Solving E-commerce SEO Issues: Duplicate Content

Every online store strives to get more sales, and that happens in two ways: creative ads and good SEO. In order for e-commerce businesses to increase their revenue, they need to boost their visibility on search engines. 

Visibility on search engines depends on a comprehensive SEO strategy that covers all the essential aspects, including technical and content. Doing so, there are challenges that come up along the way, such as duplicate content that might affect the results. 

In this guide, we’ll go through the most common challenges in e-commerce SEO and best practices to overcome them. But first things first, what is e-commerce SEO? 

What is E-commerce SEO?

E-commerce SEO is the process of improving an online store’s organic ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. By implementing the right strategy, more visitors (customers in our case) are more likely to visit the store and complete purchases. 

Important Tasks in E-commerce SEO: 

• – Keyword research
• – Optimizing product and category descriptions
• – Improving site structure
• – Creating backlinks and internal links 
• – Creating intro content 
• – Optimizing meta tags 

Why is E-commerce SEO Important? 

The importance of e-commerce goes beyond driving sales, as it adds credibility to the store, cause people are more likely to trust the organic results. Moreover, your store can gain a competitive advantage over other stores that don’t apply SEO. 

E-commerce SEO vs. Regular SEO

The main difference between a regular and e-commerce SEO is the final goal. First, regular seo is more about a broader brand awareness and traffic, through optimizing blog posts and landing pages. Whereas e-commerce seo aims to increase the sales revenue through targeting transactional keywords and attracting customers ready to buy. 

Duplicate Content in E-commerce

One of the factors that highly affects the SEO performance of e-commerce sites is duplicate content. This issue occurs when the products have the same content on the same website or across different websites, whether that happens in the text itself, meta tags or the product description. 

Duplicate content can be caused by copying the same content from the manufacturer itself, or when a single product has multiple colors, sizes, or models, which often creates multiple pages with very similar content. 

Why is Duplicate Content an Issue?

There are many reasons why duplicate content affects SEO performance, which can be divided into these three main reasons: 

• – Confuses Search Engines: When Google sees multiple pages with the same content, it struggles to decide which one is the most relevant.
• – Decreases SEO Value: Instead of all backlinks strengthening one page, they’re divided across multiple duplicate pages. This makes each page weaker in SEO than if all the authority went to a single URL.
• – Lower Rankings & Visibility: Search engines prefer unique, valuable content. If your site has duplicates and your competitor writes original product descriptions, Google is more likely to rank them higher.

How to Solve the Duplicate Content Issue?

In order for you to benefit the most from SEO and content on your e-commerce site, you need to make sure that the duplicate content issue is solved, which can be done through: 

1. 1. Write unique product descriptions: Write your own version, highlighting the uses, benefits and advantages of the products. 
2. 2. Use canonical tags: If you have multiple URLs for the same product due to filters, set the canonical tag to the main product page. 
3. 3. Consolidate product variations: Instead of separate pages for each color/size, keep them on one product page with dropdowns.
4. 4. Fix URL variations: Set up 301 redirects for duplicated URLs to make sure that only one version is crawlable. 

FAQs

• 1. What is duplicate content in e-commerce?

Duplicate content in e-commerce happens when the same or very similar product descriptions, meta tags, or category texts appear on multiple pages of the same site or across different websites. This makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to rank.

• 2. Why does duplicate content hurt SEO for online stores?

Duplicate content confuses search engines, splits backlink value across multiple pages, and reduces the chances of ranking. Competitors with unique content are more likely to appear higher in search results.

• 3. How can I fix duplicate product pages caused by variations like size or color?

The best solution is to consolidate product variations into one page and use dropdown options for size, color, or model. You can also apply canonical tags to ensure search engines recognize the main version of the product page.

• 4. What are the best practices to avoid duplicate content in e-commerce SEO?

• – Write unique product and category descriptions.
• – Use canonical tags for duplicate or filtered URLs.
• – Consolidate product variations into a single page.
• – Set up 301 redirects for duplicate URLs.
• – Regularly audit your store with SEO tools to detect duplicate content.