Ecommerce SEO Strategies – Tips to increase your SEO traffic to your Ecommerce Business

Transcription

Today it’s all about Ecommerce SEO.
Hi and welcome. My name is Harold F. Rich, and as you may know, I am also very experienced in Ecommerce SEO or SEO in general.

Because my background is SEO, so I used to run an SEO agency for the last ten years. Before I moved more towards Ecommerce, I did a lot in SEO, and I did a lot in international SEO so I can tell you a lot of insights that we have seen for our own Ecommerce seven-figure businesses. And I can also tell you a lot of insights from what I’ve seen in our clients’ stores.

So if it comes to Ecommerce SEO these days, it’s much better than it was. These days, most of the Ecommerce platforms are quite SEO friendly. That means before, before Magento and before also WordPress, where you can use Woocommerce or Shopify or PrestaShop, before there was like, not real shop systems. You could use something like Joomla and then have I think it was called Virtual Marketer shop plug-in or something like that. But the problem was that this had been no real shop systems.

What I mean by quite SEO friendly is that you can modify everything on the page level. What that means is that you can change the title, the meta description, you can edit all the text, of course, the H1, H2, and so on. You can most of the time implement the canonical tag that will help you to avoid duplicate content. You’re also able to implement the hareflang tags, which will help you to control your websites or give Google some more information about in what regions you want to rank for.

So if you are going international, you can target your website, or you can target your subfolders to individual countries, and the hareflang tag that you can implement in your website could also help Google to decide, okay, this part of the site, should be shown to this region in that language.

This is stuff that you’ll need to know if you’re going internationally. For most of the shop owners or store owners, it’s important that you can modify the title, the meta description. Of course, all the product details and stuff like that. This is is critically important. And like I said, most of the Ecommerce systems can do that.

For Shopify, for example, or almost all the shop systems out there I would recommend to install some SEO plugins that will allow you do things easier, like to set the titles easier or to also redirect. If you remove a URL, if you remove a product or you rename a product, it often happens that there will be an error, because the URL doesn’t exist anymore, and some of these plug-ins will just make sure the old URL will automatically get redirected to the new URL.

For Ecommerce SEO, it’s basically like all the other SEO stuff that you should do for your website, but there are some special things that you should know for Ecommerce SEO, especially if you have products that are quite similar that will be a product that have almost the same content on the page. That could be because it’s just a different color, it’s just a different size, it’s just a different weight, or whatever. It’s very slight modifications, and that would produce duplicate content. So if you have a product with the color black, blue, and green, and most of the shop systems will then create three different URLs.

For Google, the problem is these three different URLs will probably have the same title, the same meta description, and 99.9% content, it’s just the color is different. Google will now not know if you want to rank for this particular keyword, that is the product or is the product category or stuff like that. If Google finds three or more URLs to target that product, Google may not be sure what you want to rank. So it could happen that sometimes you rank quite well or that URL, but then on the other day on the next week, you will lose a lot of rankings, because Google will pick up a different URL.

That could not only happen because of colors; it could also occur if you have very similar products or if you have just missed out to change titles and meta descriptions for a different product, so Google will just be confused what product to pick for that ranking. So it’s essential for you to get that right.

Some systems, some shop systems can do it by putting everything under one URL. So they will just technically exchange or replace the content of the website without having a different URL. Some systems will allow you to implement a canonical tag so that you can say, for this keyword, I want this version to rank, and all the other versions will point to this version. One of the best solutions, I think is if you don’t have a category inside your URL. Because what happens if you have your product in more than one category, that happens a lot of times. Because it couldn’t just be in category A, it would also fit in category number B. So you would end up in having two different URLs again if you would not, if you would have the category inside of the product. Because it would one time be category A and one-time category B inside of the URL. So a solution would be not to have the category in the URL.

There are also plug-ins, SEO plug-ins out there that will make it easy for you to strip out the category, so it will always be just yourwebsite.com/product1 or something like that, so you will never have the category in there. You can avoid duplicate content.

A mistake that I see a lot of time is that store owner, they use their Ecommerce store, just mainly to list everything they get from the merchant, they just take it over like it is. And this is very bad. If you just take the product descriptions from your merchants, if you just put on the same content as everybody else, Google will not rank you. Because Google doesn’t want to show the same at the same search results over and over again. This will be a very bad user experience if you imagine for yourself, you’re looking for a product you click on a website where you found the product. You don’t like the website and the product description, and so on, you would go to the next search result and click on that, and it will be the same and also for the third one. This would be a very bad user experience.

This is why Google will not show your search result if you have just duplicate content and it was already indexed first by the merchant of some other competitor. It’s getting very hard to rank or almost impossible to rank because Google is trying to filter it out. So keep in mind, you have to produce different content. You have to produce better content. If you can’t change, or can’t change the content for any reason, then at least you have to add a little content so it’s not exactly the same.

I hope that was useful. This was just a little insight about Ecommerce SEO. I’m will some more videos on the topic, so make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel or sign up for our newsletter on our website and I see you tomorrow. Have a nice day. Bye bye.