How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?
-
I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building.
We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer.
I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content?
With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it?
Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.
-
Great answer Andy, had already posted my previous response to Don.
We do have design resources in house so this is not an issue, I guess that in the past we have been pretty tied up in grasping at straws to find a post that can relate in some way to a new product. I get the whole concept of content being king but I do also get that there is the notion that in the past we have maybe tried too had to draw parallels between an article and a product in the thin hope of that article bringing in convertable traffic.
Again, a really helpful post that I will certainly look to expand upon further and will be more than happy to feedback any results.
As for the tracking, thats exactly how we do track the conversions from the blog so yes please, would really appreciate any guidance in being able to track customers from the blog better.
Thanks,
Tim
-
Hi Tim
How are you measuring the success of the blog, simply using Analytics last click model - if this is the case it won't work, but I am currently writing something on how to set up Analytics to track once a user has visited the blog, then how do they go on to convert, which channels do they come from.
Once you start looking at this, you might actually realise the blog does better than you think. I am almost complete and should have it done by Monday to share with you if you are interested.
Thanks
Andy
-
Thanks Don,
They are all great points and we do already carry service reviews for the site, but not on products so this certainly something that I am keen to look in to further. We currently just have product page ratings.
One thing though that I am still unsure of and could do with some assistance with is an idea of what kind of strategy should be employed in terms of content. Is it a good idea to put a lot of resources in to the blog content, whilst this does get a lot of traffic, if does not convert particularly well in relation to products. But is it good for the domain as a whole? What kind of effect would be achievable on the domain as a whole by allocating resources in this manner?
Thanks again,
Tim
-
Hi
With our blog we don't use it as a product focus - more industry news focus, general category focus, relevant content - since changing to this strategy the conversion rate has improved.
So might be worth doing some less product specific articles and more generic articles - this is also good for long tail SEO keywords.
I don't know what resources you have available, and I am not going to say do infographics as this is wrong (too many people churning out infographics when they are not needed), but if you do have some design resources, either make your articles a bit more unique with images, illustrations - but if you do have some good information that works well as an infographic - then create one. These are usually very good for getting links. Don't just create these for the sake of it though.
But as Don said, more relevant content. Other idea's
How to guides
Unboxing articles / videos
Latest news articles
Explanation articles - help your customers to understand the products you sell, this will lead to more conversions as they can see the benefits.
Hope this is useful
Andy
-
Hi Timothy,
Short answer is content.
Easy to say hard to complete. Here are some strategy's I found helpful in the past.
Customer Reviews (moderated): these provide additional details that customers appreciate reading before making a buying decision. It also adds long-tail keywords that you may have not thought of along with lots of unique content.
Product Schema / microdata: this gives search engines and shopping listing sites a workable schema to list your products on sources you may not have been aware of.
Research and Self Review: This is one way Amazon gets ahead of its competition to illicit customer reviews. They actually send their top reviewers free products to generate unique review content. (Amazon Vine). Most companies probably can't afford to do this, so is why I recommend self reviews. If you're not a strong writer possibly hire a copy writer to proof-read.
Customer Images (Moderated): Adding customer generated images is an easy way to get additional unique photos and alt text.
Some thoughts, hope it helps,
Don
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do links from International SEO counterpart site carry weight?
Hi everyone! One of our clients has a competitor who has an international reach with their website. Their hreflang goes from Brazil, German, US, China, etc. We found that the Chinese site (.cn) sends over 900,000+ backlinks to the main US site (.com). The hreflang for the site has the .com US version of the site as the canonical. So my question is - does our competitor get any link equity from the 900,000 links they are getting from their Chinese (.cn) version of the site? My initial thought is that because they are marked up with hreflang and canonical tags, those 900,000+ links wouldn't' have any equity? Would love some thoughts/guidance on what others think.
Link Building | | JKhoo0 -
If your website is mentioned on an external site does it matter the amount of people who click on the link to your site to improve your domain authority
I want to know about link building strategy and does it matter the amount of times someone clicks on link on to your site from the external site to affect your domain authority
Link Building | | SimplifyValetStorage0 -
Link building for a 'boring' eCommerce site
Hey all, I'm in need of some serious inspiration and I'm hoping one of you generous people can help. We're looking to do a spot of link building for an eCommerce site which I would describe (without putting it down too much) as 'boring'. This isn't our fault per se as the site sells printer cartridges and there's only a certain amount of excitement such a product can create. As a result natural linkbuilding is quite tricky, especially when it comes to creating links to anything other than our homepage. For the past couple of years we have focused on creating good content and indeed have a thriving database of hundreds of helpful articles and videos on the site. These are generating decent traffic (and rank #1 for many different help related search terms) but the problem with these articles is that they don’t convert in to sales at all well. I’m also conscious that it will ultimately end in us developing a link profile which would classify us as a printer repair resource rather than cartridge sales website. I have read numerous guides on Moz but they all tend to focus on products which are a little sexier than those that we sell. Getting someone to share and link to a truly unique product would be incredibly easy compared with asking someone to engage, share and link to the latest Epson cartridge. I started writing articles on some decent quality business blogs however the links given don’t look particularly natural and the link would always be to our homepage. We have the staff and the time but we built a whole host of rubbish links back before Penguin and I want to ensure that we are going to head in the right direction before embarking on something new. If you had a site which was really dull how would you devise a link building strategy that was relevant and, most importantly, natural? Thanks for your help. Chris
Link Building | | ChrisHolgate1 -
Adding content to an eCommerce site
We're creating buyers guides for the each category on our ecommerce website and we're not sure where to place the content for maximum impact. Option a: place the content on the category page beneath the product listings Option b: place the content on our blog and created links between the content and category page Which option do you think would be most effective/ user friendly? Any thoughts, help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Alick
Link Building | | Alick3000 -
Does Google index a content in iframe?
Hello guys, I´ve done a infografic and i want to share it with some bloggers. But, i want to share an iframe, not an image (beacuse there is some links on it). My question: Can Google consider the links inside an iframe (for link building)? Thank you 🙂
Link Building | | seomobly0 -
Any good site for Blog Submission (without any waiting/approval) ??
Is there any good blog submission site which does not have long waiting period before article is published and which allows followed link from blog? I have a list of such blog submission sites but they all either need weeks delay till it gets approved or never gets approved. So I would really appreciate If you can tell me some of such sites that you are aware of..
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Seo using images
I have a client that creates a lot of custom jewelry and takes pictures of it. They've been reluctant to part with it for fear of competitors stealing their designs, but I was able to finally wrastle them into submission and get them to release 30+ original images. I had some ideas about it, but I was wondering if you guys could help me brainstorm doing some linkbuilding using these images. 1. tag them all on pinterest 2. create a slideshow using them and upload to slidesharing sites 3. create a flickr account and upload all the images 4. search for other image/slideshare gallery sites and upload to them. (I welcome any suggestions regarding this). Any other suggestions for submissions? I was also thinking of creating some written content around each image. What type of web properties would be best for for example a FAQ about custom made emerald rings, or other types of jewelry.
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
Create content or more link building?
For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.
Link Building | | scanlin0