E-commerce system

Search Friendly Ecommerce Systems

E-Commerce Systems and Natural Search

Nowhere is the problem more acute than proprietary E-Commerce platforms, in many cases these facilities would be better if they were ring fenced so that the pages cannot be indexed by search engine spiders.

With E-Commerce systems the problem of duplication is compounded by the continual recycling of product information, this is generally pasted in from other websites or feed into a back end system and is word for word identical to most of the other sites selling the same products.

This takes duplication to a new level and is the reason why most E-Commerce sites have little profile for the products they are selling, especially the product pages themselves. The drivers here are twofold, firstly many of these sites have large numbers of products which makes the creation of unique product information time consuming and the second driver is a general apathy that the only way forward is through paid search as this is both easy and in theory measurable.

The fact that it may well be non sustainable in the long term or just plain expensive seems to be overlooked. If you factor in the random click abuse, the lack of clarity for the statistics and of course the disturbing fact that most of these sites have never had good natural search results it is really hard to make a case that paid search is a better strategy verses organic search with paid search as a tactical tool.

Corporate E-Commerce Lacks Basic SEM Understanding

In my experience many corporate companies clearly do not understand what their agency is actually doing, of course they will have their meetings and their reports but the reliance on the agency feedback is too high. Any large E-commerce business should have a competent level of understanding of all aspects of SEM including natural search and paid search. In addition they should get independent evaluation of the reports and the results of any natural search strategy on a regular basis.

Of course in a lot of cases the agency may be doing a good job but often the E-Commerce management team will not have sufficient knowledge to properly evaluate this especially in natural search.

A simple examination of the Internet profile for many High Street E-Commerce brands will show websites that are heavily reliant on PPC with little product profile in natural search. Many of these are victims of the web architecture that they use for their E-Commerce facility, additionally many more have not used what superficial SEO functionality is available in the system.

It is perfectly feasible for product pages to be well placed in search, there are some good examples of success but invariably these are Internet led businesses and not recognised High Street brands. Probably some of the worst performers here are from the retail sector, this is a really embarrassing situation for many of these established retail businesses and yet there seems no urgency to compete for search positions outside of paid search.

Some would argue that this lack of urgency is due to huge legacy CMS/ E-Commerce platforms that are too unwieldy to improve with SEO functionality but a closer look will show many are using modern systems that are not delivering. There have been a number of high profile retail website re-launches in the last two years but still these established brands have completely missed the point and signed up to systems that cannot deliver what is needed.