Advice on outranking Amazon and other big names in eCommerce
-
I have a client that is targeting some product related keywords. They are on page one for them but Amazon, OfficeMax and Staples are ranking in the top 3 spots for this specific product.
Before I start targeting completely different words, do you have any advice on how to tackle big name eCommerce sites who are ranking higher than you.
Thank you!
-
Thanks!
Creating instructional content would be a great way to capture more of those long tail searches about their products. Thanks for the idea!
-
Amazon, OfficeMax and Stapes are powerful sites owned by established and popular brands. They have a lot of links, a lot of social mentions, a lot of domain queries.... I could go on listing a lot more of their their assets. You get the idea.
If you look in their product SERPs only a few sites are able to beat them in a direct frontal attack. That means... out of thousands of sites trying only a few are successful. The odds are not looking good for your client.
Where I am able to beat them I have a whole website dedicated to a small group of products and they have one or two product pages. My sites have product pages but more important they have information pages that explain how to select the products, how to use them, how to maintain them and a lot more.
I regularly beat them on informational queries about the products. I sometimes beat them on product queries, but it is often an information page on my site that out ranks them. That's OK because I have lots of calls to action that take the visitor to a product page.
I can't offer a strategy to beat them with product pages on a product site. My strategy to beat them is to have many times their content depth with useful information about individual products and a website that earns the respect of the visitor - who, buying from you will probably pay more than amazon is charging.
I beat them a lot on long tail queries, again, it is information pages on my site outranking product pages on their site.
Beating them 4 to 1 or 8 to 1 with content is really expensive and very time consuming. Most people are unable to do that because they are not into content production or they are into content production and their content sucks and is not engaged by visitors. It has taken me years to get into a position where I can sometimes beat them in a very specialized niche.
It bothers me to have a website that on the basis of content deserves top rankings for lots of queries. But, that's the way things are at this time. How the future will go, I don't know. I am getting stronger and they are getting stronger and I don't know for sure who has the velocity advantage. Right now Google likes brands so I am not betting on getting to the top of all of my SERPs anytime soon.
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
-
Very Old Pages Creeping Up - Advice
We are currently having very old pages dating back 5+ years ago appearing on moz all of a sudden, we don't necessarily get traffic from these links anymore and i doubt they still hold any weight. Currently they take you to a 404 page, would there be any worth in redirecting these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?
Hello mozers, We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well. The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more. My question is the following: When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely. So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google? The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects. Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro130 -
Subdomain optimization - advices
Hi, I need some specific advices on which is the best way to optimize the subdomain of a main domain. Besides meta title, description, etc. Br.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar0 -
Anyone notice big drops in Bing?
I am running keyword reports and I am seeing several sites that have taken big hits in Bing, but still are OK in Google. Anyone else seeing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Please Review and Advice!
My site is WordPress Solution Please expert give me some guideline how can i improve my Website's SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shakiel0 -
Can Bundling Products Help eCommerce SEO?
We currently have over 13,000 products on our site. SeoMoz reports many duplicate pages, which are items that are very similar (different size, application, sku, etc.). Would it be prudent to create a bundled product that has one page, one description, a set of images and a table with add to cart buttons for all of the different products on that page? (called a bundled product in Magento). Then create 301 redirects from all of the individual pages and categories to the relevant new bundled product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJeep0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0
