SEO Concerns for Ecommerce Websites

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engine optimization is important for all types of websites including ecommerce platforms. Things can get tricky for e-commerce websites because some have many products. It can become quite an immense task to have to optimize thousands of merchandise pages but if you want to be successful online you are going to have to take the time and dive into SEO at some point.

It is no surprise that good quality unique content is an important step to the process of optimizing a website. Often times on an e-commerce website you could have product categories where the only difference between ten or fifteen products could be simply the color. It might be easy to write one product description and simply change out the text for the color portion of the write up but you are going to want to do more than just that. You will really need to take the time and focus on creating unique product descriptions even if the products are close in nature.

What info should I include on the product pages?

Generally you need to put yourself in the shoes of your audience when trying to answer this question. If you wanted to find something very specific on this product you might flip it over and look at the serial number or possibly the model number? You want to include all relevant information regarding that specific product in the body of the page in between the text somewhere and also in the meta information. Take as much data and information that you can find surrounding the product including manufacturer names and descriptions and incorporate them into the elements of that specific product page. Make sure to not copy the descriptions word for word but rather try and put them into your own words. Over time you will see a nice increase in steady traffic that might be using those elements to search with.

What about the URL’s?

The problem with many ecommerce websites is that they are database driven and you almost always have to have some string of characters in the URL that are unavoidable. If your site structure uses page ID’s you should be able to replace the page ID’s with text in the URL structure. Use friendly URL structures that incorporate some of your keywords into the structure. You don’t want to leave it as a nasty string of characters because that does not do anybody any good.

Should I use product reviews?

If you are absolutely certain that the majority of your product reviews will most likely be positive ones than yes. Product reviews are a great way to not only strengthen the overall SEO capabilities you are trying to achieve but also the user experience. Good solid product reviews can often time lead into an increase in overall product sales.

How many drop downs should there be to find a product?

Your web traffic should never have to do more than two clicks to get to any product. The more difficult it is for that user to find your product the longer it will take for sales to start occurring. You want that flow of traffic to be as quick as possible. Right from the home page all web traffic should be able to make it to almost any product you have on your website pretty quickly. Make it effort less and painless for products to be seen.

Should I optimize the images as well?

A typical ecommerce website is going to have a great deal of images which creates an opportunity for other visitors to make their way into your website through an image search.

Sometimes someone might want to find an image of a certain product before they purchase and search for it using one of the image search engines. If your image pops up that web visitor might just turn into a web customer so it is important to label exactly what the image is. If it is a stroller name the image the name of the stroller, manufacturer and even model number can be there if you want to be aggressive.

Optimizing an ecommerce site brings on a few more elements that say a traditional informative website for a business. There are many elements of the site that traffic will use and it is important to have all those elements optimized 100% so your web traffic understands exactly how to navigate through your website.