Ecommerce websites have unique challenges when it comes to optimising product pages. Its important to make sure your website and products are easy to find in search engines such as Google. It is also important that your products are designed in a way that is user friendly and provides the information needed to lead to online sales. This guide outlines 6 ideas to help optimise your ecommerce website increasing traffic and hopefully sales.
1. Unique Product Descriptions
If you are using product descriptions given to you from suppliers or taken from other websites, this will be no benefit to you. Duplicate content is sure to lead to penalties with you Google ranking. Make sure your content is unique to your website, use the keywords of the product you are describing and be sure to mention the benefits and purpose of the product. If the product is used to solve specific problems make sure to mention the keywords of the problems associated with the product. Read more about targeting the keywords of problems rather than solutions in my previous article: increase website traffic with a smart blogging strategy.
2. Add Product Category Descriptions
Consider optimising your product category pages, by using a keyword rich title, adding a description describing the products found in the category and add an image with correct alt tags and titles. This will help with generic keyword searches for people searching for categories of products such as “men’s clothing” or “kids clothing”
3. Unique titles with keywords.
As mentioned earlier Google penalizes websites with lots of duplicate content, If you are an online furniture company imagine how many other websites have product titles called “Oak Dining Table” consider adding unique descriptive or personality words such as “ Natural Oak Dining Table” or “Modern Oak Dining Table”.
4. Use High Quality Product Photos
Product photos are important, especially for products that can only be ordered online. Looking at a product photo is an important part of the buying purchase. Large, high quality photos show viewers the detail they want to see building trust with your product. If your product needs to be shown from different angles to show the full product make sure you add extra photos. Consider providing photos of your product in use if it adds value to the function of your product.
5. Optimising Product Images with Alt tags + Titles
Add alt tags and use smart titles for all images. Do not name images photo1.jpg or image123.jpg. If it is a photo of a cow eating grass then name the image “cow eating grass” this will make your images show up in image searches. The image title and alt tag also get indexed in search engines so its important to add keywords about the image in the title and alt text.
6. Enable & Encourage User Product Reviews
Encourage buyers to review your products. This shows popularity and builds trust with people looking to buy your products. Getting reviews can be hard, consider sending email reminders to buyers offering a discount coupon for reviewing the products of their recent purchases.
These steps outlined are all easy ways to get more out of your ecommerce website. For most modern websites the functionality to achieve these steps will be available to you already. Sometimes a slight change in your approach to images, keywords and content writing can be all that’s needed to see an increase in website traffic and online sales.
