I am a slave to writing about things that I see and do in my everyday SEO efforts or searching.

To me theory often fails to show value in terms of dollars. And I am in this business to make dollars.

I have been doing a lot of eCommerce searching lately since my birthday is coming up next weekend, and I need to figure out what I want. What I have found are a ton of search results that are too specific. They go beyond the generic term I am looking for, and send me to pages with very specific products that are not what I am looking for. This fact can mean death for an eCommerce site, which should be leading generic terms to non-product, more category oriented terms.

Let’s use the example of a website that sells televisions.

Here is the search the user is doing to find our products:

If this takes our searcher to a page that has a specific Panasonic television, we will possibly lose the conversion. Does the searcher want an LCD T.V.? Do they want H.D.? Are they more likely to search our site from our product page, or backtrack and browse the SERPs?

The risk outweighs the rewards here.

However, there is also the issue that you are currently ranking for a great term.

Here is the strategy I like to utilize to keep rankings and improve conversion:

1. Locate the URLs for the pages that are coming up in the SERPs but are not converting for generic terms. If they are overly specific/ product pages I will take note of the URL and the issue I hypothesize to be true through research of analytics.

2. Locate the URLs for the category and sub-category pages that you want to rank for those terms

3. Recreate any transferable on-page optimizations you made to the product or overly specific pages. Copy title tags, descriptions, h-tags and anything else you can put on the page that will not seem out of place.

4. Copy all useful product information and store it in a document so you can reenter it into your eCommerce CMS

5. 301 the overly specific URL to the page you actually want to utilize for the term.

6. Reenter the product under a new URL. This time focus content and on-page factors on long tail terms that appropriatly define the product and will push conversion.

This will allow you to essentially replace the new page with the old overly specific page in the SERPs. The SEs should read the 301 for what it is, a permanent redirection of content. This should help steer any link equity you have built for that term to the more appropriate page.