The sites which are sales-based or eCommerce sites really see Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into action in terms of Return on Investment (ROI). Even a little tweak can increase the sales tremendously:
1. Multiple Categorizations
Most of the eCommerce sites follow ‘filing cabinet’ approach; that means that every product is ascribed to only one category. However, in actuality one product can also fall into more than one category. For example, lingerie is a product that can fall into different categories like ‘Baby doll nightgown’, ‘Basque’, and ‘Bustier’.
Most probably, you have been using ‘sort by’ choices to sort your products. What is recommended is to do these categories from their own landing pages. You have to see that each of those categories is linked to, using a clear HTML anchor text link.
2. The First Link
Several tests conducted by SEO professionals have proven that even if you link one page two or more times from any page, Google and many of the other major search engines would count only the first link.
Generally we see in a website that first there is the image of the product with the link to the product or sub-categories, and then description of that product with the same link placed again. For Search Engine it would be the only first link (which is usually in image) that really counts.
If your website has the same problem, you can fix it by placing the description and link, before the image. Alternatively, you can remove the link from the image, and let it be only with the description.
3. Keywords- Singular or plural
Logically the title for a page should be plural. However unfortunately, people tend to enter the singular version of the keyword, when they search it through search engines. Now if your website is optimized for the title which is plural, you will lose much of the traffic. The work around for this problem is to design the title of a phrase (which would be keyword optimized) using both singular and plural form of the keyword. For example, you can do something like this:
“Navigation gadgets: Buy your Navigation Gadget at mywebsite.com”
Changing a single line can double the traffic to your website.
4. Regularly freshening up of your pages
If you don’t update your pages regularly, search engines might take that page to be dead. Therefore, keep updating your page(s) regularly to tell search engines that the pages are alive. This should not be taken lightly. With Real Time Search becoming the latest trend, and Google algorithms continually change to incorporate a system to check for freshness of pages as well; it becomes crucial, that you regularly freshen up your pages.
Question may arise, how you can keep updating your pages regularly for your eCommerce sites. You can follow these simple tips to do that:
•Include user reviews for your products in your pages.
•If you haven’t done already, include a blog on your site. Categorize the posts nicely, and feed them into category pages to include some lines from the most new posts. It might take some time to implement but the efforts would be worth it; you would have your pages updated and fresh every time you write a relevant post.
•To set yourself apart from your competitors, regularly review and change the copy on the category and product pages. It is not only keeping your pages fresh, but would result in ranking boost.
5. Links to Deeper Pages
Continuing SEO campaigns can turn into never-ending battles in no time trying to govern those ‘keywords’ which brings more traffic. Most of the time companies spend so much time and resource for competitive keywords, that they almost ignore tail phrases, for instance, product names. To make it more clear we take an example; You are selling a LCD TV of myBrand company, and its product name, for instance is “myBrand RFG--40x3500 LCD TV”.
You obviously would get more traffic to your site from the keyword “myBrand LCD TV”, but as a matter of fact, but traffic which comes with “myBrand RFG--40x3500 LCD TV” has higher conversion rates. They can be ranked much easily with only a few inbound links.
TO gain an edge over your competitors, don’t only compete for those glamorous keywords, but also invest considerable resources for link building of some deeper pages on the website. You will see your sale increasing a lot with this small change of focusing on deeper pages and links.
We hope that above 5 SEO tips for eCommerce sites would bring a little value to your efforts for SEO.A small change goes a long way; so try incorporating these small changes and see how they help you in not just attracting more traffic, but also making more profit..