Optimizing E-Commerce Pages

If you run a store on your website, your biggest challenge is likely getting people to the product pages.  This is really where you want people to go since these pages generate revenue for your business.  Here are some starting tips to help you:

1. Guest blog

Do as I do and start guest blogging.  A lot of times you’ll be able to write about topics that are contextually related to what you sell.  For example, if you’re a roofing contractor, you can guest blog about energy saving tips around the house.  There’s a genuine interest in how to save energy since it keeps you cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and energy savings usually mean money savings.  Then at the end of your post, you can link to a product page and briefly mention how your service or good relates to energy sales.  You’ve already set up a motive for people to buy and you didn’t spam or upset anybody.  Plus, that backlink will help with the SEO of that particular page.

2. Get Snippy with Rich Snippets

When the Big Three (Google, Bing, Yahoo) announced Schema.org, it buzzed in the news for a couple of days and then was never really talked about again.  While I don’t like the cartelization of structured data (the W3C has been working on RDFa and Microformats for years), the fact is there’s nothing I can do to stop it.  So those of us who want to rank higher can either start using rich snippets and Schema.org or we can refuse while our competitors start doing it.  Smaller sites have an advantage in this field – they have less pages to change, so they can deploy structured data projects in less time.  Your information will be more readable by the search engines, meaning they will display things like price and ratings in the results – and this change in display will make your individual page bigger in the results.  Bigger stands out more.  The old saying, “It’s not about how big your boat is, but the motion of the ocean” is false.  You will never cross the Atlantic in a row boat and you’ll never attract customers with a tiny search result.

3. Give People a Backup Call to Action

Your product page does two things.  First, it draws people to the page. This is done through the text that helps with your SEO.  Then, it makes people buy from you.  This is done with the display of the product, the reviews, and so forth.  But what do you do with people who are drawn to your page (presumably because they were searching for this product) but don’t buy?  You need a backup call to action in order to avoid losing these customers.  They’re obviously in the mood to buy, but don’t want to at that exact moment, for whatever reason.  Some want to comparison shop.  Others are making a list for later.  You need to capture these leads if you don’t want to risk them forgetting about you when they go to buy.  To that end, I suggest collecting email addresses so that you can send these people updates later.

Author: Brandon Schwartz, the owner of Boomajoom.com.  Brandon provides e-commerce SEO services to those want more help with this kind of thing.  He also does SEO for San Jose customers as well as any around the country who want to reach more customers.