Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm not sure you can cover every angle or scenario.

We've found our data to be reliable enough to make good decisions.

Yes. Then you'll have to factor in the other costs associated with the sale like shipping, handling, discounts, etc.

There are some unknown variables such as repeat sales that are acquired from the initial conversion and/or volume purchases made after the initial conversion (assuming there are any).

Know your margins and watch the cost per conversion for your products.

Eventually, you'll get a good idea of what I call a "conversion threshold" which tells me what I can expect to spend to convert that product to a sale. From my experience, once the conversion threshold is determined, it won't deviate far from it over time.

If my net on the product is $20 and my conversion threshold is $12 then I'm making money (excluding cost for shipping, handling, promo discounts etc).

If the threshold his $18 or $22 then I re-think what to do with the product.

I'd put together a report that shows product cost, retail price, margin, net and cost per conversion. It should be quite telling.

We use Volusion. The SEO delivery aspect of their software is excellent.

You do not have to purchase their SEO package to rank. I don't know where you heard that, but it is categorically false.

We closed one of our Volusion sites and redirected customers to our 2nd site. Everything has been fine in that regard.

There are currently many reasons to leave Volusion, but in my opinion SEO delivery is not one of them.

If you'd like to share links or a look under the hood of your store, feel free to pm me.

Hi Ben. We use a combination of both bullet points and paragraphs. Personally, I like bullet points when looking at products because typically they highlight the features, benefits another other specifications that sometimes get lost in paragraph text.

From my experience, it doesn't matter from an SEO perspective whether paragraph or bullets are used.

From a user perspective, I'd suggest using whatever format helps the user get the most information the quickest that helps them make a "conversion" decision.

Should price be included in rich snippets?

Is there any research supporting inclusion or exclusion of prices in snippets?

Know your margins and keep an eye on your cost/conversion (assuming you have something to convert).

Hi Stephanie,

I took the course last fall and recommend it if you have the basics down. It is pricey, but you get a LOT of information to digest that is immediately actionable. I'm an in-house SEO and told the boss if we're going to go to the "next level" I needed some training. Soaking up GWT best practices will only get you so far in my opinion and eventually you'll probably feel like you've plateaued. Here's a few observations on the course:

1. If you have a basic understanding of SEO and need more comprehensive and advanced training - it is very thorough. Almost too much information and in some cases not enough depth when needed. On-page optimization, site hierarchy/structure, local SEO and link building strategies were excellent.

2. The information is actionable. You can implement what you're given as you're getting it.

3.  Yes, some of the information/techniques are dated and could be fresher. It might be easier to keep it fresh if the scope was not so broad. Having said that, I like the breadth of the training.

4.  They have a support program where course instructors can answer student questions on-line. It's a great concept, but could be better executed in my opinion. I felt the instructor's were too busy with their own jobs, clients, life, etc. to provide timely answers and depth to students inquiries.

5. One hour a week we get to have a live chat webinar with the course instructor. I liked it but I could have spent a half hour myself asking questions that came up from the course due to its volume of strategies.

6. I would have liked more current "real world" examples of sites using the practices so we can see the tactics in action.

Now, I feel like I need advanced Analytics and CRO training to compliment the SEO training I've received. There's a lot to do and do well.

Yes. If the image is tagged with different keywords, how is Google going to know they are the same image?

Keep the file name different and alt different as well.

Perhaps. How deep can Google read into an image properties beyond the alt tag?

Hi Bryan,

This is similar to the good, great, industry standard bounce rate questions for ecommerce.

It depends on your products, promotions, cart friendliness, software performance etc.

Like bounce rate, your cart abandonment rate will develop a track record over time and once your site performs consistently, you'll now what is good and when there is a problem.

As a parent, you know when those two great looking kids of yours are not acting healthy. Similarly, you'll know when your site, cart etc. is not acting healthy either.

I'm sure our cart abandonment rate is higher than average because of the large volume of heavy products we sell on our site. Once the customer sees the shipping cost at checkout, they balk and bounce.

Our cart provider (Volusion) has been having functionality issues of all kinds since late February. That's a whole 'nother can of worms but suffice to say it has had a significant impact on cart abandonment.

Hi Peter. Thanks for weighing in. Please let us know if you find something definitive.

I've still not heard back from local.com and have not tried in a couple of days. I'm curious if I can handle this at the news station/ newspaper level. Perhaps those outlets have some influence on how the content is fed.

A timely question. We've got a bunch of local.com backlinks that just showed up. All are no followed and the anchor text is "website." How nice.

Our domain authority dropped a couple of points (perhaps associated with this - who knows), so I called local.com several times about the backlinks. Still haven't heard from them.

I don't know if Google frowns on a littany of no followed backlinks from local.com with a bunch of spammy looking anchor text, but apparently, SEOmoz frowns on it.

My intent is to ask local.com if they can at least use our store name for anchor text. If they can't, I'd just as soon they give us 2 or 3 no followed links with our store name in the anchor text.

If they can't do that, then I'd be fine if they just get rid of the backlinks altogether. If they're going to give me some directory love, do it right. If they're not going to do it right, don't do it.

Hi Robert. I think of bounce rate as my site's pulse. Over time I establish what is a "healthy" pulse, which for us is about 50-55%. Every site will be different based on its content (products) and delivery.

Our site has a lot of products that are not shippable, but only available for store pick up. We also have a lot of products that are only able to be delivered in-state, which affects bounce rate.

After we started our product feed, our bounce rate jumped to 55-60% but our sales jumped significantly also. A 55-60% bounce rate is not great for us, but the sales have been great so it is an acceptable trade-off.

I would say we have a "good" bounce rate for what we do. Its not great, but good. I would suggest great is a rate that is trending down while sales are trending up.

It's early in my observation/research of Google Product optimization, but it seems to me that Google leans to branded keyword optimization.

You'll appear in Google products for both branded and non branded keywords but results suggest to me (without enough hard data) that branded terms are favored (perhaps because branded terms tend to be long tail).

Hopefully, we get some more comments here that have more data-backed experiences.

Keyword: work jeans

Branded keyword: Carhartt work jeans

Title: Work Jeans for Men

Branded Title: Carhartt Work Jeans for Men

If a keyword is branded (meaning there is significant keyword searches that use the brand in the search), I move the brand to the head of the title.

If the keyword is not branded, I don't put the brand on it or if there are several products to play with, I'll do both and put the brand at the head and at the back of the title:

Work Jeans for Men by Carhartt

or

Carhartt Work Jeans for Men

Excellent BJ. Thanks for the input. The Geo landing pages are a great idea and I should be using them.

Would you mind giving us a couple of links to some Geo landing pages you think are effective - your own or someone else if you're not comfortable putting it here?

I'd like to see a good solid blog or two on building effective money-making landing pages.

Hey Brendan. What various signals do you get in your data that suggests it is inaccurate? Using GA is kinda like getting security information from the fox that is watching the hen house.

The German in me favors free beer - especially Sam Adams.

If you don't have a brand to leverage (and even if you do) use value propositions and calls to action.

I don't know if our brands are famous or not, but we're 2nd and 3rd generation family brands and we leverage the name for all its worth. Plus, our name offers connotations that our url does not.

Now we're not just in-state but nationwide. Makes us feel good when a customer from Wisconsin sent us this yesterday:

"I am truly impressed with your services. I will be ordering more items very soon. I will be also be suggesting your site to my horse community. Thank you for communicating so well! "

Hopefully, his horse friends won't think he's crazy for referring them to a lumber.com site.

While waiting for EGOL, I'll throw this in. I've wondered the same thing as you and have a hard time using that Title real estate for much other than keywords and brand.

So I compromise and put the promo language at the front of my meta descriptions in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Mighty Mouse uses more than free beer to steal peanuts! Great tidbits!

Charles - to your point I give a thumbs up to EGOL's post.

I have compared the sites of competitors outranking us and and often times I cannot find a single common thread among them as to why they are ranking so well except for strong PA/DA.

Their site appearance, layout, navigation, user friendliness, promotions and depth of content may not be that great, but they're pulling rank.

If your PA/DA is comparable, then you've got underlying issues.

"Free Beer" is very compelling. How's your conversion rate on those titles?

Great analogy!!

What is Google Analytics telling you about those pages?

I would think not since the visitor took an action from a link on the page. Once the link on the page is clicked, it effectively closes the loop that was created when the page was entered. You might not have a high time on page, but hopefully you'd get "credit" for action taken and not be classified as a bounce.

Having said that, I don't know if Google differentiates between clicking on a page link that takes you to another page on the site versus a page link that takes you off the site.

I forgot to the attribute the above information to Google Analytics. You might dig around GWT to see if they offer more specifics.

I used to the think we get dinged in SERPS for bounce rate. But since a visitor may land on a relevant page and get all the information they need and then leave, it makes sense that very little if any importance would be attributed to bounces in Google's algorithm.

Non-branded:  flannel lined jeans

Branded:  Carhartt flannel lined jeans

If the plural version is generating the most exact match and phrase match traffic, plus is converting at the rate necessary, don't worry about the singular version.

Conversely, if the demand is for the singular and the singular produces the conversions, go for the singular.

I've found that a lot of the plural "category" type terms produce traffic but not necessarily as many conversions as the singular version.

As Anthony suggests the keyword will often dictate whether it is a short tail navigational type term or longer tail singular type converting term.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits to your site.

A bounce is calculated as a single-page view or single-event trigger in a session or visit.

The following situations qualify as bounces:

• A user clicks on a link deep into your site sent by a friend, reads the information on the page, and closes the browser.
• A user comes to your home page, looks around for a minute or two, and immediately leaves.
• A user comes directly to a reference page on your site from a web search, leaves the page available in the browser while completing other tasks in other browser windows and the session times out.

Time on page will be 00:00 if no actions are taken on the page, no matter how much time or scrolling is done on the page.

What was occurring was a one day snapshot of a page bounce. What was throwing me off is the 00:00 time on page.

The data was from one day, so the pages with no time on page and 100% bounce rate did not have time to gather more looks and influence the data accordingly.

I did not know that Google does not count time on page if the person bounced from the page they entered - no matter how much time spent, content read, page scrolled etc.

Unfortunately, the page may be highly relevant, but we get no credit for time on page and we get dinged for a high bounce rate.

The feed manager says they didn't touch anything in our Analytics account.

He added that they have the same type of thing happening in their Analytics account as if it was a "normal" type of occurrance.

Doesn't seem normal to me, so I'm hoping someone knows what's going on.

We've got a company managing the feed for us and we're feeding Google, Bing and The Find. On a side note, The Find is worthless.

I'm sending our feed manager an email now with a screenshot of the data.

Just thought of something else. We're also set up with a product feed.

Hi Sean,

We've got an ecommerce site on CMS.

I thought Analytics was installed properly - perhaps not. I've not seen this before.

The keywords are random and widespread. I'm in Traffic Sources>Sources>Search>Overview

My finger hovering over the panic button is developing a hair trigger.

Hello,

I'm seeing the following Analytics data for some of my keywords:

Multiple Visits

Pages/Visit: 1

Avg Visit Duration: 00:00

% New Visits: 100%

Bounce Rate: 100%

The data is the same on all "affected keywords".

What is going on and how do I fix it?

Thanks for the help!

Once you drill down to keywords, pages, time-on page and %exit, I think you'll probably see pretty quickly where you can address some things that will help.

I think you're right on the money with keeping your content fresh.

Good luck.

The quickest way I've found to boost mozrank and trust is developing good local optimization and submitting our site to directories. The jump in those factors happened relatively quickly - weeks not months.

Boosting the moz and trust ranks will help you rank while you build the DA with back links.

I would suggest a couple of things.

First of all I would suggest that bounce rate could be compared to a pulse. Over time, you'll discover an acceptable bounce rate (pulse) for a particular site and those rates may vary from site to site. An acceptable site bounce rate for us is about 50-55%. If the rate pushes toward 60%, it tells me there is something going on that I need to investigate more deeply.

If you're in ecommerce, product feeds will affect your bounce rate and you'll need to identify products that adversely inflate your bounce rate and address accordingly.

Secondly, bounce rate also applies to pages (which in turn affects site rate). Its relatively easy  to identify pages that are affecting bounce rate. I know what pages on our site will have a higher bounce rate than others. If there is something I can do do reduce the bounce rate for a page, I do it.

Having said all that, I would throw a guess out there that an acceptable bounce rate would be between 45 and 65% with a rate in the 50% being realistic.

If you take a snippet of text that is keyword rich, and slap it on 10 other sites, they will almost always (in google search) outperform your whole unique story.

Alan, I'm missing something or not getting it (perhaps both).

I understood there was an "indexing time stamp" in Google that helped Google identify the original content and therefore punish those that scraped it.

Is this not the case? I thought Panda was supposed to enhance that ability rather than do just the opposite and punish the origins of the content.

Interesting. What would compel the Oracle to grab the block of text and do such a thing?

Specific to your industry or similar industry no. But as you suggest - in principle across ecommerce, yes.

If your title tags and product descriptions are not unique enough, you will get flagged for duplicate content in Webmaster tools. If you've got a bunch of products with a couple of words or product numbers or colors that make up the difference, you'll most likely get dinged - we have.

Will you get a site wide penalty drop in rank, product drop in rank or failure to improve rankings probably depends on how widespread your duplicate content is.

You'll want to use rel canonical tags on all your pages. There are other advanced steps to take in terms of identifying product landing pages, % exit pages and sales. Index the producers and no-index others etc.

I would also look at top ranking competitors and glean what you can from their structural delivery. If they're page 1, they're doing something right.

I'd also do a keyword search of this site for duplicate content and you may find other suggestions more specific to your products and industry. Good luck.

Thanks - I have my moments :). Winnowing the field is the hard part. You've got to lay it all out there in a well-structured way that won't get you banged for duplicate content.

Then you've got to give it time for the products to percolate to the top.

If you've got a site with some authority I suppose the process will move more quickly, but if you're a start-up or a few years into it, you need the money now so you hang on to as much low hanging fruit as you can.

Its challenging.

Like most retail there are gonna be about 20-30% of your products doing 80% of your business. Attack those.

Hi Simon,

When faced with stuff like this, I try to vary the keyword research as best I can and start with broad match and narrow it down from there.

You used a conversational keyword in your question: "motorcycle cover" albeit a short tail. Would creating and optimizing a page for motorcycle covers be an option and then in the drop down put the different bikes they would fit?

Edit: Yamaha Motorcycle Covers exact match looks pretty good. Maybe parse it that way.

Its ironic you say, "I know say its silly to list all the bikes the cover fits", because your alternative is to create a whole page for every other option and as you suggest, there is inherent risk in that.

I'd try to identify the best option for generating traffic that will convert and minimize your exposure to duplicate content.

Ultimately, you'll probably find your solution will be a combination of doing things both ways depending on the product and traffic patterns.

Jos, keep an eye on other posts that relate to rankings fluctuations. A Google update is coming. Whether or not some of these observations showing on the forum radar is the initial affects of the update remains to be seen.

Be careful to panic or over-assume or you might start grabbing at straws.

Included in that count is the H1 instance of the keyword. Are you certain that keyword density is the only factor at play in your rankings?