E-Commerce is a relatively new and hugely profitable merchant format. It allows businesses to buy and sell all over the world at the click of a button, and it's revolutionized the way businesses all over the world interact with their customers.
Besides offering new opportunities for business, it also provides some unique challenges. Businesses rely entirely on the internet to find and reach their customers, and they have to compete with a lot more businesses.
When they encounter competition, brick and mortar businesses can literally distance themselves from their competitors by opening a location on the opposite end of town to make themselves a more practical choice for local customers. E-Commerce businesses, on the other hand, have to compete directly with everyone in their region, their country, or sometimes the whole world.
Competing on the internet means ensuring that your potential customers can find you, and the biggest hurdle to that is making sure that you show up in the search results. So, how can you make sure that happens?
Site Organization
Your site needs to be built in a systematic and hierarchical fashion so that it’s easy for a search engine to crawl and understand. Create keyword rich categories to organize your products, and create individual pages for those categories that you can reach through your home page. Then create unique product pages for each product that you’re going to sell.
The URLs of your pages have a major impact on how they’ll be ranked, and making sure that they’re placed in a logical hierarchy is essential. Each page should be subordinate to the more general category above it, like this:
www.exampleecommerce.com/
www.exampleecommerce.com/example-category/
www.exampleecommerce.com/example-category/example-product/
This way the search engine’s bot can easily read that the product belongs to the category given in the URL, which would be much more difficult to indicate if you tried to attach each product page directly to the homepage like this: www.exampleecommerce.com/example-product/.
Keyword Rich URLs
When you’re setting up the URLs for categories and products it’s important that you put the names of the categories and products directly into the URL instead of using generic or arbitrary identifiers like product codes. That means that something like "www.computers.com/laptops/super-ultra-book12000/" is much better than something generic and meaningless, like "www.store.com/category-3/product-125TF87XZ832".
Product Descriptions
Now that we’ve got the structural stuff out of the way it’s time to tell the search engine what your product is about and who it’s for. Each of your product pages needs to have a unique description for the product. It doesn’t need to be very long, but it should contain important keywords about your product. For example, if we’re selling homemade chairs, your product description might look something like this:
“This homemade chair is produced from ethically sourced Argentine oak. The unique design is the work of our local craftsman, who has been producing high quality wood furniture for fifteen years.”
This description contains a number of keywords that someone might search to find your product, including direct matches for “homemade chair” and “high quality wood furniture”, and partial matches for searches that include “local”, “ethically sourced”, “craftsman”, “Argentine oak”, etc...
Reviews
Pages are weighed more highly if they are regularly updated, and for e-commerce pages that usually means encouraging people to leave reviews. While it’s not a great idea to have fake reviews posted to your site (they’re unethical and usually fairly easy to detect), it is a good idea to encourage customers to leave reviews after their purchase.
An easy way to do this is to automatically send an email after their shipment arrives, or to offer a minor incentive for customers to create an account on your site that will prompt them for a review the next time they log in.
Optimizing your e-commerce pages can sound daunting, but with perseverance and perhaps a bit of help from your neighborhood digital marketer you can bring your site into the public view.