Ecommerce SEO is something that all online retailers interested in. Having their website ranking higher in the search engines than their competitors means they are more likely to engage in a sale of a particular product.

Ecommerce retailers seem to struggle in keeping the search engines happy when it comes to SEO. This resource is going discuss some of the biggest issues around SEO for ecommerce, which you should look out for to ensure you are going to get the most out of being online.

Duplicated content

Duplicated content on ecommerce websites is very common. The more products you have on your website the more chance there is that some of those products is going to have similar descriptions / content to other products, on other pages of your website.

To optimise your website for these types of issues you should look into:

  • Ensuring that irrelevant content, such as shipping information, size guides and anything else which is likely to be highly consistent across your website is in an area which is perhaps not crawled direct by the search engines when they visit that page. A good way of doing this is to embed an HTML iframe into the product pages of your website where all consistent content can be in one single location and then loaded upon the loading of the page.
  • Ensuring that your product descriptions are different to those that your manufacturer has on their website. If this doesn’t happen then Google and other search engines will need to choose between your website and the manufacturer’s website when it comes to displaying unique only results.

Search engine friendliness

Although this is not as much of an issue these days as what it was a few years back, it is important to note that your ecommerce software package has at least been modified or developed with a search engine friendly approach.
Ensure that your software (at the very least) has the ability to:

  • Generate SE friendly URLs (i.e http://www.zappos.com/mens/wooly-scarf/ instead of http://www.zappos.com/?ProductId=1205&CatID=15)
  • Generate unique title tags for your pages, based on what you specify the title tag to be. This will give you the ability to target different keywords on your catalogue and product pages on your website.
  •  Generate unique META descriptions. Again this will help in targeting your researched (hopefully high volume) keywords.

Monitor reviews on your website

Allowing users to add their own content to your products pages, by way of reviewing can be detrimental to your search engine rankings. You will want to ensure that you are checking what people are saying in the reviews, and avoiding them to post superfluous links within their reviews.

Link Building

Possibly one of the most difficult aspects of ecommerce SEO would be finding websites to link to your website. Link building is a way for Search engines to determine the quality of a resource on the web. If a webpage has a few links from other websites, then search engines can value those as a vote of confidence that your website is worth linking to.

Ecommerce related websites, have a harder time getting these links unless they are earned naturally through the quality of the customer service or the products itself. Finding other websites to link to your ecommerce website is generally a struggle because it is evident that the only reason you are requesting a link is for commercial gain.

Look into meaningful ways to ensure your ecommerce website / business offers something which other websites don’t. This can often build a point of difference for website and is in tuen going to be more likely to attract links.