First, e-commerce doesn’t typically have much content on the category pages. Many homepages are just a list of links to categories of products within the site.

So how do you go about optimizing a page with little content?

Well, to be honest, it’s quite easy. Since there is little content, the content that does exist needs to be closely examined to make sure it’s in line with business goals. Headings should be examined, category names, internal linking, and especially page titles. The anchor text that is used within the site should be in line with the page titles, headings, and any textual content that is included on the page.

While it’s not as difficult as it seems, it does take quite a bit of practice. It’s much easier to get content heavy pages to rank, which is why so many firms focus on blogs for e-commerce sites. But making someone click again from an article to the category of products they really wanted doesn’t seem like the best user experience to me. I find conversions to be better if we get people directly to a listing of products or options to narrow down what they’re looking for.

As with anything in SEO, everyone has their own method. I just happen to work with e-commerce almost exclusively and think many of the firms take shortcuts to ranking that don’t really lead to the best conversions.

When looking at keywords to build traffic around, it is much better to come up with a huge list of less frequently searched terms than a list of a few hugely popular phrases. Or is it?

You see, SEO companies say things like this all the time. However, sometimes you can see some other odd effects when you rank for a head term. Things that you never expected begin to happen, and that’s what makes you scratch your head a bit and analyze data.

Take the word tools as an example. As the rankings started to go up for that word, so did searches with the site name in them. You see, not only does it attract people with that head phrase, but it also gets people searching for that company because of familiarity with them further down the buying cycle. Conversion rates initially drop like a rock, but sales don’t. The truth is, it could take a few weeks or even months to truly understand the effects of ranking for such a phrase.

Now, if you’re getting traffic for a tail term you’ll see immediate benefits in the terms of sales. But, combine the head terms and traffic jumps quite a bit initially, then grows even more as people become familiar with the brand. It truly seems that all the benefits come most to light when you’re ranking for both head and tail terms.

Tails may be easier to rank for and get some sales with, but nothing beats the traffic and branding capabilities of head terms. Conventional wisdom, meet the facts.

This will be on a somewhat limited basis for the next few weeks, but will hopefully expand down the road into as many as are interested. Ok, that level is hard to reach, but we should have more openings before long.

If you’re interested, use the contact form and we’ll get back to you after evaluating your site.

If your website isn’t performing as you think it should, contact us for a quote. You’ll be glad you did.