If you run an eCommerce website, you know the importance of ranking on Google. According to Insider Intelligence, by 2023, 22.3% of total retail sales will be made online (up from just 13.8% in 2019), and many online purchases start with a search engine.
SEO is a crucial part of helping your website to appear in search engines for the right terms, putting yourself in front of potential customers. However, a lot of SEO revolves around a long-term approach with consistent products and pages.
What about when you have seasonal or new products that you need to appear in search engines fast?
Google’s John Mueller recently tackled this question in an online webinar. See below his actionable suggestions that can help your website rank new products quickly and effectively (his response is after 31 minutes in the video below).
Defining Seasonal and New Products
For the sake of this discussion, seasonal products are anything you sell on your website through its own unique product page, usually when the product is in season. The example given in the video above is of a St Patrick’s Day Cake. These products may only be relevant for a short amount of time, and might not even appear on the site for most of the year.
New products are defined for this article as any new products that involve the creation of a new page on the website. Many of our Shopify brand partnerships at Alvio involve one partner supplying products for another partner’s website – these will be classed as new products on the website in the eyes of search engines.
Building rankings for product pages is something that can take time and effort long-term, sometimes for years for high-competition products. This time commitment makes ranking for new and seasonal products particularly challenging.
How to Rank Seasonal eCommerce Products
First of all, your website must have good SEO fundamentals, so new pages will naturally rank quite successfully. Then, it’s a case of making Google and other search engines notice your new products.
Google’s John Mueller said that the most important thing when it comes to ranking new and seasonal products is showing search engines that these products are of importance to you and your audience:
“From a practical point of view, that means when we look at something like the home page of a website or whatever the most important page is from the website, let us know about what you consider to be important and link to that prominently.”
It is also recommended that any new products are mentioned on the homepage. That way, if Google only crawls and updates your main page, it will still obtain some new information that could help influence rankings.
A ‘New-In’ section can be a practical help in this situation. By putting a selection of new products on the homepage or another prominent page, you’ll help search engines recognise these as important products, which will help them to rank quicker.
Utilising Techniques to Grow Your Shopify Business
Search engine optimisation is an important part of growing your online business. Combining a great website with the potential of Shopify collaborative commerce will help your site achieve even greater growth, both now and in the future.
If you’re interested in unlocking the power of collaboration for your eCommerce business, why not speak to our team today and see how our app could help you?
