The Importance Of Optimizing Deep Links For Ecommerce

I recently spoke with a friend that started an online store last year. They soberly admitted that it was a lot harder than they expected. However, they were able to change things around by optimizing the pages for individual product listings. They turned a once floundering online business into a steady stream of income.

This is something that other e-commerce entrepreneurs need to take into consideration. They can increase sales and net profit margins considerably by optimizing deep links and sales pages.

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Deep-link Optimization Is The Key To Turning Around A Struggling E-commerce Store

Many people are surprised to find out how difficult it is to create a successful e-commerce store. They are also surprised to find out that the profit margins are so much lower than they expected. Although the gross margin on e-commerce sales is around 40%, the net profit margin is closer to 10%. Small cost overruns can easily push an online store to the brink of bankruptcy.

It seems that creating a profitable e-commerce business would be so much easier since the industry is growing so rapidly. It is estimated that there are now over 2.05 billion e-commerce shoppers in the world. Unfortunately, the rapid growth in the commerce sector has not made it easier for new stores to thrive.

There are a lot of reasons that e-commerce stores struggle. It is easy to shift the blame towards external factors, such as massive competitors and changing market forces. However, the problem usually stems from poorly formulated executive decisions.

One of the biggest mistakes that online stores make is failing to optimize deep links appropriately. You need to make sure that every potential customer can easily find the products that they are most interested in. Here are some tips to do this.

Make Sure That You Have An Internal Search Engine On Your Site

If you have more than five or six products on your e-commerce site, then you are going to need an internal search engine. One company found that 50% of their website visitors immediately go to the internal search engine. Although having a good navigation structure is important, very few people are willing to spend time sifting through multiple webpages to find the product that they are looking for. An instant search engine will work even better.

Include Relevant Keywords In Your URL

Some e-commerce stores use numbers to denote product listings. This is often because they use a content management system that automatically assigns random URLs to new pages.

Although this approach makes it easier to set up new pages, it is terrible from an optimization perspective. Here are some reasons that you should have the product keywords in the URL instead:

You will get more search engine traffic because webpages that have keywords in their URLs will almost always rank better in the SERPs. This is especially important because organic search engine traffic converts much better than most other types of traffic.
It is important to make your pages as easy for returning visitors to find again as possible. This will be a lot easier if you have the keywords listed in them. The reason is that people will still usually have the webpage stored in the cache. This means that if they tape the keywords in their browser address bar again, your webpage will appear. They will be a lot more likely to return to your webpage if they see it in the cache. Otherwise, they would probably search for the product again and possibly visit a competitor that showed up on Google.
Even if your webpage is no longer stored in their cache, it will be easier for people to find it again if you have keywords in the URL. They might physically tape the address into their browser bar. If it was a complicated URL with strings of numbers, then they wouldn’t go through the hassle.

You might find that sales are going to increase significantly after you start adding keywords in your URLs.