A high-value, fully actionable lightning session on optimising for quick wins.

1. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Ecommerce
quick wins
María Camañes Forés
Senior SEO Consultant

2. Ecommerce Quick Wins
María Camañes Forés
• Senior SEO Consultant at Builtvisible,
where I joined 3 years ago
• Passionate about the technical side of
SEO and specialised in site speed
optimisation and eCommerce SEO
• Work across a variety of accounts but
mostly large eCommerce sites
• Occasional speaker and regular trainer at
BrightonSEO
• Twitter @mariacamanes

3. Ecommerce Quick Wins
We’ve focused on three types of opportunities:
1. Quick wins that are relatively easy to implement and don’t
require much dev resource (so that you can take off some
weight of the dev queue)
2. Opportunities that will drive quick performance changes
and contribute to revenue uplifts without having to wait for
rankings to build up
3. Opportunities which can solve at scale some of the
challenges ecommerce sites usually face
Introduction

4. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Creating compelling
product pages

5. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Common issues with thin
content
Crawling
efficiency
Search engines have
to crawl more pages
on your site
Link equity
dilution and
lower quality
score
Authority and
relevancy (‘SEO
benefit’) is split over
more pages
Cannibalisation
Multiple pages
competing for the
same keyword,
resulting in lower
rankings
Pages
disappearing
from SERPs
In the given
scenarios, SEs may
be inclined to remove
one of the pages from
SERPs
Penalties and
filters
These can be
triggered in extreme
circumstances

6. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Content uniqueness
• One of the most common issues ecommerce
sites have to fight with is content uniqueness,
especially when it comes to their product pages
• Compared to regular websites, ecommerce
sites contain less unique content and, on
product pages, this is often limited to the
product description only (in the best cases)
• Due to the large amounts of products and the
similarity between many of them, in many cases
product descriptions are taken from
manufacturer websites or descriptions are
reused across multiple similar items

7. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Issues associated with
this
This can lead to multiple issues, including
indexation bloat, content duplication and
keyword cannibalisation
As a consequence, it’s quite common to see
Google canonicalising URLs towards another
similar page (ignoring the user-declared
canonical) and seeing them disappear from
Google’s index.
To avoid this kind of scenario, you need to
make sure product pages across your site have
enough unique content. However, this is easier
said than done. Due to the typically large
number of pages on ecommerce sites this can
be a real challenge.
So you’ll need to find other ways to make sure
all your indexable pages have unique content.

8. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tip 1:
Add product reviews
One of the best ways to do this at scale is
allowing – and encouraging –customers to
leave reviews on your product pages
This type of UGC can be one of the best ways to
improve content uniqueness – and freshness – and a
source of relevant content to your pages (at scale).
They also help your pages become more relevant for
targeted keywords in a natural way, which will help
your product pages rank for long-tail keywords.
Lastly, they are seen as an endorsement of trust by
Google and they can encourage visitors to make a
purchase (increasing conversion rate and revenue).
Remember to add the reviews and aggregateRating
properties to your Product Schema code.
Note: might require a little bit of dev work upfront, but
will require little maintenance and its benefits will be
seen across a large number of pages.

9. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tip 2:
Improve page
templates by adding
unique and related
content
• Educate your visitors with content with links /
videos to guides
• Showcase tips from ‘style editors’
• Link to related articles / content
• Feature user-generated content that shows the
products in real life
• Include FAQs
• Add details about product’s material, features,
how to take care of it, etc.
• Highlight delivery and returns information (e.g.
when will it be dispatched, delivery location
options, same day or weekends delivery, order
tracking, price, etc.)
Your product might not be right for every
user that lands on the page so ensure there
are other products for them to explore

10. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tip 3:
Avoid tabbed content
Tabbed content is devalued by search
engines
• When you hide content in tabs, you are
effectively saying to users and to search
engines “don’t worry about that, it’s less
important than the other content on the page”.
• It is important that any ‘SEO content’ which is
required to rank is not hidden within tabs.
• Site-wide content such as ‘delivery and returns’
information can be tabbed as it’s less relevant
to the terms we’re trying to rank.

11. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tip 4:
Show related products
at the end of the
product pageYour product might not be right for every
user that lands on the page so ensure there
are other products for them to explore
• Manually curate the suggestions or use
automation to flag up products based on
customers' previous buying behaviour
• Never leave the visitor at a dead end. You'll
find your website engagement increases if you
offer suitable recommendations
• This will help will the customer find what they're
after and may also increase your Average
Order Value (AOV)
Pro Tip: Create an internal-linking calendar, where
you prominently link to most searched for products
ahead of their seasonal peaks
Examples: items frequently bought together, you might also like, accessories, recently
viewed products, etc. (test conversion rate across a few different types)

12. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tip 5:
Other colours and sizes
• When the product is available on other sizes
or colours, resolvable in another URL, cross-
link them
• Include ‘in stock’ availability, making it obvious
which variants are available to avoid users
frustrations i.e. customers who click through
several options to choose a size before finding
it is out of stock!
• Having different URLs for different colours or
sizes should be decided based on the demand
identified during keyword research

13. Ecommerce Quick Wins
There are a lot of different properties you can add
to this schema property, but here are some of the
most common, and the ones we recommend
adding to product pages:
• name;
• image;
• description;
• aggregateRating;
• offers > price;
• offers > priceCurrency
Tip 6:
Product markup
Product markup gives Google detailed
product information they can use to
display rich snippets (for example,
price, availability, and review ratings)

14. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Don’t forget to validate your
implementations
Structured data testing tool
Check the enhancements report on GSC

15. Ecommerce Quick Wins
• User ratings: allows you to specify your products/services and related data to
search engines. Ratings (5-star system), price, number of reviews, and other
specific information can appear in SERPs in the form of rich snippets
• Videos: communicates specific details about a video on your page to the
search engines and allows a thumbnail of your video to show up next to your
result in Google searches. It can better communicate that there’s a video on
your page which could increase CTR
• Breadcrumbs: allows your breadcrumbs to show in your Google search results
(inclusive of clickable links) instead of the full URL of the page. By marking up
your breadcrumbs, you are giving searchers options of where to start their
search in your site
Other types of markup
for ecommerce sites
Schema.org

16. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Tips on writing
compelling product
page copy that
converts
If you or your copywriting team are looking to
increase conversions for your product pages, then
take a look at this guide, which includes tips on
adding urgency, social commerce, gaining user
trust, and more:
From clicks to conversion: 12 ways to improve your
product page performance

17. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Product-level content analysis
and optimisation
• Compile a list of the top 20 or so pages in each of your sub-
categories which bring in the most revenue or have highest
conversion rates.
• Use Google Search Console page performance data to highlight
opportunities for enhancing product page and category page
copy.
• Look at improving CTR of high-impression keywords. Google is
putting value on these pages to display them in SERPs, so how
can you better demonstrate this value to users?
• You might find that intent is an issue for the keywords your
product pages are currently ranking for, and you can use this for
editorial or blog post ideation instead.

18. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Use strategic internal
linking to boost your
high priority pages’
rankings
You want to internally link FROM authoritative
pages TO high-priority product and category
pages.
For example, if you have an informational piece of
content that has attracted a fair few links, add a
link to one or more pages you want to boost.
• Make sure you’re linking to relevant internal
pages ONLY
• Link to a product or category page (these are
the pages you’re ultimately trying to boost, as
they directly convert to revenue)
• Link to deep pages on the site (product pages)
How to identify quick ways to improve your internal
link structure

19. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Quality category
pages and features
that aid conversion

20. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Cross-link contextually
relevant categories
Related categories snippet on each
category page improves internal
linking
• Will allow you to include more links outside of
the breadcrumb trail
• Increases the link equity coming through to
these pages (which will ultimately increase
their rankings)
• Increases the relevancy of these pages and
signals the relevancy between them

21. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Enrich category pages
and increase CTR
Give your customers every possible
reason to click on to a product page
Elements to include:
• Rating stars
• Available colours
• Available sizes
• Save for later
• Discounted price
• Offers

22. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Allow customers to see
the products on a
‘quick view’
Help your customers make comparisons
between products quickly right on product
listing pages
Problem:
• Customers may wish to take a glance at
several products before they decide to visit a
product page
• It costs time to load new pages, which makes
customers impatient
Solution:
• Allow users to see products on a ‘quick view’
without having to leave the page
• Debenhams do this really well on their PLPs

23. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Show stock availability
Reduce customer frustration by
showing availability as early as
possible
• Add stock status to products on category pages
• Keep out-of-stock product pages live. You don’t
want to frustrate users with a 404 page, and
search engines will consider those as broken
links
• Specify the product stock status and introduce
alternative in-stock products
• Add an “email me when back in stock” option

24. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Show scarcity
• It's both useful and highly persuasive to show
visitors if you are running low on stock for a
particular item
• Show a warning once inventory falls beneath a
certain level (e.g. "only three remaining“)
• It’s a great way to encourage customers to buy
sooner rather than later (or never)
• Have a counter that shows the cut off for same
day dispatch or next day delivery. This also
instils urgency
• This can be done on product pages too

25. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Banner with USPs
across the site
Use banners to really highlight your key benefits
like:
• free delivery
• next day delivery
• free returns
• offers
• memberships
• samples
• trials

26. Ecommerce Quick Wins
• Ecommerce quick wins
• How to find your out-of-stock products at scale
• How to deal with out-of-stock products at scale
• Tips on writing compelling product page copy that converts
• An SEO’s guide to duplicate content
• How to identify quick ways to improve your internal link structure
Other useful
ecommerce guides

27. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Questions?

28. Ecommerce Quick Wins
Thank you.
builtvisible.com
Maria Camanes Fores
Senior SEO Consultant
maria@builtvisible.com