E-Commerce SEO: Where to start with 4,000+ products?

[ronyon]

Hey everyone!

Complete SEO novice here. I work as the sole content person for an ecommere website with 4,000+ products. I've been trying for months to come up with some sort of SEO strategy, but I'm drowning. Completely drowning.

I've been trying to use on-page analytics here at Moz for certain products that get a lot of margin for us. This worked great for awhile, but I haven't seen much progress. And then I jumped to link building and then I jumped to blogging and social, and now I don't know where to focus. I know each and every one of these is important, but I feel like I'm only giving 10% to each instead of 100%. I'm not getting anywhere. I'm just doggy paddling.

I am in desperate need of a starting point. And yes, I've read Moz's beginner guide to SEO. I've researched for hours, but nobody seems to have a good starting point for someone trying to optimize a site with 4,000+ products. WHERE DO I START? Category pages? Low-hanging fruit? I feel like I've tried it all.

I need some concrete ecommerce advice. Something that gives me a solid game plan as a one-woman show. Do I go brand by brand? Do I go with products with good margin? Do I stop focusing on individual products and go for category pages? I can't wrap my head around an SEO workflow.

I'm really looking for ANY advice that can stop my head from spinning with ecommerce SEO. It's completely overwhelming!

Thank you in advance!

[ndhsne45]

This guide is really helpful for me as I'm also running a site of Ecommerce of the lottery at lotto.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

I really think that you should pick your battles. That way you avoid that feeling of being spread too thin. Do a few product pages well, and then move on. (But also don't get locked in to a few. It's like playing Jenga. Tap few bricks to see which ones are low hanging fruit.)

By doing a few things well, you'll able to show results earlier. It's not the answer you were looking for, but I think getting buy-in from the rest of the marketing team (and the company at large) is really key. It's good to have more help and more budget, and the results to deserve them!

Best of luck.

[ronyon]

Hey Andrew!

Thanks so much for responding. We do have an existing customer base, and I'm actually part of the in-house marketing team. I was hired to do the blog and social media, and SEO is now part of my job as well. Luckily I'm a writer, so I'm happy to do the descriptions, I just don't know where to start and am curious about an SEO's daily workflow.

[ronyon]

Oh man, I wish I could get some help! I might be able to if I can just get the ball rolling for the first little bit. They've never had anyone to work on it, and that torch is now passed to me, so I'm trying to get a handle on a game plan.

Really can't thank everyone here enough for the help. Very solid advice that's getting me pumped to take this on. THANK YOU!

[ronyon]

A lot of times I can definitely combine them! That's a great idea. And I loved loved the link building article you sent along. THANK YOU!

[WesleySmits]

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

[TakeshiYoung]

Re-writing so many product descriptions is a big task. I would first see if you can combine any of the products into a single page.

For example, if you have "12 inch red kite" and "18 inch red kite" and the products are identical except for the size, create a single product page with a dropdown to select the size. If your CMS doesn't allow you to do that, you can create a separate page and canonical the other pages to it. That way, you reduce the amount of unique content you have to write.

Getting user generated content from things like reviews can also help streamline the unique content creation. Incentivizing customers with coupons is a great way to have them coming back to your site and leaving a review.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

@Ronyon - I second the @wesleysmits recommendation to prioritize products with key business value.

To address some of your points:

1. "Do I go with brand by brand? Do I go with products with good margin?".

• Go for the products that bring in the most profits for the company**.** Margins aren't exactly the key point. It's the real dollars coming in. If you have a product bringing in an incredible amount of money, your minor improvements will have magnified results. Example: Let's say the top product the site sells (out of 4k items) brings in $10k profit/mo. If you are able to improve sales on that single product (i.e. you ONLY do SEO + conversion improvements on that product), and you're able to boost sales by 50%, you're bringing $5k/mo more. That's $60k/yr. BY ONLY OPTIMIZING ONE PRODUCT.
• Go for products that are easiest to sell. If you have a products already bringing in a lot of organic search traffic, @egol is absolutely right. Improving the hook-i-ness of the title and creating the perfect description will have great impact. And it's EASY! If you have 100 visitors/day through organic search on just one product page, and you're able to improve the Click Through Rate by 10%, you've brought in 10 additional visits a day. Furthermore, if you can improve the product graphic or copy on the page, you might be able to boost conversion rates on that product. That's an additional sale every week or two. For an hour or two of work, not bad!
• It's OK to work on things one at a time. But you have to choose your battles. Make sure you're going to make an impact.

Here's another tip. Without knowing the big picture, it sounds like you need help w/ just the labor of the thing IF that's the case, then **make the case to the bean-counters that your work generates profits. If you had more help (hire another SEO), you'd be able to generate profits faster. Then you can also be a manager. **How?

• Create a before/after report of your work using Webmasters/Analytics.
• Take a snapshot of how the website is performing (Traffic per product page, CTR's, Conversion Rates, Bounce Rates, ranks for all the product pages)
• Do your SEO magic
• Go to your manager and say "Check out what I did. As a result of what I did in the past 3 months (for example), I'm bringing in $3.5k/mo extra for the next year. That justifies hiring a link-builder to help me out!"

This tip isn't just from me. There's a big tome of a book--The Art of SEO; co-authored by randfish--that spends Chapter 13 talking about "Building an in-house SEO team" (among other things). A great deal of that section talks about why it's so important to get buy-in from the organization.

SEO is a profit center. Management would love to make more money, faster. Give them a few good-looking charts, and get some help!

[DougRoberts]

There's no absolutely perfect way to prioritise the order to review/update the existing product pages. You've just got to determine which products matter the most to you.

As we've mentioned you want to think about prioritising the products with the most sales, products with the highest margin, new products, hot products (ones that have a social buzz about them!) etc.

You may want to rule out products that are near end of life and will be removed from your catalogue soon or products that have low sales and low margin (think about the ROI of your time/cost)

As for how many you do - you'll need to go with what you're comfortable with. The problem with trying to do too many is that it becomes increasingly hard to create great content the more you do. You're better off writing a few great ones than forcing yourself to churn through loads. You want to sound unique/fresh/natural. Hard to do when you're tired!

When it comes to writing the descriptions, comments/feedback is a good place to find out what really matters to people, the concerns people have, the suitability for a particular audience etc.  (Tip: You don't have to look at the comments on your own site.)

If you've got a great social following, then you may be able to think of an interesting/creative way to utilise that to help you out.

Of course, before you start working your way through the list, make sure you create a checklist/process for adding new products so that the problem doesn't get any worse while you're working your way through!

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

@Takeshi - hey that link is absolutely fantastic.

[WesleySmits]

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

[ronyon]

THANK YOU all so much for the great insight. I really appreciate it. The good news is that I'm a writer first and foremost, so writing product descriptions is something I love to do.

A little more background--We have a great social following, so we're good there. And our website is definitely well designed by our web master. We also have a great blog that I run where we interview photographers. I try to post 3-5 times a week, and it gets decent traffic. So here I am as the writer/social media manager, just feeling confused about where to start in tackling the 4,000+ products on an on-page level.

I came here a year ago with all of these products in there with manufacturer descriptions, which was a total bummer, but I've been working on writing original and relevant descriptions for new products from here on out. The biggest problem I face is deciding where to start. Doug, I love your feedback, and I think I'll start creating a list of the pages actually generating sales and apply what works there to the high margin products.

It's good to hear from you guys and get feedback on the actual workflow of on-page optimization. I find keyword research to be the most terrifying.  What's the best way to go about tackling a daily list of products to optimize? Out of the 4,000? And what does your daily SEO schedule look like for something like this? Would you recommend a certain number of original descriptions a day? I do so many other things beside SEO, so I'm trying to get a good feel for how it's done.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your help, everyone.

[bashseo]

I cant stress enough how EGOL has hit the nail right on the head.   You'll commonly find that most, if not about 99% of sites selling  a particular product almost always use the stock product description provided by the manufacturer.  One of the tests that I do is just take a snippet of the stock product description and paste that into Google to get a head count on just how many sites are using stock product descriptions.  This is also a good indicator on which of my competitors are paying for SEO, and if they are, what kind of in-house of firm im up against.

Creating unique product descriptions not only makes your products one of the few with a UNIQUE description, it also stands out in SE's, and almost always from what i've seen helps that particular products rankings as well, not to mention it helps increase conversions.  I know that its VERY VERY VERY time consuming, but one of the things that I like to do that i've found simplifies the process is to just record yourself describing the product, and then transcribing the recording.

[PremioOscar]

Thanks guys for this post,

I am in the same situation, e-commerce site, thousands of products to optimize for, all the tools set up and lots of confusion in my head.

I  am optimizing product pages by targeting one root keywords and one key-phrase in order to get low converting traffic and some more relevant traffic. And I am using the on-page moz tool to help me with that.

According to moz I should be shortening all the title tags and meta description which are way too long as well as increasing the relevance of the pages related to the keywords I am targeting them for.

I am doing social as well but Facebook isn't the best social media platform for my industry so I am focusing on Twitter mostly.

Content wise I am writing seo-friendly product descriptions, easy to scan and with relevant information and I am trying to put a content section (blog, news, etc) on the site which hasn't been done before.

Link building is a huge work to do on e-commerce and my thought is to build links at intermediate level, such as category and subcategory pages in order to pass juice to inner pages.

It's a lot of work to do on e-commerce sites and my biggest problem is create a schedule and prioritize things.

[DougRoberts]

Looking at which products have the highest value to you (margin) is a good place to start, but you also need to consider which products matter most to your customers.

Take a look at which of your products are getting the highest search volume. Can you see why? Is it the uniqueness of the product, the great product descriptions capturing long tail traffic or a lack of competition in the market place?

Which of your product pages are are actually generating sales? Can you establish why? Are there opportunities to up sell your higher margin items rather than just a random related items list produced by your ecommerce platform.

The key for me though is understanding your customers. It's a lot easier to build a strategy to reach and attract more customers - once you've established who your customers really are. I've seen many people fall into the trap of thinking that "the internet is their customer".

What are their needs, their motivations? What language does you customer use when talking about your products? A great place to look is at any customer feedback, testimonials and comments etc.

What information do they need when they consider buying your products. Why problems do your products solve. Would how-to guides, frequently asked questions content help attract people who know they have a problem or a need, but don't know what the solution to that problem is?

Even if your products pages face strong competition from other sites, you can still win by becoming the prospects trusted guide/authority earlier on in the buying cycle.

Absolutely agree with EGOLs advice. Don't use manufacturer supplied product descriptions or generic, bland copy uninspiring copy.

Remember you're writing your product descriptions for people and not search engines. As well as attracting the traffic, the descriptions have to sell the product's value/benefits. Don't just list features, tell people why these features matter - what are the benefits to them. Eg: 5 point locking mechanism to ensure the safety of your valuables.

[WesleySmits]

I've worked with some e-commerce sites before. I'll try and explain the way i handled it.

1. Know the opportunities and limitations of your CMS (Content Management System). I've worked with Magento and i did a lot of things by myself which were done automaticly by Magento. Such as creating XML sitemaps. Knowing what your CMS does for you helps you focus on the weak points of the CMS.

2. On page optimisation: An E-commerce site wants to get found on it's products in most cases. Are your product pages optimized? Make sure that all your product pages have a really good title and description. Not only for SEO purposed. Of course having your important keywords in there helps but make sure people would click on it too. Find someone from your target group and ask them about the quality of your titles / description. Would they click on it? If no, then why not. Use their feedback to improve them even more. Product descriptions should be really good too. This webshop http://www.vat19.com/ really knows how to create product pages which are aimed at their target group and contain a lot of content. The images and video's are rich media which are relevant for the target group and Google loves this.

3. Social: There are so many possibilities for E-commerce websites on the social platforms. Make sure you have a Facebook page, twitter account, Google+ account and Pinterest account. The buttons should be implemented on at least the product pages as well. Facebook and twitter allow you to reach your target group and get more exposure to other people. It is now even possible to include webshop functionality on Facebook pages. Google+ will soon get this too if i'm not mistaking. I mean they have Google shopping and they are making Google+ the center of all Google products with an added social layer. Pinterest allows you to pin all your products and recently they added the option of adding prices and stock to your pins.

4. Link building: As Takeshi said before this is an excellant list of link building techniques: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies. Make sure you have content that people want to link to. Some e-commerce solutions offer a blog next to the webshop and i know that there is a Magento plugin for making a connection to Wordpress. A blog is something to get a better connection to your customers and is great link bait by itself. If you do other things such as product review video's or so this is also an excellant place to gather feedback from customers.

I hope i helped you somehow and if you want more advice or if anything was unclear please let me know.

Good luck

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

(Your budget range and the tools you have available will dictate the strategies you use.)

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Hey Ronyon --

I just wanted to check that you have the fundamental stuff (low-hanging fruit) taken care of:

• Fix on-page errors (e.g. unique titles, meta descriptions, everything is correct length)
• Subscribe to various useful tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, etc.)
• Submit to a few directories (this is a useful tool: https://getlisted.org/)

From there, you have to figure out where you can build your links from.

Quick question -- what's your approximate budget range? And do you have an existing customer base or are you starting out?

-- Andrew

[EGOL]

I am in desperate need of a starting point.

You start by doing what most other ecommerce webmasters are not willing to do....That is..... Write Unique and Substantive Product Descriptions.

[TakeshiYoung]

I've worked with a number of ecommerce sites... my recommendation would start by fixing on-page factors first. Just basic stuff like titles, image alts, URLs, semantic markup, etc. Fix it at the template level, so it's taken care of site-wide.

Site architecture is key with a large site, so make sure that your site is laid out properly. Mostly this means making sure your categorization/organization makes sense, making sure all your content is being linked to, and eliminating duplicate content issues.

Once all the on-page stuff has been taken care, I would focus on link building. Building links to an ecommerce site is not easy, but it's doable. Start by taking a look at some of your competitors, to see where they are getting links. As an ecomm site you can also take advantage of things like giveaways and contests to attract links. Leverage your blog to get guest bloggers.

Here's a good list of link building ideas, if you need more:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies