Does Thin Content Hurt Ecommerce Sites and How to Fix It

Google Panda update not only affected traditional websites but its consequences were even on E-commerce sites. Most of the E-commerce businesses were taken off guard with its first hit. What happens if an e-commerce site has been never “hit” by Google updates and if still Panda update has its affect on businesses, but they don’t even recognize it? But this unidentified problem which is like a missed chance hurts the brand manufacturers most.

A successful brand does not even require SEO; even it uses SEO where there is no need for it to worry about any updates. But these successful brands need to take help of SEO until and unless if they have any competition in market with large retailers as competitors.

What does thin content have to do with it?

In these days, as e-commerce sites have put its step forward most of the purchases are carried out online. Search engines provide users to shop online from any devices such as mobiles for convenience. If a brand has trustworthy customers then there will not be any effect of Google updates but in case of new business in online it has to depend only on search. So, online businesses which are new have to follow rules of SEO to gain popularity among online shoppers and should survive from Google updates.

After these Panda updates it will not be sufficient if you drop a pair of keywords on to a page and put it for shoppers. Panda updates have changed rules by concentrating on to text over other aspects. Even it affects brands severely if only images are present without any content. After this update, it is made compulsory that even ecommerce sites have to focus on content like traditional websites.

2012 can be considered as year of content strategy, while in 2013 it’s very important that even ecommerce business have to follow SEO as part of content strategy and also digital strategy. It is essential for ecommerce businesses to identify problem of thin content and find a solution for it.

How to identify ‘thin content’ category pages?

Following are the basic points which are missing on a typical ecommerce sites and help you to recognize thin content category pages:

A paragraph describing category page with three to five sentences and should include a pair of keyword variations.

Links within the paragraph are must and rich with anchor text linking to subcategories, and also associated categories which help search engines understand content relationships.

Another important factor is not to miss alt tags for images as these help search engines to understand what the image is about.

Breadcrumb navigations help out in understanding site-architecture easily and crawl without confusion.
Category heading in H1 tag is of utmost important as it helps search engines to understand meaning of the page in absence of content and is preferred over an image banner.

A title tag should include category name and should be placed first before brand name as search engines read title tags from left to right.

A short friendly URL which includes category name should be placed right after domain name.

So, it is important to follow above rules along with using right keywords which lastly helps in gaining more users and popularity among online users.