Monthly Archives: January 2012

Basic eCommerce SEO Checklist

Posted on by
2


So you’re looking at eCommerce packages or maybe thinking about having a custom shopping cart written for you. What are the basic SEO items you need to make sure you have?

SEO Friendly URLs – Each product should have its own unique URL and should not have parameters.

Example.com/blue-widget/ – good
Example.com/product?id=123 – bad

While search engines are much more sophisticated than they used to be and can understand parameters in URLs, the fewer things you do to complicate the issue the better. You should be able to specify the keywords in the URL, keep the URLs as short as possible, use only keywords, remove stop words, and don’t stuff with extra keywords. If you change the product slightly or modify any of the information, you should be able to keep the URL intact.

Product Titles
Each page should have a unique title that is not identical or similar to any other product you are selling. Unless you are a Fortune 100 Company or are a household brand name, the name of the product should come before the name of your company or store.

Product Meta Description
While this isn’t a direct ranking factor, it still is important that every item has a unique meta description. Having multiple products with identical or nearly identical meta descriptions is a signal of low quality.

HTML and XML sitemaps
Every eCommerce store with more than 100 items should have an HTML and XML sitemap. It should automatically update as you add or remove products.

Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the small text navigation that shows where you are in the eCommerce hierarchy. They often look like this:

Home > Shoes > Women’s Shoes > Sneakers

Each word should be a link back to its category or sub-category page

Category & Sub Category Pages
If you have more than 100 items, you will need some categorization or breakdown so customers can shop. The URLs should be SEO friendly

Example.com/shoes/womens-shoes/sneakers/ – good
Example.com/category?id=5678 – bad

Again, search engines can figure out complicated URLs, but it’s in your best interest to keep it simple, easy to understand, and to inject some keyword value wherever you can. If you want your category pages to rank, you will need to add some editorial content, like a picture and text. If you are using images and text on the category pages, make sure both link to the product page for usability. Use the product name as the alt tag for usability and SEO value. If you have any sorting features, such as sort by price or relevancy, don’t let those URLs get indexed by the search engines. Block them using a meta tag. You should also be able to control the default sorting order of the products.

Navigation and Crawlability
Your eCommerce website should be easy for users to navigate and for search engines to crawl. You can test this with any free or commercial spider simulators such as screaming frog. The more complex your navigation and the more levels deep your products are, the less likely it is that search engines will fully index all of your products.

Product Categorization
In the early days of eCommerce, products could only be in one category, but this is not a limitation that modern shopping carts should have. You should be able to put products in one primary category and multiple other categories or featured departments. This gives you the ability to create special, holiday, or other themed groupings.

Merchandising
Your eCommerce solution should give you the ability to create directly or create a file to control how the homepage of your store looks. Ideally, you should be able to have both graphic and textual elements. If you can have editorial feature shots, that’s a plus. If you can have multiple editorial items that rotate or display randomly, that’s better. The more control you have to prioritize things, the better. The items on your homepage should be the most important from an SEO perspective.

Page Size
You want to keep your pages loading as quickly as possible. Use good sized images, but don’t serve a 1000×1000 pixel image and display it at 300×300 using CSS or HTML. Keep external scripts, images, CSS, and other elements to a minimum.

Checkout
Block everything from the shopping cart into checkout and completion from being indexed using the nofollow tag. It serves no value in a search engine.

From an SEO perspective, the more of these items you can have built in or customized into your package, the better.

Image credit: Shutterstock/pressureUA

eCommerce SEO for New Products & Seasonal Products

Posted on by
3


When you are running an eCommerce website, two of the situations you are likely to encounter are how to do SEO for new products, and for seasonal products. We will be taking a look at some of the best practices for both situations.

SEO For New Products

Sometimes you will have a product that you know will be available in a few weeks or months, but isn’t available for sale yet. Here’s the ideal situation you’d want to create: one where your page is ranking for the product before it’s available, so your page is perfectly positioned when the time comes. You need to set up a “placeholder” page on the exact URL the final product will be available at. There are ways to change the URL properly, but getting the URL right and sticking with it, is your best case scenario. Fill the page with as much real text as you can get your hands on. Do not put up dummy text, or the invariable “coming soon” text, the more real the information you use, the better. Additionally do not use a data feed or verbatim information from the manufacturer/supplier, as this will be seen on other websites and by search engines, “flagged” as “duplicate text” and hinder your ability to rank by search engines. Once you have the product “fleshed out”, start giving signals to the search engines with some internal links. Initially you just need to give the new product a few internal links to get the process started.

Your next goal is to add as much real information as you can get, to make the product to look as complete or close to its final state as possible. Once you have the product complete or nearly complete, between 60 – 90 days if possible, you will want to increase the number of internal links. Somewhere between 45-30 days, you can give the product a link on your homepage, and start to build external links. Depending on the importance and revenue potential of the product, think about additional promotions like press releases, white papers, research, case studies, how-to articles, guests posts, interviews and so on.

As the product nears it’s sale date, hopefully customers will start searching for the product. If you do rank, having them land on your website and not be able to purchase or “do anything” is not a situation you want to be in. It would be ideal if you could take orders, if not, at least try to capture email or other contact info so that you can notify customers when you eventually “open for business”.

SEO For Seasonal Products

Performing SEO for seasonal products is very similar to the process discussed above for new products. The big difference is what you do at the end of each season. If the product will “come back”, then you want to keep the page in place – just remove the ability for customers to place orders. This makes choosing the URL especially important. If you put model number, year or other fluctuating data that will change from one season to the next, things can get problematic. If the product comes back every year but is only slightly modified, try to use a generic URL scheme that allows you to “swap” this year’s model onto the same URL from last year/season. Taking the URL down and putting it up on a new URL next season is like starting from scratch every year.

If the product isn’t making a reappearance, or even if it’ll be significantly different, then you’ll want to let the URL “expire” in a graceful way. Instead of just removing the URL, you want to serve a 301 redirect to the replacement product, up one category, or to the most appropriate other page. This allows you to recycle any existing link equity the page has built up, instead of letting it evaporate. While search engines are getting better at handling 302 redirects, it’s not worth the risk, and you should always issue a 301.

One last consideration, is you want to avoid adding, removing, changing, or redirecting large portions of your product offerings or catalog at once. For example changing 50% or more of your products in a one-month time period should be avoided if at all possible. This may be impossible if you are strictly a seasonal merchant, but try to avoid if you can.

Takeaways from this post:

  • Try to choose your urls carefully especially for new and seasonal products, avoid changing them if at all possible
  • Create a “place holder” page for new products with as much real information as possible, avoiding duplicate or filler text
  • Point only a few internal links at the product in its initial stages
  • As the product sale date approaches try to flesh out the information as close to its final state as you can get it
  • Slowly point more internal links at the product, eventually adding a link to the home page
  • Build external links and think about additional marketing if the product is important
  • Try to take pre-orders or capture contact info before the sale date
  • If the product is seasonal and will return next year, leave the URL up just remove the ability to purchase
  • If the product will not return, issue a 301 redirect to the most appropriate page
  • Try to avoid changing too many of your products in a small window of time if you can avoid it

Image credit: Shutterstock/Loskutnikov

eCommerce SEO for Mobile Websites & Mobile apps

Posted on by
9


In late 2011 a report was released showing over 90% of mobile eCommerce purchases came from iPhone and iPad devices. For merchants having a moblie website that performs well and allows consumers to research, shop and complete transactions is really no longer an option, but a necessity. How should merchants go from not having a mobile platform to implementing one? Should they choose a subdomain, mobile version, or app? What are the big pitfalls to watch out for?

Many of the elements for good mobile SEO seem like usability issues. The fact is, if you design, build and implement websites pages and URL’s that work well on normal desktop computers, and don’t require elaborate workarounds or jumping through hoops – mobile SEO isn’t really that different than normal SEO. The key is not to complicate the user experience for the mobile version, and not allow your technical implementation to “get in the way” of search engines understanding your pages.

Mobile Subdomains

Implementing a mobile subdomain is clearly the easiest way to solve the problem. However, in reality, this is an easy short term solution with long term problems. When you choose a mobile subdomain like:

m.example.com/some-page.php

You encounter problems when users cross platforms and view your content on desktop devices. For example, try to share a YouTube video from Facebook you liked from your phone to someone with a desktop and you will get a URL that looks like this

http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4p9mbicqu&reload=3#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DmxpDTzeUM8A&v=mxpDTzeUM8A&gl=US

Try to click and view that link on a desktop computer and you get redirected back through a series of multiple urls and eventually end up at a dead end with no video. While viewing a YouTube video isn’t mission critical for anyone, what if it was a product someone wanted to buy? Sure you could have smart programmers put a lot of time, effort and programming resources and make sure the urls redirect properly, but the more moving parts you have, the more spots there are for errors to creep in. If the programmers at Youtube can’t get it right, do you think you have more programming resources to solve the problem?

The second danger of using a mobile subdomain is that search engines will index them. For example search engines will index the standard and mobile versions of your website make a “best guess” which is the page they want to rank in the search engines. Most of the time they will get it right, but they aren’t perfect, and when they do get it wrong you have an angry customer with a bad user experience on their hands.

Mobile Version

Having a mobile version of your website is similar to a mobile subdomain with a simple but important difference. The URL for every page is the same, however the content will change based on if the user is coming from a mobile or desktop computer. In a perfect world you would keep the URL identical for both visitors, however using CSS and server side programming, you would serve a different style sheet and omit information not necessary for the mobile platform. You could do it with just a style sheet, and “hide” certain elements from displaying. However this would make the mobile page larger than it needs to be, slower to load and have an impact on performance. Google has indicated page speed is now a component in search engine rankings so avoid creating this potential trouble spot if possible.

It is possible to keep the URL’s the same and “activate” the mobile version with a parameter like this:

example.com/some-page.php?ver=mobile
example.com/some-page.php#mobile

These implementations share the same problems as a subdomain: if a person on a desktop computer clicks a mobile link, you still need to redirect them to the full site version or risk them viewing a tiny or “lite” version of your page.

From a link building perspective, having a mobile subdomain or URL with parameters is problematic as well. If search engines see links to different versions, it’s possible they will misattribute or divide the link equity between the standard and mobile pages. You can use the rel=canonical tags to give the search engines hints to the real URL but its an imperfect solution that doesn’t work 100% of the time.

Mobile App

Creating a mobile app is a “sexy” solution a lot of companies are choosing, but it’s not the right solution for everyone. If you are a large well known store, or have a dedicated customer base who makes multiple purchases from you per year, then developing a mobile app makes absolute sense. However if you are a smaller merchant and your customers only visit you once or once a year, asking them to download and install a mobile app creates a speed bump or abandonment point in the checkout process, and is not something you’d want to do.

From a long term maintenance standpoint, creating a mobile app means creating another maintenance point. So be sure it’s something you can support for the long run. If your IT budget is small, serving a mobile version on the one URL is the most cost effective solution.

If you do decide to go with a mobile app, it’s important to make sure the mobile app sends the information to the live website. For example if you put an item in your shopping cart in the amazon mobile app but don’t checkout, the item is still in your cart on the regular website. This is also true for your wish lists:

 

Takeaways from this post:

Having a mobile friendly website is essential if you want to perform mobile eCommerce

  • While mobile subdomains may get you up to speed faster, they are problematic in the long run, difficult to maintain and require more programming resources
  • Mobile subdomains often leads to duplicate content or incorrect context being interpreted by the search engines
  • Using one URL, but changing the content based on what device the user has is usually the optimal solution
  • Using parameters in URL to activate mobile versions works, but make sure you don’t serve the mobile version to desktop users
  • Use mobile apps only when you have a large number of returning customers

Image credit: Shutterstock/Zhiltsov Alexandr

Are Daily Deal Sites Right for Your Business?

Posted on by
Reply

As a business owner you may have heard about daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social. They help you use deep discounts to attract new customers in droves. Let’s take a look at how daily deal sites work, one of their biggest benefits, and some of the risks involved in running a deal of your own.

How Daily Deal Sites Work

You offer a significant deal on a product or service (like 50-90% off). The site promotes your offer via email or social media outlets. People buy the deal vouchers. The daily deal site takes their cut. You get the rest. Word spreads and you see more new customers (and hopefully higher profits). Even if you eat a loss on a huge discount, the hope is that you can convert those deal-seekers into regular customers paying your normal prices.

Daily Deal Sites and Small Businesses: The Local Appeal

Small businesses targeting local markets don’t always embrace e-commerce or social media. It can feel too risky to invest time and money into building an online presence or email marketing list. Partnering with daily deal sites eliminates some of this risk because you get access to their existing audience in your local market (people who have subscribed to receive deals like yours).

Risks of Daily Deal Sites

Instant access to a well-targeted local market is a great benefit of daily deal sites. But there are also risks in offering these deep discounts.

  1. You might underestimate the interest in your daily deal. That can lead to disappointed customers if you over-promise or under-deliver (and more time needed to address customer service issues locally).
  2. You might not be able to get these discount-hungry customers to come back after the initial promotion.
  3. A recent analysis from Cornell University showed that running a daily deal can lead to more negative online reviews — reviews which may influence buying decisions of other potential customers. Ratings from reviewers using daily deals were an average of 10% lower.

Are daily deals right for your small business? That depends on a lot of things, from your current customer base to your confidence in your ability to turn one-time deal-seekers into repeat customers. If you have experience running daily deals in your local market, we’d love to hear your story. Leave a comment below to tell us which daily deal site you used and what results you experienced.