3 common ecommerce SEO problems and how to fix them
Welcome back ranker! May for us is eCommerce month because at the end of the month we have the big eCommerce conference, which we’ll be attending, and have
our usual stand. I’ll be giving away time to do free audits at the stand and that sort of stuff. So in preparation, I thought we’d cover eCommerce topics for the next few
weeks in the lead up to the conference, because, let’s face it, that’s where SEO really comes into its own.
Incidentally, Phil Leahy, who is the organiser and founder of The Internet Conference, was one of the judges for a recent gong handed out by the Internet Retailing Guide for the Top 50 People in eCommerce. Check out the list, as there are some pretty impressive names to be found. As luck would have it, many of those people will be in attendance at The Internet Conference at the end of May. Get along and have a chinwag with some of them. That’s the great thing about this conference, it’s like a group of old friends getting together to talk business, and it has a real community feel about it.
The Dick Smith Experiment
So on that note, let’s take a look at an Internet retailer that has recently become an annexed Internet retailer, and that is dicksmith.com.au. Now for all of my overseas viewers who don’t know who Dick Smith is, here goes. Dick Smith is an actual, real bloke, and he had his own chain of electronics stores for thirty years or so. He then sold them off to another large retailer in Woolworths over here a few years ago, which then in turn sold them to a large investment group who successfully ran it intothe ground.
The online assets have been bought by Ruslan Kogan, who you’ve heard me talk about before. He’s one of Australia’s Internet retailing success stories, a member of the Top 50 list and will be speaking at The Internet Conference. I wanted to show you a couple of things I see Internet retailers getting wrong all the time. They’re just little things that once changed can make a big difference to your rankings. So in this example I’m looking at a category page for mobile wireless.
All the product titles in the category listings are h3’s. I used to say it was counterintuitive to link an h3. Now I actually think it’s damaging to link heading tags. The reason for this is that I think it’s viewed as spammy, and I think it may be a hangover in the algorithm from the olden days when people used to do heading tags, then link those heading tags to squeeze a bit of extra ranking juice from it.
Fix These Mistakes And Improve Your Rankings
Based on some recent experiments we’ve been conducting, we’ve seen that removing the heading tags from links, especially in category pages, can make a big difference. So don’t have your heading tags linkable in your site.
Another thing we always see Internet retailers doing wrong is when you go to a target page and the page title doesn’t match the h1 of the product. The URL is another example. It’s imperative you
have all three of those descriptions matching. However, there is a bigger problem with this product page. When I go and do a Google search for that product using the h3 in the catalogue, I’m finding the page is #8. Now you may say that it’s possible they’ve no index, maybe they robot.txt everything because the business is bust and they’re closing down all the stores. No, not the case. I’ve checked both these factors and they’re not the problem. The problem is the product is available using two different URL’s. It’s a blatant case of somebody not using canonical tags, and neither of the pages that are exactly the same, have canonical tags. A canonical tag will simply say that the original version of this page is here. And if I’m on the original version of that page, the canonical tag inside the code should have the URL for that page. If however, I’m on a different page, the canonical tag should show the URL of the original page.
Unfortunately, canonical tags are a little overrated. They simply don’t work that well Google says they work across domains, they’re good for this and that, but as I’ve shown you many times before, pages still get indexed that have been canonical tagged and they shouldn’t get indexed. We’ve seen it many times before. I don’t know why it’s flaky like that, it just is. Another mystery of the Universe. Don’t blame me, blame Google.
So there are just a few things you should be stopping if you are doing them. Stop linking your heading tags on your category pages, and ensure you only have one version of your product page, and make sure your product pages have a page title that matches the URL, that in turn matches the h1.
They’re my top 3 tips for this week for eCommerce. Hope to see you all at The Internet Conference, May 25 th to 27 th . See you all next week. Bye for now.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
