Unique Content is a phrase that is often touted by those in the SEO industry, even Google representatives champion “having great content”, but the reality for many website owners is that they are unable to provide this – especially on an ecommerce website.
Typically an ecommerce website’s product page will contain vital information such as the price of the item and a small description, which has usually been written by the manufacturer. Making this type of page stand out above the competition to potentially gain rankings is going to be difficult in this state.
If this scenario fits your ecommerce website, here are a few ideas how you can integrate unique content onto your product pages.
Unique Descriptions / Reviews
Depending on the amount of products your website sells, keeping on top of this may be difficult, but if you could write a small description of the product in your own words, or based on your experience of the product, it will help make the search engines see the page as more unique.
Customer Reviews
Let your costumers assist your on-site SEO! If your customers write reviews on your products, then they will be creating unique content for your page. Just a few customer reviews can help your page be seen as unique. The other benefit of adding customer reviews on a regular basis is that the page will be updated at different times, meaning the page will retain an element of “freshness”.
Customer Comments
Similar to customer reviews, simply encouraging customers to comment on product pages (similar to encouraging users to comment on blog posts) can help the page be seen as unique to a certain extent. I’d suggest that you do this in addition to unique reviews though to keep the page on-topic. To discourage spam, I’d suggest you use a Facebook commenting system instead of an anonymous system.
News Feeds
This won’t be appropriate for every product, but in some cases there may be opportunities to integrate RSS news feeds onto your product pages. Although the content is being sourced from elsewhere, the page content will be updated regularly keeping the “freshness” of the page alive.
Customers Also Bought
If your using a popular open source ecommerce system, then adding the functionality to display similar products to the page that is being displayed should be straight forward. By adding additional content to the page, it will help raise the amount of uniqueness.
So there you have it, six probably head smacking tips to help you make your ecommerce product pages be seen as unique, especially when compared to your competitors who aren’t making the same amount of effort as you!