{"id":1707,"date":"2017-09-01T03:56:28","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T17:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pixeld.com.au\/how-to-optimise-an-e%e2%80%91commerce-website-for-google\/"},"modified":"2023-09-01T13:24:08","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T03:24:08","slug":"how-to-optimise-an-e%e2%80%91commerce-website-for-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixeld.com.au\/how-to-optimise-an-e%e2%80%91commerce-website-for-google\/","title":{"rendered":"How to optimise an e\u2011commerce website for Google"},"content":{"rendered":"
Trying to optimise an e-commerce website for search engines can be an overwhelming task, especially if you have a large catalogue of products. You could be trying to optimise hundreds, if not thousands of product pages. My advice is that spending all of your time optimising product pages is not worth it, for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n
Here are some of the challenges of this approach.<\/p>\n
There is no magical number of words you should write on a page to get it to rank well. There is a strong argument for the more words the better, but at the end of the day you should write an amount of copy that is appropriate for the topic. Writing for the sake of writing is no longer the answer.<\/p>\n
Writing lengthy content for individual products can be a real strain on your creative powers. Further more what customer hangs around to read paragraphs of text whilst they are window shopping? I’d suggest one paragraph of text is appropriate for most online stores which is not exactly ‘classic SEO guidelines’.<\/p>\n
You might have a range of products that are all very similar, so writing descriptions for each one can be a real chore, especially if you are trying to reach a magic word count. The temptation is to copy and paste. Not so fast. You can’t just have the same content on every product page. Google doesn’t like duplicate content and might penalise those pages, and worst case might even penalise your entire site. Google prefers each of your pages to have unique content that is useful to your visitors. There is no short cut.<\/p>\n
If you optimise a whole bunch of product pages that are all very similar products, they all compete with each other and don’t send a strong signal to Google which page should rank for that topic. But a category page has the opportunity to be your ‘landing page’ for a search term. It’s the overarching parent of all of those products. The boss.<\/p>\n
If I was selling leather belts for example, I could have a category page titled ‘leather belts’ that has some copy, images and products listed, all revolving around the topic of leather belts. This page has a great chance of ranking for people broadly searching for leather belts.<\/p>\n
The individual product pages that fall underneath this category could be ‘Black Hugo Boss leather belt’ or ‘Brown Calvin Klein leather belt’. These pages have a great chance of ranking well for people searching specifically for a brand or colour of leather belt, but less chance for people searching broadly for leather belts. The more specific a page is, the easier it is to rank for that specific term.<\/p>\n
Optimising a product category page is exactly the same as any other page on your website. You need to have the correct elements on the page to signal to Google what your page is about.<\/p>\n