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Blog items tagged with "on-page-seo"

3 Ways to Generate Higher CTR's with Product Page Schema Markup

Ecommerce SEO's are always looking for ways to boost their product page click-through rates (CTR's) from Google SERPs. In this short article, I will show you three of the most powerful ways to do just that using Schema markup.

Depending on whether or not your product pages contain images, videos, ratings, or reviews - some of these elements may not apply. Nonetheless, take a quick gander and see if you can implement product page Schema markup to boost your CTR's, and perhaps, your SEO keyword rankings.

1. Ratings & Reviews

If your ecommerce site features ratings and reviews on your product pages, you can make this information appear in Google search results. You've probably seen these beautiful rich snippets popping on high authority site listings - the little 5 star rating showing just under the URL.

Product Review Rich Snippet Schema

There are a number of ways to trigger this rich snippet on your product pages. For instance, you can manually integrated the code via the AggregateRating microdata at Schema.org/Product, or try other methods like the hReview-aggregate microformat to make ratings and reviews data appear in Google.

After implementing this product page Schema markup, hop on over to your Google Webmaster Tools account and use the Rich Snippet Testing Tool to ensure it's working properly.

2. Images & Videos

Perhaps the most profound product page rich snippet that grabs attention and entices click-through's is for images and videos. Rich snippets for video and images do not render as often as other product page rich snippets (often it's YouTube that owns these gems,) however if your product page SEO is highly specific (make, model, model variation, etc.) and the users search query was also specific, it's definitely achievable and worth while.

Video Rich Snippet Schema

In this case, ispot.tv used a Macy's commercial to trigger the video rich snippet in their Google listing - creative, yet borderline ethical. Nonetheless, they masterfully leveraged the Schema.org/VideoObject microdata to make it happen.

Video Rich Snippet Code

For images, use the Schema.org/ImageObject microdata markup. It's essentially the same format as for Videos, and equally as eye-grabbing.

3. Product Name & Price

The product name and price rich snippet is especially powerful if your ecommerce site offers competitive pricing. It also helps to bring in better quality traffic, as shoppers know the price before they click your listing.

In the example below, FarmandFleet.com was able to trigger the price of their 57 piece socket wrench set at $79.99.

Product Price Rich Snippet Schema

This was achieved by leveraging the Schema.org/Offer microdata markup.

Product Price Rich Snippet Code

As you've probably gathered, implementing product page Schema markup takes some technical capacity. But in most cases of using Schema, the content of your product pages is easier to interpret by Google, and thus generates some impactful search results. If you're using Wordpress to manage your online store, explore some of the Schema-generating plugins available. These can make the process much easier and streamlined.

 

Tyler Tafelsky PPC EcommerceAbout the Author:
Tyler Tafelsky is an ecommerce SEO analyst at Click Centric SEO. In addition to blogging at BetterTriathlete.com, Tyler is well-versed in multiple facets of organic search marketing, particularly link generation, content strategy, and social media marketing.

5 Must-Use HTML Tags for Product Page SEO

HTML Tags for Ecommerce SEOOptimizing product pages is an integral aspect of ecommerce SEO. But many search marketers are stuck in rut as to which elements of a product page need to be optimized.

Most of us know the basic tags for SEO: page title tag, Meta description tag, etc. So in this article, I highlight 5 HTML tags that you might not be including in your on-page optimization.

Schema Product Markup

If you're new to Schema, then I highly suggest you visit Schema.org and freshen up. Using Schema's structured data markup enables you to better communicate a page's content to search engines. In short, it's a game changer for ecommerce SEO.

What is Schema

There are specific schemas for products. These can not only help your product pages rank harder, but also display rich snippets in Google's search results.

Some of the most powerful to consider include: aggregateRating, brand, model, and productID. Take a gander and get busy!

Rel="Canonical" Tag

Think of the Rel=Canonical tag as means to tell search engines the most important pages on your site. In some cases, particularly on ecommerce sites with 1000's of pages, duplicate content (or very similar pages) can exist. Often times, this can discount SEO value to the page your really want getting all the love and attention from Google.

SEO Conanical Tags

Tell Google "this is the page to crawl, index, and rank" and implement the Rel=Canonical tag on your optimized product pages. It's super easy and potentially an SEO game-changer depending on your website.

Image ALT Tag

The image ALT tag is intended to be alternative text for those viewing a page that doesn't render an image. The ALT tag should reflect what the image is, but it's constantly abused by SEO's and keyword stuffers. Just don't leave it blank. Write at least something in for your ALT tags.

SEO Alt Tag

The nice thing about product pages is that the images being used are typically very keyword relevant. For this reason, it's legit to use keywords in the image ALT tag for these pages. If you have multiple images, vary your ALT tags with keyword variations. You can take the practice of image optimization even further by using these strategies.

Header 2's, 3's and 4's

Introduce some depth to you product pages by including more elaborate descriptions. Not only are unique, creatively-written product descriptions essential for SEO, but they also sell and can inspire visitors to make a purchase.

When separating ideas and paragraphs, use H2, H3, and H4 tags where appropriate. This is good practice incorporate in all aspects of on-page SEO.

Strong, Italics, Underline Tags

Text styling tags, like the strong (bold), italics, and underline tags, are some of the most under-used HTML tags that can help with both SEO and CRO. Wrapping keywords and phrases in these tags can help to emphasize greater meaning and value in certain words on your product pages. Not only does this practice help signify keywords of value for SEO, but creatively using text styling makes for a better user experience.

 

Tyler Tafelsky PPC EcommerceAbout the Author:
Tyler Tafelsky is an ecommerce SEO analyst at Click Centric SEO. In addition cycling and blogging at BetterTriathlete.com, Tyler is well-versed in multiple facets of organic search marketing, particularly link generation, content strategy, and social media marketing.

Sitemaps: Ecommerce Essentials for On-Page SEO

When it comes to SEO, particularly SEO for ecommerce sites, sitemaps are one of the most important elements of a website.

The sitemap is considered by many search marketing experts the second most important page of a website (next to the homepage as number one.) If you think of your website as a book, the sitemap serves as main reference point, or index.

In its very essence, a sitemap contains links to all primary pages of a website. Although not commonly used by typical users for navigation, the sitemap serve as a roadmap for search engine spiders, giving direction to all of the rich, rank-ready content that needs to be crawled and indexed.

Sitemaps for SEO

As a result, sitemaps are absolutely essential for SEO (specifically "on-page SEO"). Most websites only need one sitemap to fit the bill; however, larger ecommerce sites can be an exception.

Because ecommerce sites are deep and often contain thousands of pages, one sitemap can pose some limitations for SEO. In short, one sitemap with thousands of links is a bit much. That is, the value of each link is significantly reduced when spread amongst thousands of counterparts.

Using Segmented Sitemaps for Deep Ecommerce Sites

There are no rules as to how many sitemaps you can have. Deep ecommerce sites with thousands of pages should take full advantage of segmented sitemaps. These are more focal sitemaps that are broken-down based on specific product categories, brands, and other characteristics that make logical sense.

For example, an online electronics store that specializes in hi-def TV's may want to create dedicated sitemaps for each brand it offers. This retailer could create segmented sitemaps for Samsung TV's, Sony TV's, Toshiba TV's, and so on.

Perhaps the ecommerce retailer only offers a few select television products per brand, in addition to many other electronics. In this case, they might simply have one sitemap for TV's, and additional sitemaps dedicated to other product categories, such as PC's, MP3 players, smartphones, etc.

The main idea is be logical about the segmentation process with respect to your ecommerce SEO strategy. If "Samsung TVs" is the keyword you want to rank for (and you have a ton of Samsung televisions in-stock,) then it would make logical sense to build a dedicated sitemap for this brand.

Leveraging XML Sitemaps SEO Empowerment

XML sitemaps are a little bit different. Unlike "HTML sitemaps" (which are visible to website users,) XML sitemaps are a files that are uploaded to your website, but invisible to the common visitor.

These XML files also contain links to your primary pages (and can also be segmented,) however they carry a different purpose for SEO. XML sitemaps are submitted to Google (via your Google Webmaster Tools account) to notify Google spiders of all the pages that you want crawled and indexed.

Because some pages of your site may not be easily discoverable by Google's normal crawling process, regular XML sitemap submissions are good way to ensure that Google is well-aware of what needs to be crawled and indexed. This is particularly important when you add new pages to your website.

To learn more about sitemaps and Google's guidelines on this Google Support page about the topic.

 

Tyler Tafelsky PPC EcommerceAbout the Author:
Tyler Tafelsky is the lead SEO analyst at Click Centric SEO. Tyler is well-versed in multiple facets of Internet marketing, including organic SEO, PPC advertising, social media, and content marketing. Keep in touch with Tyler by following him on Twitter or encircling him Google+.

[Infographic:] On-page SEO for Ecommerce Sites

There's no two ways about it: SEO for ecommerce sites is a challenge.

With (literally) thousands of pages to tend to, it takes a lot of resources to check off all the on-page SEO boxes that Google looks for.

Fortunately, you can get more traffic to your product and category pages by implementing these simple on-page SEO "hacks" courtesy of Backlinko.

On-Page SEO Infographic

While all of these SEO tips apply to ecommerce sites, here are the four strategies that can get you the most traffic in the shortest period of time:

1. Add modifiers to title tags: A common mistake that I see ecommerce sites make is to use short title tags. There's a large percentage of searchers who use long tail keywords, like "best blue widget", "cheap blue widgets", or "brand blue widgets". By adding these modifiers before and after your target keywords you can potentially wrangle in more search traffic.

2. Speed up your page loading speed: A study by Amazon found that they lost 1% in sales for every 100 miliseconds of site speed loading time. If you run an ecommerce site you literally can't afford to have a slow website. One of the fastest ways to boost site speed loading time is to switch over to a better hosting plan. It's usually more expensive, but the ROI is typically positive over the long-term.

3. Post long content: Google loves giving their users pages with lots and lots of content. Unfortunately, most product pages are fairly thin in the content department (mostly due to the sheer number of pages ecommerce sites tend to have). One way to get around this is to identify your top 5-10 pages that you'd like to get more traffic to. Then add more details and information about the product on those pages.

4. Lower your bounce rate: A bounce doesn't just represent a lost sale: it may also mean decreased visibility in Google search. One site way to reduce your bounce rate is to add multiple "related products" sliders. This is a technique Zappos employs on their product pages:

Related Products

This can also boost page views and time on site: two important user-interaction signals for SEO. Stay tuned for more ecommerce SEO best practices.

The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Sites

Ecommerce SEO can be a complex undertaking that demands a higher degree of effort and consideration compared to typical websites. In addition to optimizing a robust site (that may contain hundreds and thousands of pages,) ecommerce SEO is typically more keyword competitive as well. ecommerce seo checklist

In short, there's just a lot that goes into the SEO process for an online store. Although the best results are attained with a professional ecommerce SEO company, there are a number of on-site SEO tasks that can be handled in-house by a webmaster or tech-savvy marketing team.

In this article we share several SEO processes that are essential for ecommerce sites. Think of all of these processes as your ultimate SEO checklist for your ecommerce store.

Your Ecommerce SEO Checklist

  • Define keyword optimization naming convention - This doesn't sound as technical as it may seem. A "keyword optimization naming convention" is simply the semantic structure of words that you use for essential SEO elements (namely the Meta Title.) Because ecommerce sites are often so deep with pages, it's best to write a consistent naming convention for the Title and other parts of a page. A good place to start in developing SEO-friendly naming conventions is with the brand name and then the primary keyword phrase (or product name.) So your naming convention formula might be "[Brand] [Product Name] | [Ecommerce Store Name]" (e.g. "Nike Flex Trainer 2 Shoes | EcommerceShoeStore.com.") You can also apply naming conventions for URLs, Meta Descriptions, and other important content elements with SEO value.
  • Always write unique page copy - One of the biggest SEO mishaps that ecommerce stores face is duplicate content. This often stems from using generic product descriptions provided by manufacturers. The problem is that the same product descriptions are found on various other websites (perhaps even competitors'.) As a result of using generic content, the SEO value of your product pages is significantly diminished (if not entirely obsolete.) Instead, take the time to write unique and compelling product descriptions. This might demand the help of an experienced copywriter, but the investment is usually well worth it.
  • Keyword optimize media files – Most individuals who know a thing or two about SEO are familiar with keyword optimizing the ALT tag for images. However only few keyword optimize the entire file before uploading it to the website. To do this, name your media files with respect to your keyword targets (which is typically logical for product page image.) Additionally, you can modify the properties of images to be more keyword relevant. Right click the image or media file, select properties, and populate the title, sub-title, tags, description, and comments of the file to reflect your keyword targets. This helps maximize the SEO value of your pages when you go to upload the files.
  • Optimize for faster load speeds - Beyond the scope of SEO, optimizing your ecommerce website for fast load speed enhances user experience (which aids in conversions.) Although there is some SEO value to having a quick load times, most value is seen for conversion optimization. Faster load speed is achieved by minimizing the HTML code and optimizing robust media files. By taking the time to strip unnecessary code and reduce the file size of images and video, you can significantly improve your website load speed.
  • Start content marketing (if you haven't already) – Content marketing is the glue that holds your social media marketing and SEO efforts together. In a nutshell, you can create informative, inspiring, and enlightening videos, articles/blog posts, or images/graphics, and share the goodness with your social media followers. Awesome content earns social authority and gets linked-to naturally. As a result, you can leverage content marketing to both increase your keyword rankings and grow your social media following.
  • Integrate social media icons - There's no question that social media is having a game-changing impact on SEO. Tweets, shares, likes, +1's, pins, and other "social signals" are becoming stronger ranking factors. In essence, social signals tell search engines that humans are digging it, so it's worthy of higher rankings. In addition building a presence on relevant social media sites, integrating social media icons makes it more efficient for visitors to like your content, particularly product pages, the homepage, and blog posts.
  • Build a HTML sitemap - The HTML sitemap serves as the index of your ecommerce site, and is considered by many SEO experts as the second most important page of the website (next to the homepage.) Although visitors rarely use the sitemap, it's very important to search engine spiders and SEO in general. The issue with ecommerce websites is that a complete sitemap can sometimes contain thousands of pages. When this is the case, you can create segmented sitemaps that focus on specific product categories. From you primary HTML sitemap, you can link to each segmented sitemap. This is a great solution for SEO and helps to keep your online store in good shape for crawling and indexing.

Although there's a lot more that goes into ecommerce SEO than the processes mentioned above, this is a solid starting place to get the ball rolling. On-page SEO is only a small piece of the puzzle, however by respecting the potential behind content marketing and social media, you'll be well on your way to executing some momentous off-page SEO strategies.

Product Page SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites

When it comes to ecommerce SEO, product pages are the bee's knees. In addition to SEO and generating valuable search traffic, product pages are primary conversion touch-points that sway visitors to buy now, or to keep browsing. 

It's thus important that you respect both SEO and CRO (conversion rate optimization) when optimizing your product pages.

Although the scope of this article is to offer product page SEO tips for your ecommerce website, some insights will touch upon CRO and promoting the conversion value of these pages.

Before Optimizing, Know Your Keyword Targets

When you're doing keyword research, you'll want to understand how your product pages relate to the searching behaviors of your target market.

Product pages represent a specific product. Your target search market is seeking a specific product. For this reason, you should optimize your product pages for very specific long-tail keywords.

Not only are these keywords more achievable in a competitive ecommerce SEO context, but the individual's searching these long-tails are further along in the buying cycle and know exactly what they're looking for.

So when pinpointing your keyword targets for product pages, go deep. That is, avoid broad keywords like "Men's Tri Shorts" and shoot for more specific long-tails like "TYR Competitor 7" Tri Shorts Men's."

Write a Keyword Naming Convention

The keyword naming convention is the order or sequence of terms that make up your complete keyword target. Determining the keyword naming convention is important to ensure the on-page SEO or keyword optimization process is consistent.

Consistency is key when it comes to any form of on-page SEO. For example, let's say we are optimizing a product page for the latter phrase "TYR Competitor 7" Tri Shorts Men's."

If we write this phrase as our Page Title, we'll want to use the exact same sequence of keywords for the Meta Description and header of the page copy (not "Men's Tri Shorts TYR Competitor 7.") Be sure to pinpoint this naming convention for your product pages and keep it consistent for each of the following elements mentioned below.

Optimizing Product Pages for Ecommerce SEO

After you have your keyword naming convention down, the on-page SEO process is fairly simple. Below are the content elements you'll want to optimize for each page (and examples based on our mock keyword target:)

  • URL: Be sure to include the most essential terms of the keyword phrase.
    • www.ecommerce-website.com/tyr-competitor-7-triathlon-shorts-mens/
  • Page Title: Define your page using the exact phrase match of the keyword target (but try to keep titles under 70 characters so all text appears in the search results.)
    • TYR Competitor 7" Tri Shorts Men's | [Ecommerce Website]
  • Meta Description: Although it is under debate on whether or not keyword inclusion in the Meta description helps with SEO, search terms will be displayed in bold which can help to make your listing more relevant to searchers. Additionally, this description is your sales pitch to compel search users to click your listing.
    • Shop for TYR Competitor 7" Tri Shorts in Men's from [Ecommerce Website]. We offer some of the lowest prices on TYR triathlon gear and clothing.
  • Page Copy: In the visible copy, try to use the same keyword naming convention in the first header as the Page Title. It also helps to have the keyword mentioned a few times in the supportive copy or product description. Consumer-generated reviews are one of the best way to integrate quality content that offers conversion value (as well as SEO value.)
    • Page copywriting tip - don't use product descriptions provided by manufacturers. You want to avoid any risk of duplicate content with other website, so write your own copy and make it unique.
  • Media Files: Before uploaded images and videos to your product pages, keyword optimize media files by opening-up the image or video properties. Here you can add keyword references to titles, sub-titles, tags, descriptions, and other fields.
    • Bonus -Do this can result in your images showing up in Google Image search for related product keywords.

That, my friends, this the simple process of on-page SEO for ecommerce product pages. Stay tuned for more SEO-focused articles here at Click Centric SEO.

Using Google Suggested Search (Autocomplete) for SEO Keyword Research

When it comes to on-page SEO for ecommerce sites, optimizing for the right keyword is paramount. Ecommerce sites face an extra degree of difficulty when it comes to product-related keywords. This is primarily because product-related keywords are known to be profitable, and many marketers are investing heavily to be found on those keywords.

As a result of the keyword competitiveness found in various ecommerce markets, smart SEO's are going after more specific, long-tail search terms. So instead of optimizing an online shoe store for 'Saucony running shoes' (which is extremely competitive,) a more precise keyword target that might actually lead to high rankings is "Saucony progrid guide 3 womens running shoe," (assuming the online store carries such shoes.)

How did I come up with that lengthy, seven-word target? By using Google's suggested search feature, or autocomplete

As you start typing "Saucony progrid guide," Google suggests the Progrid models 3, 4, or 5. After following through with a model number, gender is often the next filter suggested by Google. Based on our shoe store's "inventory," we will know that "Saucony progrid guide 3 womens" is our primary keyword target, with "running shoes" as the secondary long-tail target.

In a competitive keyword category, this keyword research strategy is highly effective to gain insight on the searching behaviors of common Google users.

Use Google Suggested Search for PPC Keyword Research

Using the Google autocomplete feature is also a great way to target keywords for ecommerce PPC advertising. In any ecommerce PPC campaign, typically the more keyword-specific you can get with your ad groups, the better. By utilizing suggested search, advertisers can bid with precision on highly targeted keywords using creative bidding strategies like modified broad match.

Using the above example, we could bid on dedicated ad group for the keyword phrase "+saucony +guide +3 +womens." (Using plus signs in front of keywords is modified broad match - a highly efficient form of bidding.) The only way our ad will trigger is if all of those keywords are used in a search query.

Based on the competition in the image above, we could apply some superb PPC strategies to really stand out from lazy competitors above (except for the one at the bottom.) Spread this bidding strategy across an entire product line, and you have yourself a very powerful AdWords campaign with highly focused ad groups.

Now can you create more relevant ad copy, but your quality scores are typically lower, resulting in lower bid prices. Additionally, you can make better use of Google's Ad Extensions features, which really spruce-up the ad at no additional cost.


 

This article written by Tyler Tafelsky, one of our Ecommerce SEO Specialists here at ClickCentric SEO. Connect with Tyler on Google+".

3 Essentials of Search Engine Optimization for Ecommerce Sites

Ecommerce sites are conceptually similar in that they all have product categories, subcategories, product pages, shopping carts, and checkout processes. This makes the fundamentals of ecommerce search engine optimization, (SEO) relatively universal for most online stores; however, there are still a number of intricacies that contribute to better rankings.

In this article, we outline some of the most important concepts of SEO for ecommerce sites. Acknowledging these three components of search engine optimization will help you create a more prominent presence in the organic search results.

1. Optimize Product-Level Pages

Product pages are some of the most important page for ecommerce SEO. These are the pages that contain unique, value-driven content that is often optimized for specific (often times long-tail) keyword targets. When optimizing product-level pages for ecommerce SEO:

  • always do keyword research to know the exact keyword target/search query per product.
  • ensure all page text is crawl-able by search engine spiders.
  • make strategic use of headers, strong tags, and other content elements while optimizing product pages.
  • mention key product features, specifications, unique selling propositions in the content.
  • implement rich media like videos and image galleries.
  • infuse user-generated customer reviews on each product page.
  • display related products or additional selling pushes, such as 'products that might go good with this product' or ‘customers who bought this, also bought that.’

2. Proper Page Classification

Classifying pages on your ecommerce site is highly important to bolster category pages that have been optimized for ‘short tail’ keyword queries and generic searches. Proper page classification also ensures a more intuitive navigation and browsing experience for users (which also translates to better conversion rates). For effective classification of pages:

  • assign and organize product-level pages under tiers for product categories and subcategories.
  • organize the each product category into a hierarchy.
  • focus on more short-tail keyword optimization when doing category level SEO (such as brands or broad-based categories.)
  • List and link all relevant product level pages on each category page.

3. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is common problem for ecommerce sites and can negatively impact your SEO efforts. In many cases, particularly with content management system (CMS) software, pages may be generated without acknowledging issues with duplicate content. Whether this be duplicate page titles and meta data, page copy, or complete pages, you'll want to be mindful of many considerations, including:

  • avoid duplicate content both on-page and off-page.
  • ensure that your have unique category pages (that show no signs of overlapping with other related pages and more importantly, have unique product pages.
  • assign source attribution to products by adding parameters to URLs.
  • when doing affiliate marketing, have alternate versions of your product information in different feeds. Create different sets of descriptions, titles, and other elements.
  • consider having select fields in the different feeds, reserving the full product data set for your website.
  • use Google Webmaster Tools, check search engine indexes and do analysis to identify and to eliminate duplicate content. These are three core components of SEO for ecommerce sites that must not go overlooked.

Although there are many other factors that go into the optimization of an ecommerce store, these three are the most essential can make or break your search engine optimization campaign.

In addition to these essentials mentioned above, cohesive ecommerce SEO campaigns will almost always include social media marketing as well as a number of off-page SEO strategies, such as link building, content marketing, and ongoing public relations management.

The idea is build a strong ecommerce brand through a number of channels, with SEO being the base for increased exposure in the search results.

 

This article written by Tyler Tafelsky, one of our Ecommerce SEO Specialists here at ClickCentric SEO.

Visit Tyler on Google+

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