Writing cornerstone content for a shop (eCommerce) website
-
Hi there
I am trying to optimise my site to the best that it can be. Since the most recent Google updates, everything that I reading is saying cornerstone content with lots of valuable content is a really good strategy as it tells Google what is the most important content on your site. Writing articles that are well structured and have give the user a detailed overview of that subject. Lots of top SEO's are saying 3000 words plus on these pages.
My question is, how do I go about this with and eCommerce site? Obviously that majority of the keywords that I want to target are product related and these are the pages that I want to come up in the search. How do I go about creating cornerstone content for these pages? I am thinking that one of my cornerstone pieces of content would be "The Ultimate Guide to [my main product category]". But that product has numerous products related to it, all of which have their own keywords, so how would this help the products to rank?
The site had two main product categories, with numerous products under each of those categories. The two main categories are targeting my best performing keywords, but currently the landing page for these is the main product category pages.
I am really struggling to work out the best strategy here. The content that I have on my actual products pages is comprehensive and covers a lot of detail about that particular product and has started to rank for product keywords, but I am guessing Google wouldn't consider that to be cornerstone content.
I hope this make sense.
Any advice anyone can give would be really useful.
Many thanks in advance
-
For a retail site, fewer things are more killer than.... "help the visitor learn about the product, decide what to buy, learn how to use the product, learn how to fix the product, and how to enjoy".
-
The issue is getting the customers in the first place. The only thing we can rely on is producing great content as at the moment we don’t have the customer base or the traffic, which is why I think producing the killer content is what we need to do.
-
Questions received from customers by email and phone are the most important driver of the content plan. At the same time, you must know the products well enough that you can identify the things that the customer needs to know, but is not asking.
We pay no attention to content length, other than telling enough to convey the information. I bet we don't have a single 3000 word article on our retail sites.
-
Yes. This is exactly what we have done. We have great products and put huge efforts into researching everything about them. We have reviewed them. Fixed them. And most of all enjoyed them. Every product we have we tested and know inside out. Naturally we have then written reviews on the products and other articles relating to the subject, but possibly the issue here is that it’s not enough? Maybe the structure is not right, which I what I am really wanting get to.
You say don’t focus on blogs or articles (content), or length, but naturally this is one thing google loves. The key content on your site. The cornerstone or x10 content. I guess what you mean is that by doing all of the above and being at one with the product the content will flow naturally. But surely there has to be some kind of keyword strategy which then leads to a content strategy or, vice versa. This surely is the basis of on page SEO?
-
I would step away from the idea of blogs and blog posts and 3k articles.
Instead decide how you can build a website designed to help the visitor learn about the product, decide what to buy, learn how to use the product, learn how to fix the product, and how to enjoy. This requires authors who have deep product knowledge and experience, and who also understand the customer. Targeting keywords is natural if you have the knowledge and experience to do the above.
-
Thanks for your response. Yes, you don’t see this often. Most traffic from organic is driven to the product pages. Obviously we are a young site and competing with people who have been in it longer and ranking well. Having said that, the niche is relatively uncompetitive. With regard to content, do you mean that you should write about your product or to you target audience in extensive blog posts. 3k plus words. With good structure and answering the questions that the user wants answered. With a table of contents etc.
I guess the main issue I am having with these pages is choosing the keywords to target as ultimately I will be competing with my product/product category pages.
Does that make sense?
-
An effective way for a small business to succeed in search is to build an ecommerce site with an extensive content library or build a large information site with a store. This should be done without concern for which type of page gets the top ranking, and with a plan to direct content-consuming visitors to sales pages. Most businesses do not take this route because they fear of paying two rain-makers for each order-packer.
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
-
Help optimizing website for speed
Hello, My website is www.likechimp.com and is a University project. I need to optimise the website for speed as the bounce rate is fairly quick - I feel this could be due to how long it takes web site to load? Any tips in increasing internet speed. I am willing to higher someone if they feel they can help! Thanks, L
On-Page Optimization | | xlucax0 -
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having duplicate content. I mean somewhere google says they will prefer original content & will give preference to them who have original content but this statement contradict when I see Indeed.com as they aggregate content from other sites but still rank higher than original content provider side. How does Indeed.com make it to the top of every single search despite of having aggregated content or duplicate content
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Over-Optimized Website
I'm looking for advice for what you would start with if you were working on a website that was extremely over-optimized for 1 keyword. So, for example, I'm going to pretend this client is a dog trainer in Toronto (I can't publicly post the URL). I've read places that having exact-match anchor text links to inner pages in the footer of the site can cause problems and removing it has resulted in big ranking jumps. I'm looking to see if there are other big items that you would tackle first if this was your client. Some examples of things the site has: There is a page for dog training under their Services menu. However, internal links on their site link "dog training" to both the homepage and to this service page. Is that going to cause issues? The anchor text for internal linking is almost always the exact same word - "Dog Training". There is a banner that goes across the top of the site that appears on every page that says "Dog Training Toronto". I'm guessing I should remove that. Would the same keyword being overly used on every page cause confusion? Almost every image on his site is saved in the format "Dog Training Toronto". I'm looking to see if anyone has general tips on where to start with a site that has been over-optimized for 1 keyword. He actually has a ton of good content on his blog that gets a ton of traffic (because it's actually useful) so it's not that his content sucks - it's just been overly structured and SEO'd to death. I found a few articles on this but other than the footer advice I didn't find too many case studies of others that have run into this issue and done a few steps that actually worked.
On-Page Optimization | | ImprezzioMarketing0 -
Cornerstone Page And Outbound Links
I have a cornerstone page and 10 related articles that all have links to the cornerstone page. My question is, should the cornerstone page link back to those 10 articles as well or will it lose juice by doing so? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Rewrite URL for big website
My website is currently have over 1000 000 links indexed by Google , i'm going to rewrite all of these links, is this crazy ? Can someone give me a checklist to avoid going wrong way ? My website: http://www.webtretho.com/forum/ My current url format: webtretho.com/forum/f[forum_id]/[thread-title-thread_id/ Ex: Old URL: http://www.webtretho.com/forum/f90/chia-se-dau-hieu-mang-thai-1357342-new/ New URL: http://www.webtretho.com/forum/chuan-bi-mang-thai/chia-se-dau-hieu-mang-thai-1357342-new/
On-Page Optimization | | firstjames0 -
Website accessible on http and https. Is it bad?
We noticed that our website is accessible on: http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com Both the versions have page rank of 4. Though on https version we have added canonical tag indicating http:// version as preferred. Is this fine or we need to use 301 redirect and let the site be accessible only on http:// version??
On-Page Optimization | | CyrilWilson1 -
Depreciated content - Canononical, 301, or noindex?
I have a page that has existed on our website for many years, without ever being updated.This is what I would consider an "evergreen" content page, but it is now considered out of date and depreciated. It was never ranking high for any keyword in particular, but it is a page that has existed for many years. We have now created a more up-to-date version of the page, with much more informative content, a new URL, and of course it is SEO optimized. I am puzzled as to what I should do with my old page. Should I add a canononical link pointing it to the new updated page, or should I 301 redirect it to the new page, or should I no-index the old page? What are your thoughts and suggestions? I can give more information if needed. Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | jcph0 -
Home Page Content - In a Div?
Is putting content in a div so it doesn't muck up the look of the home page create a problem in doing well organically? Example - http://www.callawaygardens.com. We have lots of clients that want no text on the home page and we are trying to figure out how to do this while still ranking well organically. What are your thoughts? Can we get in trouble? Are there negative impacts with SEO doing it like this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStream80