We’ve all heard that SEO is important, but it can be hard to know where to start. If you’re an e-commerce store owner, the first place to start improving your ranking on Google is your website’s on-page SEO. But if your site is more than one page, how do you know where to focus your energy?
Here are some great e-commerce on-page SEO tips that will boost your rankings and drive more sales.
Let Search Engines Read Reviews
One way to attract new customers and increase your visibility is with unique, informative content on your product pages. If you have hundreds of product pages, you might have the bandwidth to constantly create new content. One option for developing a steady stream of new content is with product recommendations and reviews. Your customers submit reviews and serve as salespeople to convince others to convert.
Almost 90% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family members, which means a few reviews can go a long way to boost your conversion rate.
Highlighting these reviews on your site is great for users, but also for your eCommerce SEO efforts. Content-rich reviews provide fresh updates to your pages, something Google rewards, and enhance the context needed by crawlers to understand why they should show your product in a search result instead of one of your competitors.
Unfortunately, some of the most popular product review tools display this rich, valuable content in a way search engines can’t read. With these tools, reviews are injected into your page via JavaScript and the actual review text is not present within the source code. While Google is getting better at understanding this complex coding, it’s not perfect. If search crawlers have difficulty understanding your JavaScript, then it will be ignored entirely.
When building out a review platform, choose one that embeds the review content directly into the HTML of your site. This guarantees that both users and search engines can read these endorsements, improving your long-tail keyword listing and increasing your qualified traffic leads.
Create Dynamic Meta Descriptions
The meta description appears directly below a page title in the SERPs. Google doesn’t read what you write in the meta description, but your customers do. In addition to the title and the URL, it’s the only information they have on your site before they decide whether or not you get their click.
For eCommerce sites that offering thousands of products that often get replaced seasonally, finding a way to write engaging meta descriptions at scale is a challenge. Some companies invest the time creating a unique description for every page, but that’s not feasible if you’re a small business or major department store retailer.
Smart SEOs use “Concatenation schemas” and establish a set of rules to automate meta description creation while generating unique content. This is a small piece of code that uses a predetermined set of rules to write relevant descriptions automatically.
For example, the following rule could be written for photography retailer B&H Photo:
- Shop for PRODUCT NAME at BRAND. BRAND provides SUBCATEGORY and CATEGORY for all photography and electronics enthusiasts.
In action, the product description looks like this:
- Shop for Canon EOS Rebel at B&H Photo. B&H Photo provides DSLR Cameras and Digital Cameras for all photography and electronics enthusiasts.
Instead of taking days or weeks to update a category, this schema allows you to update your entire site automatically. With a little testing, you should be able to find a description that improves your organic click-through rates.
Keep Your Product Descriptions Unique
Along with meta descriptions, you want to make sure your product descriptions are unique as well.
Unique content became a priority after Google released its Panda algorithm, which focuses on promoting high-quality content that is relevant to users. The goal was also to penalize duplicate content that was scrapped from other pages.
One of the first steps to boost your eCommerce SEO efforts is to identify any content on your product pages that contain duplicated copy, particularly pages that have the same description as products offered by competitors or manufacturers.
Once you identify duplicated content, rewrite it from scratch. This makes your content unique compared to your competitors, and well-written descriptions provide Google with additional context around what you’re selling, increasing the likelihood that they’ll show your product for relevant searches.
If you need to prioritize your content and have a seemingly endless list of product descriptions ahead of you, create content for your highest margin and best selling products first. Then develop a strategy to replace duplicated descriptions in phases, or as new products get added to your lineup. Eventually, you will convert your entire site over to the new descriptions.
If you sell your products through other marketplaces, like Amazon or eBay, use the manufacturer’s descriptions so your unique content isn’t shared across the web.
Only Index One Version Of Your Domain
Speaking of duplicate content, you want to make sure there is only one copy of any given page on your domain. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for companies, even large ones, to have their entire website duplicated. This is usually happening when a site has an active “www” and “non-www version,” like a page that starts with “http”.
When you have multiple duplicated sites, your pages compete against each other in search, and competitors with only one page for a given product will outrank you.
Duplicate pages often occur when subdomains aren’t blocked by Robots.txt files, gated behind a password-protected log-in wall, or redirected to the main www page. Search engine crawlers find the duplicate pages and split equity between in the rankings. Instead of one page getting 100% of the value, two pages get 50%.
There are multiple steps you can take to identify if you have multiple versions of your domain indexed:
- Crawl on your webpage using a tool like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or SEMRush
- Review Google Analytics data for organic landing pages to see if unwanted subdomains appear.
- Search Google’s index of your site by using advances modifiers, such as “site:mysite.com -inurl:www” to display all indexed pages on your site that are not located in the www subdomain.
Ideally, you will block any duplicate pages before creating them, but if you notice them in your index, be sure to update your robots.txt as quickly as possible.
Add Pagination Elements to Category Pages
On category pages with thousands of products, the last thing you want is to force users to load everything at once and then scroll through listings until they find something they want. Most eCommerce websites solve this by breaking up the category into easily digestible pages with just a portion of the listings, typically with 25-50 items per page.
While this is great for customer experience, it can have a negative impact on your eCommerce SEO as Google isn’t sure which category page to display for users in search results. Adding SEO pagination elements with “rel=next” and “rel=prev” tags tells Google and other search engines how pages are related to one another.
Smart web developers will also give users the option to view all of the listings on one page. If you decide to add the option to your eCommerce pages, make sure you follow the canonical rules outlined by Google to prevent confusion and penalties by the search crawlers.
Embrace Schematic Markup
Schematic markup is one of the most effective, but underutilized, tools for SEO eCommerce. These little snippets of code improve your results by placing star ratings and price tags directly in Google search results. While schematic data isn’t a direct ranking factor, these visually pleasing additions provide context to potential customers and can increase your click-through rate.
According to a study by Search Engine Land in 2014, structured markup appears in 36% of search results, but less than one percent of all websites have it on their pages.
Implementing structured markup on your website means adding of code to your page templates from Schema.org. We’ve written about the benefits of Schema before, but it bears repeating: this is a powerful tool for any business willing to set it up.
When properly integrated into your code, this Schema data enables Google to render more effective search results and can positively influence click-through rate.
Prioritize Speed
Starting in July 2018, speed will be a ranking factor in Google’s mobile search results. Along with impacting your eCommerce SEO, site speed has a significant effect on the user experience. An average increase of your mobile site speed by one second can increase your bounce rate by 8.3%, decrease your conversion rate by 3.5% and decrease your pageviews by 9.4%.
Google’s best practices say that a page should load in under four seconds, and the faster your site becomes, the better. SEO experts need to quickly identify and correct anything that slows your page speed down.
Start by monitoring the bounce rate, load time, and time on site to understand the health of your site speed. You can also use free tools, such as Web Page Test, to identify bottlenecks in page speed.
Canonical URLs
Ecommerce sites have some of the messiest and longest URLs you find online. The bigger the store, the worse it gets, as the inclusion of parameters from search and navigation systems can add millions of unique URLs based on click paths.
It’s not uncommon to see large retailers with up to 1,000 URL variations for a single product. Thanks to search functionality, this outcome is often unavoidable, since the last thing you want to do is prevent your customer from finding the products they’re looking for.
Unfortunately, this scenario is troublesome for retailers and brands since it wastes Google’s time as the crawlers track down and index every version of the URL.
If this is the case with your business, make sure you eliminate index bloat by using canonical tags as well as with Google’s parameter exclusion tool.
Keyword Research
Every 60 seconds, 3.8 million Google searches are performed.
That’s a lot.
And, want to hear something even crazier?
The average consumer processes 100,500 digital words on a daily basis.
So, with all this information, how do you make sure customers find you in the search engines?
Seer Interactive and Annie Cushing tested this idea on 12 of their clients in six different industries.
While the short-tail terms received 11 times more traffic, the average conversion rates for the long-tail keywords were 4.15% higher than the short-tail.
Conclusion
On page SEO refers to all of the on page factors that are within your control on your website. It can fall into several categories, but for this post I’m going to be focusing on on page optimization of ecommerce websites.