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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
This excellent guide by Sam Underwood shows how to improve your eCommerce category pages for SEO while ensuring the user remains at the core of your decisions.
One of the best sections in this article regards helpful content.
John Mueller, the search advocate at Google says:
When eCommerce category pages don’t have any other content at all, other than links to the products, then it’s really hard for us to rank those pages.
While you shouldn't add 1000's of words below the fold, some content below your products can be extremely valuable.
- Answer questions that help users make purchase decisions
- Answer questions succinctly
- Don’t stuff content
If you use our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, you can add content to the bottom of your listings pages via the Below Category Content text area when you edit a category.
Discover 11 Ways to Improve Category Pages for SEO
I came across an interesting plugin last week which might be useful for store owners with large catalogs and many product images which lack alt tags.
Woo Image Seo is a free plugin which can automatically add alt tags and title attributes to product images. It can include the product name, product category, site name, or any custom text.
It's got excellent reviews also, but of course, as with any plugin it would be best to test it on a separate staging site first.
Take a closer look at the Woo Image SEO plugin
Harry Roberts has written a really important article on Critical CSS which sums up a lot of my own views on the subject.
Critical CSS can be defined as "the styles needed to render the initial viewport".
In theory, in a perfect world, with all things being equal, it’s demonstrably a good idea. However, in practice, in the real world, it often falls short as a fragile and expensive technique to implement, which seldom provides the benefits that many developers expect.
Harry looks at why this is the case.
Read about why Critical CSS isn't the game changer it was hoped to be
Online shopping is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, so is the rate of returned items. In 2021, online shoppers returned over 20.8% of all merchandise ordered - a huge number.
In this post by Gorgias, they share 10 actionable strategies (including tools and examples) to help you develop a return-proof customer experience.
Number 2 in the list covers in-depth and accurate product descriptions. When customers know exactly what to expect from the product they are purchasing, the odds of them being dissatisfied when it arrives are much lower.
Note: If you use our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme you may be aware that CommerceKit now includes a Size Guide module bundled for free as part of our recent 2.6 update.
Read 10 Ways to Reduce eCommerce Returns
If you dabble with CSS on occasion, an exciting new feature just landed called Container Queries.
When designing a component, we tend to add different variations and change them either based on a CSS class, or the viewport size. This isn’t ideal in all cases.
With container queries, we can simply write CSS that responds to the parent or container width.
In this handy demo, built by Ahmad Shadeed, you can resize various components in your browser window to see how they reshape according to their container's size.
Learn more about CSS Container Queries
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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