SEO for E-Commerce Sites

[Sequelmed]

Hi Everybody,

I have two e-commerce sites just launched with not much content at the moment just user login pages for the clients to avail the service. The management is not interested to put much content there i think. Maximum what they will be putting only 5 pages of content in total, not more than this. Any practical tips how to optimize such sites especially when there is not much content.

Best

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning,

I'm a little confused. So, if I'm understanding this there are a handful of pages, and a user login page. After a client logins in they can make purchases of products? Or are you selling the service of being able to log in?

Regardless, without content there are some basic website strategies for SEO best practice when setting up a site etc, however I personally feel like I need to know more before I can give a sufficient answer.

Kiss Metric wrote a great piece on the 7 Critical Errors of e-commerce, and the number one is not having content, I feel like management may be setting you up for failure.

[DSM_UK]

Hi Tanveer,

When you say there is login areas, how much of the site will be publicly (and therefore Search Engine) accessible?

If the content level is low, then it will be easy to keep things compliant, and the many guides on here will help with that, heading tags, meta tags image alt tags and all the good stuff etc. 
Moz's new cheat sheet is a great starting point: https://moz.com/blog/seo-cheat-sheet 

Is your client base already established? Or are you looking for these sites to help build it?

If content such as a blog is not available to you from management then a PPC campaign might be more suitable?

Kind Regards

Jimmy

[Chenzo]

Tanveer, forget it.

Let them know - Google's job is to find relevant, useful content and provide that to the consumer.

One of the best tactics to implement with an E-Commerce is provide 150-200ish of useful content about the product on unique pages for each which will increase the amount of "indexed" pages on the site which will in turn increase the sites value.

You have to get them to also consider producing AT LEAST an article once a week catering to their audience which then ties in their social media which I sure do hope they are at least investing in that as well.

Your pal,

Chenzo

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Tanveer,

Thanks for reaching out to the community with your question! You've already been asked some important questions, and I have one of my own: What is the purpose of each site? That is, what kinds of products/services are these eCommerce sites selling?

Please fill us in with some details on these sites so we can help. Thanks!

Christy

[PatrickDelehanty]

I agree with Christy - it'd be nice to have a bit of background for what's happening.

In the meantime, you can check out the following:
Thin & Duplicate Content: eCommerce SEO
7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites I would also suggest looking into Google's duplicate content resources as there are tons of great tips for you to look into, including pagination, parameters, and canonical tags.

I would make sure that your on-site SEO is unique for each product, as well as your information architecture.

Keep us posted! Thanks so much.

[Sequelmed]

Hi Folks,

Thanks for generously responding to my query. Yeh I feel there must be some more information about the sites I am talking about.

Sites are actually web-based applications to be used by our existing clients and will be completely available to search engines for indexing except the applications.

Login areas and the applications onward have different urls not for search engine consumption but for the users only.

Each site has only one product (application) to be sold/used by the clients. Rests of the promotional pages are very few and available to search engines. And I expect management is not interested to add up any more pages, even the one site has not even a single page so for except the application and login area.

Hope this information is enough to help you frame you response to this specific situation.

The sources you suggested I am consulting and in the meantime hoping to listen from you.

Thanks