Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
-
Hi All,
I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority".
I'll give an example...
If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece.To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)?
Thanks
-
Nice little thread here, read all of it :).
I would be inclined to attach a signup form for a newsletter as the content is good.
Then I would include the latest informative article, tutorial in the newsletter connected with car accessories, link to facebook, plus 1, twitter page.
First to get some social engagement which in turn should help out with SEO but then an added benefit of flogging some accessories (although you would need to sell a lot of smelly trees to make anything) but you get the idea, I would site down and draw it out, give it some serious thought.
-
Philipp makes good points that ads can divert attention from your brand and your sales products. I agree with him.
However, my site is still selling a lot of merchandise. I don't have ads in people's face on merchandise pages. If there is an ad on a merchandise page it is at the bottom - most don't have ads. My ads focus on article pages.
Finally, you can block certain types of ads and also ads from competing domains. Adsense, tribalfusion and most other ad networks have a variety of ad blocking methods.
-
1. Yes, I would put it in a blog section. You might want to call it "tips" or something instead of blog, which is more appealing and - depending on the content - a more precise description. Important is that you have your articles on the same subdomain as the shop (or the same domain in the least).
2. Not that I'm Egol... but personally, I wouldn't put any ads on my ecommerce sites: as I am aiming at high conversions I don't want users to click on ads (unless those ads pay me more than my own sales).
And yes, the ads can potentially hurt your brand, so if you do have them, you must keep a close eye on those in order to make sure they're not out-of-context. But if you don't overdo it with the ads, most users won't even notice.And another word about content: IMO that's the only way to push your ecommerce site and open it up for the longtail - with articles that are helpful but not directly linked to a product you sell.
-
Thank you both for the answers.
In my case the site is more like Egol's first example.I will then add two related questions -
1. Should such related articles that I will use mostly for branding, likes and basically authority be posted in my Blog or Article section?
2. Egol - Don't you feel that putting ads in such article "hurts" your brand?
(making it appear to be smaller - you won't see ads on GAP etc.)Thanks again
-
I Agree with EGOL, however to answer our point on Articles Good or Bad. They're most definitely a good thing.
Attracting clicks, links, likes and bookmarks are great for your seo and attracting mor visitors in. I find for every 100 visitors that visit my article pages around 6% will share the content one way or another and thus drag in more visitors.
If nothing else it builds a bit of brand recognition in my niche and build my SEO.
-
Lots of retail sites have extensive article libraries that attract traffic, likes, links and make the site popular. These articles often describe how the products are used and are especially valuable on sites in do-it-yourself, personal improvement and hobby niches. I have a retail site with a lot of how-to-do-it, historical and review content and those articles account for about 1/2 of the traffic. They also produce some sales. In addition, I monetize them with ads.
On a more powerful scale is an information site with a store. These can be really popular and be monetized with house ads that funnel traffic into the store and third party ads that produce income. I have one of these that is supported by ad revenue and a store that sees revenue growth in proportion to the traffic - as most of the purchases are impulse. In addition, your sales will be tied the the effectiveness of your ads and their placement - experimentation is essential if you want to get the most out of them.
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
-
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Number of Links for Internal E-commerce Search Pages (and Anchor Text)
Hello! We have an internal search engine for different email, postal, and phone data products on our website (75,000 product pages... calling all direct marketers!), I've noindexed all our dynamic search pages, but I'm wondering how else I can improve these pages. Should I reduce the amount of links on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Currently there are 20 search results per page. " <variable>Mailing List" has been a pretty good source of traffic for our product pages.
Should I change the anchor text for all the product pages listed to include the added long-tail keyword, or would that be extremely spammy, having the word "Mailing List" 20+ times on my page? We have both static and dynamic search pages - here is one of static ones: http://www.consumerbase.com/direct-marketing-mailing-lists.html
My main problem with adding the long tail KWs to the anchor text is that we still want our static search pages indexed.</variable> Thanks!0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Need help identifying why my content rich site was hurt by the Panda Update.
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4) which has been heavily impacted by the Panda update. Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike jamescrayton2003@yahoo.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeATL0