Powerful Product Portrayal

Earlier we blogged about how to use snippets for your ecommerce based website, and we got a flood of responses. This week, we will delve further into how you can work with your ecommerce website to achieve higher rankings and sales.

On-page SEO is an important part of the strategy for ranking. Content that will help your consumer feel connected to your product is key in making a sale. Keep in mind that it isn’t just the content on your page that is important. It’s a mix of content and presentation. Your website functions like a brochure for your products, and if that brochure doesn’t catch the consumer’s eye, sales are going to be that much tougher to drive.

Tuning Your Product Portrayal

The first step is to take a look at your website’s listing on Google by typing in site:domain.com, where domain.com is your domain name. This will show the default pages that Google has stored for you. You need to decide whether that description is acceptable or you need to edit it by adding a meta description tag to your pages. If your site is a few thousand products wide, it will take some time. However, the investment is worthwhile. And you should get started now!

Next, take a look at the way you’ve presented your product. If you haven’t offered at least a few paragraphs about why your product is interesting to your buyer, you’re missing out. Even websites selling showers offer more than just technical information.

Also, make sure you have a few high-resolution photos of your product so the end user knows what they are going to get. A great way to set yourself apart from the competition is to create a video for your product. It doesn’t need to be very long, just 20 to 30 seconds focusing on how the product functions and its selling points.

Market Terminology and Tone

Keep the end user who will be buying your product in mind, and think the way they would. Ensure that you have a description they would understand and relate to. Think of the words your customer would use to search for the product. They can be general to start with to generate traffic for long tail terms. Then you can add more specific terms like model number or other specifics in the text for someone who is looking for details.

Don’t Duplicate Content

Most manufacturers will provide a default description for their products. If you’re just going to copy and paste that text, you’re not getting very far. A lot of other websites have probably already done the same, plus there’s a chance you’ll get a negative ranking because you’re duplicating content. So stay away from those default descriptions.

Real Benefits vs. Feature Lists

Be creative about how the product you are selling will help solve a pain point that a customer may have instead of listing a set of product features. Most users are not expert enough to understand the technicalities of the products they are buying and are looking for general information on how they will benefit.

SEO-Friendly Descriptions

At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your descriptions are doing more than just the task of ensuring that your customer buys the product. You also want to rank your page for relevant search terms. The key, as we’ve said before, is using terms that you feel people would actually use for the product. Over time, you will see multiple phrases from your search history that are being used to find your website. Based on those terms, you can edit your product descriptions to maximize your SEO potential as well.

Test and Tweak

Finally, test and tweak your pages to the best of your ability. Google allows you to A/B test pages via their Analytics product. You can use other methods such as Multivariate and Taguchi tests as well. However, a simple split test is a great start to see what converts best for you.

 

 

SEO for Your eCommerce Website

Google supports a number of Schema.org-based classes and properties. What this means for your website is that the level of control you have for your store is pretty awesome. In case you’re wondering what schema’s are and how they help your website, schemas are open-source class implementations that integrate into Google search results. These schemas help show things like photos of a page author, star rating for a product, location of a store, phone number and so on.

Let’s take a look at new implementations from Google and how they can help your store convert more customers.

Using the new tags allows you granular control over your products and lets you leverage the strength of Google search into your product feed. There are as many as 25 different attributes you can use to describe your product and get into Google’s search feed with better results.

The new attributes also allow you to link products to each other and describe physical properties of products. For example, you could have isAccessoryOrSparePartFor, isConsumableFor, isRelatedTo or isSimilarTo. Plus, physical product properties can include color, depth, height, weight, width and itemCondition. These properties allow you to provide structured data about the dimensions, appearance and condition of your products.

This is just a sampling of the attributes available from GoodRelations that can give you far more control over your product list. Another potential benefit of using snippets in your pages is being on the good books of Google. There is no denying the fact that when you see a photo of the page owner, a star rating or a list of reviews for the product, the conversion rate goes a lot higher.

In the long run, these Schema integrations have excellent benefits for the end user. For example, a single page with a list of all products and prices for a product would certainly make life easier for your customer. Whichever way you look at it, there are exciting times ahead for consumers and retailers alike with the integration of these new schemas and granular information being available for products.