We provide SEO services for a number of ecommerce websites and am always following fellow SEO’ers and web designers to see what they have to say for tips, experimental data and more. And even if you know half this stuff, written in a new light, we can always benefit from some more refreshing Ecommerce SEO Tips.
For a refreshing read and good data on this, I’d like to thank Yoast (who needs no introduction) and Brian (from ecreativeim) who wrote some excellent articles on this subject (follow the links).
Okay, so where do I start here – well first of all, this article has everything to do with how your website is built and not necessarily with link building; but all good SEO starts with a quality website.
I’m not going to talk about title tags, descriptions, headers, keyword density or any of that here. It’s about quality content.
You see, if you’re selling a hundred or thousands of products, the likeliness that you’ll be selling products of a range that are extremely similar if not practically identical bar a dash in the product code you might have on your hands a site that has an incredible amount of duplicate content.
For example – you’re selling laser levels. There are 20 brands, each brand carries 20 laser levels and they all pretty much do the same thing apart. So that’s 400 laser levels that more or less do the same thing.
Ecommerce SEO Do’s and Don’ts:
So there are a few ‘wrong’ things to do here:
- Take the manufacturers’ description of the laser levels. How many other dealers have done exactly the same thing – and obviously the manufacturers already have it on their site. This would count as DUPLICATE CONTENT and does nothing for your ranking apart from harm.
- Write an excellent description and then use this description for all products, only making a few minor adjustments in the titles and specifications. Google will consider only ONE of these products worth ranking and the rest as ‘unoriginal trash’. So trash the duplicate descriptions and get thinking. Google cares for original quality content.
- Too little a description – like ‘red laser 50ft range’. Google is clear that bad content can affect the good content that is on your site. So AVOID all crap descriptions and content. Don’t waste your time with it – it’s better not to have spent the time putting up crap content.
So DO:
- Create worthwhile content for every product you sell.
- Create your own descriptions for everything you sell.
- Fix up your website accordingly.
Hope these ecommerce seo tips are useful and answers some questions why you have a 1000 product website but aren’t making any sales (nor are you ranking for anything).