Ecommerce SEO help
-
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!
-
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.
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is good for SEO update blog post dates after update post content
Hello I am updating some posts of my Blog, adding new and fresh content and rewriting some of the existing. After doing that I am thinking to update de post publishing so that I appears on front page of the blog and user can read ir again. But I don't know if it is good for google to change the publishing date of the post that he had indexed 5 years ago. Also I don't know if google will read it again if it is old and see the new changes in order to improve it in search results
Algorithm Updates | | maestrosonrisas0 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Placement of /p/ in URL structure for ecommerce site product URLs
Hi, We're a discussion about how to structure a clients ecommerce site product page URLs where 12345 represent the product SKU/number: https://domain.com/Item--i-12345 https://domain.com/product-name/p/12345 https://domain.com/p/12345 It's a toss up between the second and the third URL, but the SEO company is saying the third is best because of the placement with the /p/ and creating a silo for "products" that help search engines recognize it is a product. Does anyone have thoughts on this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | AliMac260 -
How do I code SEO for a secondary site without impacting the main site?
We have a secondary site for our online magazine, how do I code the SEO so I don't steal links from the main site?
Algorithm Updates | | gacwebteam0 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
Pdfs for SEO - benefits, downfalls and promotional methods
Hi fellow Mozzers, We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords. The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted. I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint. So: is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content? are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML? as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both) Hopefully that's all clear! Nick
Algorithm Updates | | themegroup0 -
Penalization.... please help me...
First of all, sorry for my english but i'm an Italian girl seo. Before Panda update seo was clear and easy: good quality, good natural backlink and so on... Now there is an update fast every week and it's a mess! I work as seo for a big italian e-commerce and (more or less) one month's ago in google webmaster tool I tried a message frome Google who told me the site: www.giordanoshop.com is penalty for innatural backlink. But I ve do noting against Google politicy: no pay backlink, no fam and so on.. There are some streing link but I can't delete it because I don't do it. I ask the riconsideretion of website but google still tell me it faund innatural link. What shoud I do? The pr of the site is the same but all keyword has lose ranking: from 1 page to 3 and from 1 to 6 page... What can I do? I risk to lose my work sob.
Algorithm Updates | | giordanoshop0 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0