Can URL optimization improve revenue? Yes. As a CEO do you need to consider it even if your agency prices it as “advanced SEO”? Yes.

ECOMMERCE URL OPTIMIZATION

I remember working on e-commerce websites and speaking with the guys supposedly in charge of posting new products. They would ask me,”Are you the internet dude?” Then I would be worried and try to be patient with the sarcastic remarks that would come later designed to get me to leave them alone as they cloned parts postings by the dozen. What they didn’t realize as they were cloning was that the URL for the new product was being created with the URL elements of the old product. So the minor differences that may set it apart to a search engine would be lost in translation thus making it invisible. That means no revenue MR. CEO. Got that?

The meta tag description and page content can get worked on and be correct but if the URL is bad, then you’re going to have a tough time selling product. Reviewing the case of the TV repair store is one way to look at it. Let say you are a guy named Barney and you own a TV repair store. Well if you name your website “Barney’s amazing with stuff” then when people search for “TV repair in Hollywood” the search engines are not going to make the connection between your badly worded URL and the product you are trying to sell. That’s the top level explanation.

So when that gets applied to various pages of your website and you feel like “being different” when you name your product pages “Cool Stuff”, well guess what? There is nobody searching for cool stuff so the search engines don’t know what you’re selling! So the old days of having web pages with a “#” sign for all pages are gone. Yes the industry moved forward in a more specific way and left you behind.

MIGRATIONS and REDESIGNS

So now when you are considering a website migration or redesign, you should have an SEO advisor. It may even be recommended to buy a test domain and put it in a sandbox to see how the URL optimization would actually work on that content management system. Because if you have NO CONTROL over URL edits….like some….then your URL optimization is going to be horrible. And all that work will be for nothing. Yup I said it.

And later when you’re all done with your redesign, it is a good idea to run searches on keyword combinations to see if your pages are coming up or if they need to be “renamed”. If you have control over your URL optimization then this will be easy and you’ll be able to see the difference. You may want to name the page a certain way, but spelling it out will get you more revenue MR. CEO. Yup, I went there AGAIN!

If you would like to hire AVM to help you work on your e-commerce SEO then email us and get started with a small retainer. After your results begin to pick up you’ll be glad you took a small step improving your revenues.