seo texts

As I wrote about in my last post, optimizing your e-commerce is necessary if you want to see any organic traffic from SEO. While more time consuming than for an average blog, if you put the time in, you will be rewarded for your efforts. In fact, if done correctly you can double your online sales – without tweaking any other part of your marketing plan. Here are a few best practices to consider:

A. Address Your Out-of-Stock Items

When you run out of an item, you should take several steps:

1. Leave the page up. If the item is temporarily out of stock, leave up the page so you do not lose traffic. Do not delete, direct away from, or hide the page.
2. Offer alternative items. Link to relevant products on your site, such as newer models, the same product in other colors, similar products from another brand, and products matching price and category.
3. Inform users when it will return, either on site or via email notification.
4. Offer to backorder the product. Give a time estimate and send out when it gets in; if they really want it, users usually will not mind a short wait.

B. Deal with Expired Products

First and foremost, do not delete these pages! It is detrimental to your SEO, and customers who bookmarked these pages will get an error message, with no redirection to your site. Here are a few alternatives that will assist with keeping your SEO rankings:

1. Redirect. Set up a permanent 301 redirection page to the newest model of an obsolete product. If there is no new model, redirect to a parent category full of similar items.
2. Reuse. Reuse URLs if you sell products where model number and specifications are not important.
3. Delete. If there is nothing similar to the item, delete the page with a 401 status code, which tells Google that page is permanently gone.
4. Keep for research. You can keep important pages for customer research, but mark the item as permanently out of stock.

C. Create SEO for New Products

Setting up your website architecture and internal link system is key. Link your home page to all the categories, and then product pages link out from categories. Do not forget to link between the parent category and product pages; all of this will help Google crawl and index your content quickly. Also, spotlight new products on your homepage, which will also help get them ranked and indexed.

D. Leverage Internal Site Search

Optimize your internal search engine to help your customers navigate and prevent sales losses:

1. Enable tracking, and see what is popular. Use the search record to see what keywords people are searching within your site, and calculate the revenue they accrue. Also check what searches are most popular – this shows which products are profitable, and if people are not finding certain items.
2. Use a click tracking tool. Tools like Crazy Egg or Google Analytics will show you where visitors are on your homepage, category pages, and products. It can help you see where conversion problems happen, so you can fix the process.
3. Use site search in your keyword research. See what keywords visitors are searching for, and use those to boost your SEO, find new products, identify popular products, and overcome problems with search.
4. Test it! Type some of your keywords into search and see what they pull up. Use this to fix inconsistencies and broken links.

E. Manage Internal Architecture

Internal link building helps with SEO, but you need internal architecture to increase rankings. This takes time to plan and make user friendly; try some of the following ideas:

1. Navigation: offer customer parent-category level navigation.
2. Links: link product pages to other category-relevant products.
3. Breadcrumbs: leave links so users and Google can navigate up a level to the parent categories.