Editorial Articles

Not everyone has the luxury of reworking or re-launching their e-commerce site when they real-ise that they have made SEO oversights or have identified a new opportunity that wasn’t avail-able in the past. Or maybe you are doing everything right but need that little extra push to over-take a competitor in the rankings? Here are some quick wins to explore.

Use PPC Ads to Inspire Meta Descriptions
The chances are that at some point you’ve in a paid search campaign on Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you’ve ran a well managed campaign it will have delivered plenty of good quality visitors and no doubt sales too. But there is a way you can benefit even more.

We often recommend integrating SEO and PPC tactics when talking to clients and in our ex-perience one of the quickest wins of integration is using your successful adverts to inspire the ‘meta descriptions’ for your natural search listings.

Meta descriptions are one of the hardest working but most under appreciated elements of an SEO campaign. Search for any keyword and on the results page you’ll see two lines of copy below the blue clickable link. These snippets can be tailored using your ‘meta description’ tag. This content is really valuable SERP real estate and you need to make that content work hard to get the ‘click’ and a visitor on to your site.

Show Your Product Feed Some Love
Too many online retailers set up a product feed which is syndicated through Google Product search and then forget about it. Ask whoever is dealing with your natural search how much time they have spent on this recently?

Your analytics will show you just how important your product feed is to sales and revenue, so make sure it gets the attention it deserves. If Google senses a commercial intent in a keyword search it typically triggers its product content in the search results. If someone is making that kind of search then that is where you need to invest some of your resources accordingly

Incentivise Repeat Customers to Link
Google’s algorithm may get more complex every year but one thing that will never change is its citation model. Google believes that the most trusted sites on the web are those that are men-tioned or linked to the most frequently, by the most authoritative websites. The problem is that link building is hard work.

However, if you already have a community of people who believe in your service enough to buy from you repeatedly, they are prime candidates to link to your website.

Perhaps you could produce a widget which allows them to syndicate your most link-worthy con-tent, or create an SEO-friendly affiliate scheme, or maybe an old fashioned polite request will work! But why spend time trying to build links with people who don’t know about your site when you have an engaged audience at your fingertips?

Make your product pages unique
Gone are the days when Google and other search engines make drastic updates that send shockwaves through their index. Nowadays, there is a stream of near constant updates, most of which are hard if not impossible to detect. However, there was one recent change that might be having a significant impact on your company’s bottom line.

The “May-Day Update” change robbed many sites of their long-tail traffic to internal pages. Not every website lost out though, those with unique product descriptions, multi-media content and user reviews have thrived.

No longer can you rely on building trust in your domain and rely on boiler-plate manufacturer descriptions to fill your product pages. 

Kelvin Newman
Creative Director, SiteVisibility
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