Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
-
Hi !
In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages.
For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category)
Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides?
Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is.
Looking forward to your answers
-
Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells. Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined. We know that because we hear it * Every Day * in our customer reviews.
The ads that we run do not say buy from us. We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website. At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses. Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad. Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site.
The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store. We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot. Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed. We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles. We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information. It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products. They can also click an ad to our competitors. But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.
-
If by "content pages" you mean blog posts on your site, I'd suggest not doing this at all. It's not great for your SEO but it won't directly hurt your rankings.
What EGOL said is correct in that providing helpful links in your articles is an excellent idea and something you should definitely be doing, but there's a very big difference between helpful links and self-promotion. Blog posts are meant to be informative and that's why the good ones get shared but dropping a sales pitch in there changes the tone from "here is helpful information you're looking for, share it around" to "here's my product, you should buy it". A link to your products is usually going to feel like a sales pitch, no matter what anchor text you use.
To put yourself in your readers' shoes, imagine if I started dropping links to my product pages here - suddenly my entire comment would feel pretty shady, right?
Linking to your other posts and external sources is a great idea but in most instances, linking to your own products is reason enough for me to stop reading. Of course, there are exceptions to this - the question to ask if whether or not that link is genuinely helpful.
-
** Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?**
Bad? No way. It is the smartest thing that you can do.
I spend a lot of my time writing content that explains how to use, repair and select products. These are posted on my site and they always have links or standard-size banner ads pointing to the page in our on-site store where the item can be purchased.
If you have an article on how to repair a product, and offer links to where the tools, replacement parts and supplies can be purchased then that is a genuine benefit to the reader. It is actually useful content. And, the reader will feel good about buying these things from you because they just learned something from reading your article. And, because you demonstrated your expertise the buyer should be comfortable buying your recommendations rather than going to another site, searching, and questioning... "is this what I really need?".
I am spending a lot of time this month and spent a lot of time last month writing content for the purpose of driving sales.
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
-
Do the back-links go wasted when anchor text or context content doesn't match with page content?
Hi Community, I have seen number of back-links where the content in that link is not matching with page content. Like page A linking to page B, but content is not really relevant beside brand name. Like page with "vertigo tiles" linked to page about "vertigo paints" where "vertigo" is brand name. Will these kind of back-links completely get wasted? I have also found some broken links which I'm planning to redirect to existing pages just to reclaim the back-links even though the content relevancy is not much beside brand name. Are these back-links are beneficial or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Why Google changed our page-title suddenly which has been same for years
Hi all, I know Google shows a different page titles. Happens when over optimised or when we copied competitors page title. But we did neither. Suddenly Google changed our homepage page title in search results. Our page title suffix "brand name" has been moved to beginning. Our page title is still for years.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Ecommerce - SEO Quick Wins?
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone had any quick wins for an ecommerce site & SEO. I am the only SEO and we have a small online team and an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. It's impossible to optimise everything, and we have taken the top 100 products and optimised them - starting from scratch with keyword research. I'm now struggling to prioritize what we need next - I know we need better internal linking, content, social and lots more, but this isn't something I can get through alone. I need a starting point and perhaps something with a quick win initially? Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Canonical Tag on All Pages
This is a new one for me. I have a client that has a canonical tag on almost every page of their site. Even on pages that don't need it. For example on http://www.client.com/examplex they had code: Maybe I have missed something, but is there a reason for this? Does this hurt the ranking of the page?
Algorithm Updates | | smulto0 -
Would you "nofollow" links from a column on HuffingtonPost?
Hi all, So, I've read a lot of posts about guest posting being dead, but what about if you have a regular column on a well-regarded site? Stop? Nofollow links? We have a regular column on the Huffington Post and each piece has historically had at least one link (or more) back to our site. Yes, early on (like last year) we did use optimized anchor text in our links, and then calmed down on that a bit. But regardless, the links have always been relevant to the topic covered, and the topic is always in our niche (namely: budget travel in Europe). I saw Matt Cutts' recent video in which he recommends using the "nofollow" tag on guest posts when linking to one's own site, and specifically mentions HuffPo. Thus, I'm prepared to go back to my old posts and "nofollow" those links, but I just wanted a sanity check from the fine folks at SEOMoz. Would you go back and nofollow them? Many thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | TomNYC0 -
Am I doing enough to rid duplicate content?
I'm in the middle of a massive cleanup effort of old duplicate content on my site, but trying to make sure I'm doing enough. My main concern now is a large group of landing pages. For example: http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/executive-suites/dallas http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/medical-space/dallas And these are just the tip of the iceberg. For now, I've put canonical tags on each sub-page to direct to the main market page (the second two both point to the first, http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/dallas for example). However this situation is in many other cities as well, and each has a main page like the first one above. For instance: http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/atlanta http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston Obviously the previous SEO was pretty heavy-handed with all of these, but my question for now is should I even bother with canonical tags for all of the sub-pages to the main pages (medical-space or executive-suites to office-space), or is the presence of all these pages problematic in itself? In other words, should http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/chicago and http://www.boxerproperty.com/lease-office-space/office-space/houston and all the others have canonical tags pointing to just one page, or should a lot of these simply be deleted? I'm continually finding more and more sub-pages that have used the same template, so I'm just not sure the best way to handle all of them. Looking back historically in Analytics, it appears many of these did drive significant organic traffic in the past, so I'm going to have a tough time justifying deleting a lot of them. Any advice?
Algorithm Updates | | BoxerPropertyHouston0 -
Pdfs for SEO - benefits, downfalls and promotional methods
Hi fellow Mozzers, We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords. The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted. I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint. So: is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content? are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML? as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both) Hopefully that's all clear! Nick
Algorithm Updates | | themegroup0 -
Affect in SERPs when moving footer links off the homepage
I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0