The holiday season is right around the corner – and with it, shopping galore. Are you ready for Christmas? Is your E-commerce site optimized for maximum sales? People will certainly be looking up holiday items and ideas on the Internet, and – to help you gain greater visibility and maximize search traffic – we’ve come up with a list of 7 SEO tips for your retail website.
1. Refresh your content. Don’t just copy and paste from your manufacturer’s website. Be creative. Yes, it takes a lot of effort, but it is worth it to have unique product descriptions, catalog and category descriptions, case studies, industry news, and shopping tips that not only make your E-commerce site a lot more interesting for visitors, but also improve your sales through better search engine visibility.
2. Create a blog. Why not? The fact that holiday season is forthcoming should give you enough things to write about. A blog not only enhances the shopping experience for your customers; it can also serve as an informative source of SEO-friendly content and useful links to your E-commerce site.
3. Incorporate keywords in your product and category URLs. SEO is all about being found more easily, by search engines and by potential customers. Do you have dynamic or static URLs? Rewrite your URLs to include relevant search terms and keywords, and not just a bunch of indecipherable numbers or letters.
4. Optimize your product PDF’s. If your retail website has a resource section where users can download PDF-formatted white papers and product literature, then now is the time to optimize the content of these. Use text that search engines can read, and of course, remember to complete document properties.
5. Optimize your images. Chances are that you’ve posted image previews of what you’re selling. Therein lies another SEO opportunity which other people tend to overlook. Leverage those images for better rankings by adding captions and unique alt text attributes. One of our clients gets 10%of their sales from the products showing up in image search!
6. Rehash repetitive content. If you’re a retailer specializing in a specific product or industry, it doesn’t mean that you have to keep repeating content over and over. Duplicate content can be penalized by Google and other search engines. To avoid suffering the same fate, highlight your products with unique content. Better yet, get testimonials from happy, satisfied customers and incorporate these into your product pages. A great way to help create unique content for your site is to allow customers to submit reviews and comments.
7. Optimize your top pages. Products and categories are added to and removed from e-Commerce sites regularly. It’s good to optimize, but it’s better to optimize the top product. If you remove a page 301 redirect it to a similar product or home page, so that you keep any authority that page developed with Google.