If you have an Ecommerce website it is likely that a significant percentage of your customers/traffic come from the search engines. I bet you know that already.
Without listings on the first page of the SERPs (search engine results pages) you are likely to get a marginal amount of traffic. Again, no surprises.
So, as you strive to get those premium listings here is a key point to consider:
If you have the exact same product names and descriptions as 40 other sites, the odds of your site getting top placement goes down dramatically. The most common cause of this problem is when you get your product data from an upstream distributor. Guess what? You and every other retailer is getting the exact same data. If you just plunk it on your website – you are going to have the same content as everyone else. That is not a good path to search engine success.
Furthermore, with the increasing importance of Comparison Shopping Engines and other search tools, you really need to consider your product skus and product images. Sure it is easy to grab your vendors images. But if a shopper identifies that you have the same item as every other retailer out there and you are not competing on price, your odds of getting the first crack at the sale are going to drop.
Of course, there are many ways to compete successfully besides price, but you’ve got to get people to your site so you can make the case for the sale.
The more you can shape your data and make it your own, the better off you will be on many levels. When you have thousands of products – and limited time – you need to take a pragmatic approach to managing your data. Perhaps you can start by focusing on your top sellers and see if the effort to develop compelling and unique product data leads to an increased return in sales.
A good way to gauge how many sites are out there with identical products is to pick an arbitrary product on your site and copy and paste a string of text from the description, with quotes around it, into the Google search box. You might be surprised to find out who else is selling your products.
Data. Data. Data. The Internet is one giant database. To the extent you can make some of that data your own, you will be able to stick out above the crowd. When vying for Ecommerce sales, that is a good thing.
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