Ecommerce SEO help

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products.

We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot.

I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France.

I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands.

I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO.

I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue.

Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Becky

Marcus pretty well covered things, but wanted to point you to a video Matt Cutts did a few years back about discontinued products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A - a good watch to get an idea of how Google may look at things, and he breaks out some options depending on the type of site you have.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Becky

In an ideal world you will want to keep the old pages up or at least redirect them to the equivalent. If they 404 then that's just not ideal. If these pages acquire inbound links (which may be doubtful) you are throwing away equity by not keeping them or redirecting them.

You could try the following:

• Crawl all pages in screaming frog
• Export the list of all pages
• Crawl the list
• Note all internal 404s and 301 them to the relevant page

That is a bit of a hack but if aspects of this are outside of your control that will allow you to keep track of historical changes.

With regards to general optimisation of products you will want to look at ways to prioritise - one person and 20,000 products is a tough gig. However, there may only be 2,000 products that are really important / profitable. This should factor in what is important to the business first so you have some way to prioritise. Then look at the current situation (rank), opportunity (competition) and create an ordered list to give you some plan of attack.

The category pages are a little different and a sensible approach would be to do an audit of sorts as there is likely to be far less of these.

• Get a list of all category pages and targeted keywords
• Find where you are currently (situation analysis)
• Review the competition (opportunities)
• Look for categories where you are almost there OR could improve over what is there currently
• Order by opportunity and focus on those first

If you can create an ordered list that factors in opportunity / difficulty and any other factors you can at least tackle this in a structured way.

Sounds like Chaos though - 20,000 products is a tough gig for one SEO.

Hope that helps.
Marcus