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
-
Website Traffic Is Down
Hi, My Website www.financeninvestments.com is down for almost now 2 years. I was receiving the good traffic before this but now the traffic is almost down. I want to again do something to get my Traffic back with some consistent efforts. So what efforts should i do to make this back.Pls suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rahulsoni250 -
Content Internal Linking ?
Should we internally link new content to old content using anchor tags (keywords) related to pages from all new blogposts or should be keep rotating the blogposts like link from some blog posts & not from others. What ratio should we maintain. Right now i keep 2 links maximum from a 300 words posts or 3 in 500 words posts maximum. But linking from each new blog posts will be good?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
Which cms is good for health product website (selling).?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
E-commerce store, in need of protecting our own content
Dear other Moz fans, We have an E-commerce store in Norway. Our main conversion to sale still happens in our physical store, but do to the description and information we provide online.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Monica_Flirt
To warn you before you click; Our store is a boutique for "erotic items". A nice one how ever, made buy woman for woman and their man. We use enormous time writing descriptions and information for (almost) every item online.
We really want to protect our content (text information). What is the best practice to mark up "protection" of our hard work content? Thank you for your time.
Regards form the Flirt girls in Norway.0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice? Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0