SEO for eCommerce

Ok this is a huge subject so we’re going to have to break it down a little and see how we can use SEO to help out an eCommerce website that isn’t doing so well.

eCommerce websites should generally do quite well for SEO, especially if they are selling reasonably niche products. Product pages are rich in content and often in keywords too, after all how many “Size ten Green Widget”s with “Free delivery” can there be on the internet? (Actually quite a few, but more on that later.)

The big problem with eCommerce sites is often two fold, Duplication and duplication. See what I did there?

How does Duplication happen?

Online stores are rife with Duplicated content, either on site or off. Within the domain there can be all sorts of problems caused by the enumerable ways in which a query can be made to the database. Each different method of query produces a set page of html that is accessible from a dozen different URLs and linked to in this manner from the whole site.

If that wasn’t bad enough then there is the age old problem of laziness when writing content. Many Online Store webmasters will gladly accept and use the spreadsheet of product details and descriptions given to them by the manufacturer. Its easy, fast, the photos are generally great and the descriptions bound to be accurate – All good! Right? Errr, no. Every other eCommerce Website selling that product is doing the exact same thing, meaning that at best, your page is hidden in the mass of other websites selling using the same text, at worst you get hit with a duplicate penalty and your product page, which should be your greatest sales asset, sinks to the bottom of the SERPs and mutates into some squid like thing that reaches out of the depths of page ten and steals profit from your wallet.

EEEK! That sounds horrible, how can I remove duplicate URLS, and make sure they don’t come back?

Removing Duplicate content is actually fairly simple these days, which is why its puzzling that blog posts on the subject often run into thousands of words. Google took a leaf out of the nerd culture following such sci-fi greats as Star Trek, Star Wars and Dallas (Dallas?) and decided to give the internet its very own canon. In Nerd culture, the Canon is the definitive list of what is real, within the imaginary universe. So in the same way that the events of the new Star Trek film make the entire original series of Star Trek into an alternative history, The Force is generated by microscopic symbiotic organisms and the entire 8th Series of Dallas was just a dream, you can make all the perfectly tailored friendly URLs on your website “Canonical”.

All you need to do is add a simple line, the Canonical Tag to the head of your webpages and that’s it: done!

That was easy! And is that all we need to do to make our eStores SEO friendly and duplicate free?

Not all of it but that will remove a hefty chunk of duplicate data from your site. To be perfectly safe you should really write all new product descriptions and create new imagery for your products. This has so many benefits, not just for SEO, that it’s worth doing anyway. The conversion increase alone is worth it.

Think about it; your customers have been looking through pages and pages of the same data about the product they want to buy and on coming across a new description, with unique points about the product, and photos with camera angles they’ve never seen before, you think they won’t stop and think to themselves: “This seller has made far more effort to grab my attention, told me more about this widget than anyone else and shown me how good it looks from a different angle!” and then push that all important “Buy” button?