Large block of several thousand words on homepage of Ecommerce site - opinions?
-
I work for a local SEO company who are continually adding content to the home page of clients websites. While i do agree that it is a good idea to add content to the home page and to link to inner pages, the home page of several clients exceeds 6,000 or more words.
Every month, an article based on a brand or category (which already has its own page which is optimised with an article) is added to the home page with links to inner pages. I have stressed that it is not a good idea to have so much content on the home page, and even more so that it shouldn't target all the same keywords.
I have pointed out that many of the brand and category pages do not rank well for their keywords, whereas in most cases it is the home page which is ranking instead, which i have suggested this is because the home page is too well optimised for those keywords.
What are your opinions on this? Are you for or against continually adding content (which already has its own designated page) to the home page of an Ecommerce website?
I should also add that this content is within a drop down div box at the footer on some sites and just above the footer on other sites. The category and brand pages also have drop down divs with an article just below the header.
-
Right okay. Well then I'd suggest you move each of the blocks from the home page to a new page.
Then look at the calls to action on the new pages to encourage click-throughs to products. Or look at adding links/photos to products that relate to the topic being discussed. Anything you write on the site should be a standalone piece of content, but would presumably, in one form or other, relate to what's being sold on the site. That being the case, the traffic coming to the articles will be people interested in the type of things being sold, so you should be able to encourage the click-through to products.
Yes, you will get some non-converting traffic, but by putting each one on a separate page and working on the SEO of each, you can broaden your scope for MORE traffic, which you can then encourage to buy.
The home page is not the place for everything and will be restricting what you can achieve in traffic terms.
-
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'lower level' pages, but we are able to edit the home page to add a small piece of text such as 'latest products'/'latest brands' etc.
We can add extra pages of content (that aren't product or brand pages) but don't as the company i work for feels that adding a blog or article section will bring in non-converting traffic from search engines, thus the only non-product oriented pages are the basics such as 'contact us', 'about us', 'shopping cart' etc.
-
Can you create a 'lower level' pages for each 'article' (and then manually edit the home page for 'latest' bits) or is the system quite restrictive - e.g. unless you add a new product or brand, you can't add a page?
-
Thank you Martin,
The websites are Ecommerce stores so the focus isn't on articles, but the articles are there on each category / brand page in order for search engines to relate the pages to a few keywords, so there's isn't exactly a 'latest posts' or similar feature we can make use of.
All of the pages on the site already have content, but I agree that interlinking between the pages is a good idea, although it's not very scalable as the main focus is on brand pages (so the majority of content for brands will not mention other brand names, thus having nowhere to interlink these).
-
Ugh. Not good. In my humble opinion people aren't going to scroll down to read that much content - so that's bad from a user experience point of view. So here's some pointers
1. Keep the Home Page Fresh - if they're in the position of being able to regularly add content, then keep the home page fresh, maybe with the latest post and then snippets to the preview 2 or 3 for people who may be interested. Or have an intro page as the home page with a 'latest articles' box that's prominent.
2. Move the other articles to their own page - this means you're growing the site, can better interlink between posts, can optimise each for carefully selected keywords and makes each one individually shareable by social media.
3. Link Build to relevant articles or categories - much more achievable when that content is not on the home page.
The drop-down DIVs are only helpful for users - Google will be seeing 6000 words of text, which is OTT. That content needs moving, so that unique pages of content are created and can be separately promoted.
Hope this helps - a website restructure sounds like it's in order.
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
-
Best site structure for us?
Hey guys, I have a somewhat silly question that I probably know the answer to - but would still like to hear your POV's. We're a WP theme making company but we also build other stuff. Context: 1. All demos for themes currently go under domain.com/Theme_A/ The demo is lorem ipsum so is marked noindex nofollow. That being said we get rocking analytics data usually (not sure if it's still valuable for G after the noindex). 2. Currently we need landing pages for themes and we're running them under domain.com/Theme_A/optimized-landing-page-title.php dofollow and indexed ofc. My question is...Would we be better off to include all landing pages under a domain.com/wordpress-themes/ category/tax and then go for the optimized-landing-page-title.php page? Does it make any difference either or? Right now we're not REALLY running them on subdomains (though the structure seems like it), they're just folders. We're thinking that more seo juice would flow through the different pages if we have them all under the same category, rather than basically starting from scratch each time under a new folder. Right? Thanks!!!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes1 -
2000 Active pages 404 on LIVE Ecommerce site - what will google do now?
Hi All, One of my ecommerce site having more than 20,000 pages from that one of the categories having 2000 pages showing 404 and still taking time for developer to fix this issue and may be they will be able to fix after 2-3 days so is this okay with google or google will take any action during this period? Thanks! Dev
On-Page Optimization | | devdan0 -
Should I host my Ecommerce Software in a Subdomain?
We have a single consumer product that we sell through traditional retailers and our website. We have used an ecommerce provider for our website since it's inception 6 years ago. The problem I am facing is website structure. Our domain points to our ecommerce store, and therefore all content pages are created through the ecommerce platform. However, we can't really do a whole lot in terms of structuring URL's or sub domains. Basically, any content created is given an automatically created URL, and can only be fit in a pre-determined category. There is no way to use sub categories. Are we better off for use and site structure to host the ecommerce portion of the site in a subdomain, such as store.domain.com, and then manually creating all of our content and other pages? I look at nest.com as sort of template for that. They too only have a few products, so a full ecommerce design isn't really necessary. Are we better off for SEO and ease of use to handle that separately from our overall website structure? Thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | Rybicki0 -
I'm looking to put a quite length FAQs tab on product pages on an ecommerce site. Am I likely to have duplicate content issues?
On an ecommerce site we have unique content on the product pages (i.e. descriptions), as well as the usual delivery and returns tabs for customer convenience. From this we haven't had any duplicate content issues or warnings, which seems to be the case industry-wide. However, we're looking to add a more lengthy FAQs tab which is still highly relevant to the customer but contains a lot more text than the other tabs. The product descriptions are also relatively small. Do you think this will cause potential duplicate content issues or should it be treated the same as a delivery tab, for instance?
On-Page Optimization | | creativemay0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce
We have a website that we created a little over a year ago and have included our core products we have always focused on such as mobility scooters and power wheelchairs. We have been going through and updating product descriptions, adding product reviews that our customers have provided etc in order to improve on our SEO rankings and not be penalized by the Panda update. We were approached by a manufacturer last year about their products and they had close to 10k products that we were able to upload easily into our system. Obviously these all have standard manufacturers descriptions many sites are also using. It will take us forever to go through and change all of these and many products are similar to each other anyway they just vary in size, color etc. Will it help our rankings for our core products to simply go through and delete all of these additional products and categories and just add them one by one with unique descriptions and more detailed information when we have time? We aren't really selling many of them anyway so it won't hurt our sales. I'm clearly new to SEO and any help at all would be greatly appreciated. My main website is www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale dot com A sample core category that we have changed descriptions for is http://www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale.com/mobility-scooters-s/36.htm A sample of a category and products we simply uploaded would be at http://www.bestmedicalsuppliesonsale.com/Wound-Care-s/4837.htm I'm open to all suggestions I would just like to see my traffic and obviously sales increase. If there are any other glaring problems please let me know. I need help!
On-Page Optimization | | BestMedical0 -
New Articles and Posts - what key word to focus on?
I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/ Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points.... the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?! My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham? I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?! Mmm, thanks for pointers!
On-Page Optimization | | bizint0 -
Sudden Site Rankings Drop
Good day guys, We have been following strict SEO strategies for the past 6 months, all sites have been improving incredibly well, all except one. The site in question is http://bit.ly/IH4pkM . The site is regarding automotive spray booth equipment. We were ranking on the first page for the keyword "spray booth" (which is the most important one), at place #4 for weeks on end. However since half-way last week, the site has been dropped to half-way the second page (#17). There are barely any crawler errors listed for our campaign on SEOMoz. There were several pages of which the meta description was missing, but that has been fixed earlier this week. When it comes to link building, I looked at what the top competitors were doing, and was looking for unique link building opportunities myself. We have received 0 webmaster tools warnings as well. I do not believe we are penalized due to the "penguin" update. After all, if you search for for the company's name in Google, it is still listed on there (# 2). Nor have we been part of dodgy link networks at all. So my question is, what do you guys believe made us drop the rankings? Is there some on-page issues I am overlooking? Any recommendations to restore out previous rankings? Kind Regards, Roderic
On-Page Optimization | | Michael-Goode0 -
Is having the word catalog in an ecommerce site url detrimental to seo.
IS: www.example.com/catalog/category%/product% better than www.example.com/category%/product% category and product are dynamic values that change with the diff. categ. and products displayed while catalog is constant.
On-Page Optimization | | no6thgear0