SEO Best Practices That Could Double Your E-Commerce Sales

Question #: How Do I Deal With Seasonal Products?

Aim to strengthen the product categories. Focus on product categories and link seasonal products to them with breadcrumbs and links in the descriptions on the product pages. Optimize your most important product pages with the greatest potential and spend the rest of your SEO budget to strengthen product categories.

If you’re launching a popular product and know there will be a big demand for it, add a “coming soon” page in the URL structure and offer unique content, launch notifications and pre-order forms. Integrate social media into this page and warm up prospects with user generated content.

With annual releases that you know will be replaced annually, simply add the year in the URL like this: website.com/category-sub-category/product-name-2012/ and 301 redirect it to the website.com/category-sub-category/product-name-2013/ version when the new version replaces it.

Question #: How Do I Handle SEO For New Products?

Good information architecture, website structure and internal link architecture are critical to rank new product pages well. Link categories from your home page, and your product pages from the category levels. This will ensure that Google finds, crawls and indexes your content fast. Also link to them from their parent category pages.

Optimize your website theme so that new products are always presented on your home page where they’ll get found and indexed. A good internal link architecture will get your new product pages indexed and ranked quickly.

Question #: How Do I Deal With Products Pages With Little Or No Unique Content?

With all the challenges of running an e-commerce enterprise, few businesses think about unique content on product pages. Many pull product information from a database, leading to duplicate content problems.

Some pages have little more than a product photo. This leaves the search engines with no way to understand what this page is about, how it relates to other pages on your site, and how relevant it is for search users.

1. Add content for your most popular products. Start by identifying your best-selling and most popular product pages using Web analytics tools and then updating them with content manually.
2. Strengthen your product categories. You can’t produce text for 100,000 different products. Instead, focus your SEO on strengthening the products’ parent category. Improve internal link architecture, breadcrumbs, and add relevant products to feed the search bots and teach them what your site is about.
3. Add user generated content. It can effectively differentiate your product pages from other duplicates on the Web. Social media works well. Endorsements and reviews from happy users or customers will not only enhance your SEO campaign but also boost sales conversions

Question #: How Do I Weave SEO Into The Web Design Process?

Web design isn’t just about visual appeal. You need a specialist e-commerce Web designer who’s experienced and will work as a team with your SEO consultant, analyst, conversion rate optimizer and others. You must give them space and budgets to act as experts.

When your website design and information architecture work in tandem, with no pages/URLs breaking out of the structure, you’ll boost the entire site every time you publish a new product page and ensure early crawling by search spiders. Good design and content along with a pleasant visitor experience will generate more sales.

1. Failing to plan is planning to fail. SEO must be baked into the business/website early in the planning phase, before you even start working on your wireframes and design process — not after the site is launched. Making awesome category/section templates and having product pages promote them with internal links is very effective.
2. SEO for e-commerce websites is different from traditional SEO. E-commerce SEO requires a consultant skilled in multiple disciplines, with a deep understanding of human psychology, conversion rate optimization, analytics, Web design & development, social media marketing and communication, copywriting, economy, usability and user experience. The best e-commerce SEO specialists also have deep insight and understanding of commerce and how a retail business functions.
3. E-commerce Web design is never “finished.” It’s a continuous process of A/B testing to hunt down the best performing variations. The right “tools” are important, but the best consultant or company is more important. An expensive consultant is not expensive if she can generate many more sales than a “cheap” one.

Question #: How Do I Organize Related Products On The Site?

Presenting relevant related items on product pages can boost sales. Meta data from your PIM ensures that all items presented are relevant, personalized and in stock. Your Web designer and developers must also focus on internal link architecture.

1. Be relevant. If visitors arrive on a product page for the latest Apple iPhone, you should also suggest other relevant products, based on the cost, quality and persona of this buyer. The latest Google Nexus might be a similar product, but a loyal Apple acolyte may never buy it anyway! Measure and optimize product suggestions.
2. Location or placement. Let the product featured on the page stand out and shine. Give it space. Don’t clutter it up with other suggestions. Don’t waste your best location on products that don’t sell and are not popular.

Question #: How Do I Leverage Internal Site Search?

It’s shocking that experts optimizing a site for Google search don’t optimize for their own internal search engine on e-commerce websites! That’s often because they overlook or underestimate the role of internal search, losing sales. People searching with misspellings, synonyms, hyphenation or spacing errors are not taken to the appropriate product pages. They should be.

1. Enable tracking of your site search. Use tools which allow you to see keywords people are searching for within your site, and calculate the revenue they generate.
2. Count popular searches. They can mean your product is popular and can be profitable. They may also indicate that people are not finding what they came to your site for!
3. Use a tool like Crazy Egg to track clicks and see how people behave on your home page, important category pages and on product pages.
4. Think of your site search results pages as “landing pages.” The search results should be relevant and help users solve their problems. Make sure you “noindex” your search results.
5. Include site search in your keyword research. Analyze what your visitors are searching for to find new product ideas, locate potential areas for improvements, identify popular products, and overcome problems with search and usability.
6. Test your site search and fix errors. Type some of the keywords you’ve uncovered into your internal search and see what they find as a result. When you fix whatever is broken, sales will shoot up!
7. Optimize internal search. Make sure every internal search finds the right product. This requires tweaking meta-data within your e-commerce solution. By handling this through meta-data, you won’t create pages loaded with incorrect or misspelled words.