With the most profitable holiday season in full swing, it’s time to optimise your site for the search engines, making it ready for the holiday rush. There’s still time left to implement the Google shopping SEO tips we have listed below, so there’s no need to panic! Simply work your way through our tips and you look forward to increased profits this holiday season.
Making the most of our Google Shopping SEO tips
Some of these Google shopping SEO tips do require a working knowledge of coding but most of them just need a little time and patience, as well as a willingness to get the job done! All of these tips are specifically aimed at SEO for ecommerce websites, so they have the potential to significantly increase your profits by making your site more visible to search engines and shoppers. If you need any help, however, just give the team at GO Creative a call and we can help!
List your products for free!
We’ll start our Google shopping SEO tips with a strategy that results in free ads for your ecommerce site. That’s because if you have a merchant account with Google or Bing (Microsoft) you can take advantage of their free shopping ads. This increases your exposure to holiday shoppers without paying for additional ads. You do, however, need to have a Bing or Google shopping feed set up and be paying for their ads before you qualify for these free ads, but extra ads for free can’t be bad!
You can check the progress of these free Google shopping ads under ‘Performances’ in your Google Merchant Centre account or under ‘Google/Organic Traffic’ in your Google Analytics Account. The latter combines traffic from both your organic search listings with the free Google shopping ads, so it’s not as user-friendly as your Google Merchant Account. Bing doesn’t have any metrics for their free ads just yet, but hopefully this will happen soon.
If you don’t know how to get on Google shopping or Bing shopping, just give us a call and we can help.
Structured data increases your click through rate (CTR)
Structured data adds customer-friendly information to your organic listings in search engines, giving shoppers more information and increasing your CTR. When you make use of structured data, your site can be featured in Google’s Knowledge Panels or their mobile-only Popular Products Carousel, both of which are seen at the top of the search pages.
Product Schema is another way to increase your site’s rankings. It’s essential SEO for ecommerce websites, because it adds information such as star ratings, the number of reviews, product prices, and so on, to your organic listings and ads. All of these additions to your shopping ads help to engage customers and can increase your conversions. However, these are some of our trickier Google shopping SEO tips, because you will need some coding knowledge to implement the structured data and product schema. If you get it right, however, it’s well worth the additional boost in sales!
Review your content
In this section you will find some pretty easy Google shopping SEO tips that just about everyone can do themselves. That’s because every website has evergreen content that’s written once and never reviewed again! This content acts as a resource for your customers and is designed to answer customer questions, explain how your products work, and generally engage with your customers. Over time, these pages can gain external links and start to rank on their own.
Reworking this content for the holidays can help to increase sales, whether you rely on organic listings or Bing or Google shopping ads. Another benefit is that rewriting allows you to leverage the page’s rankings, rather than writing a new page with no existing rankings.
For example, if you have a page of evergreen content that regales the delights of smartphones for teenagers, how can you refresh that to increase holiday sales? Well, it’s likely that this page covers all the awesome apps teenagers can download, all the games they can play and how chatting to their friends all day long is necessary to life itself, because that’s what teenagers want to hear.
On the other hand, parents who might want to buy their teenager a smartphone for Christmas, aren’t going to be swayed by this type of information. They want to know about the phones warranty, safety features and ratings, as well as what other parents think about this phone. So a rewrite is in order to attract parents to this page, rather than teenagers who rely on their parents to buy their technology during the holidays!
You can even change the title, so that it appeals more to parents than teenagers, such as ‘A Parent’s Guide to Smartphones for Teenagers’ and add updated images and more ‘parent-orientated’ content. This type of reworked content is great SEO for ecommerce websites during the holidays!
Another way you can attract more shoppers to your site is to refocus your most popular categories and product pages at holiday shoppers. You can do this by looking for keywords that reflect the holiday or event, for example Black Friday Deals, Cyber Monday Deals, Christmas Discounts, Boxing Day Sales, and so on. Start updating the title tags and meta descriptions of both your category and product pages, as well as finetuning your content with these keywords. Then start driving backlinks to these pages in collaboration with your in-house marketing team or the GO Creative SEO marketing experts (we can help!).
Audit your site for errors
To ensure that you get as much benefit out of our Google shopping SEO tips as possible, now is the time to make sure that your site doesn’t have any problems. So you need to look for errors that could affect your rankings, such as broken links, slow loading pages or pages that are blocked from the search engines by your robots.txt file. Any of these problems can affect your rankings, traffic and conversions, so eliminate them as soon as possible and enjoy the profits of the holiday season!
Optimise the UX (user experience)
A user-friendly ecommerce site will help to increase conversions, so add interactive content, minimise the use of complex forms, personalise your customer’s shopping experience and highlight social proof.
Another tactic is to include internal links to popular evergreen pages on product pages where their content is relevant. This saves a shopper having to search for additional information that may help them with their buying decision.
Wrapping up our Google shopping SEO tips
If you can act on all of these tips as soon as possible, you give yourself time to optimise your rankings, increase traffic to your site and boost your conversions. One final point that’s also important at this time is not to make any big changes to your site until after the holidays. That’s because if anything goes wrong, your site can be down during some of the most profitable times of the year. As an example, changing hosting providers is one task that is best left until a quieter time of year, but any changes that could affect your site’s visibility or rankings if they go wrong, could be a disaster!
Have yourself a very merry (and profitable) holiday season!
