Larger companies often don’t have the time or manpower to work page-by-page to improve their SEO results. If you carry thousands or tens of thousands of products, it’s an impossible task to isolate each one, write an individual description, and meta-tag it for ease of finding. In terms of time and tedium, it’s off the scale.
However – thanks to our extensive work with larger e-commerce sites, Spray Marketing is more than aware of ways to combat this. It’s all to do with the following categories:
1) How Your Site Is Indexed
2) Category Copy On-Page
3) Product Schema
4) The Structure Of The URL
5) Main Menu Navigation
All of the above, properly maintained and programmed, will lead to strong organic growth and plenty of traffic. See below for more details:
1) How Your Site Is Indexed.
Google (and other search engines) constantly crawl the internet, looking for the most-attractive sites to them. These ‘bots’ that do the crawling, are looking for a variety of factors that have to be in place first. It stands to reason then, there’s no point optimising your site, if your content isn’t being located because other things are not right.
To this end, there are a few ways to improve your site indexation:
- a) review the number of 5xx (server) errors your site returns in Google Search Console. Too many connection timeouts and server errors will indicate a site in poor health.
- b) The next step is to take a look at sitemaps. These are (in the simplest of terms) page listings, usually organised in a hierarchical fashion, that show what’s on the site.
A common mistake is to remove a page from the site (for example, a discontinued product or service), but forget to remove the page from the sitemap too. This results in a 404 display in a Google search to the viewer, and wasted crawl time for the Google bots. Keep sitemaps dynamically updated to respond immediately to stock changes.
- c) Review Product Paramaters. These paramaters are for the convenience of the visitor, allowing them to refine and sort their requirements. From a black bag, to a black leather bag, to a black leather clutch bag with gold trimmings… The parameters allow Google to do (and not do) what you want.
2) Category Copy On-Page
Think it’s ok just to list available products, and the job’s done? Think again. Product category pages need plenty of textual HTML content too. This guides Google’s crawlers and helps them understand what search results the page should appear in.
Here’s an example of one of our clients – Butterfly Direct – a health supplements company. There’s plenty of on-page copy for the reader, and for the crawlers to latch on to and make sense of.
http://www.butterflydirect.co.uk/product/fat-blocker/
This approach is much more achievable . Rather than writing 10,000 individual descriptions, with good planning, it’s very possible to write content for perhaps the hundreds of categories your products may fall into.
3) Product Schema
Good use of Product Schema will ensure your products stand out. Many companies don’t use it – to their detriment, which is surprising as it’s just a question of adding simple tags to various elements of your pages. Easy things like title, price and a quick description. Reviews also count too.
Now that Google display ‘similar’ items side by side in image search, there’s never been a better time to integrate Product Schema. It’s all about raising standards!
4) Structure Of Your URL
It’s all about going back to your roots. Well – the root folder, at least.
Put aside the logical urge to go several directories deep, as longer descriptions mean the product description won’t be ‘seen’ until the end by crawlers. Although it may feel more logical to have your products several directories deep like www.example.com/products/lovely things/other things/thing-1) – this isn’t the system to go for.
When it comes to URL structure, the best solution is to keep your products as close to the root folder as possible. Major online retailers rarely go deeper than one or two folders away from the root directory.
By all means, use longer parameter strings after the product folder, but ensure the product name is visible in the URL for search results.
A step further is to consider BreadcrumbList schema. This takes the URLs that appear in SERP snippets and changes them into a clean, arrow-directed form that is much more intuitive to users. However, whether you do or don’t implement BreadcrumbList schema, always ensure your products and categories are readable, neat and as close to the root directory as you’re able.
5) Main Menu Navigation
This menu will most likely show across hundreds of thousands of pages, so the value of internal linking in main menu navigation cannot be under-estimated for e-commerce sites.
One way to capitalise on menu navigation is to use secondary navigation options.
For example – you have an ‘all departments’ menu that may show perhaps 15 general categories. But, when the viewer hovers over a category, it expands out with secondary offerings. Or maybe even third choices after that.
For example – you choose chairs. This then expands out to dining room, kitchen, bedroom, etc. And this expands out to comfortable, casual, formal etc…
If that menu was to appear for every product and category page, it would go a long way to boosting the main menu pages and the internal linking value.
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