Let’s imagine you have a well-designed, fast, user-friendly, eye-catching webshop full of fancy features. Is this enough for your eshop to be popular and have high CR (conversion rate)? Obviously not – in fact you can have the most luxurious hotel in the world, but if it is in the middle of the desert without any type of marketing no one will even know it is there. It is also quite obvious that the best possible means of advertising your online store is to be high in search engines rankings (especially in Google), because this is how people nowadays search for what they want to buy. Easier said than done -so the question is: how to achieve this? How to make your eshop appear high in rankings without too much effort?
1. Unique page titles and content
Internet robots (programs finding websites and analyzing their content) look for uniqueness and diversification. If all of your pages’ content is similar, they will decide that you are boring and as a punishment will decrease your position in the ranking. Therefore, if you would like to “satisfy their needs” it is highly recommended to make each of your webpages as unique as possible.
From our experience in the e-commerce market we suggest the following solution:
- Category pages should not only be containers with products. They should also have their unique descriptions, which clearly and precisely define what a certain category is connected to and what kind of products it contains. Category descriptions should appear above the products because Internet Robots tend to look mostly at the first part of the content on your webpage. Each category’s page title should be preferably the name of your category plus parent categories if there are any. Remember that the names of the categories should also be unique and precise.
Exemplary category page title:
Evening Dresses – Ladies Clothing
- Product pagesshould also have unique content by means of a detailed description of a product. You can also add some flash videos and images to make it even more original. Product names should also be as unique as possible – naming products e.g. Evening Dress 1, Evening Dress 2, Evening Dress 3 is not a good idea. Product page titles should be generated from a product name and the category (-ies) to which the product belongs.
Exemplary product page title:
Golden Evening Dress – Evening Dresses – Ladies Clothing
2. Setting up a blog
If your webshop is connected to something that people might find particularly interesting (e.g. you sell gadgets for football fans or computer games), it is a good idea to set up a blog and write interesting articles within the area connected to what you sell. So, if you sell gadgets for football fans you can write interesting articles about the freshest news from football world, some gossips about football players or the reviews of recent matches. If you sell computer games you can write reviews of the newest computer games, make some rankings, write about the authors of the games, etc. Thanks to the blog you may gather quite a big audience, who after reading your posts will directly enter your e-shop. This can also lead to the increased position in Google ranking (it’s called external linking and becomes more and more relevant for Internet robots).
A good example of the above is one of the biggest online fashion stores - Asos, which has a few different blogs. All of them are indeed connected with fashion (either directly like in Kate’s Closet blog where you can find posts about most fashionable clothes and indirectly like in Press Play blog where you will find posts about famous artists, singers, actors etc).
3. SEO friendly URLs
Take a look at the following URLs:
- http://demo.21webmerce.com/product/dresses/1000009/38/blue-dress
- http://www.inwear.com/dk/item/C42802004/?partner=5343
Which is more coherent and user-friendly? Obviously, the first one – you can read and understand from the link what will be the content of this URL. Internet robots also look at such links from the user perspective and treat clear and comprehensive links better than “dirty” ones.
There are in fact a few different alternatives to create SEO friendly URLs for webshops. One of the most popular and effective ways is described below:
- Category page – the URL should contain a category name. Instead of spaces between different words (if a category name has more than one word) there should by a ‘-‘ sign. Sometimes the predefined word, “category” or “shop”, is used because according to some SEO experts it helps Internet robots to correctly identify the type of a page from the link.
Exemplary link: http://demo.21webmerce.com/category/1000005/christian-dior
- Product page – the URL should contain both a product name and a category name to which the product belongs (here also a sign ‘-‘ should be used instead of spaces). Sometimes the predefined word, “product” or “shop”, is used due to the same reasons as in the previous point.
Exemplary link: http://demo.21webmerce.com/product/dresses/1000009/38/blue-dress
It goes without saying that there are hundreds of additional steps that you can take to further enhance the popularity of your webshop in search engine rankings. Nevertheless, the ones described in this article are probably the most relevant and might be a good start for your SEO improvements.
Do you know some other interesting ways of improving SEO in an eshop? Feel free to share it with us and leave a comment below!
