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
-
Blogspot blog is subdomain, but domain is changing - How will this affect backlinks?
Hi Moz community, I appreciate the title is confusing, so let me explain. We use blogspot to host our blog. It's set up as a subdomain of our website. Let's call it: lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com Our website, in this example, is **lovelytraining.com ** We're migrating our website to a new domain: lovely.training We'll be redirecting everything on the primary website, so our link profile won't be lost. However, as the blog is hosted on blogspot, we'll lose links pointed to the blog. The blog would remain lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com - but our website would now be lovely.training The question is, has anyone migrated/redirected a blogspot blog in this way, to retain links? Secondly, is there another way we can tell Google that this is blog should be treated as a subdomain of our website? I'm sure I'm missing out something stupid, so don't go easy on me! Thanks all.
Web Design | | RobertChapman0 -
Blogging for SEO in Muse 2017
Can anyone give advice about SEO - specifically blogging in Wordpress and embedding it in your Muse site - that is specific to the 2017 updates. I found a lot of negative information, but that was mostly on forums from 2+ years ago. On their own forums, Muse says that you can get SEO plugins that help with this, but I am not sure I can trust those with clients yet. I have worked in Wordpress for years, but prefer the design freedom adobe provides. Specifically I am worried about whether the traffic to the site would be credited to the wordpress blog (on a different URL) or if it positively impacts my own URL used for the muse site. Would it be considered duplicate content? Also, are there any solutions that I don't know to ask about? Thanks in advance for listening.
Web Design | | Jesiwicks0 -
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 -
Blog on Subdomain or Subdirectory?
I was wondering what the SEO impact was of having a blog on a sub domain or sub directory. Which of the following is better? blog.companysite.com companysite.com/blog Personally, I like making the blog a more important part of the site so 2) is preferable; however, I don't know which one is best for SEO purposes. Do the search engines consider a subdomain as a different website? Can SEO authority be passed through each equally? What is your preference? Regards, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Ecommerce & Responsive design
Hi there, We are thinking to redevelope our ecommerce websites and thinking responsive design. Due to responsive design when the screen gets smaller to fit iphone and ipad we need to hide some content to make it more user friendly. My question is, how Google will treat hiding content with the smaller screens? Will this effect our rankings in a negative way? We really don't want to get punished by Google 🙂 Thank You
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
How important are tags on blogs?
Hi, I've always used tags on blogs, but I've noticed that some prominent and reputable blogs (e.g., SEOmoz blog, Problogger, Copyblogger) are no longer using tags at the end of each post. I'm curious about what is the reason for this - any ideas? Thanks in advance, Carolina
Web Design | | csmm0 -
Ecommerce Style Wordpress But No Shopping Cart.
Wondering if anyone knows if you can purchase an ecommece style wordpress theme, but not use the shopping cart portion or display pricing. We would like to display our website how an ecommerce is set up, but at this time, we do not sell anything online. We are considering in the near future to sell half of our products. And this would not be very large. Or can ecommerce be added to any wordpress theme. ?
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time
We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done. I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc.... I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business. Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto. Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product. Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments1