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
-
Discontinued products on ecommerce store
Hi, I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back). For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value. The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coma990 -
New Domain, No 301 Possible - Any Advice
A client of mine lost their domain when an ex business partner sold it out from under them. They've filed with WIPO, but in the meantime we're trying to figure out how to help them out. They had two really excellent links - one from the NY Times and one from a .edu website. I'm going to reach out to the authors of those articles (the articles are pretty old, so I doubt they'll change the links), but does anyone have any advice on how to let search engines know the new domain replaces the old without having the ability to do redirects? The content on the site is exactly the same - we were able to get the files over, happily. I've re-submitted the site for indexing, changed the domain links in Moz Local, changed in Analytics, and on all their social sites. Is there anything I'm not thinking of that can be done to let Google know that this new domain replaces the old? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newwhy0 -
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Exact match .org Ecommerce: Reason why internal page is ranking over home page
Hello, We have a new store where an internal category page (our biggest category) is moving up ahead of the home page. What could be the reason for this? It's an exact match .org. Over-optimization? Something else? It happened both when I didn't optimize the home page title tag and when I did for the main keyword, i.e. mainkeyword | mainkeyword.org, or just mainkeyword.org Home Page. Both didn't help with this. We have very few backlinks. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is this a good sitemap hierarchy for a big eCommerce site (50k+ pages).
Hi guys, hope you're all good. I am currently in the process of designing a new sitemap hierarchy to ensure that every page on the site gets indexed and is accessible via Google. It's important that our sitemap file is well structured, divided and organised into relevant sub-categories to improve indexing. I just wanted to make sure that it's all good before forwarding onto the development team for them to consider. At the moment the site has everything thrown into /sitemap.xml/ and it exceeds the 50k limit. Here is what I have came up with: A primary sitemap.xml referencing other sitemap files, each of the following areas will have their own sitemap of which is referenced by /sitemap.xml/. As an example, sitemap.xml will contain 6 links, all of which link to other sitemaps. Product pages; Blog posts; Categories and sub categories; Forum posts, pages etc; TV specific pages (we have a TV show); Other pages. Is this format correct? Once it has been implemented I can then go ahead and submit all 6 separate sitemaps to webmaster tools + add a sitemap link to the footer of the site. All comments are greatly appreciated - if you know of a site which has a good sitemap architecture, please send the link my way! Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Reverting back to old domain name.
I've recently been asked by a client if I can foresee any issues with reverting back to their original domain name. With the original domain name they had a pretty decent DA for their sector which they have now lost. Although I do appreciate that over time this might come back, the CEO is very keen to switch back to the old domain. They do currently have 301 redirects from the old domain to the new and have implemented rel canonical. As yet they have not notified Google of the change of address using Webmaster Tools. Can anyone forsee any issues with returning back to the old domain name? They have only been using the new domain name for a couple of months which currently has a DA for 1.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Macrofireball0 -
Website using search term as URL brand name to cheat Google
Google has come a long way over the past 5 years, the quality updates have really helped bring top quality content to the top that is relevant for users search terms, although there is one really ANNOYING thing that still has not been fixed. Websites using brand name as service search term to manipulate Google I have got a real example but I wouldn't like to use it in case the brand mentions flags up in their tools and they spot this post, but take this search for example "Service+Location" You will get 'service+location.com' rank #1 Why? Heaven knows. They have less than 100 backlinks which are of a very low, spammy quality from directories. The content is poor compared to the competition and the competitors have amazing link profiles, great social engagement, much better website user experience and the data does not prove anything. All the competitors are targeting the same search term but yet the worst site is ranking the highest. Why on earth is Google not fixing this issue. This page we are seeing rank #1 do not even deserve to be ranking on the first 5 pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Why is Google Reporting big increase in duplicate content after Canonicalization update?
Our web hosting company recently applied a update to our site that should have rectified Canonicalized URLs. Webmaster tools had been reporting duplicate content on pages that had a query string on the end. After the update there has been a massive jump in Webmaster tools reporting now over 800 pages of duplicate content, Up from about 100 prior to the update plus it reporting some very odd pages (see attached image) They claim they have implement Canonicalization in line with Google Panda & Penguin, but surely something is not right here and it's going to cause us a big problem with traffic. Can anyone shed any light on the situation??? Duplicate%20Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0