SEO in eCommerce : Gaining and Maintaining Rankings.

Due to the sheer volume of pages that an eCommerce site can have, it can be very time consuming to conduct initial and ongoing SEO optimizations. But the benefits are undeniable and thus, can not be ignored. So, with that in mind, let's look at some ways you can streamline the process and maintain your site without the job consuming you, by looking at a few things to consider.

Adding New Products

Whether you’re just adding a new product or are actually getting started with your site, it is important to make sure that the product is slotted in in a way that Google and other search engines can find and rank it easily.

First of all, it is important to make sure that your website has a strong URL structure. The first page a web crawler will visit will most likely be your homepage. From your homepage, you want to branch out to your category pages. From there, you want to link to subcategories (if you have them) and finally the product pages.

Keeping a simple, organized, hierarchical topology like this will make it easy for the search engine spiders to browse and understand your website. Don’t forget to make sure similar and relevant products link to each other to further help the search Gods to paint a picture of what the product is and how it relates to search terms it receives.

Another top tip is to display new products on your homepage prominently so that they are quicker to be seen, indexed and ranked.

Product Page Content (or lack of!)

When sourcing your products, you may be provided with little product information to put on the page and there will be a good chance that it won’t be unique, so putting it on your page will negate any SEO benefits a description could have potentially offered.

At the same time, not everyone with an eCommerce website is time-rich enough to write ample, quality, site exclusive content for all of the products sold. So what can you do?

A good place to start is identifying the products that are making you the most money and putting your efforts into those first. This way you know that your work will be reaping reward as opposed to spending time on products that rarely get looked at or attract virtual window shoppers.

Another way to make your content unique is to look to the users for help. Reviews, comments and/or FAQs regarding the product that are provided by your customers pretty much guarantee content that will separate you from your competition.

For shops with lots of products, it might be better to focus on the content of the all-encompassing category sections. By strengthening these pages, the SEO benefits will trickle down through all the products in the category.

Out of Stock Items

This can be a tricky one as you don’t want your customers wasting time looking at products you can’t sell them, but taking down the page, even temporarily, can lose you some of that search engine love.

If the item will be back in stock later than it is best to leave it just how it is. DIsplaying a date when they should be back in store is a good idea. Another good idea is to add an email capture form to build a list of interested people that you can shoot a message to when it comes back in. You could even go as far as to allow people to backorder the items but make it very clear if they are doing so and what sort of time frame they can expect the product in.

If you have stopped selling this product completely, then it can still be a good idea to leave the product page up if it is still seeing traffic and the product is still niche relevant. It’s advisable to leave the content mostly as it is but you should try to redirect them to alternative and relevant products that you can sell them. This way, instead of cutting off the traffic and killing the conversions, you are redirecting visitors to products you can sell them.