SEO For Ecommerce Sites – 5 Simple, Must Do Website Tips

Selling online is no longer easy (or as it easy as it was), as with more and more competition now fighting for the first page of results on Google, you have to make sure you stand out from the rest when it comes to getting online sales.

Beating the likes of Amazon, Ebay and John Lewis when it comes to selling online is not something you will achieve overnight, if at all, but you still have a good chance of ranking alongside them if you spend your time really pushing your website forward and doing everything you can to make your site and product pages different to and stronger than the many others competing against you.

So, if you find yourself in the same world as many other online retailers, here are some onsite SEO tips for you to try and get more success.

1 – Unique Title Tags

Although we discuss this a bit later in our content tip, if you are selling the same product as 50 other websites then you need to do everything you can to be different, no matter how small the difference is. Make sure you do not use non-meaningful title tags and that you spend some time making sure that all of your products have fantastic, unique and SEO friendly title tags, so that you can earn a few extra optimisation points. Although you do not have much room to play with, make sure you get the brand, product and unique product code, as this will also help you to pick up the specific searches, which if a buyer has searched for specifically that product, is a much stronger buying signal.

For example, if you are selling a Samsung TV, think about:

SAMSUNG UE43JU6000 Smart Ultra HD 4k | Buy Samsung TV’s

There really is no need to have your company name in every single title tag, so do not go down the road of having this in every tag, instead use the space wisely and make sure it is far more SEO friendly than your rivals.

2 – Appealing Meta Description Tags

Although not really an “SEO” tip, if you make sure your meta tags are really appealing and generally engaging, you are going to increase your click through rate (CTR), as when your website appears on the same page as 9 others in the Google results, you need to make sure your listing stands out. Too many retailers forget about the meta description, which means the listing results can often be a mixture of product specifications and other aspects that the user does not need to see at that moment in time. Make sure every product has a unique meta description and do not rely on the first paragraph of your product page to be used, as this is your chance to really entice the user to come to your site and not to someone else’s.

3 – Content, Content, Content

If you are an online retailer, the chances are that you are selling the same products as many other similar retailers, unless the products are your own or you have exclusive rights to sell them. Therefore, unless you take the time and effort to try and make sure your product pages are unique and re-written, you are simply going to be producing the same information as every other business also selling that product.

So, what do you do? The chances are you won’t have the time or the enthusiasm to re-write 1,000 descriptions about the products you sell, so if you really cannot do this, why not bring different kinds of unique content into the product page. Things like reviews, support guides, articles and related content will help your product page rise above the many others out there that have not considered the effect of duplicate content on their product page rankings.

4 – URL Structure

Although you cannot tarnish all online shop platforms with the same brush, some of them tend to create some seriously strange URL’s for their products, so this is something that really needs to be addressed if it applies to you. Remember, Google uses the URL and the keywords within it to help with indexing and of course ranking, so if your URL looks like this:

www.example.com/p1/hhnshf7/enn7272

You have issues.

A good product URL could contain the category, product type, brand and ID if possible, so if you were selling a Samsung TV, it could look something like this:

www.example.com/televisions/samsung/samsung-ue43ju6000-smart-ultra-hd-4k

Or similar, as this URL really does give the search engines a good navigational path to crawl down and at the same time explains exactly the product you are trying to sell, and when you compare it to the example I mentioned before, you really can see the difference.

5 – Deal With Removed Products Correctly

So, your potential customer has found something through Google that you sell and lands on your site, desperate to hit the buy now button and place their order. But, they arrive on your site and they get a server error or a really pathetically thought out 404 page, as you no longer sell the product and have not really thought about all of those links, listings and adverts you have left behind. No retailer can be expected to sell the same products forever, as sometimes getting stock is impossible or you might just choose to move onto other things, but after a year or so of online marketing, these products will have a trail that you need to deal with correctly.

Dealing with dead products in the correct way is vital, as you need to turn the negative fact of not having the product into a positive, which you can do in a few ways. If the page has simply moved, then redirect the page to the correct location, or if you no longer stock or sell the product, then you can redirect the page to the top level category. You can also think about dynamic and enhanced 404 pages, where you can give the user a chance to see other products and related alternatives, or you can turn them into historic pages which then offer alternative options, or maybe product support and guidance.