The Biggest Ecommerce SEO Mistake Brands Make
Moving one word from the middle of a title tag to the start took a page from position two in Google to number one – more than doubling ecommerce revenue from that page.
Brands are sitting on a major ecommerce SEO revenue opportunity hiding in plain sight
Most brands think of metadata as admin. Boxes to fill in. But your title tag is the number one most important SEO ranking factor… so it is the most business-critical digital real estate that you own!
Not only is your title tag the first place Google and other search engines look to understand what your page is about, it's often the very first introduction to your brand that potential customers see when they find you in the Google search results.
Most ecommerce websites are only using half of the available space and the problem is exacerbated by having thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pages
You get 60 characters of title tag space per page to include relevant words that match the content of your landing page.
You get 150 characters for each meta description which is the bit of blurb that appears below each title in the organic search result in Google – and whilst meta descriptions haven't been a ranking factor for well over a decade it's your golden opportunity to grab your customers' attention so they click through to your page.
Every character in your metadata is precious
Except most ecommerce websites are only using half of the available space and the problem is exacerbated by having thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pages.
If you imagine every title tag and description is like a free billboard you've been given, if you're only using a fraction of the advertising space it's the equivalent of only putting a tiny ad in the corner.
When you have an ecommerce site, it's like having thousands of giant billboards in every city around the world with tiny ads – the scale of the missed revenue opportunity is huge.
Metadata architecture optimisation for ecommerce SEO excellence
Our award-winning 3 step approach to metadata optimisation or as we like to call it metadata architecture, is based on our ThoughtShift Full-Funnel Methodology developed over 15 years of experience working across hundreds of ecommerce sites including Selfridges, The Body Shop and numerous independent brands.
1. Insight
First, we analyse SEO landing page data in Google Analytics to identify the top revenue driving pages as these often present the greatest opportunities.
If you're already driving thousands in organic search revenue from a page, it's because that page already ranks for keywords that drive end of funnel conversions.
So we then check Google Search Console and ranking tools such as Ahrefs to see what search queries and keywords the page ranks for currently.
If you're not ranking number 1, then the fastest revenue growth opportunity is to increase the current SEO positions. Increasing from position 2 to position 1 can double revenue and increasing a revenue driving keyword ranking in position 10 to position 1 can 10x the revenue from that page.
At the same we look for gaps in the current keyword targeting.
For product pages this is often things like brand name, product name, product reference code, material, colour, size, style.
For category pages, these gaps are often less obvious and require competitor and audience analysis but often will be ways that people search at the consideration stage that are not as specific as a product level search.
2. Optimise
Secondly, we optimise each page of metadata to fully utilise the 60 characters for the title tag and 150 characters for the meta description.
Google places the highest relevance on keywords placed at the start of the title tag, this diminishes the further away from the start you get. So we've seen changing one word, one position to the left has been all that's been needed to push a ranking from number to 2 to number 1 and double revenue from that page.
Squeezing in a few more keyword variations can gain page 1 of Google visibility for those new keywords from not ranking at all - all within a matter of days or weeks of the changes going live – but, you can inadvertently push existing keyword positions down if you don't carefully protect those converting keywords - the ones proven to drive revenue.
Another gotcha to look out for when optimising metadata is to make sure you don't have multiple pages targeting the same keywords.
Sometimes when you already have 2 pages ranking for the same keyword, removing a keyword to deoptimise one page from ranking is what you want to do so that the remaining page is then the authority on the topic and it gets an immediate boost in visibility… and revenue.
3. Impact
Thirdly, we monitor the impact of the changes you've made and see if you gain the expected results.
Don't make too many changes at once or it will be harder to measure and ideally you want to be able to demonstrate impact for those particular landing pages and overall with more SEO visibility, rankings and most importantly… ecommerce revenue.
Metadata architecture optimisation is just one critical success factor
Our award-winning ecommerce SEO agency approach to growing revenue has been honed since 2011 and now AI Overviews dominate the majority of search results, our ecommerce SEO experts have developed our approach to help trusted brands take SEO, Organic Shopping and AI SEO performance to the next level.
For a free digital performance consultation tailored to your unique circumstances, get in touch with our experts.