SEO For eCommerce Blog Series Part Six: Additional Content and Reporting

Welcome to the final instalment of this six-part SEO for ecommerce blog series! So far, we have covered:

• why SEO is different for ecommerce sites compared to lead gen sites
• unique elements of ecommerce websites, including category pages, product listing pages and product description pages
• user intent and user experience including page speed, on-site search and images
• keyword research, schema markup and metadata
• blogging, featured snippets, duplicate content, internal linking, breadcrumb trails, and link building

As we scrutinise SEO for ecommerce one last time, we’ll be looking at FAQs, reviews, user-generated content, calls to action, reporting, and goal setting.

FAQs

FAQs can be a rich source of content, and there are plenty of places where you can find inspiration for creating a page like this. An FAQ list should aim to address questions your customers may have – these might be questions that are literally frequently asked by customers, or they may be questions you anticipate them having and would like to address pre-emptively. These FAQs can free up time for your team and provide plenty of information so customers can make an informed purchase. You could ask your customer service team for examples of FAQs from customer phone calls or contact forms, as well as use your imagination to pre-empt the things people might ask. You may have general FAQs about your company as a whole or about specific products or ranges. If they are specific, they could appear on category pages or product pages as well as on a main FAQ listing page. There could also be an opportunity here for more internal linking, from FAQ pages to blog pages and vice versa.

Your research into what to tackle in your FAQs could also tie in with your featured snippet research. We discussed featured snippets in part five. As featured snippets generally appear for question-based queries, FAQs already lend themselves well to optimising for them. You can also use FAQ schema markup to tell Google that each question and answer is an FAQ, increasing the chances of them appearing as rich snippets in SERPs.

Reviews

Onto reviews, and if you don’t have reviews or testimonials on your ecommerce website, adding them could be a great opportunity to optimise for new keywords. If you do have reviews already, consider their placement on your website – are they easy to find and prominent? Users may not navigate to a page that lists reviews only, but product-specific reviews could be added to each product description page to make them easier to find and give customers even more reasons to buy the item they are looking at. Reviews are great for SEO because they are unique content and they may include keywords and phrases that you wouldn’t otherwise think of targeting in your copy.

If you’re struggling to get reviews – or even if you aren’t – it’s a good idea to put a strategy in place for gathering more reviews. You might want to use a service such as Feefo to email customers asking for a review after they have made a purchase. Having a good rating on Feefo will also be a great signal for customers to buy from you. You could also look to gather reviews on external sites such as Google Reviews and Facebook, and add these to your website.

Like FAQs, you can also add schema markup to your reviews to tell Google what type of content this is and increase visibility on SERPs.

User-generated Content

Reviews are great user-generated content – that’s content that’s created by your customers rather than yourself – but they aren’t the only example of UGC. So consider what other content could be used to enhance your product pages. For example, you could encourage customers to send photos or videos of the products they have purchased. This is particularly useful in fashion because it allows customers to see clothes worn by real people in real situations, especially if there are people of varying heights and sizes wearing the same clothing, to help people decide what size to buy. This can also provide you with more content to share on social media. In terms of SEO, it can provide more unique content for your product pages.

Calls To Action

Another aspect of your website to review is your calls to action. These could be anywhere on your website and they prompt people to take the next step at every part of the user journey. It’s important to note that the call to action may not always be “buy now” – it may be more appropriate to use micro-conversions, for example encouraging people to sign up to your newsletter or follow you on social media, especially if they are on a blog post page rather than a product page, as they may not yet be ready to buy but could be receptive to other, smaller conversions. Whatever call to action you use, make sure it’s eye-catching!

Why is this important for SEO? Because SEO isn’t just about getting traffic to your website through search engines; it’s also about getting those users to convert when they do land on your website. That’s why conversion rate optimisation (CRO) goes hand-in-hand with SEO and various other marketing strategies such as PPC and social media – your job isn’t just to get people onto your website, but to make them want to convert. That’s why when we think about SEO, we don’t just set goals around the number of users or other traffic metrics, but also around sales and conversions – as we’ll discuss in the final section.

Reporting & Goal Setting

Your SEO goals should align with the goals of your business. So while high rankings on Google are a means to an end, rankings alone don’t guarantee a return on investment. You might want to set goals for the number of users that come to your website via organic search, as well as the number of sales or transactions, and the amount of revenue delivered. The nature of ecommerce means that it is easier to measure the success of SEO for ecommerce sites compared to lead gen sites where you can’t track money spent by website visitors so easily.

How you measure performance will also vary for different page types. As discussed, someone looking at a blog post such as a “how to” guide may not yet be ready to buy, so when looking at landing page performance, it’s unfair to expect blog posts and similar content to deliver as much revenue as product pages. Don’t do your blog a disservice by reporting on how much revenue it has generated. Instead, consider time spent on site, pages per session, bounce rate, and event clicks for micro-conversions. Meanwhile, take full advantage of the data available to you in Google Analytics, in terms of what product description pages, product listing pages, and category pages are getting more traffic and revenue. You could also look at the customer journey through your website. Use all of this information to identify priority pages to optimise, decide what new goals to set, and plan how to continually meet those goals.

We hope you have found this series informative. If you need any help with improving SEO for your ecommerce website in order to meet your business goals, we’re just a phone call or a message away. Get in touch with our expert team.