Three common e-commerce SEO problems and how to fix them

We’re focusing on e-commerce in May, because that’s where SEO really comes into its own. To start things off, I took a look at the site for Dick Smith, and found it had some problems that are common among e-commerce sites that aren’t ranking where they want to be.

The first problem is on category pages. These are the pages that offer many different items in one category, with linked pictures for each item.

The problem happens when the heading tags for each item are linked. A page full of linkable H2 or H3 tags looks spammy to Google, and will lower your rankings. Get rid of those links to improve your rank.

The second problem is with page titles. If you’ve got a great H1 title on a page, it should match the page title, as well as the URL for the page. If you’ve got code numbers or product names in there that aren’t in the H1 title, they’re going to hurt your rankings. Change all three to the same wording.

Finally, take a look at your product pages themselves. Some retailers have more than one URL leading to multiple copies of the same page. These have canonical tags indicating the URL of the original tag.

This used to be common practice, but they just don’t work that well. Pages get indexed that shouldn’t get indexed – it’s just a problem that Google has. Instead, make sure you only have one version of each title page so Google doesn’t get confused when it crawls your site.

Use those three tips when working on your page and you should see an improvement in your rankings.

For more information, visit the StewArt website.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business  StewArt Media  has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.