Back to resources

eCommerce and Website PDF Document Indexing

ecommerce and Website PDF Document Indexing

What is the Value of Providing Searchable PDFs and other Documents for Search Engine Indexing?

Typically, an ecommerce or website application benefits significantly from additional search traffic. Search engines provide value to searchers by constantly looking for high credibility, vastly relevant, and unique content to “add” to their search indexes. When a site exists within a medium to highly competitive industry, providing unique content that is valuable and credible becomes a challenge. This is where PDFs (Portable Document Format) and other OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) documents deliver a significant boost in unique content that's of value to an industry.

As a search engine receives "requests" for terms that are specific to a manufacturer’s outdated parts. Currently, the parts are no longer available through traditional, streamlined manufacturing outlets. Where does the search engine go to find a "valid" response for the searchers request? In this scenario, a searcher will need to interact with another human being in order to glean the information they need. Opening up OCR'd, PDFs and similar documents that traditionally live in a corporate "silo" now grant users the unique ability to quickly find the deep content they need.

These relevant keywords help seekers find specific manufactured parts that are no longer offered new, but are still available for sale. In this instance, a site visitor might type in a keyword that pulls content from a PDF or OCR'd document. These selected keywords relate to an active product or offering that wouldn't otherwise contain the keyword. Now, this opens up an entirely new category of data for the search engines to associate to a product line, categories or other means for the manufacturer, distributor or services provider.

How to Enable Your ecommerce or Website for PDF and Document Indexing

As a starting place, it's typically best to assess the content that is easily available and to identify content that may require extensive OCR work or additional work. Specifically, any PDFs, Word documents or other electronic formats will typically be quicker to assimilate into a usable format. Upon generating a list of hundreds, thousands, or possibly even hundreds of thousands of records to import, the next step is to identify important information within the content that would be ideally gleaned. On the other hand, you must determine content that would not want to find its way into the site as it may not be productive or useful.

Let's take the case of a manufacturer who produces replacement parts for a product that is no longer in production from the original manufacturer. This replacement part manufacturer may provide specific part numbers that pertain to their processes and documentation; however, these may not be directly related to the original manufacturer or other replacement part manufacturers. Thus it would make sense for the replacement part manufacturer to provide the original manufacturer's manuals, specification sheets, product technical bulletins, etc. Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt to add their product information of any competitors who they can provider parts from. Enabling this content for users and removing the unnecessary components provides a significant value to end users and brings rich SEO content to the site for search engines to index. This method proves to provide unique content and is rare to find across the rest of the web.

Improve Your Search Engine Indexing

PDFs and OCR'd documents can add a surprising lift to almost any business. Efficiently indexing your content is no easy task, and can be overwhelming at first. Here at Clarity, we help improve your company's web systems, and overall bottom line. Please contact us or fill out our request form to learn how your business can improve!

Find out more

Click here to review options to gather more info.
From resource guides to complimentary expert review... we're here to help!