Ecommerce SEO Questions

vortez

vortez

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So I have an ecommerce site with lots of pages indexed, about 11.000

The thing is it's not properly optimized for SEO and I would want to start doing it.

I'll start by writing unique content to each page, but being realistic here I won't have 11.000 pages with unique content so would it be wise to no index follow all pages that have duplicate and don't rank for anything?

I am afraid that if I do that my indexed pages will go from 11.000 to probably somewhere about 1k and that might cause a ranking decrease?
 
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Use rel=canonical for similar items.

For example you have 10 red glasses models that you're selling and you want to rank on the term "red glass". You choose one of the glasses that sells better than the rest or a glass you have the highest profit on and rel=canonical the other 9 glasses to the 10th.

What this does is it tells google that the products are similar and that Google should only take into account the 10th glass. From a user experience standpoint nothing changes, the pages will still be indexed but only one will rank for the term. The users can see all 10 products.

But make sure to use the canonical tag in a proper way, any mistake and you will suffer from it.
 
OP, you will find my tutorial here helpful:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/tu...erate-and-semi-unique-content-in-mass.801320/

I would not even look at product level SEO unless they are top sellers. 11,000 products is quite a lot, it would take you years and it's just commercially not worth it. The only think I would do is put as much information as you can on the page, not for Google but for the buyers.

I would start on category level. You want all your products in proper categories, where customers would expect to find them. You will find also that people are much more likely to Google "55 inch TV" rather than product level keywords like "JVC LT-55C550 55" LED TV" anyway.

For categories you want the exact same shit you would have on any page, lots of good content, proper tags in proper places but the design aspect of it all is a little harder... To keep people converting you need to put the products they want in front of the customer which means to have a 3000 word article on stuff would just kill conversions as no one would scroll.

I've done a few things that worked well for me...
1. You can put between 100 and 300 words at the top above the products before it starts to feel too obstructive. The rest you can put at the bottom under the products and out the way.
2. JavaScript tabs. You want 2 tabs at the top, the default view shows a grid/list of your products as you and all customers would expect. A 2nd tab headed "information" or something like this displays your 1000+ words of content. This worked well and was my preferred method.

Here is a basic example of what I mean by tabs
http://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/tryit.asp?filename=trybs_ref_js_tab_events2&stacked=h

You also want to get your bread crumbs right, if you can have 1000 products with links to their parent category you're building a pretty big silo there which is super easy to do for ecommerce.

What platform have you built the site on also? I wouldn't use anything but magento for a store of that size. If you are using this look at magmi, it will make importing all this so easy for you.
 
OP, if you want to increase sales though PPC is where you should be looking.

Get a Google product feed up ASAP. It will convert 2 to 5 times as much as organic traffic as people will see the price and product image before they click.

Just spend $100 on it, if you don't make $500 in sales I would be fucking shocked.

From there let it keep running and just use these 2 general rules to optimise the feed.

When a product gets to 50 impressions and 0 clicks, improve the image and title, also look at price (but with 11k products there is no way you're doing that manually so this may not work for you)

If a products gets to 50 clicks and 0 conversions, remove it.

I've got our feed down to every £25 we spend we sell around £700-£900. The best shit is because we have 220,000 products in the feed the sales have been kind of crazy.

We had a guy spend £1100 on CO2 tyre inflaters for his rally team who then refereed all the other teams to us who made similar orders. Kind of crazy.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
UrsuAke said:
Use rel=canonical for similar items.

For example you have 10 red glasses models that you're selling and you want to rank on the term "red glass". You choose one of the glasses that sells better than the rest or a glass you have the highest profit on and rel=canonical the other 9 glasses to the 10th.

What this does is it tells google that the products are similar and that Google should only take into account the 10th glass. From a user experience standpoint nothing changes, the pages will still be indexed but only one will rank for the term. The users can see all 10 products.

But make sure to use the canonical tag in a proper way, any mistake and you will suffer from it.
Click to expand...

Thanks,

Could you tell me why you would choose canonical instead of no index follow?

Ste Fishkin said:
OP, you will find my tutorial here helpful:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/tu...erate-and-semi-unique-content-in-mass.801320/

I would not even look at product level SEO unless they are top sellers. 11,000 products is quite a lot, it would take you years and it's just commercially not worth it. The only think I would do is put as much information as you can on the page, not for Google but for the buyers.

I would start on category level. You want all your products in proper categories, where customers would expect to find them. You will find also that people are much more likely to Google "55 inch TV" rather than product level keywords like "JVC LT-55C550 55" LED TV" anyway.

For categories you want the exact same shit you would have on any page, lots of good content, proper tags in proper places but the design aspect of it all is a little harder... To keep people converting you need to put the products they want in front of the customer which means to have a 3000 word article on stuff would just kill conversions as no one would scroll.

I've done a few things that worked well for me...
1. You can put between 100 and 300 words at the top above the products before it starts to feel too obstructive. The rest you can put at the bottom under the products and out the way.
2. JavaScript tabs. You want 2 tabs at the top, the default view shows a grid/list of your products as you and all customers would expect. A 2nd tab headed "information" or something like this displays your 1000+ words of content. This worked well and was my preferred method.

Here is a basic example of what I mean by tabs
http://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/tryit.asp?filename=trybs_ref_js_tab_events2&stacked=h

You also want to get your bread crumbs right, if you can have 1000 products with links to their parent category you're building a pretty big silo there which is super easy to do for ecommerce.

What platform have you built the site on also? I wouldn't use anything but magento for a store of that size. If you are using this look at magmi, it will make importing all this so easy for you.
Click to expand...

The thing is I don't have 11k products, I have 11k indexed pages.

More probably there are about 1k but the website is setup in other countries like fr, de, dk etc so it all ads up.

1. I was thinking of doing the same thing.
2. Awesome idea!!! Never thought about it but the more I think of it the more I like it! So that will add up content on the page for the google bots but won't affect the design.

Would hiding content like that have any affect on on page?

The website is build on magento.



Ste Fishkin said:
OP, if you want to increase sales though PPC is where you should be looking.

Get a Google product feed up ASAP. It will convert 2 to 5 times as much as organic traffic as people will see the price and product image before they click.

Just spend $100 on it, if you don't make $500 in sales I would be fucking shocked.

From there let it keep running and just use these 2 general rules to optimise the feed.

When a product gets to 50 impressions and 0 clicks, improve the image and title, also look at price (but with 11k products there is no way you're doing that manually so this may not work for you)

If a products gets to 50 clicks and 0 conversions, remove it.

I've got our feed down to every £25 we spend we sell around £700-£900. The best shit is because we have 220,000 products in the feed the sales have been kind of crazy.

We had a guy spend £1100 on CO2 tyre inflaters for his rally team who then refereed all the other teams to us who made similar orders. Kind of crazy.
Click to expand...

I am doing lots of ppc right now but looking to expand.

Yea the product feed works wonders, thanks:)
 
I use a wordpress plugin called category collapser to hide the top/bottom content, but it's for wordpress ecommerce sites though.

Would google product feed work well for shops with less than 200 products?
 
4Panda said:
I use a wordpress plugin called category collapser to hide the top/bottom content, but it's for wordpress ecommerce sites though.

Would google product feed work well for shops with less than 200 products?
Click to expand...

Yes - it will work for anything that sells products.

We have sites that sell entire motorcycles along with just parts.
 
Ste Fishkin said:
Yes - it will work for anything that sells products.

We have sites that sell entire motorcycles along with just parts.
Click to expand...

Damn, you replied instantly...

Btw, has the newly enforced GTIN by Google affected your feeds? It can be quite a nightmare for big shops with no gtin before.
 
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