What is the feeliing of "Here's where our site can help" text links used for conversions?
-
If you have an ecommerce site that is using editorial content on topics related to the site's business model to build organic traffic and draw visitors who might be interested in using the site's services eventually, what is the SEO (page ranking) impact -- as well as the impact on the visitors' perceptions about the reliability of the information on the site -- of using phrases like "Here is where [our site] can help you." in nearly every article. Note: the "our site" text would be linked in each case as a conversion point to one of the site's services pages to get visitors to move from content pages on a site to the sales pages on the site.
Will this have an impact on page rankings? Does it dilute the page's relevance to search engines? Will the content look less authoritative because of the prevalence of these types of links?
What about the same conversion links without the "we can help" text - i.e., more natural-sounding links that stem from the flow of the article but can lead interested visitors deeper into the ecommerce section of the site?
-
Hi Will
The only problem I see here is why you are writing these articles in the first place. It's not uncommon for an eCommece site to write helpful articles about problem-solving then offer a solution by adding a link to one of their products or services.
If the article is well written and optimised then it makes sense that if ranked for a particular problem the addition is a link could drive traffic to your money pages.
However, equally valid is you building a reputation for problem-solving without trying to sell at every opportunity. We SEOs post on MOZ, in forums, in our own Facebook groups and other places, but very rarely will you see a direct contextual link back to our services. Building a reputation takes time and effort and it needs to be done gently without feeling the necessity to sell a product or service at any opportunity.
The upshot is that I would temper this activity. Produce genuinely interesting and useful content and your reputation will grow. People will then want to follow you because you offer sound advice. If one in four articles have internal links then cool, but presumably if they are on your site reading your stuff they are aware that you sell as well.
Retail sites can be really bad at this - blog post after blog post just sharing products - complete waste of time, they never rank and only work for email purposes, well you know what - stick them in an email - tell your acolytes but don't clog up the site with tosh.
Anyway that's my spin - if you try and oversell you can end up not selling - people get bored very quickly and a post with buy-me written all over it is doomed to fail.
Cheers Nigel
-
Bottom line, should the opportunity for conversion be readily available at all times? Absolutely! Should you ever flood links across your websites pages for the purpose of increasing the likeliness they will click the link most likely as a result of human error?
Absolutely not, don't do that. I'm probably misinterpreting the question my bad if I am, but just on the off chance I'm clarifying of coarse! I find that you will get tremendously more value than rushing the monetization. Any sales technique that is initially viewed and interpreted to be a sales gimmick, will most likely fail out the gate..
What my sales training taught me when working for a multi million dollar bank that invested thousands into my education of moving their products and services is that selling complete garbage that offers literally nothing can easily be done! (Nothing horrible just credit card insurance haha.)
About 5% of my sales with that bank came from drive by pitches. So incentive wise, I didn't do so hot in the first 3 months. However, Once I learned the true powerhouse/weaponry, the one two punch of sales was RAPPORT/Rebuttal. Once you refine those 2 skills, It was game on!
On the internet if you master this craft, which most certainly I have not, it is a process that can be entirely automated after much trial and tribulation. MY boy is a Ecig Vape juice vendor, he tells me he actually gets 25% of his sales by literally hitting people up in the chat box when they land on his site. And he gets another 25% from hitting them up AFTER they've made a purchase, which causes many to buy tons more stuff!
In conclusion, gain their trust, get them to humanize you and your products first, sell second. Spam always fail!
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 you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance". I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources. I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank. Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic. Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity? I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | DavidCapital0 -
Site appearing and disappearing from google serps.
Hi, My website is normally on page 2-3 on google consistently. Over the past month it has been appearing and then completely disappearing from the serps. One day it will be on page 2, then the next day completely missing from the serps. When i check the index it seems to be indexed correctly when doing site:mysite.com. I don't understand why this keeps happening, any experience with this issue? It doesn't seem to be a google dance as far as I can tell. When my other sites dance they typically just go up or down a few ranks for a couple weeks until they stabilize. Not completely fall off the search engine.
Algorithm Updates | | Chris_www0 -
What happens when we change redirects to pass linkjuice to different pages from backlinks? Google's stand?
Hi Moz community, We have employed different pages (topics) at same URLs for years. This has brought different backlinks to same page which has led to non relevancy of backlinks. Now we are planning to redirect some URLs which may improve or drop rankings of certain pages. If we roll back the redirects in case of ranking drop, will there be any negative impact from Google? Does Google notice anything about redirect changes beside just passing pagerank from backlinks? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Should I create a menu link for sitemap?
Hi guys, I am new to SEO and I have a question for you guys. We created a sitemap for our website. I was thinking of creating a sitemap link on our homepage. Do you think it's a good idea? Would this help us in terms of ranking improvements? Or would help with anything at all? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | ahmetkul0 -
Links hovering at the bottom of a search result
Hey folks, Curious has to the how and why there are links at the bottom of this search query for "Justin Bieber Networth" for other celebrities, completely unrelated i.e. "harry styles, taylor swift" etc. http://imgur.com/DNXuyRW (also attached) Is this an SEO tool? How did they embed this into a search query? Thanks! Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 12.04.43 PM DNXuyRW
Algorithm Updates | | Anti-Alex0 -
Please help explain this (Question about search results)
What's up SEO's, I'm new the SEO world and had a quick question. I just installed the MOZBAR and did a google search: "What is Google Voice" I attached an image of the results I received. Can someone explain how MacWorld's article outranked Google's when both Google's Page Authority and Domain Authority are so much stronger than MacWorlds. This is in addition to google having many more links. This is basic, but any insight will be very helpful. Thanks guys! [Screen%20Shot%202014-02-18%20at%206.08.15%20PM.png](file:///Users/jackfarrell/Desktop/Screen%20Shot%202014-02-18%20at%206.08.15%20PM.png)
Algorithm Updates | | Petbrosia1 -
Why won't my keyword search results appear on google's top 50?
They are only appearing on Bing and Yahoo, can anyone share some insight?Help? Here is the URL: www.aaexs.com
Algorithm Updates | | RealmindTechnology0 -
"Revisit-after" Metatag = Why use it?
Hi Mozfans, Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them; name="revisit-after" content="7 days" /> I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag? Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible? Thanks in advance everyone! Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshSEO20110