Google Offers 8 Tips On E-Commerce SEO

Alan Kent from Google published a video on SEO tips for e-commerce sites, this includes 8 tips. You can watch the video embedded below or just read my summary of those tips.

(1) Technical SEO Basic: Make sure you do the technical SEO basics like allowing Google to crawl your web site. Make sure your page titles including the brand name, color and type of product is important to have in your title. And make sure to add structured data to your product page. Also think about your out of stock products.

(2) Content breath: Make sure to have content that is available based on different stages of the shopping journey. From gift ideas, reviews, categories and more. Ideas is more general but categories pages are more specific. Having reviews and detailed content about a produc tor product category can help some shoppers during the earlier stages. He goes through some ways to do this, including looking at competitors and making your own unique content compared to your competitors.

(3) Markup your product variant pages, something we covered here recently. In short, each product variant should have a unique URL, such as query parameters and then select one variant should be the canonical.

(4) Deal or sale URLs should be perserved, so you reuse the same URL for your sales pages. So every year you might want to use the same Mother’s Day URL every year, don’t make a new one for year, this reminds me of the conference page URL advice.

(5) Performance: Users care a lot about how fas the page is and Google uses Core Web Vitals for rankings (limited). Alan said page speed might be the tie breaker if you are using the same text as your competitors.

(6) Be Patient: Alan said SEO is a long game and some ranking signals may take many months to take affect and sometimes you might not see results. So keep working on it and be patient. Until then, look for ways to diversify your traffic through other marketing channels.

(7) Ask Others For Help: If you are not getting the results you want after all of these tips, then seek expert SEO advice and beware of scams and taking steps against Google’s guidelines.

(8) Users: It is all about the users Google has said for years. So think about the users first, collect data, and think about making changes to help your users and not specifically about Google Search.

Here is the video:

Forum discussion at Twitter.