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Content issues plague many sites on the web. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk, largely due to issues that can stem from hosting hundreds or thousands of product pages.
Typical issues with ecommerce product pages are:
- Duplicate content.
- Thin content.
- Too much content (i.e., too many pages).
Left unchecked, these issues can negatively impact your site's performance in the SERPs.
If you run an ecommerce site and you've seen traffic flat-line, slowly erode, or fall off a cliff recently, then product page content issues may be the culprit.
Let's take a closer look at some of the most common content woes that plague ecommerce sites, and recommendations on how to can fix them.
Duplicate Content
There are typically three types of duplicate content we encounter on ecommerce sites:
- Copied versions of the manufacturer's product descriptions.
- Unique descriptions that are duplicated across multiple versions of the same product.
- Query strings generated from faceted navigation.
Copied product descriptions
A large degree of ecommerce resellers copy their generic product descriptions directly from the manufacturer's website. This is a big no-no. In the age of Panda, publishing copied or duplicated content across your site will weigh your site down in the SERPs like a battleship anchor.
How to fix it
The solution here is to author original product descriptions for every product on your site. If budget is an issue, prioritize and get fresh content written for your highest margin product pages first and work backwards.
Unique yet duplicated product descriptions
With many ecommerce sites, site owners have authored original product descriptions, which is fantastic. Where they run into trouble is they sell multiple versions of the same product (different sizes or colors or materials, etc), and each product version has a different page/URL with the same boilerplate description.
Now even though this content is technically unique to your site (it's not copied from somewhere else), it's only unique to a single page. Every other page it lives on is considered duplicated content.
How to fix it
The solution here is to concentrate multiple product version pages to a single page, with all the different product options listed down the page. Or you can position them as a list in a drop down menu, like Zappos does.
Once you combine all pages to a single page, 301 redirect the other URLs to that single page, in the event they've attracted links and/or accrued link equity. The redirects will also help Google sort out the true version of your product page, and can help with any potential crawl budget issues.
Depending on the ecommerce platform you're using, concentrating multiple versions of a product page to a single URL can be difficult or impossible. If that's the case, think about moving to a SEO-friendly platform, like Magento or Shopify.
Faceted navigation issues
Many ecommerce sites host category pages with a range of filters to help users easily navigate their site and drill down to specific products, like this Weber Grill page on Home Depot.
A faceted navigation menu like the one above can create dozens if not hundreds of query strings that are appended to the URL, thereby creating duplicate versions of the same page. Faceted navigation can be a fantastic UX feature for consumers, but can problematic for SEO.
How to fix it
There are a few ways to prevent searches engines from indexing duplicate content from faceted navigation:
- Block faceted pages via Robots.txt file.
- Parameter handling via Webmaster Tools.
- Add self-referential canonical tags (rel="canonical") Note: this may help Google distinguish original from duplicate content, but it won't address crawl budget issues.
Thin Content
Even if a site has 100 percent unique product descriptions, they can often be on the thin side (i.e., a few bullets of text). Now, product pages with light content can still rank well where domain strength helps supersede potential thin content issues.
But most sites don't have the backlink profiles of Amazon or Zappos, and I like to think in terms of risk/reward. Thickening up descriptions makes sense because:
- It can reduce any risk that thin content issues might negatively impact SERP visibility
- It adds more content for engines to crawl, which means more opportunities for your page to rank for a wider basket of search queries.
- It freshens up your page, and freshening up your content can definitely pay dividends with Google.
To audit word count for every page on your site, crawl the site with Screaming Frog and looking for potential trouble spots in the "Word Count" column.
How to fix it
Some of the ways you can address thin content on your ecommerce product pages include:
- Enable (and solicit) user reviews and feedback. User-generated content is free and helps thicken up your content with naturally-written text (not "SEO" content). This additional content can help improve potential relevancy scoring, time on page, user engagement levels, and can help the product page rank for a broader basket of search queries. Also, user reviews offer social proof and can improve conversion rates as well.
- In the previous example, I spoke about condensing multiple versions of the same product to a single page. Doing this would also help thicken up that pages since you'd list all the different dimensions, size variations, colors available to consumers.
- Write some additional, original content. You can hire a writer to help thicken up these pages with additional features and benefits, or you can do it yourself. Again, given it could be very costly to thicken up every product page on the site, you can prioritize your highest margin products first.
- Pulling in mashups of links/text of similar products, product accessories, special offers and recently viewed items is another way to add more content to a page, and a tactic many larger ecommerce sites use like Amazon.com.
Too Much Content
Saying that a site has "too much content" may sound contradictory to the issue of having content that's too thin. But when I say an ecommerce site may have too much content, I'm really talking about two distinct issues:
- Too many product pages.
- Improper handling of paginated product pages.
And specifically how having too many pages of low value content can cause PageRank and crawl budget problems.
Too many product pages
This is really an addendum to the duplicate content issues posed by faceted navigation or hosting multiple versions of the same product on different pages.
Aside from low value content concerns, hosting a mass of duplicated product pages dilutes your site's PageRank or link equity, which weakens its overall ranking power of your important content.
The other issue pertains to your site's "crawl budget" (i.e. how deep/how many pages Googlebot crawls each time it visits your website). If a large percentage of your site if comprised of duplicate or low value content, you're wasting your budget on junk content and potentially keeping quality pages from getting indexed.
Improper handling of paginated product pages
Another concern of hosting "too many pages" is not handling pagination correctly. Often times, ecommerce sites can have product categories containing hundreds or thousands of products that span multiple pages.
Like duplicate product pages, excessive paginated results rob link equity from important pages and can hurt your crawl budget.
How to fix
Some of the ways to address equity dilution or crawl budget issues that can stem from too many product pages include:
- Rel=next, rel=previous: This markup tells Google to treat ecommerce product listings spanning multiple pages in a logical sequence, thus consolidating link equity (rather than diluting it) with all pages in the series.
- Canonicalization: It's effective for consolidating link properties (thus solving equity dilution), but it won't solve potential crawl budget issues, since Googlebot will still crawl all your dupe content.
- "Noindex, follow": If your goal is to optimize crawl budget and keep duplicates or pagination out of the index, use brute force and block Googlebot via robots "noindex, follow" meta directive.
Original Article Post by Ken Lyons @ Search Engine Watch
Organic search traffic has long been one of the most valuable sources of traffic for any e-commerce site. Not only is the sheer volume of visitors huge, but those eyeballs were often net-new customers coming in from head, torso, and long-tail queries. As any good online marketer knows, organic traffic isn’t "free," but the ROI for organic search is excellent – giving it a prominent place in the marketing mix.
Now, it’s time for the bad news. Many sites that have done everything right – invested in organic search traffic as a strategic marketing channel and avoided the dreaded penalty box – are seeing their year-over-year (YoY) organic traffic tread water or decline.
This post will explore how reporting, search engine results page (SERP) real estate, product listing ads (PLAs) and images have impacted YoY numbers and what actions can make the most of organic search moving forward.
Flying Blind
First, let’s look at what used to be a simple science – tracking.
Not long ago, an organic-search query passed right through to your analytics system, giving you a quantifiable click volume and value (assuming your analytics provided conversion/revenue data). Excellent! With that information, you could focus on optimization. For example, you could bring up high-volume queries with low conversions with better content or landing pages; and you could focus on driving more traffic to low-volume queries with high conversions.
Unfortunately, search marketers no longer have such clarity into their organic-search traffic for two reasons: an increasing percentage of traffic is "no query" and a huge portion of mobile traffic isn't categorized correctly, often failing to attribute the traffic to a search rather than "direct."
The graph below derived from BloomReach internal data shows how "no query" traffic is affecting query-level visibility for a very popular e-commerce site. In just the last two years, this retailer’s query visibility has dropped from more than 90 percent to under 50 percent. This has become very common development, indicating that many retailers are trending toward total darkness.
Those with their sleeves pushed up working day-to-day on SEO know the reasons why this is happening – searchers who are logged into Google accounts, Firefox users, and most mobile searchers pass "no query" when they click on organic-search links – causing analytics systems to report it without a query.
Any organic-search efforts that are oriented to a "query" (e.g., looking query conversion rates or SEO efforts oriented to receiving traffic on specific queries) are now completely wrong unless "no query" traffic is taken into account.
The mobile trend is similar. With the rollout of iOS6 and Android 4, a massive portion of mobile organic-search traffic appears as "direct" traffic in analytics. Earlier this month, Apple announced that iOS7 would correct this problem for Safari users, which will help a bit, but that won’t solve the "no query" issue.
Intuitively, anyone who’s pulled back the covers in their analytics to view the actual page URLs from some of this "direct" traffic knows there’s an attribution problem. Clearly, it’s highly unlikely someone would type a long URL string directly into the address bar – with whatever category and page name the site uses. In fact, marketing firm RKG stated that, "analytics packages misattributed an estimated 14 percent of Google organic searches on average in Q2 due to an issue with iOS 6 searches not passing referring URLs."
Imagine a shopper who enters the "funnel" with a search on her iPhone. She clicks an organic-search result that brings her to your site. However, rather than converting on the purchase now, an incoming call sidetracks her. Later that evening, she completes the purchase on her laptop while watching TV.
This is hardly a farfetched scenario, but one that would be recorded entirely wrong in any web analytics system. Why? Because it would attribute her initial visit as "direct" traffic, and couldn’t determine that the eventual conversion was a mobile-assisted purchase – which was likely made by going directly to your website.
Bottom line: Any analytics system is dramatically under-reporting organic-search traffic, making meaningful data flat-out wrong.
Shrinking Real Estate
A recent article referenced an analysis of a SERP composition that found a very small portion of the page actually showed organic-search results. Only 13 percent of the page represented organic results, while 29 percent were AdWords results. It’s important to note that the sample query used was "auto mechanic", and the results didn't include any PLAs, where large images often push organic results even further down the page or below the fold.
Consider another example. The screenshot below shows the SERP for "summer dress," which contains paid ads, PLAs, and approximately 1.5 organic-search results.
In this case, the percentages of each type of result above the fold is dependent on elements like query, font size and whitespace determined by your browser window or device. Obviously, organic results no longer command the prime real estate on the SERP that they once did.
We all know the key to real estate value is location, location, location. As organic results are bumped further down the page, they’ll yield fewer clicks. The exact real estate that organic results occupy will depend on the search engine and query.
For example, it’s likely that a popular head term like "digital cameras" will have quite a few paid ads, PLAs and local results for nearby stores that carry cameras. However, a long-tail query for more specific camera accessories – like tripods for a GoPro Hero 3 – will have more organic results and fewer paid and local ads taking up valuable SERP space.
A Picture Sells a Thousand Shirts
In addition to PLAs taking up precious space above the fold, they also offer other competitive advantages. PLAs display an image of the product that (hopefully) matches the consumer’s query, because shoppers are very visual animals.
Sure, searchers can scan the images quickly to decide if they’re not a great match for their taste and intent, but will they assume the organic (and even paid) links on the rest of the page – links which don’t provide visual clues as to their relevance – are worth their clicks and time? Conversely, will they take those PLA results as a signal to refine their query or worse – go straight to Amazon.com to search for that right product?
To make matters metrics even worse, with PLAs siphoning traffic with their visual appeal, Google image changes in SERP pages also have reduced organic traffic.
Let’s be clear, those image clicks in the past were likely not converting at a very high rate, but they may have comprised a significant volume of organic traffic to portions of your site. Now that the image searches actually keep most users on the image SERP page rather than clicking through to the actual image, you can also see a drop in traffic.
However, despite the drop in image search traffic, the conversion rate has increased dramatically, as you can see in the graph below from data across multiple sites. We have even seen the overall revenue for image search conversions increase on sites, despite that total image search traffic taking a precipitous drop.
Plan of Action
Given the measurement, SERP, and PLA challenges, what can an e-commerce site do to maintain or even grow their organic search traffic? Three things:
1. Adjust for Tracking Issues
To quote Tony Stark, "It’s an imperfect world, but it’s the only one we’ve got." In this imperfect world of attribution, it’s important to recognize that:
- You can’t rely purely on your analytics system;
- You must adjust your organic search reporting to estimate "no query" and "mobile" traffic properly for more accurate numbers; and
- All attribution models have inherent biases, so interpretation and intuition are critical - don’t just rely on last click. Ask questions about your assumptions and the implications of each attribution model you use. Last click is a poor representation of the value of organic search given that consumers may begin their journey on organic search, but end it via an affiliate program or a branded paid search ad. Plus, with more consumers beginning their purchasing process on smartphones, connect the dots between a first click on mobile and a purchase in-store or elsewhere online.
2. Measure and Mitigate Cannibalization
Rankings alone won’t cut it if the starting line for organic results is further down the page. So, periodically test a sample of queries (ideally from the head, torso and long-tail) to see how the SERPs evolve over time.
Looking for relationships – correlation and causation – between the locations on the SERP, organic ranking for that query, conversions and revenue can be quite revealing. As many have noted, ranking first in both the organic and paid results for any given query solidifies the brand’s reputation with the customer and increases conversions. Also, as you’re thinking about organic, work with agencies and solution providers that have technology and expertise across both organic and paid search.
3. Get Strategic
Continuing the status quo without any creativity and optimization will yield diminishing returns and/or increasing costs-per-acquisition. If the head and torso clicks are drying up, look to the long-tail to make up ground.
In the long-tail, there is less competition (both for organic and paid, which means there’s often less downward pressure on the organic-listing location on the SERPs) and stronger signals of customer intent. Strategically targeting the long-tail in a scalable way can pay dividends.
If faced with less organic traffic, make sure those clicks you do get turn into customers. Work with the rest of your e-commerce team to make it effortless for those prospects to find what they are looking for, whether on the desktop or mobile device.
Summary
The wrong response to these challenges is to either give up or reduce investments in organic search. Remember that the alternatives (paid ads) are only getting more expensive.
When you measure and optimize, net-new customers will still come walking through your virtual door. Plus, in an age when Amazon reigns over many categories, acquiring, converting and cultivating net-new customers is the key to unlocking more revenue potential.
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