Can Ecommerce help with Keyword Rankings?

[hfranz]

I am curious to know if an ecommerce website plays a role in higher rankings. we have been struggling for some time on a term and all of our competitors have an online shopping cart. we have a custom magento website with a request a quote form as our products are very costly. (range from $500 - $250,000).

Is there something we can add to the code to help boost our rankings?

[EGOL]

If I had products like that I would have multiple articles about each product.  These articles would cover every possible, probable, detail, benefit, aspect, question, concern, etc. that a customer might have about these products.

I do that for products that sell for under $100 and all of that content on all of those pages gives me an excellent chance of pulling in traffic on almost every primary, secondary, and long tail keyword in my niche.

It also makes my site stand out as the place for information and the people who know what they are talking about.  So, even if I don't beat them on rankings, I beat then on exhibited knowledge.  For items under $100 that delivers a lot of sales - even if my prices are not the lowest.  I get lots of links from forums where people are talking about these products and they link to my information pages as a way of answering questions and settling arguments.

I believe that this comprehensive content approach is very helpful for my rankings, pulls in the long tail traffic and convinces customers for whom trust is important.

It is very expensive and time-consuming to build this type of attack but in my opinion, it paid before panda and penguin and is paying even better now as I see competitors dropping from the SERPs.

[TakeshiYoung]

How do your other metrics compare to your competitors (amount of unique content, user engagement, domain authority, number of links, etc). Those are more likely to impact your rankings than having a shopping cart or not.

[matbennett]

I'm pretty confident that presence of a cart does not, in itself, boost rankings.

I can see that there might be correlation between high rankings and commerce enabled sites though. Those sites possible have higher budgets, which means that more time/money is going in to things that do have impact on rankings.

There might also be some secondary effect where the presence of a store is encouraging the type of quality signals that Google does like:  Customers might be spending longer on those sites, returning more frequently, sharing pages more often and the site picking up more links i the process.

Keep focused on known ranking signals.