Simply regurgitating a catalogue of products onto a website isn’t an effective way of putting your commerce business online. If you do this you’re selling your products short, missing out on crucial traffic and ultimately losing the opportunity to convert customers.

Optimizing e-commerce sites is much harder than most websites. The obvious reason is their sheer volume of products. By having lots of product pages constantly shuffling on and off the site, numerous problems arise that make SEO in Gibraltar very difficult to instill in such frameworks.

1. Product Descriptions

This is likely the most prevalent yet easily resolved problem. This error typically rears its ugly head on smaller business’ sites. Usually, because they don’t have the manpower dedicated to filing out this content. Lacking the text description for a product stops it moving to that desirable top-10 of search engine results. Which is a travesty for items that few competitors have in stock.

However, it’s important that you don’t make all your descriptions similar, or use a template and change a few words. Write unique content for each item. Think of it as the only opportunity you have to sell the product face-to-face with your online customers.

The big DO NOT: copy and paste the description from manufacturers or other retailers, unless you want to be heavily penalized by search engines and desire the arduous challenge of climbing back up.

2. Duplicate & thin content

For products you can’t write descriptions for, put a NO INDEX meta tag. This stops search engine crawl bots determining the position of your site from looking at the content (or lack of) on the page. There’s no point letting a few omissions spoil your work and the content will still be visible to the user. Plus, an excessive amount of pages with little content makes them think that you’re creating pages to generate traffic, that’s not something you want the search engines to think.

Use an Iframe to block repetitive information. Certain details have a necessity to be placed on every product page (delivery etc.), but will still be duplicate content. Iframes make content visible for visitors on a page without being seen by search engines.

3. Lack of Product Reviews

Everyone wants recommendations, be it from friends, colleagues, family members; it’s still the catalyst of a transaction. If you don’t have a review available it means the customer will likely look for one elsewhere, which provides competitors with an opportunity to take your custom when the user types ‘x product review’ into a search engine. Don’t let a prospect be distracted.

Search engines also place emphasis on reviews, in the same vein as a the existence of a strong social network. It’s also unique content that is user-generated, which is a time saving means of filling your site with relevant material.

4. Missing Product Demand

It’s a basic economic principle for anything you sell. Considering the demand of a product. For titles and header tags, use keyword search tools and for descriptions – look at forums. This way you’ll find relevant language that your customers use. Be sure to make model numbers and brand names the emphasis of your title and header tags. Whilst be sure that all alt tag’s are filled out for images.

5. Non-Unique Titles & Keyword SEOs

Equally, when devising titles make sure they are unique and be weary of identical values. If you’re challenging ‘Gibraltar‘, don’t simply plug the word in every title. Find a balance in ensure it’s relevancy. Whilst with products, its difficult to create unique title tags when you sell multiple items from the same brand, or similar items from many brands. It may be inevitable that the keywords are repeated with the same brands and items types.

Search engines to take this issue into account but a simple and common resolution is to formulate each title to a ‘Brand – Model – Item Type’.

It is very important in terms of SEO to create such an individual URL for all of your products. Not just an anonymous ID. Making the product and its information unique increases it’s relevancy to search engines and lets customers looking on search engines know what to expect by following a link.

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