When it comes to SEO for e-commerce websites, the strategy for an effective campaign differ from other types of websites. E-commerce sites face a lot of challenges that affect their chances of ranking well in the search engines.
Unlike the giants in e-commerce business, a website that just started have 0 (zero) page indexed by search engines. Since e-commerce sites growth mostly depends on how many products they are selling, the site should hold at least as many products it is selling, increasing the number of web pages.
Most e-commerce sites have hundreds to thousands of pages that need to be optimized. The challenges that e-commerce sites face include, but are not limited to:
Navigational Structure: Due to the large amount of inventory on an e-commerce site, it can be difficult to create a navigational structure that is easy for both the customers and search engine to navigate.
Duplicate Content: Many e-commerce websites use the product descriptions provided by the manufacturer of the products. This presents a challenge because all of their competing websites are using the same product descriptions provided by the manufacturer as well.
URL Structure: Most E-commerce sites automatically generate, and create unclean and hard to read URLs. This makes it impossible for the Search Engines to determine what the web page is about and/or properly index it.
Internal Linking: E-commerce sites can have thousands of pages which make it difficult to decide what primary pages to link to.
Backlinks: E-commerce sites may have thousands of products, but they mostly don't have a lot of content to link back to. Without relevant information, most other websites have less purpose in linking back to an e-commerce site.
E-Commerce SEO Strategy
SEO for e-commerce is relatively difficult, and may meet heavy challenges to overcome. Many advanced SEO strategies can help e-commerce sites to rank well in search engines, get high quality backlinks, and enhance their overall customer experience. Below are a few advanced SEO techniques to implement.
Filtered Navigation: This process gives the customer the ability to navigate through the products available on the site based on preferences that matter to them.
Clean URL: You want to make sure that your URL contains the name of your product. This helps the search engines decide which page to index and rank.
Deep Linking: Deep linking is the process of linking your keywords to the important pages on your website. With the link, customers can be taken to the information they were looking for immediately.
Link Building: Some of the popular link-building strategies for an E-commerce site include but is not limited to: Social Networking, Blog commenting, Product Reviews, Product Contest, SEO Press Releases, and listing your site on popular deal sites if applicable.
Content Development: E-commerce websites really have a chance to overcome their SEO challenges by providing quality content. There are a lot of ways that content can increase high rankings. These include, but are not limited to:
- Product Pages.
- Category Pages.
- Reviews.
- Informative Content.
XML & HTML Sitemaps: An XML Sitemap will help the search engines to identify pages on your website, and increase their chances of getting indexed.
Conclusion
SEO for E-commerce presents a lot of challenges; however, if the strategies are implemented properly, the e-commerce site will be well on its way for an increased rankings and increased sales.