Optimizing for Branded and Unbranded terms - ecommerce
-
Hi,
To date, we have gone with optimizing our website for branded search terms - we have done this by including the manufacturer + product name in the links to the product, product urls, page titles, h1's etc...
Now, we are looking at optimising also for non branded terms - but all of our products are already optimized as above and I'm a bit lost as to how we would proceed with this process - my thoughts are:
- Create the generic categories, e.g, "Decorative Mirrors"
But then, if they link through to the existing mirrors which are optimised for branded search, how do I go about it? Do I create a duplicate of the product and remove all the branded terms in the page title, h1, url and create new content for it? E.g., the same product but available twice... Doesnt seem logical from a user perspective but I cant think of another way to do this??
Thank you
-
_Definitely _don't create any duplicate content here. I think you're on the right track, though: create some navigation pages that are optimized for unbranded search, and use those as an alternative way to find product pages, beyond just the original branded way.
Good luck!
Kristina
-
Hi there,
In my opinion, you can create a drop down menu for your category items with unbranded keywords and then link them with the targeted product page. It will help your visitors to search the product with generic (unbranded) keywords as well. You don't need to create a duplicate page here. You can simply tweak the content to accommodate the non-branded keywords as well. Also, you can use your non-brander keywords as anchor text for internal linking & external backlinks.
I would advice you to see your website's internal search trends to find out which non-branded terms people are using while exploring your website.
I hope this will help.
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
-
Ecommerce Migration - Criteria To Redirecting Products
Hi Guys, We have an e-commerce migration of a site moving from Magento to Shopify. The URL stuctures are changing so we will need redirects in place. They have over 50,000 skus/products. We need to setup redirect mapping - from old to new pages. Now setting up redirects for every single product seems overtop. Thus what is a good minimum requirement to determine if its worth redirecting a product page? We are thinking about going based on referring domains and google analytics data (for the last 12 months). If any product page has 1+ referring domain or more then 50 organic sessions during 12 months then setup a redirect otherwise no redirect required. Thoughts? Thankyou.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup0 -
How to optimize an ecommerce catalog that uses parameters only
Hello ! I am facing a problem concerning a client's website that has been developped using filters that create parameters - there are no categories. This means that, no matter what I choose as a filter, the page title, desc and my H1 stays the same. In a beautiful, unicorn rainbow filled world - I could just tell them to restructure their site with new categories/sub categories AND with filters. For SEO purposes and to find a temporary solution until we can change the architecture, what would be the best choice? Should we create individual pages that serves the same content as the catalog, but with rewritten URL, Title, Description and canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
ie: http:/domain.com/catalog/?brand=moz canonical to http:/domain.com/catalog/brand/moz ? I noticed indeed.com does that (https://ca.indeed.com/SEO-Specialist-jobs vs https://ca.indeed.com/jobs?q=SEO+Specialist&l=) Should we dynamise the content depending on which filters has been selected? Of course, some filters are real filters that wouldn't attract or add any value (such as order by) Thanks for your input!0 -
How do I find my Crunchbase Organization ID for Knowledge Graph Optimization?
With the depreciation of Freebase, we're moving some of our data to Wikidata. One of the identifiers (and signals for a Knowledge Graph placement) is your Crunchbase Organization ID. However, I can't find any reference to this number on our company Crunchbase profile. There's an application ID in the source code but it seems to be a different number length than other Org. ID examples I've seen. Anybody have experience and know where I can find this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattCommonBond0 -
Strategies for generating a knowledge panel for brand queries
Hello, I'm looking for any new ideas or experiences that might help in generating a knowledge panel for a brand query. I'm working with a company that has a strong brand, over 200K searches for the brand name alone each month, but they don't have a knowledge panel. When you search the brand name, the right side of the search results is just blank white space. Here are some of the things they do have, which tend to trigger a KP: Well built-out Wikipedia page Pages on Wikidata, Freebase, Crunchbase Home page organization schema Home page schema using sameas to connect the company to their social profiles, wikipedia page, and Freebase and Wikidata Hundreds of mentions in national press outlets Verified Twitter and Pinterest profiles (the same type of verification celebrities get) Generally, this all (and maybe even a lot less than this), would trigger a KP when you searched the brand name, but it just doesn't. No branded queries trigger a KP. It's interesting, because even the three smaller companies that they've acquired had (and still have) knowledge panels when you search those brands. So, I'm wondering if anyone has seen or worked through this behavior before? Or, even if not, any thoughts or ideas that we can do to nudge Google towards a KP for a branded search? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianspatterson0 -
Development/Test Ecommerce Website Mistakenly Indexed
My question is - relatively speaking, how damaging to SEO is it to have BOTH your development/testing site and your live version indexed/crawled by Google and appearing in the SERPs? We just launched about a month ago, and made a change to the robots text on the development site without noticing ... which lead to it being indexed too.So now the ecommerce website is duplicated in Google ... each under different URLs of course (and on diff servers, DNS etc) We'll fix it right away ... and block crawlers to the development site. But again, may general question is what is the general damage to SEO ... if any ... created by this kind of mistake. My feeling is nothing significant
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | estampe1230 -
Profound Rankings Drop - But only on Branded query
Hi all. I apologize for any redundancy in advance. I've seen similar queries about branded search but nothing that quite resembles mine. First of all, my site is Withdrawal-ease.com In the last few weeks, I've seen a significant drop in ranking for specific pages on my site that normally rank well in a brand search. I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on. So I looked at a bunch of queries for branded terms and it looks like I've been penalized...but I haven't For instance, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I would typically see my home page first and then 3-4 of my most popular pages/posts directly underneath in the organic listings. Some of those popular pages include: http://withdrawal-ease.com/proven-home-remedies-for-opiate-withdrawal/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-opiates-at-home/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-suboxone-at-home/ Although the titles are similar, the content is all original and comprehensive...it's good content that has always ranked very well...and still does. But as of Late March they don't show up for branded searches. Now, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I only get my home page listed and the other pages have all fallen to #60 according to Moz, WMT etc. What is strange is the fact that these popular pages still rank highly for my key terms and relevant searches. I have not noticed any significant drops other than when I do a branded search. I have added a picture from WMT as an example. The image displays a search from my brand name and my most popular page that would typically have ranked #2 below my homepage. As you can see. the impressions and clicks fall, then jump and then totally disappear for my branded query. Looking at the chart, one might observe that the mobile update seems to roughly correspond to the rankings drop but we've been very diligent about being mobile friendly and all of the checks for mobile friendliness pass with flying colors. I've looked at Robot TXT files and everything is fine there...all of our diagnostic tests have turned up nada as far as I can tell. Again, I have not been informed of any manual penalty and my backlink profile is not raising any alarms on Moz; I get a 1 on the spam score. We do not actively seek out links because I DID have a manual penalty in 2010 due to a horrible experience with an SEO firm. It took me over a year and 15k to clear out all of the spammy links that this guy got and I was finally cleared of the penalty in 2013. So I'm totally flummoxed. My organic search is now down significantly across ALL browsers...but again, just for branded searches. I have also attached an image of my crawl stats just in case this may shed any light. Thank you all so much for any help that you can provide; it's been extremely stressful and frustrating so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Whoa.jpg crawl%20stats.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gcat3330 -
Local Showroom Tel Showing Up in SERP for Branded Term Search?
We encountered an issue: when user search for a branded term in UK on Google UK, one of the showroom got listed in SERP under site links as a location with Location icon and takes over a few lines - their address and phone number are displayed. This caused confusion for user as it's only one of our showrooms and we don't want to direct calls to the showroom this way. I'm suspecting somehow the localization factor came into play but not sure how to remove the showroom phone number from being displayed. Anyone has any insight/experience with this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560