SEO Rules for Ecommerce Content

Marketing

Content marketing and search engine

optimization are interdependent. When

planned and executed properly, content

can greatly improve your natural search

performance. Follow these 10 rules to

successfully blend SEO needs with content

creation.

Research What Customers Care About :

Marketers are quick to embrace market

research to discover their customers’ needs.

SEO keyword research provides another

fast and free method of amassing content

ideas that real people really care about.

Seek to answer the questions people ask

the search engines as well as the big topics

that drive a large amount of demand. Don’t

forget to interview your customer support

personnel for ideas, as well. They are on

the front lines answering questions that

oftentimes mirror the information that

searchers are looking for. In addition to

providing a wealth of content ideas,

ranking well on these topics can help

reduce call center loads.

Choose Content Types Wisely :

Don’t default to writing only articles.

Certainly long-form article content is good

for SEO, when written about a topic that

searchers seek in large numbers and when

written using the language that real people

use when they search. However,

sometimes addressing frequently asked

questions or publishing a step-by-step

guide or video (with transcript) will

convey the topic most clearly and be most

likely to rank well. The best content type

depends on what will benefit your

shoppers most, as well as what will rank

well.

However, sometimes addressing

frequently-asked questions or publishing a

step-by-step guide or video … will convey

the topic most clearly…

How do you determine which content type

is the best? Try Googling it. Search for the

phrases you want to rank well for and pay

special attention to the types of content

that rank well already.

Include Descriptive Text :

Search engines evolve their capabilities

continually, but they still need descriptive

text to help them understand the content

and context of video and images. Always

include transcripts for videos and describe

the images and infographics that contain

key points you need to make. Even if the

content is understandable to shoppers

visually, search engines need that

descriptive text. Without it, search engines

won’t understand the relevance of the

content and won’t be able to rank it, and

that means no traffic and sales from

natural search.

Remember What You Need to Sell :

Stick with content ideas that coincide with

the products and services you offer. If that

sounds like an obvious point, you’ll be

surprised how frequently it’s ignored.

Searchers are interested in an endless

number of products, information, and

concepts. Google reported that 15 percent

of the search queries it receives each day

are queries that they’ve never seen before.

But only a fraction of those are relevant to

your business. Be selective. You won’t win

natural search traffic or drive sales or leads

if you try to generate content outside of

the information related to your product

base. If you sell nuts and bolts, it’s highly

unlikely that even the most passionate

content about baseball will drive traffic

and sales for your site.

Write for Your Audience, Not

Management :

Unless your audience uses the same words

that you do in your business, ditch the

jargon and create content using plain,

descriptive language. Better yet, refer to

that keyword research you did earlier in

deciding what to create content about. It

will also tell you how shoppers think and

speak about those products and services.

Don’t Forget to Sell, Gently :

Ecommerce merchants presumably want

to sell. We want shoppers to land on our

site when they search and be enticed by

the great content we create. But sometimes

it’s the content that ranks instead of the

ecommerce category and product pages.

That means that your content also needs to

sell.

You don’t have to be obvious and pushy

about selling. Information seekers can be

scared off by heavy-handed promotions.

But once you’ve demonstrated how to use

something or how to care for something,

visitors may be open to purchasing the

products required to do so. There’s no

harm in a gentle call to action, such as a

link in the text to a related category or to a

picture and link of a product described.

Remember that the goal is to attract

searchers, among other shoppers, and

searchers may be new to your brand and

product assortment. Helping them find

their way easily to a very relevant product

after providing useful, non-pushy content

makes sense for both of you.

Link Content and Ecommerce :

Linking provides pathways for shoppers to

access and digest content, and also for

search engines to understand the context

and relative importance of various areas of

the site. Use your header and footer

navigation to link to content and

information so that shoppers, search

engines, and searchers can all get where

they need to go for products and

information.

Don’t be stingy about linking from

ecommerce pages to relevant

informational content. If the content

you’re creating is truly relevant and useful,

like guides on how to buy or how to use a

product, that content should help sales

instead of detracting. If you’re concerned

that content might distract shoppers, test

the impact.

Linking provides pathways for shoppers to

access … content, and also for search

engines to understand the context…

Host Content on Your Site :

If you want to rank for something, put the

content on your own site — the same site

from which you sell your products— not a

microsite. Microsite content won’t benefit

your natural search performance. Yes,

you’ll link from that microsite back to your

ecommerce site, but it doesn’t add value as

an external link from a different site

because the search engines can usually

detect that it’s a self-owned site. In

addition, you’ll lose the benefit of the

interlinking opportunities that come with

hosting the content on your ecommerce

site.

Consider Syndicating Content :

Sometimes content on your own site won’t

attract the right audience. You need to

seek eyeballs where they’re already at. In

this case, syndicating content — i.e.,

offering content to other sites for their use

— can outweigh the need to host content

on your own site. To maintain SEO benefit

from content you’re syndicating out to

other sites, host it on your own site and

contractually require that the hosting sites

use canonical tags to refer to your site’s

content as the definitive source. This

ensures that you retain the SEO benefit of

creating the content, while also removing

any duplicate content concerns.

Be Wary of Publishing Syndicated

Content :

If you don’t have the resources to create

content in-house, publishing content from

another source might seem like an

attractive solution. For SEO, however, it is

not.When you host another site’s content

on your own site, you’re helping someone

else rank. If they’re smart, they’ll require a

canonical tag that refers any ownership

and authority that the content might

generate back to their own site. Even if

they don’t require the canonical tag, when

the same content is posted in multiple

locations, as duplicate content it loses

value for SEO in all of those locations.

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