SEO Content for eCommerce or Other Large Websites
If you’re an eCommerce store owner with loads of products listed on your site, you might be wondering if you have to write copy for each and every single one of them. The good news is that you don’t—only the products that you want to get ranked and actually sell. Standard product descriptions provided by manufacturers or distributors are usually no good here either, because they’re used on other websites and, as we saw earlier, that type of duplicate content is likely to be ignored by Google. If your website has nothing unique to say about these products, how could Google justify ranking you above competitors saying the exact same things? This is a particular problem for ‘ready made’ affiliate or dropship sites, which are supplied ‘finished’. Unfortunately, they’re usually churned-out duplicates with dozens or hundreds of identical copies, so are extremely unlikely to rank in their current state.
This obviously means a lot of work needs to be done writing good quality content, so the key here is to prioritise. How we tend to approach this for clients – and how I suggest you approach this yourself – is to prioritise the product categories that are most profitable, most popular, or that you have a head start in selling because, for example, you have a better range than your competitors in this particular category.
A client of ours sells protein supplements. In their online store are dozens of protein powders from some of the world’s biggest names, each using the manufacturer-provided descriptions. This market is so saturated and price-driven that to get these products ranking would take a lot of time and money that the client didn’t have. Instead, we took the decision to focus on a particular range of protein powders designed for a specific niche of their customers: crossfit fans. We identified the products that are most likely to appeal to crossfitters (all natural supplements, nothing artificial) and focused on this market.
By putting all our attention here rather than trying to spread across all the supplements they sell, the depth and relevance of the content can be much greater, these pages will be more likely to rank for crossfit-related phrases, and they’ll be more likely to convert crossfitters when they land on these pages, too. The margin on these products can be higher because the audience perceives a much stronger match, and the website becomes more profitable. By doing this, you can take a website from being one of 10,000 sites competing for extremely competitive phrases, where little margin is available, and make it part of a smaller number of websites targeting a much more profitable and less cutthroat, less price-driven market.
