Working with a wide range of UK and International online retailers gives me a fantastic insight to compare SEO techniques and Smart Content methods that sell products & please the search engines at the same time.
Follow these 6 onsite steps to improve your product revenue;
1.) Create Unique Content
Too often, £1000s are spent on making a site look and feel fantastic… the product descriptions are left as an after-thought and often seen as the biggest time consumer.
Walk into your average high street shop, stare at the rows of products you’re interested in and more than likely (well, I’d re-word that to ‘HOPEFULLY’!) a sales assistant will engage you and assist you in your decision making process. Re-read the product descriptions on your key products, does this information provided engage your user? Snappy descriptive content can work wonders for your search engine positioning. Make the time to ensure your content drives product benefits and not features… don’t simply copy and paste from a competitors website!
2.) Create SEO Friendly URLs
Most standard ecommerce packages will allow you to adapt your URL to include product names rather than product codes. Don’t forget, this information is read by the search engines and by your potential customers in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page)
seeing;
www.yourstore.com/brandname/product-title.html
rather than
www.yourstore.com/product_id=21423593
will make your SEO listing stand out far greater whilst the user scans the search listing for relevant terms.
3.) Offer Product Images That Sell!
A picture is worth 1000 words. Okay, this is a point many a Search Engine Optimiser may argue, but from the perspective of your customer… it certainly helps! If the products you stock aren’t run-of-the-mill why not offer unique pictures of that specific product? Don’t simply use stock photos if your products require particular emphasis on look and design… don’t be afraid to use plugins such as Lightbox to provide closeup pictures that sell your products
4.) Minimise Site Download Time
Just like on the high street, first impressions count. Make sure you make the shopping experience as simple as possible
There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a website which offers the product you want, at the price you want… but … what a struggle to navigate from one page to the next. If your pages take anymore than 4 seconds to download you can be pretty sure that your potential customer will lose patience… no matter what your pricing or product offering is. Check your download speeds using an external site such as the free to use Pingdom. For the shopper who wants to browse your site, slow download time isn’t good news no matter how swanky your website looks… and can quickly turn browsers back to Google and on to the next retailer. Make sure your images are optimised, your server is full spec and there’s no unnecessary javascripts or downloads within your site architecture that slow down the user experience.
5.) Optimise Your ‘Product Name’ Field
One of the key aspects of SEO for any retailer is ensuring your product description and name are aligned with that which your potential customers will search for. All too often, retailers that are completely au fait with their product line use shortened names rather than descriptive names when entering new products into their site database.
Lets take, as an example a ficticious digital camera, a Camera supply shop may well refer to it internally as the ‘Supersonic EOP233′. Now, only the most knowledgeable of web browsers would search for that particular term. How much more appealing to the browser would the product name ‘Supersonic EOP233 Quick Flash Digital Camera Package’ be? Utilising additional key terms such as “Digital Camera” will greatly assist through;
- inclusion within your Page Title tag ie. ‘Buy Supersonic EOP233 Quick Flash Digital Camera Package | Cameras2Go Shop’ provides far greater emphasis and authority within the Google pageranks.
- the product name should be highlighted within your page using Header <h1> or <h2> tags, again an authority element loved by Google.
- easier understanding of the product through your RSS feeds
- assist for natural ‘keyword density’ within your site – yet another key aspect of onpage SEO
6.) Onsite Linking
If there are particular products within your database you wish to focus on due to greater margins or simply excess stock, make sure they can be easily found by your site browser… if they can access them easily, so can Google.
Offer direct and descriptive ‘Anchor Text’ links to your most marketable products from your homepage (usually the page which Google grants the most site ‘authority’ too) as well as your category pages. Check to make sure that the ‘no follow’ tag isn’t implemented within any of your pages to ensure Googlebots have complete access to all of your pages. If you’re not sure how to do this, ask your site technicians or designers…or marketing people! Don’t simply link to the search page results for any particular product (ie. search.php/search=widgets) if this brings up a range of product listings. It’s no good to Google, or to the end user.
Selling online is a tough marketplace. Lead by example and make sure that the simple checkboxes relating to the overall customer experience are well and firmly checked.
