Magento 1 & 2: Increase ecommerce SEO traffic using Intelligent Product Listing pages

October 25, 2017

tagalys

High-value organic traffic at any e-commerce store is the most efficient way to reduce customer acquisition costs. This improves your path to profitability. At Tagalys, many of our clients use Intelligent Product Listing pages and get the added benefit of ranking high on search results for keywords that are on these product listing pages.

What was most fascinating is that the keywords on these product listing pages showed in the top 5 SERP results consistently across all clients. So we did some research on clients to see common factors that led to ranking high on SERP. We also noticed that clients, whose Tagalys powered product listing pages ranked high on SEO, also had an SEO expert adding the right elements on these pages directly and ensuring the pages were listed on the site map and on a landing page. The reason why there were listed on the sitemap, landing page or anchored on the home page, was to have a search engine bot, index this page, collecting all the details, thus allowing it to calculate a relevancy score for the keywords mentioned on the product listing page.

Before we get into the details, here is a brief video on Intelligent Product Listing pages

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAvorzqfops[/embedyt]

The below elements are features available in Intelligent Product Listing pages which can be directly utilized without having to add details to your e-commerce platform

Bounce rate:

Probably the most important metric that helps sustain & improve the SERP ranking of a product listing page but often overlooked. In order for bounce rates to be low, organic visitors need to visit another page like a product page or another listing page once they view your product listing page that showed in SERP. You need to know what products to showcase, to want your visitors to click on them.

Most online stores, spend time on the SEO hygiene factors that we list below but do not have any idea what products to showcase on the page. They tend to sort them by some basic sort orders like new arrivals, most popular, best sellers without understanding or evaluating if this sort order will lead to high CTR from the product listing page to the product page itself. This sort order is the core competency of Tagalys, as our TRENDING sort order, orders products on the page by calculating the probability of sale, based on the historical data of how visitors are engaging with products at your store.

From a search engine standpoint, high bounce means the traffic it sends does not find the page interesting thus to protect itself, it will start removing your page from the SERP to show other pages that have lower bounce rates.

Page Title:

Always have your search keyword as part of the page title starting with a verb e.g., Buy Maxi Dresses between $999 and $1499, Shop Diamond Rings with Rubies etc., Visitors seeking to visit an e-commerce store are more likely to use a verb in their query vs. a visitor seeking to know more about content sites.

Url component:

Having the search keywords as part of your URL also helps increase the relevance of the product listing page to be found in the search index. Keyword density and availability of the keywords closer to the domain name in the URL are critical in the relevance index for search engines

Page Heading:

Not always required, but helps with SEO, to further re-enforce the keyword relevance in the product listing page, leading to better ranking on SERP.

Description:

It is important to have a specific description of a page and not a catch-all, as that can lead to higher bounce rates which also affects your SERP ranking. For example, if your product listing page is about Maxi dresses, ensure the description talks about the maxi dresses and not what it can be paired with like peep-toe shoes, pearl jewelry, etc., This is because if a visitor searching for pearl jewelry stumbles upon your page for maxi dresses since "pearl jewelry" as it was in the description, they will leave the page thus increase the page bounce rate. This low conversion metric, reduces the rank of the page thus limiting visibility in future organic search results.

Meta keywords & Meta Description:

While there is some value in having these fields with relevant keywords, we have seen that they do not play a significant role in SERP rankings. If you have good content listed in the title, URL & description, it would be sufficient for meeting high relevance scores for the search keywords in question.

All of the above variables can be easily entered & edited by e-commerce teams, without having to modify this on the backend of your platform.

Domain ranking:

All of the above works well, assuming your domain has higher authority in the SEO world. For this, search engines like google report on a domain score that looks at variables like your page load time, mobile-friendliness, 404 redirects, etc., Hence if this basic hygiene is not met by your store, that could lead to a lower score on SERP, as your domain is ranked low by the search engine.

Tagalys maximizes conversion rate & gives merchants visual control of products displayed in Site Search & Category pages at their online store. To know more about our solutions and features, get in touch with us now.

You can also read more at Intelligent Product Listing pages here.

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Vanja S

Sheike

"Tagalys makes merchandising effortless. Their data driven sequencing and sorting drastically improves our effectiveness. Tagalys takes the guesswork out of merchandising and product recommendations."

Ryan R.

Camilla

"I love that Tagalys listens to customer needs and has an innovative + agile team around them which can support addressing those needs and adding improvements to the roadmap."

Rafaelle C.

Blue Bungalow

"Tagalys is the powerful and reliable data-driven solution that we were looking for when it came to search & merchandising for our Shopify Plus store. There is no limit as to how custom you can get with your merchandising, which is exactly what we were after!"

Tiarne Warren

Meshki

"The dedication of Tagalys team is evident from the feature developments. I appreciate their effort in understanding our business needs and feedback. We have saved numerous working hours and achieved great performances."