Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
-
Hi All,
I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority".
I'll give an example...
If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece.To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)?
Thanks
-
Nice little thread here, read all of it :).
I would be inclined to attach a signup form for a newsletter as the content is good.
Then I would include the latest informative article, tutorial in the newsletter connected with car accessories, link to facebook, plus 1, twitter page.
First to get some social engagement which in turn should help out with SEO but then an added benefit of flogging some accessories (although you would need to sell a lot of smelly trees to make anything) but you get the idea, I would site down and draw it out, give it some serious thought.
-
Philipp makes good points that ads can divert attention from your brand and your sales products. I agree with him.
However, my site is still selling a lot of merchandise. I don't have ads in people's face on merchandise pages. If there is an ad on a merchandise page it is at the bottom - most don't have ads. My ads focus on article pages.
Finally, you can block certain types of ads and also ads from competing domains. Adsense, tribalfusion and most other ad networks have a variety of ad blocking methods.
-
1. Yes, I would put it in a blog section. You might want to call it "tips" or something instead of blog, which is more appealing and - depending on the content - a more precise description. Important is that you have your articles on the same subdomain as the shop (or the same domain in the least).
2. Not that I'm Egol... but personally, I wouldn't put any ads on my ecommerce sites: as I am aiming at high conversions I don't want users to click on ads (unless those ads pay me more than my own sales).
And yes, the ads can potentially hurt your brand, so if you do have them, you must keep a close eye on those in order to make sure they're not out-of-context. But if you don't overdo it with the ads, most users won't even notice.And another word about content: IMO that's the only way to push your ecommerce site and open it up for the longtail - with articles that are helpful but not directly linked to a product you sell.
-
Thank you both for the answers.
In my case the site is more like Egol's first example.I will then add two related questions -
1. Should such related articles that I will use mostly for branding, likes and basically authority be posted in my Blog or Article section?
2. Egol - Don't you feel that putting ads in such article "hurts" your brand?
(making it appear to be smaller - you won't see ads on GAP etc.)Thanks again
-
I Agree with EGOL, however to answer our point on Articles Good or Bad. They're most definitely a good thing.
Attracting clicks, links, likes and bookmarks are great for your seo and attracting mor visitors in. I find for every 100 visitors that visit my article pages around 6% will share the content one way or another and thus drag in more visitors.
If nothing else it builds a bit of brand recognition in my niche and build my SEO.
-
Lots of retail sites have extensive article libraries that attract traffic, likes, links and make the site popular. These articles often describe how the products are used and are especially valuable on sites in do-it-yourself, personal improvement and hobby niches. I have a retail site with a lot of how-to-do-it, historical and review content and those articles account for about 1/2 of the traffic. They also produce some sales. In addition, I monetize them with ads.
On a more powerful scale is an information site with a store. These can be really popular and be monetized with house ads that funnel traffic into the store and third party ads that produce income. I have one of these that is supported by ad revenue and a store that sees revenue growth in proportion to the traffic - as most of the purchases are impulse. In addition, your sales will be tied the the effectiveness of your ads and their placement - experimentation is essential if you want to get the most out of them.
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
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Magento E-Commerce Crawl Issues
Hi Guys, First post here! I am responsible for a Magento e-commerce store and there are a few crawl issues and potential solutions that I am working and would like to get some advice to see if you agree with my approach. Old Product Pages - The majority of our stock is seasonal, therefore when a product sells out, it is not usually going to come back into stock. However the approach for Magento websites is to leave the page present but take the product off the category pages, so users can still find these pages from the search engines and they are orphaned pages as not linked to from elsewhere and not totally clear products are out of stock (just doesn't show the size pulldown or 'Add to Basket' button). There is no process in place to 301 redirect these pages either. My solution to this problem is to: 1. Change design of these pages so a clear message is shown to users that the product is out of stock and suggest related products to reduce bounce rates. I was also planning on having a link from an 'Out of Stock' page on the site to these products so they are orphaned but is this required do you think? 2. When I know for sure (e.g. over a month) that the product will not be returned (e.g. refund) by the user, then 301 redirect the product pages back to category page. How do other users 301 redirect their pages in Magento, I would like an easy to use system. Crawl Errors Identified in Google Webmaster Tools It seems in the last 2 weeks there has been a sharp increase in the number of soft 404 pages identified on the website. When I inspect these pages they seem to be categories and sub categories that no longer have any products in them. However, I don't want to delete these pages as new products might come in and go onto these category pages, therefore how should I approach this? A suggestion I have thought of is to put related products on to these pages? Any better ideas? Thanks, Graeme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | graeme19940 -
Duplicate content issue - online retail site.
Hello Mozzers, just looked at a website and just about every product page (there are hundreds - yikes!) is duplicated like this at end of each url (see below). Surely this is a serious case of duplicate content? Any idea why a web developer would do this? Thanks in advance! Luke prod=company-081
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
prod=company-081&cat=20 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Cons and pros of changing your e-commerce store domain name?
We have an online toy store, the domain is old over 10 years and we have some traffic, we are considering to change our domain name. There are two reasons why. First of all, we expand our product category, before we were only a puzzle store now we sell almost any kind of toy. And at this point, our current domain, PuzzleZoo.com is not representing our capacity. We also have toyzoo.com domain registered, that is also an old domain but there has been no activity with that domain. Our concern is, how do we avoid to lose ranking and keyword authority, are we going to start from the ground? What are the correct procedures to follow during this switch if we prefer to switch? As an alternative scenario, if we decide to keep both and open another e-store with toyzoo domain name and continue operating PuzzleZoo.com, with same products, will taht be a duplicate issue? If it is what are the consequences? (Just to add a note here, our PuzzleZoo is also a small brick and mortar store chain in CA and TX) ToyZoo will only be an online store. Even in this case at the eyes of Google, are we going to have a duplicate store that can potentially be penalized or PuzzleZoo being a brick and mortar store chain might help us to avoid being penalized? Should we switch the domain and redirect PuzzleZoo to ToyZoo, should we keep them both and running separately? We need to give a decision and I was wondering if there are any expert here that can give us a good intelligent advise on which path to go?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PuzzleZoo0 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
E commerce
Hi there. I'm currently optimizing ecommece websites for my company. The problem is, we have a duplication module whereby we duplicate sites accordingly to other countries. The on page analysis shows about 2,000 of duplicated content. How do i resolve this issue? I was planning to instruct the writers to write different content across different countries. Any suggestion on this? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | k3zuya0 -
Image optimization for e-commerce
Regarding image optimization for an ecommerce site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triplelootz
In your "category" pages you list your products with a small thumbnails / miniature image. When the user clicks on the product name or on the thumnails, he lands on the product page with the real size product image. How do you optimize the thumbnail image? Do you use a different ALT? Is Google smart enough to index the real size image? On one hand the image located on the "product" page has lot more content around, is bigger & more interesting for both the user and Google. On the other hand the "category" page has more autority ( links) than the product page... To reformulate my questions: Do you think ALT tag is important for your thumbnail image on your category pages. Do you write different ALT tag for your thumbnail image ( on your category pages) & and your real size image (on your product page)? Which ALT tag / image do you think is the most interesting for Google? What do you think? Cheers, Ludo0