Ecommerce & Outreach
-
Hey,
Does anyone have any advice on how to approach outreach for an ecommerce site? We're in the process of doing user guides, for niche products. I wondered if this was a good angle to approach relevant communities/sites.
Or is this too time consuming for little value at the end? Is it PR outreach we should look to focus on?
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
There have been some good replies so far but to address your question here, I think it's definitely worth doing the outreach and trying to build relationships. Unless you're a massive brand, it's hard to get noticed online without some form of outreach, at least to begin with.
In terms of time, it really does depend on your other priorities. If I had to put a time on it and given that you haven't really started yet, I'd block out maybe half a day to do some research and contact a few sites and then gauge feedback. Then build up from there.
Bear in mind that some companies will hire SEO and PR agencies to just focus on promotion of their website, so it can take up a lot of time. But if you start on it yourself with a few hours, then you get a good understanding quickly of what's involved.
A quick heads up - it's not easy! But it's important so it's worth pursuing.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
-
Great thank you for the feedback.
Should we be actively outreaching to the relevant communities or simply sharing this and seeing what the response is from this?
I think what I want to identify is how much time I need to spend on outreach. I know there is no simple answer to this
and it's ongoing of course.
-
This is exactly what I was going on about, it's great for onsite and offsite PR.
See about turning some of your guides into infographics, summarizing the data into easier bits of digestible tidbits. In the world of scan happy folks with a perpetual 5 min attention span, longer is better for SEO but not always for the user unless it's presented in a way that keeps them engaged.
Break up text with interactive bits like links or downloadable pdfs, and even images like many others say. Video is always helpful, but balance is even more important. Like a bag of trail-mix, PR needs a proper mixture of content.
-
As a fellow eCommerce admin, I believe that the best PR / Outreach we can do, is in terms of customer assistance means, what I mean is, customer help aides, information funnels that better explain, then further breakdowns of those explanations.
Reach out to your manufacturers, services that use your products along side their own ( information for items they may use but don't focus on, ( example would be if you sold lawnmower accessories, reaching out to lawn services and pitch your information pages, if they like it, they'll link to it to spread to their employees maybe or even send to clients to further back up their quality ))
When selling items, we can't really reach out to other sites / services about selling our items, that doesn't get much in return, however we reach out to them providing information that relates to them, they feel you're doing some work for them and then become more receptive.
Think back to web rings / circles back in the early days of the internet, if they were done right, sites with relative content linked up and provided this inner circle of related sites that would play off one another's information.
It's the digital's age of scratching their back while they scratch yours.
-
Hi
Thank you for the detailed response. I have just looked at their blog and its very creative with some amazing images.
Our offering is some B2C but mostly B2B. I want to invest more into brilliant imagery to go alongside our guides but this is something we'll need to work on.
Thank you for the feedback!
-
I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.
The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!
So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.
So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.
-
I haven't started doing this yet, is this approach worthwhile for an ecommerce site?
I know that most outreach can be ignored if it's seen to be for ecommerce or sales.
Thanks!
-
Not enough info. Can you identify and target key influencers within each niche?
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
-
ECommerce Configurable vs a lot of articles
Hey Moz Community! We have a eCommerce Store with a ton of articles/products. And we have a lot of Brands/Manufactures for Flavors with different tastes. As example we have a Brand Called "Copy cat" with 60 different flavors, and their product names are "copy cat xyz flavor". Currently we have for each flavor a single product created, so i guess we have a lot of duplicated keywords [copy cat] flavorname [flavor] + generell manufacturer content in the product descriptions. While thinking about it, i thought about to merge all those articles to configurable articles. So we have 1 Copy Cat article with some kind of a dropdown selection for the different flavor. Does anyone have experience with this? How will the User Experience change? (we are using elastic search, it's including the variations of products - so the search wouldnt be affected)
Branding | | MJClassy0 -
Is media Outreach over?
Last week was the "anti-AdBlock" week for every media in France. They started adding pop-ups asking to disable AdBlock. Their business model based on advertisement is suffering from it. But did they ask their audience what they wanted? I would have told them: ask me questions to know more about myself and personalize my experience instead of pushing more and more ads, until my computer dies from too many scripts! What they decided? Protect their content. Now you have to log-in to access articles. The result? They delete all their links. Actually they still exist, but Google doesn't see it anymore.... So it's like they don't exist. So I'm asking you, what do you think will be the future of medias? What will happen for us as SEO guys? Do we have to focus on the ones that have non-protected contents?...
Branding | | 2MSens
I'll be more than happy to get your vision.
Have a nice day, Benoit.0 -
Does anyone has experience with Q&A Sites in terms of SEO value?
I would like to increase mentions to my site and brand. I thought the Q&A sites might be useful here (like Yahoo Answers). Can anyone give me some tips where to go and what to do? I would be very happy about that 🙂
Branding | | MichaelJanik0 -
Enigma of Google & China - Can you solve it?
In March, my team in Shanghai launched a site redesign of our English language website (targeted at expats in China) which: Changed the URL's to be more SEO friendly (keyword based, shorter, etc) Implemented endless scrolling to replace previous pagination Changed some front end layouts Changed page title and meta description tags to use keywords, be unique, use correct lengths Since then, we see in Google Analytics, traffic form Google organic branded search terms has been steadily dropping (between 5 - 20% depending on the term). Not provided is down 2%. We do not rank for many non-branded terms, so have no statistical significance there. However in Google Webmaster Tools, impressions of branded queries are also down, along with non-branded search terms (including those we tried to optimise for). We see similar traffic drops from other search engines as well (Bing, Baidu) but not at as high a level (only 3% or so). We have not changed any other marketing strategy online or offline. We have tested / done: 1. Changing title tags 2. Reverting to old pagination (as we say in GWT a drop in indexed pages) 3. Checked the tracking code is working 4. Checked our rankings (we still rank position 1 for our branded queries and even some non branded) 5. Submitted new XML site map The only large issue we could find is that from that day there were over 300,000 page not found 404 errors (which we are now redirecting by 301s as Google shows them to us, and have been doing so for 2 weeks). Nothing is helping us so far, organic traffic continues to drop week on week, so I am reaching out to the Moz community. Can anybody think of a reason for such a dramatic drop? Please help!
Branding | | RingierOneAfricaMedia0 -
Rebranding & Minimizing SEO impact
Hello everyone, One of my clients is undergoing a major rebrand, which will require some substantial changes to their domain / URL structure. Primarily, we're going to: Move from a high-ish DA site to a low DA site Change the subdomain URL structure (more on that below) Update the content (copy, design, structure) on www. site to match the new brand The content on the subdomains should remain the same 301 redirect all pages from old site to new site where applicable The current site architecture makes great use of subdomains, which are also going to be changing in terms of name. So, we're moving from oldsubdomain.olddomain.com to newsubdomain.newdomain.com (and not oldsubdomian.olddomain.com to oldsubdomain.olddomain.com). The content / structure of these pages is going to change minimally. We understand that we're going to take an SEO hit overall, but are there things we can do to minimize this hit? Anyway we can 'estimate' the hit? Anyway we can educate our client to as to what to expect beyond (it is going to be bad…). Please let me know. Thanks!
Branding | | 10SL0 -
Big Problems Using &'s in Business Name?
One of my clients is a law firm with a Business name like the following:
Branding | | gbkevin
Rosenberg & Dalgren, LLP They get A TON of organic search traffic on their brand name above, but most people (95%) search "Rosenberg and Dalgren" instead of "Rosenberg & Dalgren". **Notice use of ampersand being used and alternatively, the word "and" being used. ** Currently, their local citations across the Internet (G+, YP, Yelp, etc) use the business name, "Rosenberg & Dalgren, LLP" (with ampersand). Here is the dilemma we are in... When someone searches "Rosenberg and Dalgren" in Google (which the majority of our search traffic does), Google does NOT show our local one-box on the right hand side of the SERPs (see example of a one-box I am referring to here http://blumenthals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot-2013-09-28-at-9.59.58-AM.png). But when someone searches "Rosenberg & Dalgren" in Google, it does trigger our local one-box with photos, review ratings, links to our Google+ Local page, etc. WHICH IS GREAT! They have AWESOME reviews that command powerful social proof. We want that local one-box to show up! So my question is, what can I do to trigger that local one-box for both brand name searches for "Rosenberg & Dalgren" as well as "Rosenberg and Dalgren"? I am considering changing our NAP citations to have the business name be "Rosenberg and Dalgren" since that is what 95% of people search in Google to find them. I am guessing Google doesn't quite understand that "Rosenberg and Dalgren" is linked to "Rosenberg & Dalgren" via what it sees in the knowledge graph of the Internet (citations, website, etc). So how best should I handle this and get that local one-box triggering for the majority of our branded search traffic? Lastly, what is the best advice for including company/corporate designations in the NAP citations? (ie. LLP, LLC, Inc, etc) Thank you for any help and guidance! We appreciate it!0 -
Google Local & Google+
Hi All I'm looking for a bit of a steer on which direction to go in here. I have a new client and the client has a 'branch' in London. The brand is about to be franchised across the UK. They currently have a google places page in London (old style Google places, not a plus page) and nothing else on Google +. I don't really want to touch the Google place (local page) because it ranks well for their business and far higher than their organic search result. In terms of adding to their social presence, I think a Google Plus 'Brand' page would work as a generic brand, with several additional local pages being created as franchisees come on board. They have a safe and strong brand and have plans to reinforce through social. I'm about to set up the brand page and wondered if anyone has any thoughts, words of warning or points to consider? I don't know why but I feel somewhat tetchy and fearful of Google places that have yet to be merged. Thanks
Branding | | littlesthobo0 -
Trying to de-mystify Google Places, Google Local & Google Plus
There is a lot of online 'noise' regarding the changes / merging and making the best out of Googles' Places / Local & Google Plus. Any tips, ideas, experiences or just plain revelations regarding all or any of the above services and how they will work & come together in the future?
Branding | | ScotSEO0