Help - Best MetaData formats for tags, H1, etc. for narrow-focus e-commerce biz

Started by ContentDan, 03-26-2018, 09:04:59

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ContentDanTopic starter

Hi Guys –

I'm really hoping you can help me. I've recently joined an e-commerce company as a content writer and am to write product descriptions, landing page content, long-form blog posts, etc. All is good there. BUT... I think there are HUGE flaws in what they are doing with URLs, Product Names, Title Tags, etc.

To protect the company's reputation, I'm going to use a made up company to explain what's going on and hope some of the experts here can provide guidance.
Company Pseudo Name: WallyWatches.com
Sells wrist watches. Assume that 90% of people use search term "wrist watch" rather than just "watch."
Company sells 10,000 different styles of watches.

PRODUCT NAMES
In order to avoid duplicate content and to not be seen to be keyword stuffing, the product names do NOT contain the words "wrist watch." Instead, they are named according to the image on the watch face,  e.g.  "Bright Sun," or "Red Barn."

PRODUCT URLS
The Product Names are incorporated into the URL, so URLs for every single product take the form of:
WallyWatches.com/red-barn.html
Note that neither "watch," nor "wrist watch," appear in the URL.

TITLE TAGS
For the product pages, title tags take the form of "Red Barn – Rustic – Shop by Category"

H1
The product names also serve as the H1, so no mention of "wrist watch," or "watch," there.

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The company's SEO expert has been with the company for a very long time and has a very close relationship with the owner. The SEO guy is adamant that we not include "wrist watch" in the product names or in the URLS (not even for new products going up that would have no external links pointing at them).

He has agreed to change the title tags, but some will include "watch," some will include "wrist watch," and others will include "time piece," depending upon how many characters, when added to the product name, will equal 70.

As for the H1, he's agreed to add the term "watch," to each of 10,000 SKUs, but not "wrist watch," (which is 90% of searches).

The SEO guy tells me that it is unimportant to have "wrist watch" in our product names, might even be detrimental to have the term in there as it could be seen as keyword stuffing, and an absolute no-no to have them in the URLs (even for new products).

He says that we have plenty of content in each product page that identifies the product as a wrist watch. That our poor search results will improve as I contribute unique descriptions for each watch. That we have "category pages," for different product groupings and those pages have great content and rank well in search results. Note: We do... but far fewer people search for "Rustic Wrist Watches" than do "Wrist Watches."

Currently, for the search term "wrist watch," we show up on page 3 or 4. All of our competitors, including newer businesses, businesses with fewer products, companies just not as good as us are kicking our butts. They all use the term "wrist watch" in their URLs, Product Names, Title Tags, H1s, etc.

Most of them have worse descriptions than ours (one uses the exact same description for every product). Many of them do have more links than we do... but not all.  SEO guy tells me our poor results are mostly due to not enough links... so I have to write content that other sites will link to.

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Your thoughts? Please!
Thanks,
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