Over the last few months, a few members of the online marketing team have been working hard to create the perfect set of SEO recommendations for an e-commerce website.
Well, we have implemented these suggestions – and now our client is reaping the rewards.
The original brief was quite a daunting job, considering the size of the website and the products it included. Some firms would have tarred every page in the sitemap with the same SEO brush, but – full credit to the online marketing team – at Coast Digital we go the extra mile.
If you want to create effective SEO for an e-commerce site, here are some tips to help you along the way – and some results to inspire you.
Common SEO pointers
This is day one stuff you will already know.
- META data
- Clean URL Structure
- Accessible Navigation
- Good Page Content
- Good Page Build (HTML / CSS)
- Page Headings
Some SEO gems
And here are some gems you may not have considered when you need to make sure that thousands of pages are all top-notch SEO.
Character limits of META data – this could be an issue when you have 3-5 steps in a breadcrumb trail and you are looking to replicate them in the Title / Description / Keyword fields. Make sure you make good use of the characters you have.
URL length, structure and keywords – again, if you’ve got plenty of steps in your sitemap then the last thing Google wants is to trawl through pointless ones. Clean URLs, close to the root of the domain, are what you want.
Using footer links correctly – don’t spam. Put in links that are related and not just for the benefit of search engines.
Same product in multiple locations – this is a big issue for lots of online retailers. We have the fix and it works… a mixture of robots.txt management and nofollows can help keep your domain away from the dreaded duplication penalty. The most relevant phrase for this section is: canonical linking.
Get your product page content up to scratch – a page buried deep in the sitemap is just as important as a category section homepage. Delivering a website that has genuine, well-delivered content across the sitemap is essential; otherwise you’ll fall at the first hurdle. If your client doesn’t buy into this process then it will be a hard slog to push on in the organic listings.
And here are some ‘proof is in the pudding’ type stats…
The above visitors are for non-brand related terms – so we are not claiming any credit for brand searches in our results!
If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in our other guides: here.