Search Marketing factors for Ecommerce

While building an Ecommerce Solution it is very easy to get so tied up in shopping carts, product page layouts and order processing and to forget one of the most important factors of your Ecommerce Store; Its performance in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Here at Advansys we keep tabs on the latest Ecommerce Websites as they go up and it is quite upsetting to see how many new eTailers forget to make use of the tools they have at their disposal to really make an impact on the web with their product ranges.

Unless your store is part of a larger brand, or you already have a loyal customer base, the position on which you appear in Google or Bing will determine the rate at which your business will pick up new customers. Because search engine ranking is largely based on the content you put in your site you must make sure that this is a search friendly as possible. Here are some tips to optimising your content for Search Marketing.

1. Include Stock product information
Your suppliers should be able to give you the basic product information that is required to be posted with your product, serial numbers, product codes, dimensions. This information is seen as very relevant to the product (as it is common to most ecommerce stores with that product in their stock list).

2. Write your own description content
It is very common for product descriptions to be taken directly from supplied material which means that a product search on Google will return a great number of descriptions that are exactly the same. This means that you can gain an SEO advantage by writing your own descriptions and as an added advantage, if your descriptions are complete and concise you will encourage more conversions.

3. Don’t forget your category pages
Category pages need text just as much as Product pages, use good keyword rich descriptive text and make sure that the product list on these pages also includes text pulled from the product page and supplier part numbers to increase the relevance of your pages.

4. Use all of the input fields in your CMS
If there is a field on a record then it is probably beneficial to fill it in for each product. This means that you must put in you keywords, you must put in meta descriptions and you must put in relevant page titles and SEO friendly URLs. Use every trick your CMS gives you to gain advantage.

5. Tag your images
Image searches are becoming one of the most common searches on Google today, especially when potential customers are researching a product. So have more than one image of the product, at least two, use both the alt text and title tag to tag one image with the product name and the other to tag it with the product’s supplier code, in this way you will cover all possible searches and pull in new customers, especially if your images are better than you competitors.

So there you have it; five tips to give yourself the edge over your competitors from the very start of your ecommerce experience. Now go forth and dominate!

Source: Google.com