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Hi,

Wondering if anyone can recommend how to track B2B conversions when the searcher isn't the one who transacts? I am looking at my Adwords campaigns and I don't think the conversion is 100% right. In our industry, the eventual end user (and the person who does the search) does not have the authority to purchase the product. It is usually the purchasing department who eventually get in contact and purchase the product. Sometimes it is another company on behalf of the original company who purchase the part as we might not be on the vendor list. So, in this case, the order goes from the original searcher to their purchasing department to another company who then purchase from us. Just wondering how to track this on AdWords?

Thanks

Thanks EGOL. What about category pages? The video tells you about the range rather than an individual product. Also would you post it on a few pages or is this duplication?

Just wondering where I should put my tutorial videos on my e-commerce site. I have two options

1. On the category pages - this makes sense as the videos are related to the products within the category

2. Create a help section of the website that would host all the help videos.

Which would be better for ranking and usability?

Thanks

I am struggling with the rel="canonical".  If each product had its own product PDF then it would be easy to use the  rel="canonical". However, some of the PDF manuals cover somewhere between 200-300 products. The only difference between some of the products is the physical size (like televisions i.e. 32" vs 37") so the same manual covers all the products within that range.  I am guessing using the same PDF manual for so many products is a duplicate content issue, but sadly they are really useful for users.  Maybe I could put all the pdfs on the product category pages. That said the MOZ tools are showing that we only have 200 duplicate pages out of 250,000, which I think is good.

I agree with Mike, a summary of the PDF, FAQs and how to guides would be an advantage. I've already started adding this information for some of the more popular products but we don't have enough people to write content for every product.  A smaller site would be a lot easier.

Anyone got any ideas?

@Dave - thanks mate

Thanks for advice. In the main, we've tried to add content from the PDF into the product pages but the PDFs are usually 150 pages long and we've got 250,000 products online.  I will try the  canonical idea and see what happens. Cheers for all the answers.

Hello.

A lot of the products I sell on my e-commerce site are very technical. I decided to add PDF data sheets, manuals etc on each of the product pages to improve the customer experience. Now I am not sure if it was the best thing to do.  I have noticed a couple of times that the PDF is out ranking the product page in the SERP.  For a few products, the PDF ranks but the product page doesn't.  Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks for responses.

Hello,

I have a page that isn't ranking very well.

http://nicontrols.com/uk/drives-motors/variable-speed-drives

According to the MOZ research tools I have too many on page links. I believe most of these are a result of the advanced filtration options on the left hand side of the page.  I don't want to remove the filters as they are extremely useful for customers but I am also worried about the number of links Anyone get any ideas about the number of links? Should I care?

Good work Cyto.

I had considered using the recipe image snippet for this instead of the author tag.

Cheers Cyto.  It is short term reward vs long term pain.

btw: What is the snippet for showing the product image in the SERP?

What do people think about abusing rich snippets?

I have a competitor who has started using the author tag on product pages. I guess this will be giving them an unfair advantage in the SERP.   I had considered doing the same but was a bit worried about getting banned in the future.

Should we go down the same path and is it likely that Google will eventually hit us with a ban?

Thanks Lynn.  The 31,000 was a bit of a legacy of issue and something we have solved. The robots file was changed a couple of weeks ago. So fingers crossed Google will deindex them soon. We get the same result when using inurl: where.

Any idea where the rest have come from?

Hi Irving

We checked everything obvious and cannot explain what is going on. I cannot see any major duplicate content issues and we do not have any subdomains active.  The Moz crawler also doesn't highlight any major duplicate content issues.

According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site.

I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration.

Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K)  to google.co.uk (150K).

Anyone got any ideas?

Should this content not be included on the individual product pages?

Quality score is determined by click through rate and relevance of the advert. The landing page quality is a factor but not the biggest factor in determining quality score.

Split your keywords into more targeted groups, make sure the ad is relevant to the keywords in that group and increase spend to get your quality score up.

Somewhere on youtube there is a guy from Google explaining it.

Quality score is determined by click through rate and relevance of the advert. The landing page quality is a factor but not the biggest factor in determining quality score.

Split your keywords into more targeted groups, make sure the ad is relevant to the keywords in that group and increase spend to get your quality score up.

Somewhere on youtube there is a guy from Google explaining it.

Thanks.

They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?

Anyone use "no-index" and "follow" for page 2 , page 3 etc? Does this work?

Hi

I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.

I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?

Thanks

they are no follow links but still worth having for local seo. They are also free and take little time to setup. Why wouldn't you do it?

Hi Doug

Thanks for the response and advice. I have started building back links to key pages but these are not showing up in open site explorer yet. I guess that takes time as well.

Old site has no content at all and is under a different brand name. It also got a bit of a panda smack down. The new site has a lot of useful content, product descriptions, manuals etc so should do OK. I kept the old one going whilst the new one got established.

Most of my keywords (170,000 of them) are part numbers of obsolete parts - there is not that much room for creativity.

I think you need to be patient in SEO and I am not.

Thanks again Doug

Thanks Mat, you have actually given me a great idea for an article.

Thanks Mat. Maybe I was approaching the question the wrong way round. I should make the dull content more interesting rather than trying to promote dull content.

If you're interested Google 'pump de-ragging' this is the kind of $£** I have to deal with.

btw: FollowerWonk is a great tool.

Guess that title of the question says it all. What is the best social platform for dull b2b sites? The kind of content that you wouldn't want to share with your friends and family.... Not that type of content before anyone gets the wrong idea

Hi Just wondering if anyone knew how long it usually takes for a brand new site to get indexed and ranked?  I launched a new site about 5 weeks ago. So far I have had 96,000 pages indexed but the majority haven't ranked particularly well or appeared. The ones that have ranked aren't ranking high even though they have better content than competitors sites... And my old domain.  Do I just need to hang tight and wait till my domain authority improves? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process? cheers

Hi

Just wondering what people think of using mega menus for navigation?

We have used them on our new site

http://nicontrols.com/uk/

When I run the site through the excellent SEOMoz campaign tools I see that we have too many on page links. I now believe the menu is good for customers but maybe not for link juice. Anyone got an ideas? Do I remove the mega menu or just reduce the number of links?

Many thanks

David

How did the Disque binge work out for you?

Hi

I watched the video and it made some sense however both of my keywords have a similar CTR and I use dynamic keyword insertion to make my ads more relevant. Just seems a bit hit and miss to me.

Thanks for the advice anyway.

Does anyone use shopping comparison sites to drive traffic to an ecommerce site? If so does that improve your organic ranking or result in the first page being dominated by comparison sites?

Is it me or is Google Adwords quality score a load of bull. I use part numbers as my keywords and have virtually the same landing page for each one. The only difference is the order of the paragraphs in my descriptions, the product attributes and the SKU. so why does one part get an 7 and the other a 5? Surely they should be the same?

Do some reading on the canonical tag and using it on ecommerce sites.

Out of interest which sites are you using?

LOL. I am just down the road in Blackburn (near Ewood Park). I could have posted my question on the back of a whippet If I had known.

Thanks for the advice David.

I think I might just have to just spend the money and hope we get the traffic boost.

Being from the North, I just don't like spending money.

Hi

I am doing some linking building for a niche and slightly dull industry. I have found that trade magazine want a lot of money to publish press releases with back links. The publications are relevant to my industry but have a low page rank on Google. Is it still worth paying for these links?

Thanks

David

Brad out of interest what do you think about using expandable divs so that users can see more content on the cat page if interest ? Not sure if this would be seen as black hat or not.

Thanks for the link and the advice Brad. Don't take this the wrong way as I like what you have done with the site. The content on the bottom of the page is well optimised but has been written for the benefit of google and not users. if you have guide for selecting the right baby food maker Would you be putting that at the bottom of the page? Or maybe that should be somewhere else on the site? Just trying to the best solution.

Thanks Brian . Any chance you can post a link to an example site? It is a balancing act between what works and what looks good.

Thanks ranksurge. Footer was the wrong word. I mean like comet have content at the bottom of each page just above the footer. http://www.comet.co.uk/c/Fridges-Freezers/Fridge-Freezers/1735 They don't really have that much content. How much content did you have on each page? We are looking at 500 words.

Hey,

Does anyone have any tips for optimizing e-commerce category pages? Looking to add content to each category page but not sure where to put the content i.e. above the footer? Above the search results? In the left hand nav bar? Have a landing page which they click through to see search results?

If anyone has any good examples or tips it would be much appreciated.

cheers

David

Easier and Faster , yes but more profitable, no. If people don't link to your content then your content isn't that good. People will link and share good content. Long term better content is a more profitable strategy.

I just don't understand why people want to purchase backlinks. Personally I believe time and effort should be put into making great content which people actually want to link to.

Cheers. Do you know anyone doing one big international site well?

Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?

Thanks for clearing it up Joris & Gianluca.