SEO Autopilot: Turbocharge your everyday eCommerce tasks with automation
Last week, our very own SEO Account Director Issie Hannah spoke at BrightonSEO. Issie explored some of the innovative ways SEOs can make time-consuming eCommerce tasks more efficient through automation. Here’s a rundown of the talk, including examples of some of the practical eCommerce tasks you can automate.
Having a well-optimised SEO strategy for an eCommerce site can result in more traffic, and ultimately more sales. It can also lead to better user experience. From navigation to site structure and page speed, it’s a highly effective marketing channel compared to other advertising forms. By driving in organic traffic and enhancing user experience, it can also bring a higher ROI compared to other paid channels.
However, if you work in eCommerce, you’ll know there are many different time-pressing tasks and initiatives required to get a successful website running. By using automation, you can turbocharge these tasks.
Time is important. One study found that as many as 80 hours can be saved each month through using automation. What’s more, automation can get results. Here are just a few of the everyday eCommerce tasks you can automate to drive your SEO strategy.
KEYWORD CATEGORISATION
Keyword research strategies are essential for eCommerce. They’re crucial for capturing your consumers’ wants and needs. However, when there’s keyword research, there’s keyword categorisation, which is where automation can come in handy.
AI has the power to understand the meaning of your keywords, not just categorise based on the words used in the keyword phrase. If you have a list of keywords for a client, you can ask ChatGPT to categorise these keywords and it’ll understand how.
If you’re in eCommerce, you’ll want to try and do this at scale – and what’s more, you can. Thanks to an AI extension called Numerous AI (powered by ChatGPT), you can scale your keyword categorisations. Simply add this extension to your sheets and, using the ‘=infer function’, feed it some examples. From this, it will learn and apply these patterns to the rest of the keywords.
PDP DESCRIPTIONS
Moving on to PDP (Product Detail Page) descriptions, another critical aspect of running an eCommerce site. PDP descriptions are ultimately where the purchasing decisions are made. They’re your chance to really engage with and persuade your users, and search engines value them based on their relevancy, authority and uniqueness.
Consumers are eager for information about the products they’re considering buying. However, when working in eCommerce, you’ll have lots of product pages, and therefore lots of descriptions to write.
The Numerous AI extension can help you write these descriptions at scale, using the extension’s ‘=write’ function. Here’s an example of how to use this:
On the left of this table are the products and in the middle are the prices. We’ve then given the AI tool the following instruction (highlighted in the pink box) to create the descriptions. Keep in mind, you’ll have to specify the language and currency in these instructions, otherwise the tool will default to American spelling and dollars.
MANAGING OUT OF STOCK PRODUCTS
Out of stock products are very common for eCommerce sites and can cause numerous problems. Not only can they bring technical issues like 404 pages and crawl wastage, but they also impact customer retention.
You can identify these 404 pages quickly with Screaming Frog’s Custom Search. Simply set up a crawl in Screaming Frog using the Custom Search functionality and enter the ‘Out of Stock’ HTML tag, or however it’s written on your website – just make sure the tag is entered correctly, as the Custom Search is case and word sensitive. Once the crawl is run, the tool will flag up the pages that are out of stock. After this, you can choose what you want to do with these pages.
Automation can be really great for research, identifying issues and creating solutions across an eCommerce SEO strategy. While the tips above are helpful for automating your eCommerce tasks, there are so many more exciting ways Tug can help make your SEO more efficient. Get in touch to find out more.
The Speakers
