Much of commonly known SEO works nicely for older, small to medium sites. Ecommerce sites are different. With hundreds or thousands of pages and products, they are harder to work with, often suffering from unwieldy navigation and link structures. Their generated pages produce hard to index URLs, and it’s easy to end up with duplicate content within the site.
Advanced SEO tactics do exist for ecommerce sites, however. Here is a sampler.
1. Site structure and links.
There are so many points to choose from here. I’ll just mention three. Building deep links to pages buried in the navigation structure will help SEs crawl and analyze your site. Separating site maps into sections by product category will create a two to three layer link structure that will bring every product near to the surface of the site, which SEs love. Finally, Google counts only the first of multiple links to the same page. Others are ignored.
2. Unique content.
Relevant content that’s always up to date trumps static content that’s equally optimized. Content at all counts for a lot. Product directory pages should always have a snippet of content per product. Used everywhere as they are, manufacturer’s descriptions will only trigger duplicate content alarms. Even related product descriptions need to be unique, not clones of one another.
3. Fresh content.
All pages should be kept fresh with new content updated regularly, even if it means creating rewriting busywork. Far better, however, is to find ways to bring customer content to the site. Fresh, relevant, LSI keyword-rich reviews are just right for SEO.
4. Keywords.
Customers search for specific keywords, not generic ones. To capture the traffic these searches generate, product descriptions and even titles should reflect customer search behavior. For example, companies think “digital cameras” whereas customers search for “digital camera”. Titles can include both: “Digital cameras: Buy a digital camera at Camerascamerascameras.com”. More generally, marketing departments may set up categories or change product names and lines, making it necessary to monitor and tightly control URLs and product names to prevent 404s or worse. As another example, inclusion of categories in URLs, leading to duplicate URLs, can dilute search value.
This level of SEO is more demanding, but makes a site attractive to search engines directly. Indirectly, the superior user experience will spark conversations, unsolicited links and citations. SEs noticing the buzz will direct even more traffic to the site, and business will boom.
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