Evogear.com, a retailer of sports gear and apparel, has produced a sharp increase in Google natural search rankings by redesigning the URLs of product pages on its web site and developing brand-specific content pages, director of e-commerce Nathan Decker says.
“We’ve released a number of site improvements that are having phenomenal results in our organic search campaign, and I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Decker tells InternetRetailer.com.
Evogear’s in-house IT staff has reconfigured product page web addresses displayed in URLs, or uniform resource locators, to specifically reflect the featured products or product categories, Decker says. The URL for K2 Public Enemy skis, for example, was changed to include “skis/k2-public-enemy-2007” instead of a more obscure identifier like “cat-id-12345”. Likewise, a category page for skis now includes “ski-shop” in the URL instead of the former coding.
The changes have led to thorough indexing of these pages by Google’s spiders, resulting in improved natural search rankings, Decker says. “Google has been picking up more pages, the total has gone up significantly,” Decker says.
He figures the changed URLs also provide a better shopping experience because shoppers can read the URLs while browsing through the site.
Evogear also has developed brand-specific content information pages, such as for K2, that link from several related product pages. The increased links and traffic between these pages has also helped to boost Google rankings, Decker adds. “Google looks closely at what links are linking to certain pages, so if we have many iterations of links from product pages to a brand landing page, Google’s spider understands that landing page is relevant to that brand.”
The retailer also modified its web page linking structure so that, while product pages kept the same product-specific URL throughout an in-site clickstream, Evogear is also able to analyze the clickstream shoppers took to arrive at a specific product page, Decker says.
Under the prior system, a product page’s URL would include coding to indicate which prior pages a shopper visited before arriving at that product page. Although that URL content supported Evogear’s ability to analyze clickstreams leading to product pages, it made it more difficult for the product page to get indexed by Google, Decker says. Evogear reworked its linking structure so that it could still analyze clickstreams without including prior-page coding in product page URLs, he adds.
Decker is speaking at theInternet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose, in the session Benefiting From the New Competitions Between Search Engines.
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