SEO For Ecommerce. How to avoid common mistakes and tips for optimizing ecommerce site. Google is tough on Ecommerce sites, gain a competitive edge.

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2. *
jenn@jennhorowitz.com

3. *Common Errors
*Site Speed
*Architecture
*Schema / Rich Snippets
*Reviews
*Mobile
*Keywords
*Duplicate Content
*FAQ
*Samples

4. *
Lack of Product Description: This is bad for the engines and site
visitors. Tips to resolve this issue:
*Only write quality descriptive content that helps your customers
make purchasing decisions.
*Don’t copy content from other websites.
*Test what description word count helps with purchase conversion.
Too much content might hurt.
Using Product Descriptions from Manufacturers
*You may want to consider putting a NO INDEX meta tag on product
pages that you can’t write unique content for.
Lack of Product Reviews
*About 70% of buyers are looking for reviews of products on online
stores or forums before making a purchase. The beautiful thing
about product reviews from customers is they are create unique
content for your online store and it’s free! It keeps the product
page “living”, which can help to bring the search engines back
more often.

5. *
Not Optimizing Product Pages Based on The Search Demand
* Be sure to consider the demand and search keywords that
people are typing into the search engines when you write
headlines, title pages, and product descriptions.
Non-Unique Titles
*Another problem of the large online stores is duplicated title
tags. Make sure each page has a unique tag.
*A lot of online shoppers are searching for a key phrase as
opposed to a single keyword. A formula that tends to work well
is: Brand – Model – Item Type
Lack of “Speaking” urls
*See the name of the product right in the site address.

6. *
Site speed can be an issue for ecommerce sites since there is typically a
lot to load. Use tools like http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to diagnose any
load time issues.

7. *
*Use a tool like LucidChart to create a chart of your website’s information
architecture.
*Top pages should be no more than 1-2 clicks maximum from home.
*Focus on creating a “flat architecture” for your website, meaning design that
requires as few clicks as possible to go from your home page to your product
page.
*Never use iframes to display content. Make sure your content actually exists
on the product page it is meant to be on.
*How you set up your architecture can impact duplicate content. In the
example below, the pages could be seen as duplicate content since they are
organized in various different directories, creating unique URLs for each.
Rel=canonical will fix this.
Examples:
http://www.example.com/products/blue-collar-shirt.aspx
http://www.example.com/collar/blue-collar-shirt.aspx
http://www.example.com/shirts/collar/blue-collar-shirt.aspx

8. *
*“You wouldn’t put everything in the front of a physical store —
you couldn’t — so set priorities,” says Dr. Peter J. Meyers,
president of User Effect. Most of a site's sales usually come from
a small percentage of their products. Focus on heavily
marketing these hot items up front (on the homepage)
*Reference your URL consistently throughout the code.
*Constantly test for broken links – this wastes link juice.
*Properly interlink content and product pages.
*Keep a current XML sitemap submitted to Search Console.
*Carefully consider sub-domains and sub-directories when
deciding on structure/architecture.

9. *
*Google rich snippets extract
information from your website to
display on your site's listing in the
search results, in addition to the
typical page title, page URL, and meta
description. This extra information can
include photos, ratings, author
information, product info and info on
people and more. For example, a
product has all sorts of information
associated with it, including the name,
price, size, description etc. So you can
use a bit of code to say, “Here are my
products, and here is all the
information that Google needs to know
about it to display a fuller listing."
RESOURCES
Schema.org website:
http://schema.org/Product
Google’s free rich snippet tool
CMS plugins like WordLift for
WordPress
Google’s Schema.org FAQs

10. *
*Matt Cutts from Google has
previously said that simply
including schema markup
won’t necessarily make
your site rank higher, he
declines to categorically
state that Schema.org
won’t give you a ranking
boost.
*We can’t say for 100% sure
Schema.org directly
impacts rankings.
However, we do know it
can impact CTRs.
*According to Search Engine
Land, rich snippets can
increase SERP click
through rates by up to
30%.

11. *
*According to Internet Retailer, you can increase your e-
commerce conversion rate by 14-76% by adding product
reviews to your online store. Jupiter Research also found that
77% of consumers read reviews before purchasing online.
*In addition to increasing conversions, customer reviews also
positively impact your SEO because more reviews = more
content, and frequent reviews = fresh content, which Google
loves to see.

12. *
*www.customerlobby
*http://www.capturereviews.com/
*http://www.customerlink.com
*http://www.nearbynow.co/

13. *
*Make sure your site is responsive
*Stay on top of mobile stats
*NAP (name, address, phone) should be text based, not
image based
*Eliminate photos and sliders as much as possible for content
*Test your site: http://mobiletest.me/

14. *
* A dress color may be described as ‘cobalt’ but a user may be more likely to search ‘blue dress’.
Changing the dress color to ‘cobalt blue’ is likely to support optimization of all sorts of relevant
long tail search terms.
* Instil a set of characteristics that form part of the product title: Color Brand and product
* Use model numbers and brand names in your title tags and H1 headings.
* Use brand names in your title tags and H1 headings.
* Keywords should appear in:
* The page title
* Headers
* Subheaders
* Paragraph copy
* Product descriptions
* Image file names
* Image alt tags
* Meta title and description
* URLs

15. *
Here are some tips to trimming down duplicate content:
*Rewrite content as much as possible
*Use robots.txt to block areas that create duplicate content
such as archives, tags and even category pages in some
cases.
*Use the canonical tag to indicate which web pages are the
pages you want indexed.

16. *
*You can add nofollow attributes to links that point to areas of
duplicate content. However, you have to be extremely
thorough at making sure you find every single link that needs
to be nofollowed (because Google will find them).
*rel=next,prev meta tags:
*You can signal to Google that paginated pages are part of a
series by using the meta link tag with the attributes rel=”next”
and rel=”prev.” This approach is detailed on the official Google
webmaster blog.

17. *
How Do I Deal With Out-Of-Stock Items?
*Leave the pages up. If the items will be in stock later, leave
pages up just the way they are.
*Offer alternative items. If specific products are sold out,
offer highly relevant alternatives through widgets on the
site.
*Offer to backorder the product. Let them order and promise
to have it sent out to them as soon as fresh supplies arrive.
Prospective buyers who really want the product won’t mind
waiting a few extra days for it.

18. *
What Do I Do With Obsolete/Expired Products?
*Many e-commerce websites delete the pages and take no
further action. From an SEO perspective, this is bad. You lose
SEO value, and people who bookmarked the URL will get an
error message. Your options:
*Permanently 301 redirect expired product URLs.
*Redirect to parent category.
*Permanently delete the expired product’s pages, content
and URLs.
*Reuse URLs.
*Some items deserve to live on.

19. *
How Do I Deal With Products Pages With Little Or No Unique
Content?
*Add content for your most popular products. Start by
identifying your best-selling and most popular product pages
using Web analytics tools and then updating them with
content manually.
*Strengthen your product categories. Focus your SEO on
strengthening the products’ parent category. Improve
internal link architecture, breadcrumbs, and add relevant
products to feed the search bots and teach them what your
site is about.
*Add user generated content.

20. *
How Do I Present Product Descriptions From Manufacturers?
*Rewrite the content.
*Add unique content like user-generated comments and reviews.
Invite user comments. Integrate social networking. Let users tell
their stories. Happy customers will serve as your marketing
helpers.
*Add content to product pages. Raise the quality and uniqueness of
your content by personalizing it to solve your users’ problems. Add
information, images, video or suggestions to your content.
*Add “psychological triggers” to your content. Typical product
descriptions are dull and technical. People, however, buy on
emotion and feelings. Bring your product descriptions to life by
telling a story.

21. *
How Do I Handle Category Pages?
*Add content to your category pages.
*Use search-friendly URLs. This often gets quick results
because you are giving the search engines strong hints about
what this URL is about while giving visitors help and valuable
information — just make sure to avoid keyword stuffing. The
most effective URL structure for category pages (and product
pages) is:
*Category Page: Website.com/category/
*Sub-category page: Website.com/category/sub-category/
*Product page: website.com/category-sub-category/product-name/

22. *
*Zappos.com
*Amazon.com
*http://www.evesaddiction.com/