Blog is outranking ecommerce store
-
My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store.
The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable.
The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?
-
Thanks Doug,
I will perhaps try having the links removed from the product page and see if that helps.
-
Without taking a look at the site and the content you've got it's hard to talk specifics, but you might want to test removing the links from the product pages to the blog. After all, you want people to add the products to their cart - not drift off into the blog.
(Of course. Depends on how well the blog supports people purchasing decisions, and promotes your offerings etc,)
In one of your response to Greg you say: "if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself."
This makes me suspect that it's just the weight of relevant copy on the page that's causing Google to view the blog page as more authoritative. I'd also guess (gut feeling) that having links from your product pages to your blog is also going to make is less clear to Google which should be the authoritative page.
-
It's possible that we could add the content to the product pages. Perhaps it could be added to the product page first and then posted to the blog with the website being specified as the canonical link.
-
Thanks for the suggestions about analysing the different traffic once it lands on the product pages, I hadn't thought of that.
The setup is that content is added to the blog and linked back to the relevant product page. The blog content is tagged with the name of the product and then any content with the specified tag appears on the product page via an rss feed for that tag.
You're right about different stages of the buying cycle and this is why the supporting content is posted. We have tested some CTA banners with reasonable success but need to find a successful way to implement this feature in wordpress without adding an image file each time.
-
Nope content is written afresh and not copied at all from manufacturers.
There is the option for customers to leave reviews, although currently no scheme.org markup to add it to the metadata.
What makes you think that a 301 to the product pages will stop them from being indexed. I have 301'd other pages in the past without it casing problems?
-
I'm not sure what's causing the blog posts to outrank - in most cases it is the other way around. I think Google just prefers certain type of content in some instances - e.g if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself.
-
This is a nice problem to have.
Think of the blog page as a landing page and as Robert suggested, link to the product so they can buy.
I'm curious how the keywords differ for each page. Whatever is being done on the blog pages successfully - can you do similar things to product pages that are not being blogged?
-
One solution would be to put this supporting information onto the product pages (and 301) but...
This might be more of an opportunity than a problem!
Not everyone searching for a product is actually looking to buy now. Recognising that different people will be in different stages of the buying cycle and creating content to support and more these people towards your sales pages.
Make sure that your blog posts also sell - both the products and also your offering/usp.
As well as just having a link - make sure it's an obvious call to action with a clear proposition too. if they want to go ahead any buy the product - give them a reason why they should buy from you.
Your blog posts might provide you with a great opportunity to communicate the added value, authority and trust in your brand to your prospective customer.
As well as having a link at the bottom - make sure that you've also got a clear and obvious "looking to buy now?" CTA above the fold for those competitive/impulsive people who do want to buy now!
What's happening when people arrive on your blog pages, how long so they spend on them, are they moving on to your product pages?
Is there a difference in the conversion rate for people entering via the blog and going on to your product page vs those that arrive directly on your product pages?
-
If the product descriptions are more or less copied from the manufacturer, then you may need to rewrite them and find ways to add user-generated content there, e.g. ratings and reviews, etc.
If you 301 the blog pages, then there won't be a blog to read and Google won't index the product pages.
-
What's causing the blog posts to rank above the product pages? Better information? More in-depth photos? Reviews? More content in general? If it's any of these, then think about you can apply these positives to the product pages so people start sharing and linking to those more.
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
-
Directing a domain.com/BLOG to a different host
Hello,
Web Design | | SharonEKG
i cant seem to figure out how to approach this matter. we have a website and a domain setup in one place and we wanted to setup a blog for that website on a different hosting, what do i have to do to link between the two to make it so when a user type domain com /blog he will get to our blog that is hosted on a different hosting plan? with the blog hosting plan we received a temporary domain that does not expire but i have been told that if i redirect to that temporary domain it wont work correctly also, if we do manage to go through that process will accessing the blog will the URL show domain com/blog or will still show the temporary given domain? is my only option is buying a new domain and just link between the two? Thanks!0 -
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Google Indexing Multi-Store Best Practice
Hi Guys, We currently have a main store view and a uk store view setup with a Litespeed Redirect for our website, redirecting UK IP Customers to the UK Store. We recently noticed that we were running into some issues with Google indexing pages from the uk site as well as the main store view. With trying to avoid duplicate content, my question being: What is the best practice for google indexing the UK and Main store views? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Web Design | | centurysafety0 -
Help with Schema.org on Ecommerce Products
I’m looking for ways of using schema.org with products that have pricing options. There appear to be two main problems 1) Whilst colour, width, height and depth are all catered for, size appears to be missing – how can we mark up products that are available in sizes that aren’t necessarily covered by width/height/depth (e.g. shoe size). Also, what if the product is available in different finishes – technically, these could not properly be described as colours so how could we mark them up? 2) There doesn’t seem to be any particularly good way of marking up pricing options that are displayed on the same product detail page. For e.g. if a pricing option table is used like this: | ID | Colour | Price 001-red | Red | £3.99 001-green | Green | £4.49 001-blue | Blue | £4.99 | I can mark up each row as an offer, and give each offer a price and sku or mpn, but then I can’t use itemprop=”color” to describe exactly what the option is. Would I just use itemprop=”name” in this case and abandon color altogether (even though it’s technically supposed to be describing the colour of the product and not the name of the offer)? I suppose another way I could approach it would be to mark up each row as an individual product, and assign each one an offer with the details as described above but then the containing page would effectively look like a separate product – which it isn’t. Any help or advice on this would be very much appreciated
Web Design | | paulbaguley0 -
Blog.yoursite.com or yoursite.com/blog/?
Rand made the following post in 2009. In July of 2013 I question whether this is still best practice. Obviously, much has changed in our industry in four-and-a-half years! "...if you're seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content, it's my personal belief that you should, most of the time, keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com." Source: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
Web Design | | JorgeUmana0 -
Having your blog on an external domain, is this ok?
We have our website / ecomm cart with network solutions and they do not allow you to have a internal blog like www.islesurfboards.com/blog . So the only solution is to have the blog on a external domain www.islesurfboardsblog.com which we set up. Is this ok for seo purposes or are we gonna miss out on alot by doing this. Any help?
Web Design | | isle_surf0 -
Duplicate content and blog/twitter feeds
Hi Mozzers, I have a question... I'm planning to add a blog summary/twitter feed throughout my website (onto every main content page) and then started worrying about duplicate content. What is best practice here? Let me know - thanks, Luke PS. I sat down and re: blog feed... thought that perhaps it would help if I fed different blog posts through to different pages (which I could then edit so I could add<a></a> text different from that in blog). Not sure about twitter.
Web Design | | McTaggart1 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want. We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities. We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews. We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes. All content title, headings remain same. Any suggestions are welcome 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0