Today we will focus on one of the most common problems about an eCommerce, out- of-stock products.
In the article we will establish a protocol of good practices and casuistry to manage products without stock in the most efficient way possible and to optimize them so as not to lose SEO traffic
GUEST POST FROM SEO SPECIALIST JOSE EULOGIZE
The strategies that 孟加拉国电话号码表 we will discuss below are not exclusive to e-commerce websites; the problem turns out to be more common on e-commerce sites, as products often run out of stock or are discontinued.
So if you manage an e-commerce website, it is very likely that at some point you will have a product that is temporarily out of stock or is discontinued.
So how do you have to manage these exhausted pages?
This is an important question, as it will help preserve your website’s SEO and overall health.
And, if done correctly, it will even result in additional revenue growth for your online store. (+ visibility = + sales ?)
From a report by Daniel Corsten and Thomas Gruen , we found that research in 7 different countries has shown that 1 in 5 products offered online is not available.?
What does that mean? Not only the lost opportunities to sell, but also the losses related to the investment in marketing for those products that were already positioned.
The unavailability of a product can be divided into 2 cases:
That the customer leave the store and look for another store that offers the same product, change the sales channel (for example, look for the product in a physical store) or simply change their mind and do not buy if they were not motivated enough to do so ).
- Have the customer stay in the store and wait until the product is available, look for a different product from the same brand that meets their expectations, or choose a product from another brand.
The objective of this article will be to see the ways to deal with the unavailability of the product without 警报消息 damaging the business and how to convert the lack of stock of the product into sales taking into account SEO as a central point ?
?If you want more SEO recommendations for eCommerce how this article I recommend you the SEO guide for eCommerce that I update weekly?
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Step by step for the management of products without Stock
Every industry is different and every online store has its own rules.
To know the magnitude of the problem, you need to know the numbers, so put Google Analytics and Google Search Console to work.
It is essential to have data on the visualizations of products of which we do not have stock in this way you will know how many visitors visited a product that was not available.
In this way you can see their behavior on whether they choose a different product, wait until the desired product is available (for example, activating the availability alert) or leave the store without buying anything (which neither you nor I want to happen. ).
No inbound traffic, no internal traffic
You have a product that does not arouse any interest.
Maybe the time is right to reconsider the offer?
You are thinking that there is no point in keeping products in the store that are not popular and even if they are available, they will not sell.
Will you say that it costs nothing and has nothing to do with SEO? Well, it does.
One of the main goals of Google is to provide the user with good quality content in search results. (this we all know)
And if our product (has searches) can help us fulfill this mission, it will give you better visibility and more traffic.
One metric that influences the type of information stored in a search engine’s index is the crawl budget. Known as Crawl Budget in SEO jargon
The amount of content indexed by the search engine and its currency significantly influence the visibility of the service in search results.
Although the crawl budget is not considered a ranking signal, it is difficult to imagine the traffic on a website if the subpages are not indexed and the information in the search results is not up to date.
When you stay in the search engine index, let’s say 2,000 pages, which have no value (this can be one of the possible conclusions if they do not generate traffic) and are not useful for a user (even for one who has already reached the purchase of a different way) it is worth considering getting rid of such products from both the search engine index and the store itself .
This will translate into the speed with which Google Bot crawls the website. How to do it?
If there are equivalent products that drive traffic and conversion, create a 301 redirect to those similar products
If there are no equivalent products, redirect the deleted subpage to the category where the product was.
There is no organic traffic, but the product pages are still being visited.
The situation is complicated here.
You have unavailable products that are not on the subpages where user visits started, but users are reaching them anyway.
It is likely that when these products were available, users were buying and even searching ?
Let’s imagine an example:
For an eCommerce with approximately 8,000 references we exclude their unavailable products from the category pages and introduce the noindex, nofollow attributes as there are no equivalents available for them in the store.
Unavailable products can only be found in internal ecommerce search results
By doing this:
The number of pages to be crawled and indexed has been temporarily reduced, thanks to which its power has been distributed in fewer subpages, the number of subpages that Google Bot needed to index has been limited. (Crawl Budget Optimization)
Most users don’t like to find unavailable products, so by removing such items from category pages, they won’t have a bad experience.
The measure described above has changed the structure of eCommerce and has influenced its SEO visibility for category pages, (the most important at SEO level) which has brought a slight increase in traffic thanks to Googlebot’s ability to spend more time to already indexed pages.
Converting pages with external traffic
In this case, the wrong decisions can bring not only a loss of conversion but also a loss of traffic.
Having products that are well visible in the search results means that we CANNOT afford to remove them and redirect them to a subpage of a similar product.
Although this could be favorable from an SEO point of view, since the site would be reduced (Crawl Budget), redirecting the traffic (with temporary 302 redirects) to a similar subpage would confuse the user.
Failure to redirect the removed product and the server response with the 404 (page not found) error will result in:
The user leaves the website
Loss of power ( PageRank ) from external links, leading to product pages (if any).
Also, if there is no redirect, the “product not available” message will generally return them to the search results, which will show up in the higher bounce rate and the Damping Factor effect.
Here, before taking further action, it is necessary to identify the reason why the product is not available.
Temporary unavailability of the product
Even if the approximate date of availability of the product is known and it is within the range of about 4 weeks, it is worth trying to solve the problem of its temporary unavailability in a “commercial way”.
I mean things like a “clock” that counts the time until the day of delivery with the option to buy the item before it becomes available again.
It looks like the advance sale. If you offer the user a long wait time discount, many of those who do not need the product immediately will surely take the opportunity to buy the product at a lower price.
Seasonal products and categories
Here you should think not only of individual products, but also of entire categories which are seasonal.
Removing a seasonal category like “Christmas Gifts” or “Black Friday Deals” that converts once a year would be a serious MISTAKE.
