After building a world-class e-commerce site, we sat back and waited for the masses to flock; and flock they did NOT. Why didn’t they flock?  The flock couldn’t find us to flock.

We found ourselves with a whopping 8,000 pages indexed on Google, but typically buried on page three, which is the equivalent of not showing up on Google at all.

We needed to make some massive strides and quick. After building an SEO strategy and executing it, we jumped to 500,000 pages indexed, most commonly appearing in the first five results on page one.

We trump some of our most beloved competitors and are also trumping our manufacturers.

How did we strike Google gold?  It’s simple and common sense.  Let’s start with 10 of the basics.

1.    Google wants their visitors to have a good experience.

They want to send visitors to websites that are present and accounted for. If your site is going down for periods of time, even for scheduled maintenance, and this downtime is exceeding more than an hour or two a month, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Consider your e-commerce platform a 24-hour 7-11. Keep the doors open, even when you’re restocking the shelves and waxing the floors. If your development team is full of excuses, stop them in their tracks and bring in some help, because they don’t necessarily have the skills to keep that puppy running.

2.    Again, Google wants their visitors to have a good experience.

Make sure your site screams. If visitors are waiting more than three seconds to get to a page, stand up at your local ‘website anon’ meeting and admit that you have a problem.

 3.    Fill out the necessary paperwork and check all of the boxes.

Google clearly ‘advises’ it’s constituents to populate the H1s, title tags, meta tags, so on and so forth. Make sure you build out a site map for Google so they know where you’re hiding your content and populate a robots file to tell Google when to close its eyes. This is all low-hanging fruit and should be easy to accomplish.

 4.    De-dupe the site.

Do you have duplicate pages? You’re probably quick to answer “No,” but you may not really know what I’m asking you. Does your site have guided navigation (filterable attributes), paging or sorting, and when you change one of these controls slightly does the URL change but content barely changes? For example, if you’re looking at a page with 10 products and change the sort order, does the URL change but product mix stay the same? If so, you have duplicate content and a major problem. There are some techniques to educate Google to focus their attention on the original version of the page, such as canonicalization and 301 redirects (try to avoid the latter because it carries a significant SEO penalty).

5.    Just like high school, reputation is everything.

Are your friends pushing good juju to your site? If not, ask for their support. In other words, ask your suppliers, manufacturers, re-sellers, dealers, etc., to push their web visitors back to your site, either directly to product pages, or to technical documentation or even to the home page. And, just like high school, make sure the cool kids are promoting you, not the kids that were smoking out back during freshman year.  (In a future post, I’ll discuss how you can become your own best friend and push that delicious link juice from one of your extended web properties back to your main web site.)

6.    Original content is King.

This is critical. You’ll not only need a boatload of content, but you’ll need it to be original. Original? How in the heck are you going to make a bunch of technical data about a product original, you might ask? Simple: —Re-write it. Spin it. Change it. Synonym it. Make it your own and be consistent with your strategy. If you put up the same manufactured, shared, out-of-the-box content as everyone else, you won’t please the Google machine.

7.    Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear.

You’re going to need lots-o’ content to inform Google that you’re the man and they shouldn’t waste time sending visitors to any other websites. So, don’t skimp here. Spend the money needed to build out your product pages with robust and unique content. Start small and measure the results once you’ve built out your pages. You’ll thank me.  

8.    No funny business.

If you’re trying to keyword stuff unrelated to what you sell, cloak invisible text, buy links back to your site, and yadda yadda yadda—just don’t, or you’ll end up the fool.

9.    Cross your fingers and hope to die that you’ll cross-link on your site.  

If you don’t do a good job of leading the Google horse to water on your own site, and from multiple areas of the site, your little Google horse is going to die.  

10.    Say the next sentence like a robot.  

“Google does not like computer speak.”  Make sure your site is using plain English URLs that any human can decipher.  

Don’t try to game the system. Be legit. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.  

I’m sure this makes sense but I know you’re anxious. OK, well channel your anxiety elsewhere, such as knitting, alpaca farming, log rolling or even Google Adwords. But don’t jeopardize your longevity because you’re trying to build your SEO game overnight.  

Mike Mayer is director of e-business strategy and commerce at distributor Crescent Electric Supply Co., a family-owned distributor founded in 1919. At Crescent, Mayer launched cesco.com, a related mobile site and apps, and the company’s first e-catalog for 250,000 products. He has also held various e-commerce and technology-related positions at companies including Thermo Fisher Scientific and Capgemini Ernst & Young. Follow him at LinkedIn.com/in/ecommerceexec and twitter.com/chicagomayer.

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