Online shopping is pretty much the go-to option for customers who don’t want to tire themselves out with real-life shopping cons such as long queues, finicky debit and credit machines, and stress. Naturally, if you’re selling a product or products that fulfill your customer base’s needs and want to bring it all online, you’ll want to give those customers an ecommerce website featuring a pleasant shopping experience.
One of the most important aspects of any experience while shopping online is finding exactly what you need and with as few clicks as possible in order to get it. The best way to provide that experience to your customers is by establishing proper SEO for all of your products, even the near-identical ones with only slight differences. Ecommerce website SEO is quite different from traditional SEO, but black vs. white SEO tactics still apply.
What NOT to Do
We’ll start with briefing you on how not to apply SEO to your website’s products. This is just a sample of what needs to be done if you have any of these issues currently.
- Don’t use the same title tag and meta description tag for each product; having neither of these is also a no-no.
- Don’t use the copy and paste method for product content – in other words, don’t use the same description for each and every item you’re selling.
- Don’t delete or remove pages for products currently out of stock – depending on its sales, it may come back.
- Don’t leave wholly discontinued or expired items floating around on your website.
- Don’t disregard online security – some customers are hesitant to shop online, and for good reason related to this.
- Don’t leave responsive design for mobile phones and tablets out of the picture.
What to Start Doing
If you have not already done the following actions for your ecommerce website’s products, consider making them a priority.
- Add a section for “Last items reviewed” so customers do not need to worry about constantly finding and then losing track of the products they’re most interested in buying.
- Create unique content for every description – yes, all of them. One thing you can do in this regard is add testimonials and comments to product descriptions. Not only do these add unique content, but also they encourage web traffic and promote your best products.
- Create unique URLs (web addresses) for products that are similar but with minor differences. For example, if they have a different product code number, add that number to the URL and Google will consider it unique instead of duplicate.
- Merge your pages. Instead of featuring 50 pages of near-identical products and trying to come up with unique descriptions for each one, roll all of those pages into a single page. You can add other features such as colour preview and a drop-down box menu so that the customer can select exactly what they want and what they’re looking for on only one page, rather than clicking through 50 pages altogether.
- Promote your best products over less than profitable ones. With almost too many choices for customers to make, having too many products can be as bad for your ecommerce website as it can be for your physical store building. Remove any expired/out-of-date products from your website and strengthen your product categories for seasonal products and promotions. Google Search Console can be of help with fixing any dead links or to implement 301 redirects to existing products if and where applicable.
- Have a responsive website for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The number of mobile users has exploded in the past decade, so ignoring this market can be deadly for your online business. What are you giving this market, if anything? How can you improve your website, both desktop and responsive, for them?
Above all else, you need to remember that all SEO for these sorts of websites are not static, but ever-changing – the same applies to traditional websites as well. If your ecommerce website is in desperate need of an SEO boost, then contact us at V3 Media. We can give you a free price quote for your website and determine which SEO practices to use straightaway.