ECommerce keyword targeting: Blog post vs Category page
-
I'm targeting short head and chunky middle keywords for generating traffic to an ecommerce website. I guess I have two options both with great content:
- blog posts
- category pages with content (essentially the blog post).
On the basis that it is great content that gets links, I would hope that I could garner links into the heart of the eCommerce website by doing this through option 2: category pages.
Any thoughts on blog vs ecommerce category pages for tageting keywords?
-
Actually, these articles are "posts" on a wordpress blog, but I am not using category pages or monthly pages or other things that would make them look like a blog.
Instead they are linked into my website through the homepage, through category page, and every product that they are about links to these article pages.
Really there is no difference between a blog post and an article. The difference is that a blog usually integrates its content into your site in a way that is both dumb for your visitors and for SEOs. So, use the posting ability of wordpress for its convenience, but build those pages into a website using the traditional methods that serve visitors and SEO.
-
Interesting @EGOL. You've decided to do web article pages, not blog posts. I guess this is because you've wanted to make have a long comprehensive page and a category page will just not offer enough space?
And you haven't used a blog post because you don't want comments mucking up the keywords?
-
We do the same approach as Gregory.
Articles about how to do things, how to select things, comparison between products, history of products, etc. These are substantive articles usually over 1000 words, always with several photos and maybe a video. Time consuming to produce.
However, these article pages pull in lots of traffic and almost always outrank our ecommerce pages and category pages.
Gregory seems to be using text links to move traffic to higher value pages. We have house ads in standard formats (300x250, 160x600, etc) to route the traffic to our sales pages. We also run adsense on those pages. We can tell from analytics that lots of people who make it through our shopping cart enter the site through these pages.
We use Google's DFP on these pages to compete Adsense and an ad netork against our house ads. Our house ads are valued by determining the number of people sent to our sales pages, their conversion rate and average shopping cart value. We also have multiple creatives running and DFP picks the one with the highest performance.
Gregory... think about putting a few eye-catching ads on these pages with value propositions. I bet that a lot more of your visitors will convert.
-
Thanks for your response Gregory. Funny blog post, like the way you use apples.
The phrase "short head" is sometimes called short tail, the left side of the long tail graph with "chunky middle" the middle but not yet the tail.
I guess my question is whether anyone has been successful with getting links to category pages with good content vs blog posts/articles with good content?
-
Hi Bruce,
I have two small ecommerce sites, so your question is very interesting.
I haven't heard before the phrases you used: "short head and chunky middle keywords". I guess keywords are described differently in NZ
We started out adding content by adding "article" or "guide" or "how to" pages to the site. These pages do not contain any Buy buttons, but do contain image and text links to our store pages. You can see an example here: http://www.bestdryingrack.com/How_to_dry_flowers.html
These article pages (on both sites) tend to be some of our most active landing pages, though they don't feed people into the store pages at a high rate. But even at a low rate, they are a super cheap way of letting potential customers know about our stores.
But we have since switched to adding content in a blog format. The blog is of course hosted on the site in a /blog/ folder so it helps are total link count. We made this switch because it made it much simpler to write about a broader range of topics. Before we spent weeks planning and writing a 3 page "guide" and connecting it into the site. Now we can do a single page blog post in a day anytime we come across something interesting or amusing. And it doesn't even have to closely relate to the products on the ecommerce site. Here is an example: http://www.easydigging.com/blog/apple-peeler.html
We have not been running the blog long enough to know at what rate the pages will feed people into the store, but I assume it will be similar to the article pages.My hope is that we can post weekly and therefore create more blog pages than we ever used to create article pages. Doing so would feed more people into the store and also keep increasing our link count.
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
-
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
H1 tag found on page, but saying doesn't match keyword
We've run a on-page grader test on our home page www.whichledlight.com with the keyword 'led bulbs' it comes back with saying there is a H1 tag, although the content of the keyword apperently doesn't contain 'led bulbs... which seems a bit odd because the content of the tag is 'UK’s #1 Price Comparison Site for LED Bulbs` I've used other SEO checkers and some say we don't even have a H1 tag, or H2, H3 and so on for any page. Screaming Frog seems to think we have a H1 tag though, and can also detect the content of the tag. Any ideas? ** Update ** The website is a single page app (EmberJS) so we use prerender to create snapshots of the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
We were under the impression that MOZ can crawl these prerendered pages fine, so were a bit baffled as to why it would say we have a H1 tag, but think the contents of the tag still doesn't match our keyword.0 -
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Keyword Question: How to Target my Niche
Hello, I'm a health coach helping people with multiple sclerosis. Here's my website: bobweikel(dot)com What do you think the top 4 local keywords would be for my niche? I'm in Boise ID. I'm thinking MS Boise MS Boise Idaho Multiple Sclerosis Boise Multiple Sclerosis Boise Idaho With your intuition, do you think these are valuable keywords for a coaching site? Also, can you think of any other keywords? I want this 100% white hat.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is there a negative effect to show categories and products on the same page?
I mean having say 5 different categories on a page and showing the products that are in those categories below the categories. Just In case people don't want to dig deeper to find there product because they know what they need already. I would also want those categories for the people that need to do a little more searching and have a better reference guide. So is there any negatives to my SEO doing it that way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Too many on page links - product pages
Some of the pages on my client's website have too many on page links because they have lists of all their products. Is there anything I should/could do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0