If you are looking to optimise your e-commerce site to get up the rankings, there are a few strategies you can use. One such strategy which all experts will agree on, is optimising and creating content in the shape of text, audio and even video. Sounds easy enough, however for e-commerce sites it is not always possible.
Here are 8 tips for optimising e-commerce sites through content:
1. Update descriptions often – On top of making your descriptions standout due to their originality, you should also aim to get those pages crawled often by the engines. One way to achieve this is by offering new content within those pages on a regular basis. If you are struggling to find new content to enhance the description, look at your customer support emails. Chances are that users are emailing you questions for information which wasn’t clear so your answers could also be added to the product’s description. eBay for example does this well by allowing sellers to post a buyer’s question and their answer.
2. Use keywords wisely – Using the right keywords in the product descriptions does not mean repeating the same keywords over and over. It is ok to repeat a variation of the keyword a few times or make it bold once or twice, but whatever you do, make sure it reads well. Remember the search engine isn’t your customer, you and I are. If the product description is unique and reads well you’ve ticked all the right boxes.
3. Make all your content accessible - Types of content might be inaccessible to the search engines and therefore for users for a selection of reasons. Especially for e-commerce sites where good content is hard to come by, this represents a missed opportunity. You might feel that the content is so valuable that users must subscribe first to view it, or it is coded in such as way which makes finding the content by the engines very difficult. Content such as help forums, questions and answers pages and even product guides should become accessible as a priority.
4. Keep in mind content ratio – Web content can take many shapes and forms from text to images and even audio. If your traffic goal is to gain traffic from social media sites, perhaps creative content will work well, however to increase search engine rankings text is still preferred. Keep the ration between text and other forms of content favorable towards text, but do continue to offer creative content as well. Hence the emphasis should be on ratio.
5. Avoid copy and paste – It is a common practice for e-commerce sites with many SKUs to take the manufacturer’s product descriptions and copy paste them. By doing so, perhaps you have full product descriptions, however other sites are using the precise same wording making your content secondary. To ensure your content stands out and by doing so you have the best possible chances to rank well, write your own product descriptions or re-write parts of the original description.
6. Encourage content sharing – After working hard to create quality content, you should aim to get your content out there and shared across social media sites and between users alike. The first step after the content creation is to integrate a social sharing button across all your pages, from product pages to how-to guides. There are couple of options you could consider, all are free and easy to integrate. Some offer more back end functionality than others, such as analytic reporting so I would narrow the list to www.addthis.com and www.sharethis.com.
7. Stay current with your content – It’s all fine and well to work on creating quality content, however you want people to look for this content. For e-commerce sites, content is often the products themselves or as some site owners call it, the long tail. Therefore you should look to offer products which are in high demand or those which are projected to grow. Read industry blogs to find out which products are coming to your industry or look at yearly trends using sites such as Google Trends.
8. Pay attention to grammar and spelling – If there’s one thing that will instantly cause the opposite of optimising through content, is displaying poor content. Grammar and spelling mistakes will lower your credibility as a seller and will prevent users from sharing your content. Use a spell checker before uploading any content and consider asking another pair of eyes to go over your work. If users notify you of a mistake in the copy, act quickly to resolve it.