In order for your e-commerce website to be found by users searching in the search engines you must ensure you have an SEO friendly website both structurally and from a content perspective.

Search engines like Google have automated programmes called bots or spiders which crawl a website, indexing pages as they work through the site. When a user types in a query the search engine crawls through its index to find the pages that are most relevant to that query and then brings them up in the Natural Listings.

In order for the spiders to pick up the pages of your site they must be fully optimised for SEO with keyword rich content and a structure that the spiders can easily follow.

Obviously the main objective of e-commerce websites is to sell products, which usually involves having pages with lists of items and little content and therefore little for the spiders to crawl. There are several strategies you can adopt to combat this problem and ensure that the various pages of your site to get indexed by the spiders.

The first strategy you should adopt is to create content rich landing pages which then feed into your individual product pages. These content based landing pages should have keyword friendly links which also feed out into the product pages.

Another method of improving your rankings in the search results is to include pages which focus on ‘selling’ your products, explaining the various qualities and benefits of the products your company has on offer. Like the landing pages, these pages can also be fully optimised with the keywords you want your site to appear for and contain keyword rich links that then link out to the product pages.

The structure of your website is also crucial. Our e-commerce platform MotiveShop™ can create SEO friendly URL’s which will enable the pages of your site to be easily picked up the search engine’s spiders. The software can also dynamically generate keyword rich meta descriptions and page titles – all working to ensure the spiders are finding and indexing the pages of your website.

Product bundling is a very effective e-commerce marketing strategy which allows you to sell a number of products together thus creating additional sales and maximising the potential of your cross selling and up selling opportunities.

Bundling allows the retailer to heavily affect the choices customers make whilst browsing their e-commerce website. Traditionally whilst shopping in stores customers effectively created their own bundles, making their own decisions of what products to buy. Bundles allow the retailer to make this decision for the consumer to ensure an end result that benefits both the customer and seller alike.

Bundles are a much more effective method of persuading customers to make further purchases by highlighting the benefits of buying one product with another. For example, if someone was buying a digital camera they may not think to also buy a case, memory card etc. Bundles quickly highlight that these products compliment each other which along with a discounted total price encourages the customer to make a group purchase

Bundles are easy to change and adapt to suit whatever requirements the retailers has at that time. Enabling vendors to promote different products at different times and maximise the revenue from their online sales.

A good example of our bundles feature in action can be seen on the website of one of our e-commerce clients, Jessops:

www.jessops.com