How To Optimize Your E-commerce Content to be Customer-Friendly

If you want to rank and get seen by more people, you need to offer useful content that is friendly to search engines. But it's also essential to provide content that is friendly to your customers as well. Optimizing your content not only helps influence your site visitors to complete a transaction, but it also helps your website become more relevant and stay competitive in search engine pages for specific keywords and terms.

Optimizing your content better for your customers and search engines may involve a lot of work with structure, keyword research, presentation, and the content that users read, but it's all very much worth it. More and more shopping is being done online, and it's essential to stand out against the competition. So, how can you make sure your e-commerce website is filled with both customer and search engine friendly content?

Create Good Product Descriptions

Don't use product descriptions or specifications that are directly from the manufacturer's website or online brochures. The problem with relying on text like this is that there is a chance crawlers and algorithms will treat it as duplicate content, posing a threat to your website and running the risk that your website won't be listed in the result pages whatsoever.

But what if you have thousands of different products you're trying to sell? You surely cant generate unique content for every single product. It would probably take you a year just to finish writing descriptions for a single category.

Rather than taking product descriptions from other websites or spending a ton of money on outsourcing content writers, start selecting products you want to prioritize and create unique copy around them. These can be specific product pages or category pages that are important to your business. Focus on what's the most valuable to your business as you'll want these pages to be visible in the search results.

You can also tag product pages that are not in your current list with the "noindex, nofollow" attribute until you find the time to generate unique content for these pages. Then, you can gradually remove these tags on each page so search engines can crawl to them as well.

Create Extra Content

One way to boost your brand is by offering creative, engaging content next to your existing content. Consumers want a personal relationship from the brands they trust, and this extra content will help give your website a more human touch.

Here are some ways you can create extra content beyond product descriptions and your usual e-commerce pages:

• Create How-Tos. These will teach customers how to use your products. Ideally, you'll want to create your how-tos in video format, but you can also use graphics and step-by-step guides to help your customers as well.
• Start a blog and fill it with content that your visitors will find useful. In your blog posts, you can talk about upcoming products, tips from industry experts, share news about the brands your business carries, and feature your bestsellers and outstanding products.
• Boost your brand trust. You can do this by conducting case studies and gathering reviews and testimonials. You can tell people all day that you have an awesome brand and amazing products, but they're more likely to listen to and be influenced by their peers.
• Become active on social media. Here you can boost your brand by sharing your blog posts and showing off your new or featured products. You can also use social media to answer inquiries and concerns.

Match Search Intent with Targeting Keywords

If you sell fishing supplies online, you might think "fishing rods" or "fishing equipment" are excellent keywords you can use to highlight your content since a lot of people will use them as search terms. However, you can't easily tell what the user's intent is. Sure, searchers might be looking to purchase fishing supplies, but they could also be looking for other things - like components to build their own fishing rods, or fishing charters that provide fishing equipment on their trips, or maybe they just need to know what something looks like.

There are 3 types of search intent: navigational, informational, and transactional.

• Navigational Search Intent: The purpose of this is to reach a website or a specific page on a website.
• Informational Search Intent: The purpose of this is to acquire information from a website. (What is a fishing rod? What fishing supplies do I need?)
• Transactional Search Intent: The purpose of this is to perform an activity on a website, such as making a purchase. (Buy fishing supplies. Get fishing supplies online.)

Your goal is to target queries that are transactional, so you'll want to focus on keywords that fulfill the user's intent, such as "buy fishing supplies." By adding terms such as "shop," "buy," and "compare" to your list of important keywords, you can get more favorable results. Now, you're attracting the kind of visitors you really want - the ones who want to make a purchase.

Takeaway

Having good engagement can help increase your online visibility. If customers care about your brand and online presence, more than likely, you're one step closer to completing those next transactions.

If you want to create a truly successful e-commerce website, it will require a lot of time and effort. Sometimes, content creators neglect the specifics that ensure web content is optimized, and they don't even realize it!

While it's important to start creating amazing, compelling content and follow the best practices for creating your e-commerce website, it's also crucial for your site to be readable to search engine bots, because they are usually what bring customers to your website.

Want to double your conversions? Check out some other helpful e-commerce tips!