AI summaries. More on this in the content section.

Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: #2 Don’t Neglect Ecommerce Content Marketing

So you know that SEO is important. But where will you put all the text that builds strong SEO? Bare-bones pages with short product descriptions won’t rank anywhere on search engines, so the answer, of course, is content.

Content-driven ecommerce is the key way to ensure that you’re ranking high on search engines and getting in front of eyeballs that can offer you the traffic you need. But what, exactly, does this mean? “Content” can feel like an incredibly vague term, after all. People say “content is king,” but for an ecommerce company looking to grow, this can feel like a meaningless buzz phrase. Here’s how you can develop and execute an excellent content strategy for ecommerce.

Product Page Content

When most people think about “content,” they think about blogs. Blogs are key (and we’ll talk about them in a second), but they’re not the only type of ecommerce content. You should think about every word on your site as part of your content strategy for ecommerce.

How are your products described on their product pages? Is the content interesting and evocative? Content includes every page on your site, and you shouldn’t neglect any of them.

Blogging

This is what most people think about when they mean “content.” Anyone these days can start a blog, which is what makes it particularly appealing: You don’t need to have fancy design chops or high-end video equipment, you just need to have something to say.

It can be tempting to have your ecommerce content marketing blogs be wholly about promoting your product and showing off why your company is so great. This is a mistake! As a general rule of thumb, your blogs should almost never be a “hard sell” for your product. Why? Because unless you’re a big brand-name, most people aren’t searching for your product.

Your content strategy for ecommerce should ask:

• Who is my audience? Who do you want to be visiting your site? Is this your standard target demographic, or a secondary one? For example, if you’re a chocolatier, your primary target demographic might be women ages 25+, so much of your content would be targeted towards them — except around holidays like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, when you would target their romantic partners or children, instead.
• What problems are they having? Think about it: Most people turn to a search engine when they have a problem they need solving. This could be a problem of information (e.g., “where is a bike repair shop near me,”) a problem of items (e.g., “stroller for new infant” or “running shoes for weak ankles”), or something else. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and imagine the problems they might have that you and your products can solve.
• What advice can you give to solve these problems? In your work, you’ve gathered expertise and knowledge; how can you share that knowledge with people seeking your site? This should always be closely related to your product and line of work. For example, if you sell lawn care products, you could write a blog post about the best times to water your lawn or ways to care for trees in hot summer. This positions you as an expert and leads people to trust what you have to say.

With rare exceptions, these blog posts should strive to be informative, not sales pitches. Someone who never buys from you at all should still come away from the blog having gained some value from it. This makes you seem honest, knowledgeable, and trustworthy, rather than someone just trying to make a sale. If someone finds your advice useful, they’re more likely to share it, which is a free way to get some traffic!

This isn’t to say that you should never mention your products. Links to products placed in strategic areas of your content and calls-to-action at the end of a blog are a great way to lead readers into learning more about how you can address their problems. But they should never be the meat of a piece.

Ebooks and Guides

A step up from a blog is an ebook or a visual guide. These tend to be longer than a blog and are frequently downloadable documents. These are visually appealing and tend to have more complex layouts than blogs, but can be used as high-quality tentpole pieces that you can center your content strategy for ecommerce around. You can put out paid ads that point to these ebooks, and you can use them to lead capture new contact information so that you can remarket to people down the line.

Video Content

It can be daunting to try to do video ecommerce content. You may not want to appear on camera or invest in video equipment like a high-end camera, microphone, or lighting. This is understandable! However, video content tends to rank very highly in search engines, so ecommerce product videos are often a very good idea.

The videos don’t always have to be professionally shot, either! It’s a good idea to hire videographers if you’re trying to do product videos, but you can get by on a small budget by doing vlogs or showing your product in action.

Short-Form Dominance

The rise of platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts has made vertically filmed, short-form video all the more important. You should be producing content for these platforms wherever possible, whether ads, demos, behind-the-scenes videos, or something else.

Content Distribution and Promotion

Think about how content marketing drives sales: Not only do you get traffic coming to your site who can buy your product, but you also establish yourself as an expert and a thought leader. But none of this will work if nobody sees your content! This is especially true when you’re just starting out on your content journey and may not be ranking too highly.

Some great ways to promote your content is through social media, outreach to reputable sites — consider link trading, i.e., offering to link to a piece of theirs if they do the same to yours — all of this will help get your content in front of readers and strengthen your SEO.

AI Tip: Content for Ecommerce

When you’re creating your content, think about how SERPs actually reflect the answers to queries in the age of AI summaries. Consider things like Google’s “People Also Ask” – think of search queries that will lead people to your products, search them, and take note of the alternative questions the search engine suggests. Write content incorporating those questions.

While it can be tempting to use tools like ChatGPT to generate content, be aware that this risks search engines penalizing your page for duplicate content, due to how generative AI works. Consider using it to outline or suggest skeletons of content, but having a human create it using their own words.

Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: #3 Use Smart Email Marketing

SEO and content marketing can get people to your website, but they won’t necessarily buy. In fact, most of them won’t. 99% of first-time visitors to a site won’t make a purchase. This means you’ll need to continue points of contact to nurture non-buyers into customers — and customers into brand loyalists. One of the best ways to do this is ecommerce email marketing.

If you’re like most ecommerce brands, you probably do some email marketing already, with things like seasonal promotions and monthly newsletters being very common. But a proper ecommerce email marketing strategy includes these emails and many more. Here are the steps you should take to be a successful email marketer.

Step 1: Collect an Email Opt-In

This might sound pretty obvious — how can you send emails to someone if you don’t have their email address? But it’s an important part of your ecommerce email marketing strategy nonetheless. Here are some very useful ways to do that.

• Offer premium downloadable content. Remember those ebooks and guides we just talked about? Encourage people to give you their email address so you can send a link to them.
• Offer discounts for first-time purchases. If you go to a site for the first time and see a popup letting you know that if you sign up for their newsletter in the next 15 minutes, you’ll get 20% off your first order, you’d probably consider it, wouldn’t you? This is a great way to convert first-time visitors into contacts.
• Use exit-intent popups on high-traffic content. If you have a blog post that’s doing well and very relevant to your customer base, consider a popup with a “learn more” form (or some other such variant) that appears when someone goes to leave the page. It’s important to not be obtrusive about this, or else you’ll risk souring people on your brand, but a tasteful popup tends to not be a bother for most browsers.
• Encourage people to give you their emails during the checkout process. Whether you’re keeping them abreast of future products or letting them know about great promotions, you’ll want to keep these people in the loop. Remember: If they’ve bought from you once, you’ll have a much easier time convincing them to buy from you again.

Step 2: Set Up Ecommerce Marketing Automation

Many of your emails, especially seasonal offers, will be hand-crafted, but that takes time, and limits the amount of contact points you can have with your audience. Instead, make use of ecommerce marketing automation tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp to set up versatile nurturing campaigns that will trigger automatically in certain situations. This means you’ll only have to do up-front work to set up the automated campaigns, and everything afterwards will be handled by your software.

Some very common examples of automated email marketing include:

• Abandoned cart emails. Pound-for-pound, there may not be a more effective type of automated email than an abandoned cart message. This is reaching out to people who have already put items in their shopping cart, but haven’t pulled the final trigger — whether because they were waiting for payday, thought better of it, or simply forgot and closed the window. A smart abandoned cart email strategy will have tremendous ROI.
• Welcome emails. When you collect someone’s email through a popup on a first or second visit, why not send them a welcome email sequence? Introduce yourself and your company, explain what you’re about, send some cute pictures of office pets. An excellent welcome email sequence will forge an emotional bond between you and a lead, making them more likely to open future emails.
• Per-topic campaigns. These are automated campaigns specifically tailored to premium downloadable content like ebooks. Depending on the topic at hand, you can share related posts or offer ways in which your product fits their interests. For example, if you sell hiking equipment and your ebook was “The Best Hiking Spots in Washington State,” you could link blog posts on advice for high-altitude hiking, offer discounts on hiking gear, or even recommend trusted groups and guides for visitors.

Step 3: Keep Sending Promotional & Holiday Email Blasts

Just because you’ve got ecommerce marketing automation doing work for you doesn’t mean you should stop doing non-automated, hand-crafted emails! These are the cornerstone of any ecommerce email marketing strategy, and are a great way to let your customers know about promotions, new products, and more.

There are two critical pieces of advice for promotional emails like this: One, don’t overdo it, and two, keep your offers relevant. Sending email too often — or sending about topics that your audience won’t find much value in — is a good way to get people to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

A great way to ensure relevancy is to segment your audience based on things like geographical location, age, or interest. You don’t need a thousand different segments, and many of your emails (like those announcing flash sales) can indeed be sent to everyone on your list. But segmented emails can feel more personalized, and therefore can be more effective.

AI Tip: Email Marketing for Ecommerce

Modern AI tools can dynamically adjust content to make hyper-personalized emails far more viable than they have been in the past. Also, use them to optimize send time on an extremely granular level, so you can maximize the chance of eyeballs getting on your emails — and people clicking on the links within.

(Also, while there’s no substitute for a real human touch and you should always be sure to edit the output to avoid any embarrassing mistakes, emails and other non-web content are great opportunities to use generative AI tools to save time, since search engines won’t penalize you.)

Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: #4 Invest in Ecommerce PPC Advertising

The benefit of optimal SEO marketing is that it doesn’t cost a cent (other than your time). On the downside, however, it can take time to work, and, in the meantime, you’ve just spent a good deal of effort on something that won’t see returns for weeks if not months. Thankfully, one great way to bridge the gap is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

An ecommerce PPC strategy is a great way to get your products in front of user eyeballs pronto. By buying ad space through networks like Google and Bing, you can ensure that people searching for relevant terms will see your products and can be directed to your site or to a custom landing page.

To have an effective ecommerce PPC strategy, you should make sure you’re considering:

PPC Campaign Structure

An unclear, messy structure is one of the biggest mistakes we see inexperienced PPC users making. Make sure that your campaigns are set up in a way where you can easily track performance and get visibility into things like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). You wouldn’t build a house on a poor foundation, and you shouldn’t build an ecommerce PPC campaign with poor structure.

Keyword Strategy

This is very similar to the keyword research you’d do for on-page SEO or content. Think about the keywords you’re targeting: What will people be searching for? What are the problems they’re trying to solve that will lead them to you?

Through proper use of single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) or new automated smart bidding strategies (like Target ROAS), you can target keywords that are high-traffic as well as ones that are more niche. You can also include negative keywords (i.e., keywords that you don’t want to show up for), which can be very helpful, since this can help you avoid related searches that are unlikely to lead to clicks or conversions.

Search Ad Copy

Which of these PPC ad headlines do you think would generate more traffic: “Shop Hiking Boots,” or “Hiking Boots for Unforgettable Experiences”? Probably the second, right? Your ad copy should be evocative but informative; your space is limited, so make the use of the small character count as best as you can. An expert copywriter can help distinguish your products from your competitors, who may also be targeting these same keywords.

Retargeting Campaigns

Ecommerce retargeting is the PPC version of the abandoned cart email: In terms of sheer ROAS, it’s some of the most effective money you can throw at your marketing. A retargeting campaign shows ads to people who have already seen your ads, visited your site, or even put items in a shopping cart before clicking away.

One of the hardest things to do in ecommerce PPC is reach out to a “cold audience” that’s never heard of your brand or your products before, but retargeting is targeting a warm audience that’s more familiar with you and primed to have their interest captured.

An excellent tactic that should be part of any ecommerce retargeting strategy is to use dynamic retargeting in a shopping feed. Services like Google Shopping show products that people can buy almost instantly, and devoting some of your PPC resources to getting your products into this feed will have a huge return on your investment.

Ongoing Optimization

Sometimes, you wind up swinging and missing. Other times, your ecommerce PPC ads are getting traffic, just not as much as you’d like. You should never “fire and forget” when it comes to your ads, because that just means y

just having an ecommerce Google ads strategy isn’t enough. Consider other search engines too, like Bing.

Bing has around 20% of the traffic of Google, but that’s still millions and millions of users! Because of the lower traffic, Bing paid search ads will usually be cheaper, and your ROAS will be higher than that of Google. Also, many of your Google ads for ecommerce can be exported to Bing with little to no editing, meaning you can broaden your reach with much less work.

It’s not enough to just have an ecommerce Google ads strategy alone; ecommerce Bing ads should be part of your plan, too.

AI Tip: Ecommerce PPC

Many of the leading PPC providers offer machine learning-driven options, like Google Ads’ Performance Max campaigns. Harness these! They can be excellent at delivering your ads to your target audience at a much more efficient ROI than manual strategies, especially if you’re newer to the ecommerce PPC game.