E-Commerce SEO: Where to start with 4,000+ products?

[ronyon]

THANK YOU all so much for the great insight. I really appreciate it. The good news is that I'm a writer first and foremost, so writing product descriptions is something I love to do.

A little more background--We have a great social following, so we're good there. And our website is definitely well designed by our web master. We also have a great blog that I run where we interview photographers. I try to post 3-5 times a week, and it gets decent traffic. So here I am as the writer/social media manager, just feeling confused about where to start in tackling the 4,000+ products on an on-page level.

I came here a year ago with all of these products in there with manufacturer descriptions, which was a total bummer, but I've been working on writing original and relevant descriptions for new products from here on out. The biggest problem I face is deciding where to start. Doug, I love your feedback, and I think I'll start creating a list of the pages actually generating sales and apply what works there to the high margin products.

It's good to hear from you guys and get feedback on the actual workflow of on-page optimization. I find keyword research to be the most terrifying.  What's the best way to go about tackling a daily list of products to optimize? Out of the 4,000? And what does your daily SEO schedule look like for something like this? Would you recommend a certain number of original descriptions a day? I do so many other things beside SEO, so I'm trying to get a good feel for how it's done.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your help, everyone.

[WesleySmits]

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

@Takeshi - hey that link is absolutely fantastic.

[DougRoberts]

There's no absolutely perfect way to prioritise the order to review/update the existing product pages. You've just got to determine which products matter the most to you.

As we've mentioned you want to think about prioritising the products with the most sales, products with the highest margin, new products, hot products (ones that have a social buzz about them!) etc.

You may want to rule out products that are near end of life and will be removed from your catalogue soon or products that have low sales and low margin (think about the ROI of your time/cost)

As for how many you do - you'll need to go with what you're comfortable with. The problem with trying to do too many is that it becomes increasingly hard to create great content the more you do. You're better off writing a few great ones than forcing yourself to churn through loads. You want to sound unique/fresh/natural. Hard to do when you're tired!

When it comes to writing the descriptions, comments/feedback is a good place to find out what really matters to people, the concerns people have, the suitability for a particular audience etc.  (Tip: You don't have to look at the comments on your own site.)

If you've got a great social following, then you may be able to think of an interesting/creative way to utilise that to help you out.

Of course, before you start working your way through the list, make sure you create a checklist/process for adding new products so that the problem doesn't get any worse while you're working your way through!

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

@Ronyon - I second the @wesleysmits recommendation to prioritize products with key business value.

To address some of your points:

1. "Do I go with brand by brand? Do I go with products with good margin?".

• Go for the products that bring in the most profits for the company**.** Margins aren't exactly the key point. It's the real dollars coming in. If you have a product bringing in an incredible amount of money, your minor improvements will have magnified results. Example: Let's say the top product the site sells (out of 4k items) brings in $10k profit/mo. If you are able to improve sales on that single product (i.e. you ONLY do SEO + conversion improvements on that product), and you're able to boost sales by 50%, you're bringing $5k/mo more. That's $60k/yr. BY ONLY OPTIMIZING ONE PRODUCT.
• Go for products that are easiest to sell. If you have a products already bringing in a lot of organic search traffic, @egol is absolutely right. Improving the hook-i-ness of the title and creating the perfect description will have great impact. And it's EASY! If you have 100 visitors/day through organic search on just one product page, and you're able to improve the Click Through Rate by 10%, you've brought in 10 additional visits a day. Furthermore, if you can improve the product graphic or copy on the page, you might be able to boost conversion rates on that product. That's an additional sale every week or two. For an hour or two of work, not bad!
• It's OK to work on things one at a time. But you have to choose your battles. Make sure you're going to make an impact.

Here's another tip. Without knowing the big picture, it sounds like you need help w/ just the labor of the thing IF that's the case, then **make the case to the bean-counters that your work generates profits. If you had more help (hire another SEO), you'd be able to generate profits faster. Then you can also be a manager. **How?

• Create a before/after report of your work using Webmasters/Analytics.
• Take a snapshot of how the website is performing (Traffic per product page, CTR's, Conversion Rates, Bounce Rates, ranks for all the product pages)
• Do your SEO magic
• Go to your manager and say "Check out what I did. As a result of what I did in the past 3 months (for example), I'm bringing in $3.5k/mo extra for the next year. That justifies hiring a link-builder to help me out!"

This tip isn't just from me. There's a big tome of a book--The Art of SEO; co-authored by randfish--that spends Chapter 13 talking about "Building an in-house SEO team" (among other things). A great deal of that section talks about why it's so important to get buy-in from the organization.

SEO is a profit center. Management would love to make more money, faster. Give them a few good-looking charts, and get some help!

[TakeshiYoung]

Re-writing so many product descriptions is a big task. I would first see if you can combine any of the products into a single page.

For example, if you have "12 inch red kite" and "18 inch red kite" and the products are identical except for the size, create a single product page with a dropdown to select the size. If your CMS doesn't allow you to do that, you can create a separate page and canonical the other pages to it. That way, you reduce the amount of unique content you have to write.

Getting user generated content from things like reviews can also help streamline the unique content creation. Incentivizing customers with coupons is a great way to have them coming back to your site and leaving a review.

[WesleySmits]

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

[ronyon]

A lot of times I can definitely combine them! That's a great idea. And I loved loved the link building article you sent along. THANK YOU!

[ronyon]

Oh man, I wish I could get some help! I might be able to if I can just get the ball rolling for the first little bit. They've never had anyone to work on it, and that torch is now passed to me, so I'm trying to get a handle on a game plan.

Really can't thank everyone here enough for the help. Very solid advice that's getting me pumped to take this on. THANK YOU!

[ronyon]

Hey Andrew!

Thanks so much for responding. We do have an existing customer base, and I'm actually part of the in-house marketing team. I was hired to do the blog and social media, and SEO is now part of my job as well. Luckily I'm a writer, so I'm happy to do the descriptions, I just don't know where to start and am curious about an SEO's daily workflow.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

I really think that you should pick your battles. That way you avoid that feeling of being spread too thin. Do a few product pages well, and then move on. (But also don't get locked in to a few. It's like playing Jenga. Tap few bricks to see which ones are low hanging fruit.)

By doing a few things well, you'll able to show results earlier. It's not the answer you were looking for, but I think getting buy-in from the rest of the marketing team (and the company at large) is really key. It's good to have more help and more budget, and the results to deserve them!

Best of luck.

[ndhsne45]

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