Ecommerce question - overoptimisation

[clare_f]

Hi there,

I'm the owner of this site http://goo.gl/76Mrbd and I have a newbie question

We have a large number of vintage clothing items, and for SEO purposes I would like to rank for keywords "vintage insert designer name".  I've been titling all our items with the phrase "vintage insert designer skirt/dress/pants etc" - but I've noticed that when we google these phrases - an example being "vintage moschino" we don't rank for them at all, despite the fact that each individual page gets a decent "page optimisation score" for that particular keyword.

Many people have suggested to me that the reason this is so is because we're using the keyword too much on our site, but I can't get my head around how to fix this.  What would be the best way to restructure our product descriptions so that we can fix this?

Thanks in advance

[LoganRay]

Hi,

It sounds like you might have some over-optimization going on. If this title tag formula "vintage insert designer skirt/dress/pants etc" means you're repeating the same tag on multiple products, you're triggering duplicate content red flags.

Keep in mind, there is a lot more to ranking with a website than just the title tags though. But since you're asking specifically about title tags, put Moz to good use and check your Site Crawl report to identify any duplicate issues you might be facing. I can see you've got some duplicate issues with pagination (i.e. http://irvrsbl.com/collections/outerwear?page=3), you'll need to fix that, along with any other duplicates due to multiple products fitting the same title tag formula you mentioned - your Site Crawl report will give you the full run-down.

[clare_f]

Gotcha

i'm not repeating the same tag again and again - I add different keywords before I describe the item.

I'll fix the duplicate content issue first and see what happens.

[donford]

Hi James,

I know you marked an answer as "Good" already but I want to add a little something to it.

I think what you maybe running into here is Keyword Cannibalization not over optimization. What I mean here is you are using the same "big keyword" on each one of your product pages. This means your are not only competing with everybody on the web for the keyword "vintage moschino" but yourself as well.

If you look at those ranking above you for some of these types of keywords (vintage moschino, vintage kenzo...) you'll see one thing in common, they have a landing page for the keyword "Vintage X" then products that fall under this category. Though the products maybe named "Vintage Kenzo Flower Print yada yada", they aren't targeting the big keyword "Vintage Kenzo" on the subsequent pages.

My advice, target your keywords in a hierarchy. Just like most CMS systems have a page hierarchy, you should target your keywords the same way. For example

Homepage (Vintage Clothing & Accessories)
   Category 1 (Vintage Women's Shoes)
       Sub Cat 1 Type (Vintage Women's Pumps)
         Sub-Sub Cat 1 Manufacturer (Vintage Chanel Pumps)
            Product 1 (Red Chanel Open Toe Pump)
            Product 2 (Beige Sand Chanel Leather Pump)
        Sub Cat 2 Type (Vintage Women's Flats)
          Sub-Sub Cat 2 Manufacturer (Vintage Chanel Flats)
        Sub Cat 2 Type (Vintage Women's Scarfs)
.......

That is a bit of a simplified example, but the goal here is to create the content at each level for broad keywords. As you go deeper in the site keywords get more specific. This does a couple things, one it creates many more keyword opportunities, and second it draws a high correlation on the broad keywords which are notably harder to rank, to your more specific keywords, giving each level more strength.

I hope this helps,

Don

[clare_f]

Thanks Don

I feel like this is the info I was looking for.  I'm not sure how I am going to apply this to my shopify site - still getting my head around the concept and will do some further reading

[donford]

You're welcome Clare.

Glad to help,

Did your name used to be James? Not sure where I got that from in my original response...

Don

[Skemazer]

HI Don

I like you answer and I was wondering if you could give me some advice also?

I am doing the SEO for a Shopify site www.neweyeco.net. They want to be found for prescription sports glasses and other key words related to that such as prescription sport glasses.

But the other keywords we want to get a ranking for are keywords related to specific sports under "collections" are  eg cycling glasses, golf glasses, fishing sunglasses etc - not necessarily prescription. And also under features they want to rank for "blue mirror sunglasses, clear glasses, yellow lens sunglasses etc

How would you recommend they be set up to avoid cannibalization or over optimization as I have run into issues with the Alexa rank zooming up to 16.8mill from 500K in January!!

Any advice would be very welcome.

Kind regards

Sarah