Google May-Day update: five tips for eCommerce sites

Posted on Oct 24, 2011 by Evolve ecommerce websites
Tags: google, ecommerce features | Comments (0)

Get twenty different search marketers in a room and you’ll often get twenty different opinions on a subject; but there is a growing consensus that some tweaks were made to the Google Algorithm in the last few days of April to first few days of May.

This has become known as the Google May-Day Update. Whether it’s a full blown-update or not, a large number of people seem to have noticed a change.

It’s not something we’ve seen much with our clients; but an in-house SEO at one of the UK’s most popular websites, recently told me about a huge downward shift in traffic which matches the trend being talked about in the blogosphere.

So what are the symptoms?

• Are you a site which has thousands of indexed pages where each page receives traffic from a variety of long-tail phrases?
• Have you seen these pages lose traffic, each page may only have lost a few visits each, but in aggregate this has a material impact on your traffic? 
• Does this change seem to have occurred after the 28th of April?

If you answer yes then you seem to have been affected by the May-Day update.

It’s pretty difficult to reverse engineer Google at the best of times, especially if you don’t have access to dozens of sites which have been affected but one of the best write ups on the subject is Redfly’s.

Whether you have been affected by the changes or not I think it highlights a very real risk for ecommerce players.

Have you been relying on building link equity to your homepage and then been using boiler plate product descriptions? With good basic SEO for every product this would probably have been enough to rank, but not anymore.

Go to any of the top online retailers who dominate natural search results, their product pages will be loaded with content, unique user generated reviews, extensive product descriptions which go well beyond the basics, maybe they’ll even have high quality editorial copy which helps buyers understand where this product fits in comparison to its competitors?

This content is the type of thing that customers early in the buying cycle love, so it only makes sense that it’s the type of content that Google would look to reward.

So here are my top five tips to future proof your product pages and avoid being penalised by the Google May-Day Update.

1. Have user generated reviews

I can’t see any reason why a serious online retailer would avoid having user generated reviews. If implemented correctly they’ll add variety, depth and honesty to your product pages. No competitor could ever duplicate it and it’s far more likely to have the keyword variations that your customers actually use.

2. Invest in good product imagery

If you were relying on domain authority to rank internal pages you need to build more external links to your product pages. One way we’ve had success in doing this is with product imagery. Investing in interesting photography for your products not only increases customer confidence but it will also naturally attract links as people link to the images.

3. Give every page some character

Usually product descriptions are bland beyond the point of redemption. You can often see that no love was spent describing the product and that is a terrible reflection on the retailer’s (your) perception of that item. If you aren’t familiar with Woot.com, visit the site once a day for the next week. I’ll buy you a beer if that hasn’t inspired you to write better product copy.

4. Make it obvious for people to link to your product pages

You need to understand why people would link to your content before you stand any chance of making it happen. Maybe people want to share what they’ve bought from you, on their blog? Give them an embeddable piece of code which they can include along with their personal review.

Perhaps there are two obvious products in a category that often go head to head, like the iPhone vs. the HTC Desire, create a page comparing the two products and not only will you tap into a rich vein of “product x vs product y” search terms, you will also have the type of content that will be referred to when that comparison is raised in a forum.

5. Stay one step Ahead of Google

Though no-one can predict when Google is going to make changes to its algorithm, you didn’t have to be Mystic Meg to foresee that content thin product pages on ecommerce sites might not rank forever, since equivalent pages on affiliate sites have struggled for years.