SEO for E-commerce Sites

How E-commerce sites are embarking on the long battle for SEO for the holiday season several months in advance. Mr. Kamran, an SEO expert at Digital Age, explains it.

During the end-of-year celebrations, e-merchants will not be content to compete to offer the best price to the consumer. Natural referencing is their other great battleground, which allows it to appear before competitors in Google's results on a given product or category of products. But the fight is long-term and prepares well in advance. How? 'Or' What ? To find out, the JDN asked Mr. Kamran to reveal his retro SEO planning. Objective for the e-merchant: to do at least as well in 2020 as in 2019, when SEO traffic increased by 20% compared to the previous year.

Review The Architecture Of The Site

The first actions of the retro planning are the most important. They start four months before Christmas, that is to say in August, and last for about two months. Firstly, it is a question of identifying the flagship products of the coming Christmas "according to trends, product releases, analysis of SEO research but also thematic fairs which take place at the end of the summer. , like the toy fair, for example, "says SEO expert Kamran. This initial identification serves as a basis for reviewing the catalog and identifying target categories, such as the type, range, model or brand of strategic products for the coming season.

These categories form the underpinnings of future SEO work. They make it possible to plan the massive creation of landing pages aggregating reference products. In the viewfinder of the Kamran SEO team, a navigation by which "the user directly finds all the information on the different products of the same range, declined by color, saga (for games, editor's note) , or other filter without having to multiply the comings and goings between the product pages and the list page ".

Armed with this information, SEOs begin to analyze the site tree . Their goal: to highlight improvements facilitating the distribution of products on the shelves and make navigation smooth and intuitive "Nothing beats the expertise of specialists, adds the SEO manager, this is why this step is nourished by benchmark of sites dedicated to each target universe: toys, high tech, home, etc. " The teams build a lot of landing pages dedicated to lists, models, brands or products, and the tree structure must consistently support this influx of new highly strategic pages.

This period is also an opportunity to take stock of the features that make it easier to find products inside the site. "Typically, the search for toys by age group within a category, illustrates Cécile Béroni. This is a feature likely to bring in a lot of SEO traffic".

Finally, all this work has another purpose: to determine a list of filters that will be used to categorize the some 2 million products that salespeople want to highlight for the holiday season. These filters will allow smooth integration of the products in question in the tree structure and the newly created landing pages.

Optimization Of The Content Of Landing Pages

From October, SEO teams begin to focus on content and the semantic cocoon. "It is really a question of dramatizing text content, as a salesperson in a store would do," says the SEO manager. In other words, explain to the Internet user the qualities, uses and virtues of a product, putting yourself in its place. When looking for toys, the user wonders, for example, the skills and qualities he develops in children.

Concretely, for each main request corresponding to one of the most important landing page, such as "Lego Star Wars", it is necessary to identify the variations of keywords most typed by Internet users to understand the questions they are asking. In the content, all the keywords must be used and accompanied by complete and clear information, to show that the page answers all the questions of the users.

The design of the pages is also subject to improvements: original and interactive animations (packaging, banners, specific navigation, etc.) linked to Christmas are created to improve the user experience. Finally, the SEO team creates many "personalized selections" from the landing pages. Their role is to optimize the positioning of pages on a larger number of requests by highlighting more products and to facilitate the navigation of Internet users by presenting them with products that they did not know or to which they would not necessarily have. thought.

Optimization Of Linking

It is then time to tackle the internal network in order to orchestrate a navigation that allows you to go up or down easily in the tree structure, at different levels of the site from the Christmas landing pages. "We are trying to personalize the user's journey according to the page by which he arrived on the site and the links on which he clicked to minimize the risk of disappointment.

In terms of SEO, the visibility of each page depends a lot on its depth, i.e. the number of clicks from the home page. The lower it is, the easier the search engines can crawl the page. Landing pages are therefore the ones that concentrate the most links to them so that they are more often crawled than the others. The backlinks also valuable for SEO strategy, subject to agreement with partner sites and merchants blogs.