How To Optimize An Ecommerce Site
If you have an ecommerce site – where you sell your own products, sell products as a reseller, or an affiliate site that is set up as an online store – you might be scratching your head trying to find ways to properly optimize it.
Experts will tell you that Content Is King! but its not always easy coming up with content ideas for an online store. And unless you sell one-of-a-kind items, even your product descriptions are probably duplicated across the web on other ecommerce sites.
Here are 7 simple ways to optimize an online store or ecommerce site, even if you sell a common product. Use these easy steps to get better search engine rankings, more links and more traffic…
1.
First, you want to make sure that each page of your online store is properly optimized. Consider creating a page for each individual product in your store so that you can take advantage of longtail keyword phrases.
2.
Keep in mind that on-page optimization is only a small part of the equation. Quality inbound links to each page of your site will carry even more weight with the search engines.
The goal is to get links. Of course, its harder to get links to sales pages than it is to get links to quality content – so your job becomes adding something link-worthy to your ecommerce site…
3.
For unique content, start with your product descriptions. Even if it is a common product, re-word the descriptions so that they are unique as possible. Add as much detail about the product as you can.
4.
Cross-reference related items between individual product pages. You might mention accessories, or even similar products. This adds relevant content to each page, and also creates healthy internal linking.
5.
Product Reviews make for great content on an ecommerce site, and they also attract potential buyers. Use Social Q&A sites such as MyLot.com, Yahoo Answers and Askville.com to request reviews. You can post a casual query and ask for user experience & feedback (noting that you may reprint their answers on your-ecommerce-site.com).
Another option is to post a classified ad on Craigslist.org and offer a small fee for stories/reviews.
6.
Go ’social’ with it! Create profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Put feelers out on each of these sites to find people who use and love your products. Invite them to submit a photo & brief story/review to be featured at your-ecommerce-site.com
You might also consider running a contest and letting them vote for best photo or best story submission. Make it fun!
7.
Add quality content to your online store that will help your visitors make their buying decision. Ideas might include “how to choose your first __” or “how to use __ properly”, just as examples. Get creative. If you sell camping gear, you can write a checklist for the products they will need for their camping trip. If you sell car parts you can publish how-to tips.
Of course, its always best to let your target market tell you exactly what they want to read. Use WordTracker to research longtail keyword phrases in your niche. Often these 4-5 word phrases that are being searched will generate great ideas for content that you can add to your website.
Best,
p.s. Want more great content tips? Sign up to get notified when I release Easy Unique Content at http://www.easyuniquecontent.com
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These are all great ideas Lynn but I find that doing them all can be a little overwhelming. I’ve recently got active with the social Q&A sites, I’m hoping with several days of working at it I’ll see some positive results. Thanks so much for the great tips
Hello Lynn,
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became much more relevant to e-commerce when search engines started to index them. Social media postings tend to affect search rankings only temporarily, though, so it’s best to post regularly. There are auto-posting tools on which you can pre-load posts for some social media sites to help you have a consistent presence. I have a blog about bedding and accesories, and it’s every a pleasure to watch my project grow.
Thank you for sharing your helpful tips!
I do have an online store, though it isn’t selling anything right now. I made it as an experiment to see how it goes. The conclusion i reached is that if you’re not serious about it, you should just forget it. Imagine having over 1k products in store, adding a comprehensive description for each and than not selling anything is a waste of time.
Building a blog for the store also helps a lot, i just haven’t got to that part yet.
hi Lynn,
i have read through your lines and i admired by your writings. I have an E-commerce website which consists of 100000 pages, can you tell me how to optimize and make all of them indexed by search engines.
Good post – it may seem like a lot of work to optimize your e-commerce products but it is something definitely worth doing, now with all these Google Panda updates.
When writing the description of your product, it’s easy to get lazy and copy and paste product descriptions word for word by your product supplier. Avoid this and you will avoid having search engines disregard your product page as duplicate content. A little extra time goes a long way to helping your SEO efforts.
What I find the most annoying is the URLs of these websites. Can you please give few tips on how to optimize the URLs of the dynamic websites?
I have such a hard time optimizing the individual pages of my ecommerce site. Even though it only consists of 20 pages, I run out of steam on the pages that I don;t think are as important. Maybe that’s my problem – I don’t give equal importance to all my pages ???
This post made me think hard about the two ecommerce sites that I am currently working on. My practical experience is that my site with relatively weak non-unique content and many inbound links is ranking far higher than my other site with unique content and fewer links. Seems to me that it is the link juice that really matters to the search engines whatever they say about the panda updates.
Great tips Lynn. In my experience coming up with quality content on e-commerce sites is a challenge … one that I’ve worked on for a few years. I’ve developed some ways to create outstanding and informative content for e-commerce and/or review sites. The following are a few additional tips:
1. Write buying guides. I like multi-page buying guides extensively covering every aspect of a particular product.
2. Publish comparison charts. These are easy to create if you’ve already covered a product line.
3. On any product page, add a Pros and Cons section. This is easy to do, builds credibility, and adds unique content to the page that isn’t set out on the merchants’ sites. A similar technique is a 5 Reasons to buy this product section.
4. Create a video review and then have it transcribed and publish the transcription on the same page.
I always put myself in the consumers’ shoes and think of the types of information and questions I would have. In fact, when I research my own purchases, I pay attention to the questions I have as a consumer, and note them as ways to improve my niche sites.
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Nice tips, however something that I feel you’ve overlooked is to ensure you are including each item’s title within heading tags (e.g. ). Google really loves these tags and pays particular attention to the works sitting between them.
I am e-commerce programmer and have never thought about this tips, i am very grateful for your posts as this helps me in marketing as well
Thanks a lot
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