#to say absolutely NOTHING of the way modern design has optimized for manufacturability above all other aesthetic concerns

[gender-trash]

the post about fast fashion/sewing one’s own clothes blew up again… honestly the more i think about it the angrier i am about it. with both clothing and furniture we sort of live in a world where the market is being overtaken by disposable items made with cheap materials at the lowest possible labor cost. and like, not to diss ikea or anything — god knows they’ve supplied me with enough cheap bookshelves — but this is exactly why i ended up building my own desk.

my dad tells stories about his mom, who was very talented at sewing — it wasn’t her “day job” but in that part of rural iowa in the 60s she was the person you called if, say, you needed a wedding dress on next to no notice. (i’m also told she was excellent at baking pies, but that’s beside the point.) at that time and place, it was legitimately *cheaper* to make your own clothes than to buy them from the store. they would be made of much the same materials, except that you would substitute your own labor for that of whoever assembled the storebought garment.

today, the fabric to make a shirt will almost certainly cost you more than an equivalent department store shirt would. to say nothing of the cost of your time and labor. part of this is that people who sew their own clothes generally don’t want to waste their time on shit fabric, so fabric stores don’t sell quite the same grade of shreddable polyester. part of this is that our modern globalized supply chain has minimized both labor and materials costs as hard as it can, and this optimization has intertwined labor and materials sourcing a lot more than they apparently were in the 60s.

let’s turn back to the subject of furniture. the equivalent of the cheap polyester department-store shirt is the ikea desk. the desk surface is made of laminated particle-board, which is lighter and cheaper than actual wood; the desk is sold to you flat-pak, and you assemble it yourself, thus saving on labor costs. the laminate surface will probably delaminate after a few years’ use. also as with the cheap shirt, any damage is near-impossible to fix — you could sand and refinish a scuffed plywood surface, but there’s no sanding laminated particle-board. it’s also harder to modify to suit one’s needs — i can drill a neat hole for a monitor arm in my plywood desk much more easily than in a particle-board surface.

in both cases, what do you do if you want a slightly higher grade of item? well, obviously you’ll have to pay more money — but it’s difficult to be sure you’re really getting your money’s worth. you have to spend ages and ages comparison-shopping and reading reviews about how quality has really gone downhill since production moved to [new country]. often — especially with clothes — the thing that your money is actually paying for is Style, as separate from Substance. or good advertising. i’ve been halfheartedly in the market for a decent couch for some time, and i’ve noticed that nearly every apartment makeover video on youtube is sponsored by the same furniture website, which of course has provided a free couch — that the youtuber assures us is Really Good, For The Price. as soon as a manufacturer acquires a reputation for Quality, it is in their economic interest to sell out as hard and fast as they can and pocket the increased margin from selling crap at the price of quality until people notice. and in a world where most shopping has moved online, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re still in the actual-quality period. i’m not sure if there even *are* furniture stores around here at quality levels in between ikea and danish concepts (suggesting a market for a mid-tier scandinavian furniture purveyor, perhaps hailing from norway or finland).

because of the sort of person that i am, i tire rapidly of the endless comparison shopping. i don’t want to become a damn couch supply chain expert, i just want to retire the folding chair from my living room. it can’t be *that* hard to build a couch, can it? well, not if one is privileged enough to have the tools and time and space to do it in. i think most of the comments and tags on the fast fashion post are from people wishing they had one or more of the above to make their own clothes with. speaking from direct personal experience, a sewing machine is at least both cheaper and easier to find space for than a minimally equipped woodshop.

the other common piece of advice is to buy used, buy from a thrift store or an estate sale. unfortunately hunting down all your shit used also takes a lot of time and effort, and particularly in the case of furniture hauling the stuff home is a nontrivial logistical problem. again, money or more nebulous forms of privilege (the friend with the truck) are needed to smooth these roadblocks. and it’s really amazing that the solution to “i want an item that is not garbage” is “buy an item manufactured at a time when they were not yet garbage”. yes, of course, the less-durable instances won’t have survived the passage of time, but that’s only part of the effect. things genuinely used to be manufactured to a higher standard of quality. my sewing machine is from ebay; it’s the same model my *other* grandma had, a baseline singer consumer-grade machine. all its gears are metal, and it has a heavy-ass cast metal housing, too. the other household sewing machine is a modern singer consumer-grade machine and for all its fancy stitches it looks sort of like a doll’s toy — the plastic gears are going to break at some point, or the motor will burn out, and if it turns out that the motor on the modern edition is designed to be user-replaceable i will personally eat a hat. i suppose we also used to ask a lot more of our consumer-grade sewing machines, back when sewing one’s own clothes was a baseline household skill for everyone but Rich People, instead of a hobby that consumes more money than it saves you.

i don’t know if my post really has a conclusion. i’m just angry that we live in a fallen world full of miraculous technology and yet we have not solved the seemingly simple economic problem of exchanging a reasonable amount of money for a newly produced durable good that isn’t a complete piece of shit. i am a *robotics engineer*, for the love of fuck; i have a complicated, rare, well-compensated skillset. it cannot *possibly* be a comparative advantage for me to spend my time building a couch or sewing a shirt instead of paying someone to do it for me (ideally also, if i may ask for a miracle, someone who gets things like fair pay and healthcare and vacation time). why is this transaction so damn hard??

#the trashcan speaks #to say absolutely NOTHING of the way modern design has optimized for manufacturability above all other aesthetic concerns #uniqlo seems to have recently rediscovered the arcane knitting technology of ‘increases and decreases’ and is advertising it HARD #because of course these are dead fucking easy for a hand knitter but slow things down on a machine a lot more #and even midcentury modern furniture — at the time a lot more minimal in adornment than what came before (also due to increasing pressure #towards DfM) — is a lot froofier than most modern items. it has like. trim and stuff #the midcentury version of Cutting Corners was using a cheaper wood for the less visible bits and staining it to match #not whatever the fuck particleboard is supposed to be #sewing machine go brrr #civilizational (in)adequacy

[connecticut-seo-adwords]

7 on-site SEO problems that hold back e-commerce websites

Today, I want to shift the focus toward problems that plague e-commerce sites specifically. I’ll also be addressing on-site problems that have a bit more to do with strategy and a bit less to do with specific technical mistakes.

Finally, I wanted to make sure we had some real-world examples to refer to, so I mined case studies from the industry to demonstrate the concrete impact these changes can have on your search traffic.

Let’s take a look at these problems and what you can do to resolve them.

1. Weak product descriptions (or none at all)

Since e-commerce sites usually have a very large number of products, it’s common for product descriptions to be short, automated and provided by the manufacturer.

Unfortunately, this creates a few problems for SEO:

Automated descriptions that swap a few words into a template can create duplicate content issues.

Descriptions provided by the manufacturer are almost certainly replicated on other sites, meaning that you are not providing anything unique for the search engines to index. This means the search engines have no reason to rank you above competitors.

It’s not always possible to manually update the product descriptions for every page on your site, but this action isn’t strictly necessary to resolve these issues. A focus on turning just a few of the highest-value product pages into full-fledged landing pages with conversion-based copy can have a dramatic effect on the rest of the site.

An Australian retailer named Toy Universe was able to increase its search engine traffic by 116 percent in just four months. That doubling in traffic also doubled sales. While many changes were involved in that boost, a large chunk of the effort went toward work on the product descriptions.

Put simply, the site did not originally feature any unique product descriptions or unique content for the category pages. Adding them in was a huge piece of the puzzle.

When Google first released the Panda update, this online automotive bookseller saw a 38.5 percent drop in organic search traffic overnight. The brand was well respected by its customers, but their product descriptions were supplied by the publishers; as a result, those descriptions were identical to the descriptions found on many other sites.

Eliminating duplicate product descriptions and replacing them with unique descriptions can help resolve this issue. Opening up your site to user-generated content like reviews can also help by introducing new content to reduce the proportion that is duplicate — a strategy that has obviously worked wonders for Amazon.

2. Not including user reviews

In addition to diluting duplicate content, user reviews seem to affect search results in other ways. It’s not entirely clear whether the presence of reviews affects search engine results directly or indirectly, but the impact is clear and unambiguous.

Yotpo conducted an analysis of over 30,000 businesses that added user reviews to their site and measured how this impacted organic search traffic. The results were stark: Over a period of nine months following review implementation, they found that Google organic page views per month grew by over 30 percent.

Including user reviews can be scary, as this allows buyers to leave negative feedback on your products. But there is a wealth of evidence that including user reviews increases conversion rates. In fact, in a bizarre twist of fate, more diverse product ratings improve conversions better than five-star-only reviews.

If you’ve been hesitating to include user reviews because of concerns about negative feedback or due to the difficulties of implementation, I highly recommend you take the plunge now. The impact is almost sure to be positive.

3. No unbranded keyword optimization

Perhaps one of the most common issues is that many e-commerce product pages are simply not developed with keywords in mind.

The typical product page is built around a brand and model name. It’s certainly true that some consumers may be searching for these names, and they should definitely be included in the title tag and the other important locations on the page.

That said, most consumers are likely not searching by brand or model name, especially when it comes to more obscure brands.

For that reason, it’s important to include more generic, popular phrases on your pages as well.

This isn’t to say that you should abandon any more niche keyword usage. What I mean is that you should be going after phrases that consumers are using when they search for products like yours, and that means going deeper than branding to focus on the actual mechanics of the consumer journey.

White Hat Holsters did just that, and the result was a 100 percent increase in sales and a 400 percent increase in search engine traffic. The traffic grew from 2,000 to 8,000 visits per week in just eight months.

To accomplish this, they:

used keyword tools and competitive research to identify phrases that consumers were actually using to find products like theirs.

analyzed the meta descriptions, image alts, URLs and headings.

chose three to five closely related keywords to target for each page and updated the above-the-fold region of the pages to semantically reflect those keywords.

created a blog to capture keywords searched for by consumers who were further up the funnel.

4. Focusing too heavily on transactional keywords and not developing informational content

It’s incredibly difficult to rank for “money” keywords, and it’s usually a failing strategy to focus too heavily on them, especially if this means you are neglecting the informational keywords that target customers who are a bit further up the funnel.

By shifting some of your attention toward less transactional keywords and toward more informational ones, you can rank for less competitive keywords and build a stronger reputation with the search engines.

Ranking for these less competitive phrases doesn’t just add traffic for those individual phrases; it can also improve your site’s overall reputation with the search engines. This may be because it influences behavioral metrics. Whatever the cause, I’ve personally witnessed this effect many times.

Darren Demates helped a medical e-commerce site skyrocket its search traffic by an incredible 1,780 percent using an interesting keyword method he calls the “double jeopardy technique.” Here was his process:

He obtained keywords by adding the page URLs into the Google keyword planner, instead of the usual method of guessing keywords and looking at the related suggestions. He also put the focus on informational keywords instead of transaction keywords.

He used SEMrush to find the keyword difficulty for the keywords recommended by the Google keyword planner, then weighed the difficulty against the potential traffic in order to make a judgment call about which keywords to focus most heavily on.

He used a “site:example.com [keyword]” search to identify which page on the site already had the most ranking potential for that keyword.

He searched forums using an “inurl:forum [keyword]” search to find the types of questions people were asking about his informational keywords.

He updated the thin blog posts on his site to answer all of the questions he could find on forums that people had about the keywords.

I’d recommend taking notes here and putting this to use. The possibility of increasing search engine traffic by an entire order of magnitude isn’t the kind of thing you want to ignore.

5. Implementing poorly planned site redesigns

I’ve had clients rush ahead with a site design without notifying me, and I’ve had new clients who approached me after a site update tanked their rankings.

This experience is incredibly painful, because a site redesign intended to modernize and beautify a site, or to implement changes expected to maximize conversions, can end up obliterating your organic search traffic. Few things hurt more than dropping a wad of cash on something and having it backfire on you.

If you implement a site redesign without taking SEO into account, this is almost bound to happen. Pages that ranked well can get lost, content that was pulling in traffic can get rearranged, and the results of past wins can get lost.

Seer Interactive assisted one retail client who had redesigned their site in order to secure the site with HTTPS. Their redesign caused their organic traffic to plummet by a staggering 75 percent. The situation was so bad that they no longer ranked for their own brand name.

The redesign deleted several key pages that had been pulling in traffic. This didn’t just cause the traffic from those pages to get lost, it also created 404 errors where other pages on the site still linked to the missing pages. This can cause PageRank to drop like a brick.

The site had a new URL structure, meaning all of the links pointing to the old pages were now pointing to nothing, and all of the authority the site had built up in the past was tossed right out the window.

The redesign introduced copies of pages, producing duplicate content that may have caused the site to be algorithmically penalized.

After fixing those issues and introducing a long-term content strategy, the site experienced a 435 percent growth in search traffic. This led to a 150 percent increase in transactions, and a 64 percent increase in revenue. This was accomplished in six months.

Do not execute a site redesign without the help of an SEO professional. The results can be absolutely horrifying.

6. Poor migration between e-commerce platforms

It’s a safe bet that most e-commerce sites are built using third-party platforms. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement that allows the e-commerce business to focus more on its core business and less on web development.

It’s not uncommon for a site to outgrow one platform and switch to another as their market share increases, or to switch platforms in order to gain access to previously unavailable features. Unfortunately, switching e-commerce platforms can sometimes hurt rankings.

In one case, TotalHomeSupply.com found itself losing 37 percent of its traffic after switching from Volusion to Mozu. Despite Mozu being owned by the same company and serving as the enterprise-level version of the same platform, the transfer led to technical SEO issues. (This isn’t a knock against Volusion — this can happen with any e-commerce platform if you aren’t careful.)

The drop in traffic led to a 21 percent drop in transactions, despite a 24 percent boost in the conversion rate that Mozu may have contributed to.

The issue with Mozu was that the pagination was handled by JavaScript instead of HTML. Inflow worked together with Mozu to eliminate the JavaScript issues, allowing Google to properly crawl the pagination, which was invisible to the search engines when JavaScript was involved.

In addition, they trimmed thin content that had led to a demotion from Google’s Panda update and introduced new, high-quality content.

The result was a doubling in year-over-year organic revenue and a restoration of organic traffic to levels higher than before the site migration.

As with site redesigns, make sure an SEO professional is involved any time you update your e-commerce platform.

7. Not optimizing for your most promising keywords

In the section on informational keywords, we mentioned Darren Demates’“double jeopardy” technique. In addition to focusing on information keywords, part of the reason for the strategy’s success also lies in the fact that it leverages the keywords that already show promise.

We mentioned that his technique involves performing a site: search to identify which page on the site already ranks best for any given keyword.

A related method of identifying keywords is to analyze your existing rankings to see which keywords are already performing well, and to make changes in order to better optimize for those keywords.

They identified “low-hanging fruit” pages which were already ranking fairly well for keywords, then updated those pages by tweaking the titles, headers and content in order to better reflect the keywords. They were careful to focus on keywords which would be “in season” shortly after the changes were made.

In addition, they performed some link building and improved the quality of the on-site content.

The changes resulted in a 31 percent year-over-year increase in organic search traffic and a 25 percent year-over-year increase in organic search revenue. This was a tripling on the ROI they had paid for the SEO work.

There are two primary methods you can use in order to optimize for promising keywords. The first is to run your URLs through the Google Keyword Planner as in the “double jeopardy” technique.

The second is to look at your keyword rankings in the Google Search Console or a tool like SEMrush to identify keywords that are already ranking on the second page or so. If these keywords are ranking without having already been optimized, they are a golden opportunity, and you should capitalize on them by updating your titles, headings and content.

This second approach is sometimes called the “low-hanging fruit” technique.

In the process, it’s important to make sure you aren’t cannibalizing your rankings for more important keywords, and, of course, to verify that the changes in the content will be useful for users and will not detract from the primary message of the existing page.

Time to put this information to use!

Don’t close that browser tab just yet. Leave it open and start taking a look at your site. Take a look at the problems I’ve listed here, and ask yourself if you’re facing any of them right now. You’ll thank me when your search traffic starts climbing.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Source

http://searchengineland.com/7-site-seo-problems-hold-back-e-commerce-sites-283299