SEO for ecommerce site. Where do I start?!

[amorby]

Hello! New pro member here that's very excited yet overwhelmed about working with a large e-commerce site for photo gear. I've already read the SEOMoz beginner's guide, but we have about 4k products online, and I've been researching and researching  but am feeling more confused than ever on where to start.

It seems that most SEO help articles I read are based around optimizing a couple of keywords for a site that provides a general service, but where do you begin when you have 4k products?

I've been trying to start with the products that get the most traffic and least conversions. But even then it's overwhelming--which keywords do I choose? And with products like Polaroid film where we have several similar products--how do I know which keyword to use for each product page?

This is a hugely broad question, but ANY advice on where to start would be so insanely appreciated. I'm a one-woman show completely new to this world. I can't wrap my head around optimizing certain product pages, and keyword research is even more baffling.

Any articles you've found helpful? Or advice? I'm floundering!

[amorby]

I honestly can't thank all of you enough. THANK YOU for your insight. Jason, you've confirmed that I'm doing the right thing and that I need to just take a deep breath and break it into manageable chunks. Love the editorial calendar, and I will absolutely be implementing that today.

What a fantastic community SEOMoz is! Thank you!

[Francisco_Meza]

I normally don't leave long responses and I don't read long comments either. But I wanted to say that your subscription to SEOMOZ includes webinars. Here is one of them: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues

If you have the money, buy the MOZCON videos and watch: E-Commerce SEO -- Tips & Tricks (http://www.seomoz.org/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks)

[retailgeek]

Hi,

The SEOMoz beginner guide was a great place for you to start.  Before you start focusing on tactics around optimizing specific keywords, I'd start with some site wide fundamentals.

All 4000 of your products have some basic product information that was probably created by merchants, and flows through your e-commerce CMS to your category and product detail pages.  So I'd start with some block and tackling to make sure that the information you already have about each product is adding the maximum possible SEO value.  The advantage of this approach is then you can teach your merchants how to improve their product content, and those improvements will automatically flow to your SEO.

Step 1:  Start by making sure you don't have any site wide structural errors.  Do some basic audits of the technical SEO elements on your site.  Set up an SEOMoz campaign for your site, and let it do it's first crawl.   For now just focus on the crawl diagnostics, and see if you have any systemic problems, and what your options are to fix them.  I'd also claim your site in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and see if you are getting any crawl errors, and what HTML improvements google suggests under Optimizations.  This step is going to help you find problems like duplicate content, missing Title tags, sitemap errors, etc...

Step 2:  Make sure your product content is being properly used on your product detail pages.  Use the SEOMoz OnPage Optimization Tool.  Pick a popular product detail page, and use the product name as the keyword.  See what you can do to improve your Product Detail Template to improve your score.  Remember, you aren't fixing this one page, you're fixing all the product detail pages on your site.  If you have more than one template, you'll have to do each one separately.  This step is going to help you make sure your templates for URL's, Title Tags, H1's, Meta Descriptions, and Image Tags have good defaults.

Step 3:  Now you are ready to teach whoever is creating product records on your site, how to be more SEO savvy.  Do your products have SEO friendly names?.   Is your product taxonomy SEO friendly?  I.E.  Do you have an "Apparel" category when most of your customer are searching for "Clothes".  Are you writing great, unique product descriptions for each product or are you just cutting a pasting the manufacturers description (the same one that appears on thousands of other e-commerce sites).  I recommend you tackle this step in two parts.

A.  Teach your merchants how to be SEO savvy, and make sure all new SKU's are created with great content.

B.  Identify your highest traffic categories or products, and start improving your content a few SKU's at a time.  See if you can get your merchant to enrich 20 SKU's a day.  That will mean you'll have 100% of your SKU's enriched in less than a year.  I'd focus on your highest traffic SKU's first, don't worry about if they have good conversion or not.  Remember, SEO is about helping people that want your products, find them on your site; not about making people want your products.

Step 4:  Now, you can start picking small clusters of SKU's (or sub-categories) and do all the keyword research, manual optimization, and off-site link building that you've been reading about for those SKU's.  You can build an editorial schedule where you focus on a different product category every week.  You may already have a promotional schedule for your website, and you might target improving the SEO in advance of the promotional activities.  Say you're a hardware store, and are going to be promoting BBQ's in early summer.  You might invest a week in improving your BBQ category now.  Do some keyword research on BBQ (you might discover that you need to optimize your pages for Grill, BBQ, Barbecue, Outdoor Kitchen, etc...).  That might prompt you to re-write some product descriptions   Perhaps you pull a list of people that bought grills in the past year, and send them an e-mail asking how it's working out and if they would be willing to write a review on your product detail page.   You might think about sites, blogs, and editorial sources might be writing about grills, and earn some off-site links.  Perhaps you can offer a discounts on grills to a local BBQ Contest, that will include include a link your your BBQ category page on their site, etc...  Use SEOMoz to see what good links your competitors have for their BBQ pages and see if you can earn the same links.  Create some custom landing pages "Summer is the Perfect Time for Grilling" with great content and links to your most popular grills.

You may find that a weekly schedule is too short to make progress.  In some cases you may want to invest a few weeks or even a month on each category.  Perhaps you can recruit your merchants to help you.  "If we're going to carry your product, you should include a link to our site on your webpage".

By the time you get to Step 4, you'll be well on your way to having a great optimized site.  Don't be overwhelmed by your 4,000 SKU's.  A journey of a thousand miles, starts with a single step!

Good luck,

Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

[mememax]

Hi Jens, first of all welcome to the wonderful world of SEO were nothing is 100% sure but everything is changing and worth testing, you'll be learning by making mistakes, if you don't make mistakes you're not doing anything. Many times is better to make mistakes because the road to the right path is to know where you shouldn't go avoiding bad practices.

Having said this I think you should start on organizing your inventory. Start by creating categories around your best products. Try to create new categories around trafficked keyphrases and try to achieve traffic to your listings. After having organized it create a really usable website with filters and microdata which will help users find reviews on your products making for them easy to choose which one is the best and in whatever moment be able to buy it in the shortest funnel possible, every click they need to do will make them think about giving up the buying cycle.

On the prodcut pages try to build easy and clear title the same product name wills tart delivering traffic by itsefl if it's clear what you're selling.

Also try to use a secure payment to make users feel safe when buying on your site.

Nowadays it helps a lot morehaving a really good onsite seo than build a lot of links to improve your visibility to achieve traffic. After you build a good site, improve your contents, descriptions, photos, reviews, filters, and you'll start achieving some links, you may start consider building some quality links and social media mentions as you may have read in the seo guide seomoz provides. TRy to avoid paid links and use only highly themed pages related to your website.

Adwords may also help you delivering traffic faster but try to optimize a lot your spent to make your first sales and help your site survive until your seo improves!

Hope this may help you starting!