SEO for e-commerce, linking, brand mentions, insights diagnostics
-
Hi,
I run the seo for www.bilthamber.com
It is an e-commerce site selling car care products, and we also manufacture our own products.
I was wondering how the seo for an e-commerce site might compare to the seo for a blog or information based site, or other types of site. And also how the seo for a particular product page on my site might compare to a information based page on my site. Are the tactics the same? Should you try and rank for similar terms, the same generic terms, or complelty unique terms for the best seo? Or should every page try and rank for different terms, to ensure that the engines dont rank 2 or more different pages for the same search term? And how many keywords or search terms should I try and rank a particular product page for? Or an information page, or blog page? Is there a minimum or maximum that is recommomended? Does the more terms you try and rank for on a page take the weight out of each of them? So having 4 really good search terms might be better than having 10 ok generic ones?
How do I find out what are my best, most highly converting, most profitable keywords overtime for Google? I can find some information like this, but it is showing the stats for Bing UK, not Google, even though Google UK is my main engine in Moz.
My domain authority has decreased by 3 this week, this is the first time it has gone down since I started with Moz a few months back, can anyone explain why? And how this will affect the rankings ect, and how I can get it back up higher agian?
And for linking and brand mentions, what are the goals of this feature? Should I find my mentions and ask them to talk about us more and link to us properly? I'm not sure if this is right.
Should I be asking other websites to make links to our pages, or should it be organic?
And for the insights section, I am recieveing tons of issues a lot to do with duplicate content, will having the rel=carnocial tag fix these issues?
I know thats a lot for 1 question, but its been building up in my head!
Thanks in advance!
Max
-
...if a serious amount of content on our site was to change, even if the new content was better, more informative and uses better keywords for our site, how dramatically could it affect our rankings? For better or worse...
There is no way to tell for sure, but if the proposed content is better, then in theory, you should see positive movements.
That said, don't ignore the user experience. You want people to perform an action on your pages, so perform some user testing or heat-mapping (Crazy Egg) to see how people are using your pages. This can often be a huge eye-opener because the worst person to ever try and evaluate how good a page is, is yourself. What you think is good is not always what others think is good.
Tracking clicks from the mouse can tell you a lot about where key components of the page should exist.
-Andy
-
Max
There is no science to what about I am to tell you. Or I have not seen it. It is my personal observation. I think that the better quality the content is written, the better english and the more your site is updated - the better you rank. If you regularly add pages with good quality content you get improved rankings. Simple as that.
I have seen it on too many sites. As I said no science but it happens too often to sites I work on.
On dramatic changes to ranking - no such thing. That said if you can do it, and just by virtue you can by talking about it you can - you should do it. I have no doubt it will improve your rankings. Every now and then - you get a big uplift but there is usually something incidental that also occurs, some above the line advertising works etc.
My belief is that you have the website perfect and ready to catch that "halo" or "ripple" effect from the marketing campaign. If the site is not optimized the effects of the marketing campaign vanish and you are back to square 1.
Hope that helps. In short urging you do it, but no promises - but that is SEO!
-
Hi Andy and John,
Indeed Andy has posted a great reply there! Thank you very much! Some of your words have put my mind to ease, so thank you!
I can certainly agree with the content is king concept, it has proven to work for us. Which does remind me, if a serious amount of content on our site was to change, even if the new content was better, more informative and uses better keywords for our site, how dramatically could it affect our rankings? For better or worse...
Nice link on domain authority, John.
I feel much more knowledable now, so thank you very much guys!
Max
-
Thanks John
-
Andy has created a cracking response.
I will add that recently 9 June 2015 there was an update on the mozscape calculator. Alot of DA's dropped. SO unless you have seen a drop in rankings for keywords do not concern yourself. See link below that may assist on that issue.
http://moz.com/community/q/big-drop-in-domain-authority
Great email Andy!
-
Hi Max,
That's one helluva question!
OK, so breaking it up...
I was wondering how the seo for an e-commerce site might compare to the seo for a blog or information based site
SEO is SEO, no matter what type of site you have, and the key is sticking with best practice at every step of the way. Aside from the issues the e-commerce sites send to fall foul of (duplication, cannibalisation, et al), then it is really just a case of making sure every 'i' is dotted and 't' is crossed. Your content on the site looks to be pretty unique, so you have this going for you. I haven't run a crawl on the site, so not sure if there are issues lurking beneath the hood or not. Keep a close eye on use of canonicals to help avoid duplication.
Should you try and rank for similar terms, the same generic terms, or complelty unique terms for the best seo? Or should every page try and rank for different terms,
Every page on the site needs to target its own unique phrase to avoid keyword duplication / cannibilisation and to ensure you don't have different pages trying to compete for the same phrases.
And how many keywords or search terms should I try and rank a particular product page for?
Just one per page. Keep it descriptive but remember to tag it with your brand. This will indicate to Google that you are focussed clearly on that phrase for that page. In the page itself, don't spam that phrase though. Make use of synonyms, explanations and tech specs where needed. Go all out on content as this will be one of your biggest winners.
How do I find out what are my best, most highly converting, most profitable keywords overtime for Google?
You can use the Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to give you an idea on what you should target. There is a very good article here on MOZ that explains about undertaking Keyword Research and another here on Backlinko. Keyword Spy is another good one that is free with paid options, as is Keyword Eye.
My domain authority has decreased by 3 this week, this is the first time it has gone down since I started with Moz a few months back, can anyone explain why? And how this will affect the rankings ect, and how I can get it back up higher agian?
Start by reading how MOZ calculate these scores. But I suspect back-links are going to be the biggest factor here. Someone might chip in with more precise details on this.
**And for linking and brand mentions, what are the goals of this feature? Should I find my mentions and ask them to talk about us more and link to us properly? I'm not sure if this is right. **Should I be asking other websites to make links to our pages, or should it be organic?
Link building / Outreach / Link Acquisition - whatever you want to call it, it amounts to the same - getting a link from another site. The ideal solution here is look at your product and think who would be interested in this, then make contact with them.
Linkbuilding is a huge subject that I could write a small book on, but you need to keep it clean - don't beg for links and make sure a link has a good reason to be sat on another site, and never buy links - you will come unstuck.
And for the insights section, I am recieveing tons of issues a lot to do with duplicate content, will having the rel=carnocial tag fix these issues?
It should do, but without looking at the site myself, it's difficult to say with any certainty if this is all that is going on.
Hope this helps
-Andy
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
-
Same linking c-blocks trend as competitor
I noticed in our competitive link report that our number of linking c-blocks has risen and fallen in the exact same pattern as one of our competitors. Is there a reason why this would be happening?
Moz Pro | | ZoomInformation0 -
The Pros & Cons of Free SEO Reports
Are the numerous Free SEO reports that are available around the internet, where I simply put a website address in and wait for the results actually any good? I tend to stick with Moz & Semrush which takes a little time pulling all the information I need together, but many of our clients are being approached by SEO's waving these free reports at them. Should I see these reports as valid, or ignore them and only concentrate on Moz. Any views will be greatly appreciated. -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic1 -
What do the dates refer to in seo moz reports
question is in the title - new trainee asked me and couldn't actually answer!
Moz Pro | | Highlandgael0 -
Re: Competitive Link Comparison
In Competitive Link Comparison Top 5 contenders... why would the landing page have an HTTP Status showing as Blocked by robots.txt when it is not blocked within the robots.txt file and no files are shown as blocked in Google's webmaster tools. Sorr if I've ticked the incorrect topic categories
Moz Pro | | Hornblower0 -
No internal links showing up in OpenSiteExplorer report
Hi there A simple one. I was just looking at our site in opensiteexplorer and notice that it says we have no internal links at all: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s244/sh/dd8cc88f-fee4-4ba2-8ec0-f3f8d5c408db/8d3fc3d2aa6fc9d5406051bc91731402 Rather odd as we do. Is this a bug with OSE that anyone knows about or something else? Any ideas / thoughts gratefully received.
Moz Pro | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Internal link question - compared with my competitors
Dear all, I started to working on SEO on my website http://www.techstation.it and I have some thing that I would clarify. I see a lot of differences between internal links of my website and my competitors that usually are placed a bit better. (Please check attached image). They have A LOT of internal links, about 2.000+ instead 137 (mine), that's wrong in my SEOMOz dashboard. Every news and article page has 120-130 links to other contents. About teh external followed links: Mine: 1,674 #1: 2,018 #2: 316 (????) - this is placed really good for some competitive keywords #3 (best ranked): 7,905 links I have two more points that I would fix: Articles ranking We were one of the first 5-6 website that published at the launch day the review of Intel Core i7 3960X CPU and started with a ranking in the last first page results, a few days alter in the second and now we are at the end of the second page. This happens .. I think... every time 😕 All my article pages are graded with "A grade" in the control panel. So what should I do for increase my rankings? Thank you very much in advance! Alex
Moz Pro | | techstation0 -
SEO Moz Tools - too many on the page links result driving me nuts
A while back I remember Rand and I having a conversation about how many links on the page and up until that point I had followed the NO MORE THAN 100 links on a page rule - which is what the MOZ tools are telling me now in the campaigns I have running. But then during a seminar both of us were holding this 100 link rule question came up and Rand commented that this was probably old hat now as the search engines can crawl a much greater number of links in the page. I was encouraged by his answer especially where ecommerce websites are concerned. But the MOZ tool is driving me nuts telling me that this 100 link rule is still something to be adhered too. It is especially frustrating when we are discussing ecommerce website sites with editable mega menus. Examples to support this question are www.bohemiadesign.co.uk or www.flowersbuydelivery.co.uk which are 2 ecommerce sites I am aware of using such mega menus that are editable and give a link count greater than 100. and I am sure there are many more sites like this, even Amazon for example. So, how much notice do we take of this warning in MOZ tools that is telling me about excessive numbers of links on the pages it lists as needing corrected?
Moz Pro | | ICTADVIS0 -
Link Count Per Page Including JavaScript Links - Should We Worry About Them?
With large ecommerce sites, we usually have more than 100 links per page and many times have more than 200 links on each page due to links and images in the header, footer, guided navigation and then the body product grid and content. When I use most on-page link counting tools like SEO x-ray and the SEO Moz Pro crawl report, I notice that every visible link on the page gets counted. This includes and javascript based links that expand the product grid to 30, 60 or view all, javascript sorting links, javascript links to view customer reviews for each product. etc. There was a QA post here http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-main-navigation-on-certain-pages about nofollowing and page rank sculpting and it seems pretty unanimous that most don't think that page rank sculpting is very valuable. So my question is, are the javascript links on pages that don't link to another page viewed differently by search engines? If so, shouldn't there be a way to see on-page link count minus javascript call links that don't actually link to another page? To expand a bit on my question, we also use nofollow attributes on the text links in the left navigation that are meant for refining products just as the javascript links in the product grid are meant to refine the products, sort them, allow for product comparison, allow for viewing customer reviews, etc. So should it be ok to have 300 links on a page if the unimportant ones that you don't want crawled like the left navigation refinements and product grid javascript links all have rel="nofollow" applied to them? I know that would basicly be PageRank sculting, but it seems like the best options for shopping sites that have a lot of navigation links.
Moz Pro | | abernhardt0