In our continuing series regarding the best SEO practices for ecommerce marketplaces and websites, we are looking at top ecommerce websites and online marketplaces, and the various SEO challenges they face and how to work with such websites.
In the recent times Google, the definitive search engine, has taken firm steps to improve the relevance and quality of its Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Starting with Panda Updates and more recently its Hummingbird Update, Google has amply made it clear that natural and relevant content will be the focus area for them, so if you create good content people will link with it and you will get good traffic results from Google Search engine.
Marketplace websites ran afoul of this new set of guidelines because the focus of any marketplace is the products that it has on its portfolio. Product pages are not worth to share for their great content. While product reviews are an option as user generated content, but it is no possible for all products to be reviewed as their numbers can run into thousands easily for an ecommerce website.
There are few things we can do to achieve better results with product pages in such scenario:
1) Navigation & Page Linking: Due to complexity of having so many products in the marketplace site, it is important not only link product pages in navigation but also use a listing page to connect to every product category if not direct product page. Most major marketplace websites like Amazon or eBay also use search form to allow the users to find the item they are seeking directly. It is a great option in terms of usability in a ecommerce website but it makes a URL that is decidedly unfriendly to search engines in general.
2) Title, Description and SEO: For any ecommerce website while competing with others for traffic and visitors, a well optimized title and description tags are must. Avoid using any repetitions in the same.
3) Link Building and Social Community: If product pages are poor resources for content, they still are excellent topic for social engagement with target audience, leverage your social presence to create a buzz regarding your products and let the audience spread the word around. You can also work on creating good links to your product pages by getting them registered in the directories that are relevant for your offerings, getting reputable people to review your products or offerings. Ask the people writing about you to link back to you.
4) Duplicate Content: A major issue found in ecommerce sites is the duplicate URLs which were either result of search or use of filters, the result of such occurrence was duplicate content warning. To avoid that, and consolidate page rank for a category, you should employ the rel=canonical meta tag, which indicates which one is the canonical version of the page (and URL).
5) Use of Microformats: Microformats and rich snippets are special markups that provide additional semantic information. Content tagged with microformats might appear different in SERPs and such presentation of data can get you more hits.
Getting a good ranking in Google SERPs require a lot of work, while good content is marked as one of the primary considerations by Google. Marketplaces and Ecommerce sites, have a lot of “content” that often is not very interesting or worth to share. Thus regular and continuous Search optimization exercise for content pages and keywords must be undertaken. For more info about best SEO practices for ecommerce Sites and Marketplaces, please call us today at 619.567.9322 or visit our website now.
