If you’re operating an e-commerce site, it’s likely that your keyword list is a complicated one. Not only do you have all of the keywords for your particular industry to worry about, you have individual brand and product keywords as well. Optimising your pages can be a mammoth task. Choosing exactly what points to optimise can be even trickier.

It’s important for any site to refine its SEO plan. Search engine optimisation can be applied to an entire site, but to be in budget, choices have to be made. When it comes to an e-commerce site, the number of choices is huge. E-commerce sites tend to be much larger than non-transactional sites due to their product pages. In general, product pages are an annoyance for SEO, but there is one way you can use them that gives you a distinct advantage.

Colour

We’re not talking about the advent of colour on computer screens in general, but rather the addition of words for colours to your SEO plan. Using product colour and other modifiers alongside your keywords can have a surprisingly good effect on your presence in the SERPs. This kind of long-tail optimisation can also help you target your users more effectively, increasing your sales rates. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about general long-tail optimisation.

Long-tail keywords come from the fact that internet users are getting more and more specific in their searches. Instead of searching for ‘handbags’, for example, users are far more likely to search for a specific designer, brand, material, colour or size. Sometimes all of these combine to create a highly specific search that only sites featuring that exact string of words can benefit from.

The benefits of optimising for these kinds of modifiers are doubled, because you can potentially occupy more spaces in the search engine results for a broad search as well. For example, when a user searches for ‘Versace red leather handbag’ and you have optimised for that exact product, you’re likely to appear high in the results. When a user searches ‘Versace handbag’, your skilfully optimised ‘red leather handbag’ page is likely to appear, along with one of your ‘Versace brown leather handbag,’ ‘Versace black leather handbag’ or main ‘Versace handbag’ pages.

In optimising for keyword modifiers, you have a far better chance of appearing with indented results. Google has begun limiting results from the same domain. That means that not all of your ‘tote bag’ results will appear in the pages, but some will. This is not bad news, as the indented results draw the user’s eye to your link, and at the same time informs them that your product range provides them with a number of choices.

It’s important to note that while it is possible to get away with duplicate content on these pages, Google does seem to pick them up. You’ll notice if you conduct your own tests that sites using colour tags as modifiers for pages with exactly the same content disappear from the top pages.

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