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Competition in online retail is fierce. With multiple retailers bidding on the same keywords, organic visibility can help you break through the noise. That's why harnessing organic search traffic is the foundation of a successful e-commerce website. When online shoppers are seeking something specific, it is vital that your products and services are readily visible to this target audience.

Our digital marketing experts have defined 5 priority suggestions to optimise your online product listings. It is important that your SEO strategy is targeted for both automated search crawlers and for the end user. Google may rank your pages highly, but relevant, helpful content is key to convincing a customer to click.

 

Customise page content

Update your page title and meta description to target your high volume keyword targets. Optimising this limited number of characters with keywords will allow your page to rank for larger search traffic. What’s more, metadata is the first thing that a potential customer will see on the search engine results page, so use it to convince them to purchase.  

Make sure that your H1 tags explain what’s on the page. As such, these should be different for every page. A common mistake is to set the company name as a sitewide H1. But differentiating each page title will make it clear where to find certain information.

 

Gather reviews

Using third-party review tools, like Feefo or Reevoo, builds a trustworthy site appearance. What’s more, integrating these reviews on product pages provides each page with unique content.

Product pages often contain duplicate content across your site and potentially across thousands of other websites, if you are selling someone else’s products. Using customer reviews is a way of sourcing fresh, relevant and original content for each of your product pages.

 Reevoo Reviews on High Street TVReevoo Reviews on High Street TV

 

Canonicalise your products

A common issue with e-commerce sites is that products can be found under multiple URLs if they are listed under multiple categories.

Example:

domain.com/category-1/product

domain.com/category-2/product

domain.com/category-3/product

This results in duplicate content across these pages. Duplication causes page cannibalisation, as the URLs compete for the same keywords. Ultimately, repetition throughout your site will hinder each page’s performance in search results.

To avoid this, we recommend placing canonical tags, to prioritise a single, “original” version of the page. Absolute URLs should be used when creating these canonical tags.

Magento creates a URL which is the domain followed by the product name:

domain.com/product

This should be set as the canonical tag for all of these variant pages.

 

Add schema markup

Schema is a code tag which identifies key details for search engines. Not only can schema markup help search engines better understand your page’s content, but it can even change how your listings appear in search results.

Using this microdata, Google can pull through star ratings, reviews, price and other details. Specific schema designed for product pages highlights the most relevant details for prospective shoppers. Note that development resource will be required for the implementation. 

 

Use Data Highlighter

If development resource is not available to implement your schema markup, there is a quick and easy method of applying it yourself. The Data Highlighter tool in Google Search Console plays a similar role to schema, foregrounding key data sets.

Using Data Highlighter, you can simply highlight sections of your product pages to teach Google to recognise patterns on your pages.

This includes highlighting the price, name, and image of your product. By following this easy and consistent template, Google will then roll this info out across your entire site. This means you only need to apply Data Highlighter once and even new product pages, which go live at a later date, will benefit.

Google provide easy-to-follow instructions for Data Highlighter

 

Get in touch with our digital marketing experts for an SEO audit of your e-commerce site and a personalised set of recommendations.  

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