Showing posts with label eCommerce SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eCommerce SEO. Show all posts

Guide to eCommerce Product Listing SEO

The Complete Guide to eCommerce Product Listing SEO

Getting your product listings to the top in ecommerce marketplace search results (on Amazon, eBay or Other eCommerce Marketplace) is one of the major differences between success and failure – between making money or not.

Whether you’re a seller, online marketer or just web merchandiser, understanding how to optimize product listing, is crucial to your long term online business success.

Imagine, You have a store on eBay or  Amazon filled with great product but not getting enough sell from it. 

Do you know why?

When a buyer is searching for your products on Google or in the the marketplace, the site unable to locate your products. Because your product listing is not optimized for it as it should be.

So, How to optimize then listing then?

Well, The simple answer is, You have to integrate SEO technique when you create new product listing or update existing listing.

Search Engine Optimization aka SEO is the art and science of optimize website for higher organic ranking, same method can be applied to rank your product listing in the eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.

Before we dig more about how to optimize eCommerce listing, lets talk about how these marketplace search works?

When someone search enything in an ecommerce marketplace, the marketplace search engine want to show best possible result to the user as search engine like Google & Bing Do.

These marketplace search engine gather data regarding user search, product listing, engagement, reviews and user personal purchasing behavior; the came with best products user can buy.


Product Title

One of the most important components of eBay SEO is the use of keywords. “Key” words are those words that shoppers use when searching for products.

One of the very best ways to find those specific keywords and keyword phrases is by using the eBay keyword research tool – Terapeak. You can also research SEO keywords using the eBay search field. Based on the keywords or phrases you type in the field, eBay will suggest more words culled from actual searches.

Title tags are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, and are important for eCommerce SEO. The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a product's.

This is not as thorough a method as using Terapeak but it does help. There are several other tools I use as well – Google Keyword Planner and when performing keyword research for larger sellers I use a few paid SEO tools.

Be sure to write your titles for buyers. Just shoving a whole bunch of keywords into a listing title in the hopes of showing up higher in the eBay search engine can result in a lower click-through rate. Buyers need to see a flow of words that make sense to them – very much like a complete sentence. When humans see a bunch of disjointed words, our brains literally stop. Then it has to start again to recognize the next word. Then stop, then start, again and again. They are less likely to click on your title if the title immediately above or below has a “smooth” set of words that is easily understood. That said, it’s helpful if you get proficient at finding the SEO keywords and using them effectively in your titles.

Product Description

When I perform an eBay Store Audit, this is almost always one of the biggest areas the merchant is deficient in. Please, please, please fill in your item descriptions! You don’t have to write the great American novel but by having a well-thought-out description you achieve the following:

The description is a character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a product's. Search engines show the description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the description is a very important aspect of SEO.

Higher SEO scores – use keywords in the description and HTags Increased sell-through score by providing complete and valuable info for buyers Customer loyalty and trust – buyers know a seller who gives good info is one who has their best interest at heart.

Category Selection

I make a really big deal out of categories when I teach.

Why? Because eBay has graciously done a great deal of SEO work for us all! When we choose categories and sub-categories for our listings, the names of the categories are very well researched and uber targeted keyword phrases!

Be sure to use all relevant categories for your listings. Do not “category stuff”. Meaning, don’t put your items in categories where it don’t make sense for them to be. This lowers your customer engagement, click-through, sell-through, and quality listing scores. Bottom line? You disappear from the search results.

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is hassle free shipping for the buyer. eBay loves this. Cassini loves this. Buyers love this. I’ve never understood why shoppers perceive “free shipping” as a “deal”. It just makes no sense.

Surely they must know shipping costs have been blended into the price of the item. And yet, they flock to “free shipping deals”. So, just do it. Adjust your prices as you can and offer the dreaded “free shipping”.

Add High Quality Photos

Since the sell-through rate is part of the algorithm that determines where your listings show up in the eBay search engine rankings and photos are a BIG part of making a sale – it’s time to get good at eBay photography. Large, crisp, well-lit images instill buyer confidence and increase the odds of making a sale. High-resolution is the name of the game! And eBay gives sellers the opportunity to put in 12 images – for FREE! Take advantage of that gift!

Believe me, Cassini knows the quality of your images based on pixels, compression, etc. And, since Google has gotten creepy good at “reading” images, I presume eBay has similar abilities. Adding multiple, good quality photos to your listings is a show of good faith. It shows customers and Cassini alike that you are invested in making sure all details are disclosed. Plus, you’ll have far less returns and this helps keep your seller trust score high!

Offer Hassle-Free Returns

This is kind of like the “grin and bear it” idea from the Feedback & Seller Trust section. Nobody likes to accept returns but, in all fairness to buyers, not all sellers are honest. My theory has always been that if you are an eBay seller who knows what they are doing and if you are thorough and honest in your listings, then your return rate will be almost zero.

If this sounds like you, then I highly suggest taking returns and offering to take returns on a “no questions asked” basis. You might have to smile through gritted teeth every now and again, but those transactions should be few and far between. 

Customer Inquiry Response Time

Some initials statistic gathered by industry leader suggest that "Shop Managed To Respond Same Business Day Tend to Rank Higher".

Besides “same business day” responses to customer questions being great for increasing sales, I believe response time is part of the Cassini algorithm.

My opinion is that the search engine see’s it as part of customer engagement so do your best to respond on the same business day. If you simply can’t respond on the same day, make sure your turn around time for answers in definitely within 24 hours.

Choose a Responsive Templates

Responsive eBay templates size up and down according to the size of the browser and are, by default, mobile themes. Since over 50% of Internet shoppers use their phones to browse and buy, a well crafted mobile/responsive template can help build your brand, increase customer engagement, and give you a higher conversion rate.

It is all about list your product with appropriate information and how much value you can offer to the buyer as a seller. Previously, it was very easy to manipulate search engine by flooding listings, but this is no longer the case.

How To Improve your Online Retail Store’s Search Engine Optimization

e-Commerce Website SEO Tips
Improve your e-Commerce Website Search Engine Optimization
You know the math right, According to the National Retail Federation’s annual consumer spending survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, consumers plan to spend an average of $935.58 during the holiday shopping season. Total spending includes gifts for others, self-spending, food, flowers, decorations and greeting cards for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Total planned spending this year is second only to the record total spending in 2015, at $952.58.

NRF Expects online retail sales in November and December (excluding autos, gas and restaurants) to increase a solid 3.6 percent to $655.8 billion. Online sales are forecast to increase between 7 and 10 percent over last year to as much as $117 billion. Retailers are expected to hire between 640,000 and 690,000 seasonal workers this holiday season, in line with last year’s 675,300 holiday positions.

In our last article I talked about how November Replacing Black Friday & Cyber Monday for USA, UK & Canadian Shoppers. So, now you know the Online Retail Trends & want to be top of search engine organic result. In This article, I'll focus on how to optimize your online shop or website for higher search engine organic ranking.

Have an e-Commerce Website? Every bit of your e-Commerce website markup, titles, description text, links and images that can be read by a search engine crawler and indexed in a search engine database needs to be optimized; and by optimizing, you have to make it easier and faster for a search engine to find your website content.

Your competitors are already exploring this option, why not you? If you are not utilizing this, you will find yourselves drowning in new organic visitors.

While the principle is relatively simple to understand, the ‘how’ and ‘where’ to start can get progressively intricate but before that happens, here are two axis (On-Page & Off-Page SEO) of Search Engine Optimization to work your online shop.

On-Page SEO Factors: The first place to start with SEO is on your e-commerce Retail Store’s website itself. Search engine algorithms look for several factors when they crawl through each page of your site. The most important ones are:


  • Website Structure
  • Website Speed
  • Keywords
  • Product Page URL
  • Title Tag & Meta Descriptions
  • Content Optimization
  • Images Optimization
  • Internal Links & Anchors


Website Structure

Structural elements of your online site and the way pages & products link to each other also affect ranking. Search engines go through a link structure to find and index pages. If your site is structured well, all pages and product pages will be easily found by search engine crawlers & can achieve higher organic ranking.

A clear site structure is important not only regarding ranking but most of all regarding good user experience. The aim is to build an eCommerce Site where shoppers can easily find products and information they came for.

Website Speed

contact for loading issues
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Having the best site structure will not mean anything to search engine, if your website or shop don't load fast enough (ideal is below 3 second). An statistics found that 69% of consumers leave slow loading websites. While, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less & 40% abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.



Modern ranking algorithms take the loading speed of a website very seriously, simply because good search engines don’t like recommending slow pages as this would be bad for user experience. Also, as search engines are in the business of bringing their user the best results, doing otherwise would reflect badly on them.

Free Tools to Measure Your Website Speed:


April 09, 2010, Google Official Webmaster Central Blog Statement is "Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."


Keywords

There are different types of keywords, as well as different types of search queries that people use to find products they are looking for. Search Engine Optimization is pretty much based on keywords. Finding out what words searchers use to find online stores similar to yours is the key to your online business success.


After doing deep research, you’ll have a list of relevant keywords in your bucket. You can then start the optimization process which means placing keywords throughout the whole website. The main keywords should be used in titles, URLs, headlines and repeated naturally in the content; others should be located in image tags and meta descriptions.

Free Tools to Start Keywords Research:


Product Page URL

One easy way to improve organic ranking on your e-commerce site is to ensure that each of your product URL is SEO-friendly, which means that it should include the main keyword that the page is targeting.

URL stands for uniform resource locator; it is a web address of a single web page. URLs are displayed in a web browser and on SERPs. There are two types of web addresses: static and dynamic.

A Static URL Looks Like:

myonlineshop.com/category/pet-care

A Dynamic URL Looks Like:

myonlineshop.com/category/?p=0254007

I recommend you to use static URLs whenever possible, because static one make sense & easy to remember.

Title Tag & Meta Descriptions

The Title Tag should define a site’s content in a concise and clear manner. You should keep it short & simple, I suggest that, keep it under max 60 characters. Be sure to include at least two of your most important keywords along with your brand’s name.

A title tag plays a significant part in search engine organic ranking as well as increase CTR, as it appears in the search engine result pages (SERPs), on external websites and directly in browsers.

Google Meta Tag Example
Google Title Tag & Meta Descriptions In Action.

As you can see above frog this screenshot, a meta-description is a short paragraph which is displayed right under a title tag  & URL on SERPs.

Sometimes a short title is not enough to adequately communicate what your e-commerce website potential visitor. Meta Description gives you the opportunity to introduce your brand before a searcher pays you a visit and see the products you offer.

The optimal length of a Meta Description should be max 160 characters. While creating a copy is good to be as much creative as you can. A boring description can decrease CTR and bring you fewer organic visitors. Unlike Title Tag, Meta Description is not visible directly in browsers.

Content Optimization

Although content don't play much when it's comes to online shopping site, but website content still has its technical importance for search engine ranking. A eCommerce Website with a blog and continuously new content posting using keywords related to its products is likely to get a high place on search engines if, of course, the content is of related to the user interest.

    Unique Product Descriptions: The Unique Product Description are extremely important factors in top organic ranking. The better the information is, the better the information will be (description, faq, images, etc.) and rich media (photos from all angles, videos, products in context, etc.). In addition, the more complete the product descriptions (description, faq, images, video, etc.), the better your site will be indexed on the search engines.

Tip: 81% of consumers search and shop online before buying a product, either online or in-store. However, a retailer or distributor who does not present all of their online products will lose sales.


Images Optimization

Take the time to name your product images correctly before you upload them. Not XYZ64564 but “winter-baby-boot-0325”, and also add an Image ALT tag “Winter Baby Boots”, Also if there's any folder or directory where your upload images, use the same thought.

Internal Links & Anchors

Links that point to other pages of your site called Internal Links – are an important part of on-page SEO aspect. Internal Links help search engine to crawl through your site, indexing each page as they go. Links can be text, images or representations of buttons you can click on to ‘navigate’ or jump to other pages or files. In this case you will focus on text links, which can make a world of difference to your website internal linking structure.

SEO Internal Links Best Practices

Anchor or Keyword in Links - This is the word or phrase that ‘names’ the link. Search engines like Google take into account the Anchor or Keyword Text in Links. Let’s say that these links are placed at the home page of your eCommerce Site, they would look a bit like this:

  • Women's Watches
  • Men's Watches
  • Shoes for Men

You are telling users and search engine crawlers that behind those links and according to their anchor text phrasing, that they will find either Watches for women, Watches for men and Watches for men.

It all seems pretty obvious when done right, but let’s see what over-optimized links would look like. If we take the same phrases but apply the anchors the wrong way:

  • Women's Watches
  • Men's Watches
  • Shoes for Men's
With these over-optimized anchors text, you are telling the web crawler to only take into account the following words:
  • Women's
  • Men's
  • Men's
My Opinion is, anchors text should be human-understandable as well as to search crawler.

Off-Page SEO Factors: Off-Page SEO techniques involve building links from other parts of the web to your site. In the past, e-Commerce site managers would scatter links to their site all over forums, directories, and comments sections, as well as buy links on other sites. These kinds of link building techniques are penalized by search engines these days, which means that you need to take a different approach.


Focus on building relationships & link earning, not link building. Note it, Not all the links hold the same weight, it means that you make sure that the links you build are natural & authentic. Read More about, Google's Link Schemes Here.

Although proper link building is not an easy thing to do, there are still many white hat SEO techniques you can start with even today, without considerable efforts or expenses. Check out following link building methods.

  • Ask for Backlinks.
  • Build Relationships.
  • Give a Testimonial.
  • Start a Blog.
  • List your Site in Trustworthy Directories.
  • Design & Share Infographic.
  • Write a Great Guest Post.
  • Discover competitors' Backlinks.
  • Recover your Broken Backlinks.
  • Launch a contest or a giveaway campaign.

Need Legitimate Backlinks? Contact ME Now!

So, keep your link building plan until you achieve the #1 on Google also make sure to share your thought in the comment field. Use these simple tips to help you get started with your eCommerce website Search Engine Optimization Campaign and keep an eye out for my next article, where I'll explain How Your Competitors Dominating Over Your Business.