How to reconcile SEO best practices with E-commerce Strategies
July 27, 2016 6:50 PM Subscribe
What is the best approach to reconciling SEO best practices with an E-commerce website that may not lend itself to these practices? For example, Google doesn't like duplicate content, but a site with over 10,000 products where SKUs are listed individually by variation tends to produce a lot of duplicate information.
For three years I've worked for a small, bootstrap e-commerce website. Most of our online sales come from PPC, though we do have moderate conversions from organic traffic. Before my time at the company, SEO was a relatively new field and had quite the array of exploitable loopholes -- glitches better known today as black hat SEO tactics. I'm sorry to say some of these tactics were used before my time at the company, but at the time (2009-2010) Google was more lenient and it seemed like the most cost-effective strategy.
Fast-forward to today, the age of content marketing. I've been nose-to-the-grindstone cleaning up our link profile and doing some outreach, but the challenge has been creating content that people will actually want to link to given that we are primarily a reseller. Also, one of our long-term marketing strategies has been to list product variations as individual product pages. While this has been great for acquiring sales from PLAs in Google and Bing, the downside is we have multiple variations of the same content on our site. We typically prefer not to canonicalize any one variation lest we rule out the chance of a user searching for that exact SKU, but we're also concerned about duplicate content. I'd be interested to hear from e-commerce professionals who have mastered SEO either for themselves or a client.
For three years I've worked for a small, bootstrap e-commerce website. Most of our online sales come from PPC, though we do have moderate conversions from organic traffic. Before my time at the company, SEO was a relatively new field and had quite the array of exploitable loopholes -- glitches better known today as black hat SEO tactics. I'm sorry to say some of these tactics were used before my time at the company, but at the time (2009-2010) Google was more lenient and it seemed like the most cost-effective strategy.
Fast-forward to today, the age of content marketing. I've been nose-to-the-grindstone cleaning up our link profile and doing some outreach, but the challenge has been creating content that people will actually want to link to given that we are primarily a reseller. Also, one of our long-term marketing strategies has been to list product variations as individual product pages. While this has been great for acquiring sales from PLAs in Google and Bing, the downside is we have multiple variations of the same content on our site. We typically prefer not to canonicalize any one variation lest we rule out the chance of a user searching for that exact SKU, but we're also concerned about duplicate content. I'd be interested to hear from e-commerce professionals who have mastered SEO either for themselves or a client.
I've worked on some e-commerce sites as a copywriter. Number 1, you need to have canonical content. Besides the duplicate content issues, you are also diluting your efforts. Still, I'm not entirely sure if Google penalizes for duplicate content on e-commerce sites, since there is so much out there. The same pluming fixtures will have the exact same product descriptions on Amazon, Home Depot and other sites, for example.
What I noticed was that the product pages that had the most reviews tended to show up in search more than others.
My approach was to use Keyword Planner to find a particular SKU that had search volume, but that was not being listed by the big sites like Amazon and Home Depot. I then optimized the product page for that SKU, adding unique content that wasn't anywhere else. I would then write a blog post with the SKU that linked to the product page.
The end result was some volume and enough conversions to drive ROI for my efforts (I chose higher-value products with bigger margins as well).
So that could form the basis of a content strategy. You could take a step further and write some sort of useful guide or something for the product you are testing (with SEO strategy).
posted by My Dad at 9:45 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
What I noticed was that the product pages that had the most reviews tended to show up in search more than others.
My approach was to use Keyword Planner to find a particular SKU that had search volume, but that was not being listed by the big sites like Amazon and Home Depot. I then optimized the product page for that SKU, adding unique content that wasn't anywhere else. I would then write a blog post with the SKU that linked to the product page.
The end result was some volume and enough conversions to drive ROI for my efforts (I chose higher-value products with bigger margins as well).
So that could form the basis of a content strategy. You could take a step further and write some sort of useful guide or something for the product you are testing (with SEO strategy).
posted by My Dad at 9:45 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
I should also mention that I chose keyword combinations and variations based on the SKU (in-sink garburator) that also had search volume, but that we were able to compete on based on Domain Authority. Moz has a great browser plugin that lets you check the Domain Authority of whatever sites show up on the first page of Google Search for a particular term; I chose keywords where our site could beat at least the last search result on the first page of Search.
I was also going to say that you can hire content farms to rewrite e-commerce copy such as product descriptions.
posted by My Dad at 8:30 AM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
I was also going to say that you can hire content farms to rewrite e-commerce copy such as product descriptions.
posted by My Dad at 8:30 AM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
http://www.industrialmarketer.com/why-offsite-duplicate-content-is-killing-your-e-commerce-seo/
posted by tilde at 7:45 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]