Knowledge of SEO techniques to optimize one’s site is, as is well known, extremely important; being more visible on search engines and, consequently, to Web surfers is a key piece of a successful site.
If this axiom is valid for all sites, it is even more so for e-commerce; which of course are on the net to sell their products and convert as much as possible. How should one behave from an SEO point of view if one has an e-commerce? What are the cautions to be taken into due consideration? In principle, the basic techniques to be used do not differ much from those used to best index any site: it is certain that in the case of an e-commerce is required greater specificity as it becomes essential to obtain quality traffic by going to intercept only users as interested as possible in our product and therefore more likely to make a purchase.
Precisely for this reason they become even more important actions at the base of any Seo planning such as:
- a careful analysis of the keywords to target, carefully curating the long tail, which will help us gain foundational impressions in our SERP climb.
- constant and detailed monitoring to understand as early as possible what keywords are converting and, conversely, those that risk wasting our time and money.
- be careful not to use duplicate content: this is the case, for example, of those who sell products related to famous brands within their e-commerce. In this case, there is always a tendency to include as a description of the item the one that is provided by the manufacturer. By doing so, one runs the risk of being heavily penalized. It is always better to write your own descriptive text of the product.
- allow customers to write reviews: most web users would never make a purchase without first reading opinions, comments, advice, etc., so it is important to always give the opportunity to write reviews about the product in question.
To all these shrewdnesses we could add the classic advice of integrating the site with a blog that talks about the products we sell and related topics: this will come in handy both to provide content of interest to the visitor to our site and to index us better on search engines.
E-commerce and unavailable products
Another issue related to what has been discussed so far is that of products no longer available within our e-commerce (often due to a seasonal renewal of the catalog) : how should we act when such a circumstance happens, especially if the product page in question had achieved good positioning? This question was recently addressed in the latest video by Matt Cutts who proposed different solutions related to the characteristics of the e-commerce site. According to Cutts, it is all a matter of size, and depending on the size of the site, the solutions also vary.
- Small E-commerce: if the site has few products and therefore few pages, the ideal solution is to redirect the visitor to related products. So if a product is no longer available, within the product page itself (if still present) we could insert links that redirect the visitor to similar product pages. Otherwise in case the product page has been permanently removed, create a 301 redirect rule to the new page of the product itself or a related stetto.
- Medium-sized e-commerce: in the case of a medium-sized e-commerce, so with several hundred products/pages, Matt Cutts recommends simply resorting to a ‘404 error’ page. Perhaps customized, so as to send the visitor back to the site’s homepage or otherwise to similar product pages. This is valid in the case of a product that is no longer for sale; in the case of a product that is temporarily unavailable, if the product page itself had acquired a good ranking it is also advisable to leave it online by popping up a message such as ‘product temporarily unavailable’.
- Large E-commerce: in the case of large e-commerce or portals with a large turnover, and therefore with the need to continuously insert new pages with products, Matt Cutts recommends a special meta tag that goes to interact with Google telling it when to have the page displayed and, vice versa, when not to have it appear because you do not have the product available. The meta tag is called ‘unavailable_after’ and is essentially aimed at product pages that will no longer be available after a certain date. The tag then tells Google to stop indexing the page after a certain date. By ‘playing around’ with this tag, it is possible to determine upstream when to make a page appear on search results and when to hide it.
{youtube}9tz7Eexwp_A{/youtube}
These are some cautions to keep in mind if you want to try to optimize your ecommerce in the best possible way: however, it is always advisable to entrust your site to those who have knowledge in the field SEO for ecommerce because, if you have an online store, not being visible on the web is equivalent to not selling your products and, therefore, losing time and money.