Have You Seen My Car Keys: eCommerce SEO

When’s the last time you forgot your keys? Did you find them on the couch, nightstand, or kitchen counter? Or did you resort to using your lifeline “ask one of the audience”…aka your family members? If you’re anything like me then time is of the essence and you opt for asking a family member. To make things simple I’ll usually start by describing the traits that set them apart from the rest. Now, you may wonder what this has to do with e-commerce search and Search Engine Optimization. Surprisingly, quite a bit. Especially when it comes to optimizing eCommerce  SEO for your products to ultimately help your shoppers find “their own keys”.

Let’s begin!

First, I’d like to clarify why the act of finding my keys relates to effective eCommerce SEO, which is understandably an odd comparison. Let’s say you live in a household like mine, with a multitude of keys. Keys for the garage, the house, my wife’s keys, etc. Now, how do I expect to find my keys without noting traits that differentiate them from the others? Would it help if I said they’re silver and jingle when you shake them, or that they’re the size of a ripe satsuma? In my experience, there’s only one way to find them, use differentiating traits. For example, my wife’s keys have a small silver heart attached to the ringlet. In this way, I can always tell it’s hers.

Now, how does this relate to eCommerce SEO? Simply put, effective SEO requires the same process as finding my keys. That is, we recommend leveraging what’s unique about your products with the end goal of bringing visibility to those traits rather than the product itself. This is especially important since, in the case of products, there are no longer three or four pairs of keys but hundreds if not thousands of products to sift through. So when thinking about eCommerce SEO the question then becomes less of “how do we provide visibility for this product” and closer to “what’s unique about this product that truly stands out?”

To test this thinking, which of the following URLs would bring in more favorable traffic?

• mycompany.com/branded-blender.html
• mycompany.com/branded-blender-for-smoothies.html

The difference is small, what do you think of the “for smoothies” at the end? As it turns out this “for smoothies” is a trait unique to a particular blender one of our customers carries, which is known for its ability to effectively blend smoothy. Interesting, no? This “for smoothy” trait is exactly what I mean when I say “differentiating factors” since it’s far easier to add visibility to a branded “blender for smoothies” than it is for a generic brand of “blender”.

So, let’s say you have collected every unique wrinkle about your products that are presently known to you. How do you leverage that insight? Well, we’ll be sure to elaborate in a follow-up post but for the time being let’s say you’ll need to do some research as to what keywords are popular search terms, how people search on your site, and how the two relate.

I hope I didn’t lose you with the whole “finding my car keys is comparable to eCommerce SEO bit”. I would love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on this topic. Or if you would like to suggest a better way to locate your car keys and/or optimize SEO please drop in the below comments section.