Website Optimization Tips for Ecommerce SEO
The SEO processes for ecommerce sites are a much more advanced compared to traditional websites. In essence, ecommerce sites can be super deep with multiple levels of category and products pages. As a result, on-site SEO and website optimization hold much greater importance.
There are a number of intricacies that can make or break an ecommerce SEO campaign. Being aware of the little things that can help or hinder SEO is paramount when optimizing an ecommerce website.
In this blog post, I will underscore three website optimization tips that are critical to address for ecommerce SEO.
Ensure Page Unique-ness
It’s not uncommon for ecommerce sites to encounter issues with duplicate content. Having duplicate content on any website is a big no-no for SEO. Unfortunately, this is a common culprit that can kill the rankings for an ecommerce site.
One of the most common places on a page that face duplicate content is the page title. Because some ecommerce sites are composed of thousands of product pages, it’s possible that some pages may overlap and have matching page titles. This is often the result of a content management systems (CMS) generating the duplicated page titles, not knowing the detriment this has to SEO.
Fortunately, Google is by our side on this one. In Google Webmaster Tools, view the ‘HTML Improvements’ option under the ‘Optimization’ tab. This section will tell you the pages of your ecommerce site that have duplicate page titles as well as duplicate meta descriptions. This enables ecommerce SEO’s to easily pinpoint and fix any pages that might be conflicting.
Map Out Your Site
The sitemap is considered the second most important webpage on your website (with the homepage being number one.) The sitemap is the index of your website and it withholds links to all primary webpages of the site. In short, the sitemap is the roadmap for search engine spiders and helps to ensure your ecommerce site is properly crawled and indexed.
It is thus critical that your sitemap is properly organized with links pointed to all primary pages of your website. You can structure your sitemap by product category, brand, or any other format that you deem logical. The main focus is to ensure that its complete.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that must have all individual product pages linked on your ecommerce sitemap. This could get a bit overwhelming. However, if you do want to go the extra mile, you can link product pages on the sitemap, or you can try creating a mini-sitemap. That is, an additional sitemap that’s dedicated to a specific product category. There you can link individual product pages, without overwhelming your primary sitemap with thousands of links.
Lastly, ensure that you sitemap is linked on all pages of the website. A good place for this is a site-wide navigation link or footer link. This further helps search engine spiders efficiently index your ecommerce site for search.
Produce Great Copy
Whether for product pages or category-level pages, putting some copy on the page is huge for ecommerce SEO. Like page titles and meta descriptions, you’ll want to ensure the copy is unique per page. Furthermore, your site can advance its ecommerce SEO efforts by including keyword targets in the copy.
You’ll want to have an appropriate balance of keyword inclusion and not over do it. Simply mentioning the page’s primary keyword target a couple times on the page will do. Additionally, align your keyword target so that it’s mentioned in the page title, meta description, and page copy, respectively. This tri-fecta is the bee’s knees to website optimization and will help set-off your ecommerce SEO campaign.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Website optimization for ecommerce SEO goes much deeper than this. To learn more tips and strategies to ignite your ecommerce SEO campaign, contact our website optimization company.
This blog post was written by organic SEO specialist Tyler Tafelsky. Connect with Tyler on Google+.
