Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

Medium & large retail E-commerce sites represent an excellent opportunity to rank well across a wide range of keywords with fairly high search volume. On top of that they can provide an extremely focused user experience when their highly relevant product pages are called up for specific searches. The quicker a user can find what they are looking for the more likely they are to purchase from a site. This is the logic behind focused landing pages and landing page optimization in PPC. SEO should follow the same logic. SEO for e-commerce sites should concentrate on specific product level pages as well as the more generic top level pages. Quality SEO will try to capture both the high level searches as well as the myriad of long tail terms associated with specific products.

Customers want to find what they searched for ASAP

For example, if you own a sporting goods store that sells hockey sticks the best user experience would be to show a page selling the specific hockey stick for which a user searched. As a potential customer if I search for an Easton Synergy hockey stick I really want to find pages that are specific to that query. I am more likely to find a page related to my exact query more useful and I will be more likely to buy from that site. If I have to search around for the product I will be less satisfied and will be more likely to move on to another site with more relevant results. As I take a look at results for the search phrase Easton Synergy hockey sticks I find a few sites that are close to getting it right but the majority either send the user to the home page or category level page. While the category level pages are a bit more useful I would prefer to find the specific product level page.

Easton Synergy Hockey Sticks

Why is it so hard to find product specific pages?

The reason it is difficult to rank these specific pages is due to the nature of e-commerce sites. Most medium and large e-commerce sites tend to rely on generic information provide by the manufacturer. This leads most competing retailers to have the same exact content as their competitors. Since search engines want to show unique information that means only the strongest site will show up in the top of the SERPs. As you can see here both of the sites in the following screenshots have the same exact product descriptions. They may be situated differently on the page but the fact is it looks like the same thing to a search engine crawler.

Joes

Dicks

Neither of these pages showed up in the top ten results when searching for Easton Synergy Hockey sticks even though they provide more relevant content for the query. The fact is that since every single page selling that hockey stick has the same exact content it becomes very difficult for any of them to rank well.

Make Every Page Unique

Don’t just focus on the higher level pages simply because they provide the best opportunity to rank well for more popular keywords. The low hanging fruit is in the product level pages. Most medium to large e-commerce sites have thousands of these pages and the competition is less intense. That means there are thousands of chances to rank well for highly relevant keywords that lead to a better user experience and more sales. By adding some unique content to these pages it will be much easier to rank for the highly specific (and relevant) keywords. Don’t simply slap on the manufacturer provided text and images. Add some of your own interesting commentary, allow users to add their own reviews, add some additional images, etc. Make your pages stand out to search engines and visitors and you will be able to grab the thousands of users who are searching for the products your site sells.

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