We already discussed the importance of organic keyword results for ecommerce businesses. Another area of Google that ecommerce businesses should optimize is their Google shopping results, also known as Google product search. By getting your products into the Google product search results you will increase your exposure to potential customers. If a customer is searching for a specific product, they may end up looking at Google shopping, and if your products aren’t listed there, you have no chance of securing a sale. There are a couple ways to submit your products to Google shopping, the first is a product feed by using an XML file, FTP, or Google Merchant Center. The second way to get your products into Google shopping is to use the Content data API for Shopping, which can be fully integrated similar to other Google data APIs. This method is more technical and difficult to set up.

Not only do your products need to be listed in Google shopping, they need to be competitively priced in order to compete within that space. Consumers are more and more price conscious these days, especially when Google shopping lists out all of the available options and prices with the ability to sort by price, etc. Many times when customers are searching for a brand name product, they don’t care where they get it as long as they get it for a good price. Unfortunately price plays a large role in the success of Google product search, so if you hope to make sales with Google shopping, your pricing must be competitive.

The third piece of the Google shopping puzzle is getting your producs to rank high on the first page of results. The first thing to consider is obviously that you have to have the exact product in Google shopping. If someone searches for “Brand X Product Z” you need to have that set up. The next thing to consider is your website’s overall SEO which plays a large part in how your products are ranked. The last, and arguably most important aspect of Google shopping product rankings is the number of reviews (positive reviews) your products have. Google accounts for the product reviews on many different review sites, and considers that data when choosing which items to display first.

Organic keyword results are the bread and butter of search engine optimization, although, effective methods of how to improve your keyword rankings have changed quite a bit over the last year or two. That doesn’t change the fact that ecommerce websites simply must have some good organic keyword rankings for their industry and products if they want to be competitive, make sales, and stay in business! The difference between a keyword ranked in the 11th position to the 3rd and especially the 1st position can often mean a tremendous increase in traffic to your website. Conservative estimates say about 18% of keyword traffic clicks on the 1st search result, while more aggressive estimates say closer to 36%. That traffic, of course, then becomes opportunities to create sales for your website.

Speaking of turning traffic into sales – this is a very important aspect of making your ecommerce business successful. No amount of SEO or top rankings will make you successful if you have a terrible website that is ineffective at securing sales. You obviously need products that your customers want, at competitive prices, have a simple checkout process, and ideally something to keep your customers coming back for more. That could be a customer loyalty program, great customer service, niche products, contests, promotions, and many other things. Use your imagination and think through how you can turn your existing sales into additional future sales.

So now we all know and understand that having top positions in Google is a necessity to running an effective ecommerce business, and getting there is another story. There are many schools of thought on the best way, or the most efficient way, to increase a particular website’s keyword rankings. If you ask ten SEO experts you may get ten different answers. The truth is it really depends on each specific website and its current situation. There are so many factors that contribute to keyword rankings that websites must be looked at and strategized individually. There are four main areas of focus that most SEO experts agree contribute to a website’s keyword rankings, and they are, in no particular order: on-site optimization, social media presence, external linking, and the site’s traffic results (e.g. traffic to site, click through rates, bounce rates, etc.). These four points will be discussed in more detail in a future blog.

Ecommerce Search Marketing on the Magento Platform

Magento is a powerful software solution that provides unprecedented look feel and functionality at a very low cost.  This platform can be extended to aid Search Engine Optimization.  Much of the functionality is built in, some functions need to be augmented by plugins.  To fully utilize your Magento store, you need search rankings that match your new beautiful website.

Ecommerce websites in general and Magento specifically fall into several SEO traps that can be overcome with a professional SEO company.  Some problems to look out for are issues relating to duplicate content.

Panda Update

You have probably heard about google’s panda update.  This update was also called the farmer update because it was directed towards content farms, or websites that practiced scraping of content from other websites and republishing the content on their own website for purposes of gaining search rank.  The panda algorithm works by looking for duplicate content and penalizing sites with “lite” or “duplicate content”.  For ecommerce websites that depend on template product display pages and often very light or manufacturers descriptions, this meant the panda update also affected their ability to rank.

The solution for ecommerce websites is eliminating duplicate content and adding more unique content into their website.  For magento websites this has several implications.

Removing Duplicate Content

By default Magento makes several mistakes that allow Google to think that it has duplicate content within its own website.  For example, if you track the number of pages google has indexed in your site, you may see 10,000 products indexed when you in fact only have 2000 or so products.  What is happening is google is indexing your products more than once.  This makes google think you have duplicate content and you are assessed a penalty.  The solution is a relatively straightforward implementation of Magento best practices that eliminate the ability of search engines to index your pages more than once.

Ad more Content

The next step is adding more rich content.  Sometimes this can be done by adding a blog to the website and writing lots of content for google to index.  This good content balances out the thin content on product pages giving your site more credibility in the search engines eyes.

Build out your category pages

The default option for category pages limits the content to a few hundred words at the top of the page.  To provide more content, it is recommended to modify your category template to accommodate more additional content.

Add unique descriptions to your products

Products pages are often light on content.  It is important to write unique descriptions that are as long as possible.  This unique content will pay off as google will choose your products over other products when returning search results.

Push your product reviews

Customer generated content is the best way to improve the content on your site.  Consumers value the opinions of other consumers more than advertising and trust these opinions when making a purchasing decision.  Consider modifying your product reviews code to allow for more extensive reviews or star type review system.  Most importantly, promote your product reviews.  Having the review option on the website is not enough.  Email your customers after they have received the product and ask for their review.  This improves your customer service and your search results by having your customers write your content for you.

Shopping Services

The google shopping service is becoming more and more important to ecommerce search marketing.  Getting your products onto google shopping and in the top results is becoming more and more difficult.  The first step is uploading your products to the service and keeping them fresh.  Magento users may have noticed the changes to the google api included in magento’s software has changed and may not be working properly.  Currently as this article was written, the base functionality of Magento’s google shopping api is not suitable to properly provide your data to the service.

Consider alternatives to Magento API.  Services such as godatafeeds integrate with Magento’s backend and provide a good interface to update your products once the data is standardized.  That brings us to the next point data standardization is the most important factor to your ratings.  Google is stringently enforcing their policy of data integrity.  Many fields pertaining to SKU, Brand, Color, category and more need to be properly cleaned before submition.  The last point is reviews.   Stores with the most reviews are rank before stores with less reviews.  So an important SEO strategy for improving shopping results is to push these independent store reviews.