E commerce SEO : 8 ways on how SEO can help you sell more
E commerce SEO : 8 ways on how SEO can help you sell more
Most online retailers take a two-dimensional approach to Search Engine Optimization of their online shop: optimize the home page for the most relevant keywords, perhaps, optimize a few of the most lucrative product categories and maybe even one or two individual products and that's about it.
There's not much wrong with this approach but a little extra attention to the often-neglected individual product pages and a little extra effort on improving the information-quality of your e commerce site can not only help it attract traffic that a simplistic SEO strategy may not alone be able to deliver, but also improve your visitor-to-customer conversion levels, resulting in a better return for your SEO investment.
Here, we look at 8 ways that can help your e commerce site attract more visitors and convert more of those visitors into customers.
1. Looking beyond the product pages
A typical e commerce site consists of several pages which consist of details about individual products which are often assigned to a particular product category. Individual product pages are often specific to the product and contain features of the product which makes for content not very attractive to search engines.
If you want to make your online store more attractive to search engines, and your users, consider having something like a Resources' section which offers rich content about the products and services you are selling, beyond the mere descriptions and features.
Some ideas on generating rich-content for your online store:
Customer reviews / Testimonials think Amazon. Allow your customers to post reviews about a recent purchase from your online shop. Link this to the related product pages and to the home page of course. Not only will it help increase your natural rankings but also help your customers make purchase decisions
Case Studies this is especially important if you are selling a service. Talk to your customers, find out how you may have helped make a positive difference to them in some way. Document this (with their permission, of course) in a Case Study.
Blog search engines love blogs! Why not start a business blog offering your customers tips/tricks/useful advice on your related industry. Your customers will thank you for it and so will the search engines!
2. Differentiate your inner pages
A common challenge many online retailers face is that many of their product pages are similar to each other. This is especially true if they are selling mainstream / generic products such as electronics where the product description is often provided by the main manufacturers many online retailers stocking the same item tend to have the same or very similar product descriptions. Main problem with this approach is the risk of being penalized by Google and other search engines for duplicate content.
Consider spending some time, especially on the higher value items of creating your own product info focus on the benefits, rephrase the jargon and enhance the product appeal by mentioning how it can benefit the user. Not only will this help you rank better but also help you differentiate your product from your other online competitors.
3. Optimize your PDF product catalogues
Yes, you can SEO pdf product catalogues too! You have probably come across pdf results in Google when searching for something.
Some tips on optimizing your pdf product catalogues:
Make sure you support images with relevant text. Lots of them. search engines can read text within pdf files and in many ways, treat them similar to a regular html page
Pay attention to the title of the pdf and include your keywords in page titles, anchor text and so on.
Try to keep the size of your pdf file as small as possible without compromising quality smaller lighter' fonts, optimal image resolutions and so on all help in optimizing the size. Not only will this help in rankings (search engines love fast loading objects whether it's files, pdf, and html) but also reduce the possibility of user abandoning the file download which often happens if the file size is too big and the user is on a slower internet connection.
If you want to learn more, the folks at websiteoptimization.com have written a great article on optimizing pdf files.
5. Optimize your product images
Remember to include alt text and captions for all your images this will help in better search engine readability. Do this correctly and consistently and there is a better chance that your product images will show up in image searches of search engines, creating a new source of traffic for your online store.
6. The importance of your product pages
Your individual product pages can in many ways play a more pivotal role in increasing your profitability than your e-commerce' home page when optimized correctly.
How? Products such as electronics usually have a well defined product no and users often use this to search for the product online. By optimizing your individual product pages for the model no (alongwith the other, more generic info) can help it appear high with the results page, increasing the likelihood of a sale.
Some ideas on optimizing individual product pages:
Assign appropriate page titles and meta information
Include the model name and name with the H1 and alt text
Include the product name and if possible, model no within the URL:
Good www.yoursite.com/category/product_name_model.html
Bad www.yoursite.com/uniqueID=?1234.html
7. Expand your sales channel
Your own e-commerce site is only one of the many online outlets that you can use to sell your products. Google Product Search, Live Product Search, MSN Shopping are just some of the search engine product catalogues. Uploading your products is usually free and can be done by submitting a feed or manually (one item at a time or uploading a CSV file).
Uploading your inventory to third party sites can not only result in increased sales by the way of more traffic but also increase the chance of cross-selling as users who arrive at your site for one product may decide to purchase a second one if they spot a bargain!
8. Deploy Social media
If you still haven't gotten your head around the concept of Social Media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, at the very least, your product pages should have a social bookmarking widget such as Addthis or Addtoany. This will allow users to save their wish list and favorite products to Facebook, twitter and so on.
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