Keeping E Commerce Product Content Fresh

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Some months ago we created unique content for each of our product descriptions - basically, we removed manufacturers description and made our own unique content.

But our content is now, I feel, stale but I'm trying to work out how we can produce fresh content for the product pages and how much is needed for Google to notice the changes?

My question is:

1. What does google class as freshness? Would a new photo count? I've always thought that it has to be mainly text content but we do not get that many reviews as our products are not mainstream and it's a small market so are we to create extra bits of text content in the descriptions, and how much?

[ProductPearson]

Photos are of course very useful - especially if you can take them yourself of the products, upload in nice quality and name them accordingly including the file name (product_name.jpg) to ensure that extra exposure.

You may find that some items even bring in most of the traffic from image results if the item is something that is visually appealing.

Reviews are of course ideal as they are unique content and it can be hard to get them, but there are many people on Twitter who will review product samples and return the items in order to increase their own exposure, giving you a win win situation as you could keep the item to resend to someone else, and get a lengthy review to put unique content on your product pages.

You can also add some humour to the posts and keep things fresh, and if new versions of a product come out, you can add a changelog for example. Firebox.com has some pretty humourous item descriptions.

Ash

[MoosaHemani]

I don’t think it is important to change the content if you only have Google in mind but if you really think that the content is stale and it hurts your audience there here are few ideas that will help you generate new content with less effort.

-          HQ Images

You can take high quality images and replace it with the current one with better and SEO friendly names. This will help you get better rankings in Google image search and if they will be more attractive you will see audience, links and conversions from it.

-          Reviews

I do understand that there are less people who actually respond to reviews but if you play some campaign that evoke users to review to your products, chances are you will get good reviews that will again help potential buyer with their buying decision.

A competition or contest around the reviews will be worth investing.

-          Videos

The thing that I see most ecommerce website is not investing on is the videos. If it is possible for you to make videos and put it on your product section, chances are your conversation rate will increase tremendously.

There are tons of more ideas that you can play around with and having a new text is one of them.

Hope this helps!

[ProductPearson]

The problem with holding a competition for reviews is that people will usually send low quality and false reviews just to earn entries, whereas if they have an opportunity to increase journalistic exposure, they are more likely to provide a high quality review for free, but that's just my opinion and your suggestions are great.

[BruceA]

HI

Do you have a blog?  If so is it on your site sub-domain?  Create new blogs regularly and google will pick up the new information and crawl more often.  if the blog is linked to your current site that is good enough.

There is not much more you can do with products, but you can certainly make the core pages seasonal, so adding new content for each season which give the site a fresh updated look without trying to re-invent the wheel.

Bruce

[TommyTan]

Hi,

If you're worried about the Freshness factor for search, I don't believe it specifically applies to individual pages such as your product page.  It doesn't make sense to constantly update your images or product description to keep your product content fresh.  If you look around, you don't see a lot of eCommerce sites constantly update their product descriptions.

I believe this factor applies to the website as a whole.  As long as there are new and fresh activities going on your website such as new reviews that Moosa mentioned below, it should be fine.  I believe you will also be adding more products and updating landing pages which already satisfy the "freshness factor."

I would suggest spending more time on other factors if you're just thinking about Search Engine.

My 2 cents