Use These Proven SEO Strategies For Your eCommerce Site!

“Great power comes with great responsibility.” said Uncle Ben. With the Spiderman reference in mind, planning to set up and maintain a successful eCommerce site requires you to formulate an effective SEO strategy so that you can cement your name in the market. In that strategy, your work involves creating evergreen content as well as providing routine upkeep on your site. Let’s find out what today’s proven SEO strategies are and start implementing them.

Avoid Keyword Cannibalism in Product Pages

The golden rule: Avoid duplicating content; should never fall on deaf ears especially if you are running an eCommerce site. However, optimizing your product pages by establishing efficient keywords can become quite the challenge, and you may make the mistake of cannibalizing your own keywords.

If this happens, do not beat yourself up over such a mistake. Your site may feature many products and a majority of them are pretty similar to one another. Because of that, you may have the impression that the more times you can make a keyword appear, the faster that keyword’s ranking can rise. However, you are essentially competing with yourself if all the products are trying to rank for the same keywords. The simple act of using similar keywords on all product pages result in the creation of duplicate content.

Perform Timely Site Maintenance

One of the most common SEO strategies to implement for any eCommerce site is site maintenance and upkeep. Yes, you have to be particularly diligent in the upkeep of your site’s product pages. If you perform timely or regular maintenance, you can prevent product pages and landing pages from generating 404 errors. The next thing on your to-do list is to make sure all external links are active and do not link to any broken page. As Google is constantly ranking sites based on their user-friendliness, broken links can affect your site negatively by sending the thumbs-down sign to the Search Engine behemoth.

Learn How to Implement the Canonical Tag

As mentioned, Google penalizes sites that have duplicate content. So it is pertinent in today’s time to implement canonical tags on appropriate pages. The tag is written as rel=“canonical tag” and will help to avoid redundancy as well as potential penalizations from Google. When you implement the tag, you are informing Google that you are aware that duplicate content exists on your domain. If you are wondering how you can use the said tag, see the following example:

When the viewer clicks a product, a new page is opened with a new URL. However, the same product is still being discussed. For example, your user is looking for a brand new performance exhaust system and wants to confirm the part’s serial number. Upon locating the product, he or she wants to pull up a larger image of the exhaust system. Now, use the canonical tag on the larger image, especially if it opens with a new URL.

Take Advantage of Your Linkable Assets

A sound SEO strategy for any eCommerce site is to provide linkable assets and avoid duplicate content. You should note that product pages are not considered as highly linkable assets that they contain minimal educational information and unique content. For starters, consider creating two or three pages on your domain and make sure that they are content driven. In addition, creating a simple product information page or FAQ is also considered as viable linkable assets. These pages are the ones that will help you create an effective backlink portfolio for your site. Yes, you can finally have your assets referenced on external domains!