Can we really learn from the best?
-
Hi All,
When I started my site (an eCommerce site) I copied (or tried) a lot of things from the best eCommerce sites I thought were out there.
Sites like Zappos, ZALES, Overstock, BlueNile etc.
I got hit pretty hard with latest algo changes and I posted my question at Google Webmaster Help forum I received answers from Gurus that we are keyword stuffing etc. (mainly with internal links to product pages but other issues as well).
My answer was a link to Zappos and other sites showing that what we do is nothing compared to them. I also showed dozens of SEO "errors" like using H1 tag 10 times per page, not using canonicals and many other issues. The Guru's answer was "LOL" - who am I to compare myself to Zappos.
So the question is... Can we take them for example or are they first simply because they are the biggest?
-
Companies that spend more time building their brand are going to be trusted more than companies that spend most of their time on SEO. Companies that have well-known brands and high-traffic websites with hundreds of thousands + quality external links, an aged domain, lots of brand-related signals (e.g. searches for their brand) are going to be given the benefit of a doubt.
The rest of us are S.O.L. until we can build that brand presence. You have to toe the line.
Yes you can learn from the big brand sites, especially when it comes to things like upselling, cross-selling, brand building, email marketing... but having worked with a lot of big brands I can tell you that their SEOs don't typically know anymore than others. They also have to go through a maze of bureaucracy to get anything implemented. As such, I don't pay much attention to what they are doing SEO-wise. If something works for them it probably has more to do with the power of their brand and domain than it does with a particular tactic. Emulating them with regard to SEO is typically useless, at best, and often dangerous.
-
Is there an eCommerce website (or several) you can recommend to look at?
-
In the early days we did what we wanted and had good results. Then we started to read everything out there about SEO & Marketing etc, and started to implement these changes which gave negative results.
We then started to look at what others were doing, if we felt they were the best we tried to emulate them.
What we realised pretty quick is, it doesn't work! We just have the perception they are doing it right, but we don't have access to their analytics to know if they are. You have to try things out and find out what works best for your company. Often this involves asking your customers what they like and what works for them.
I've read so many articles from experts that say don't use "send" on a call to action button. For one client that simple word has worked wonders. For another "read more" had a higher conversion than any thing else we used.
-
Sorry it wasn't clear.
All of our content is unique and we are not in the same industry as they are.
By "copied" I meant concept, structural design, naming conventions etc.
Copied IDEAS...Thanks
-
It's great to learn some new ideas from the best eCommerece websites. I would recommend you to take them for example of the good things on their website and not from the Black Hat part.
Also, it's very general to say that they are "the best", because it depends on the keywords you are searching in order to see them first on Google.
Hope that helps!
-
Hello there,
Being quite new to SEO and also PPC I rely a lot on MOZ blog and Q&A as well as other sources and I do keep an eye on bigger companies (I manage an e-commerce site for a small comapany) to get ideas and also to compare what I do to what they do, where I can improve, where I am going wrong. And I do think you can learn from them, but the way I see it is that you shouldn't be kind of replicating strategies or tactics that others have implemented because they might not work for you, and in this case they didn't.
Some of my competitors have Websites that rank well and better than the one I manage but they have tons of keywords on each page and their sites are optimized for search engines not for humans.
Consider also the link profiles of these companies, I am sure Amazon doesn't struggle in acquiring natural links from relevant and authoritative sites.
My suggestion is that you should optimize your website for your audience using as many best practices as you can and doing it by evaluating your objectives and goals. Also use competitors and bigger companies to get ideas and to differentiate your OVP
Good luck
-
Hi there,
I also run an eCommerce site. And we rank number one for many keywords in the Disco, DJ and Lighting product categories. You have told me exactly why you failed to rank in your first opening line: "I copied".
Google doesn't want content that is identical to an already existing, larger company. Why should it include your website in SERPs when you're just a copy of a much larger website?
I personally don't see anything blackhat about Zappos. But I've literally just grazed over it.
What you need to do is be unique. All content should be unique to your website. No copying manufacturer descriptions, no keyword stuffing your descriptions, using correct title tags, h1 tags and alt tagging your images.
We have competitors who have been a PR 5 and ranking better with certain keywords for years. Thankfully, Penguin and Panda took care of them and we were boosted to that beautiful number 1 spot in the SERPS.
SEO in ecommerce requires patience, beautiful content, unique descriptions, SIMPLE navigation and customer experience.
You need to find the thin line between a fantastic user experience and a crawlers dream!
I don't take any "examples" from any website. I do my SEO how my website needs to be done. I know my website, I know my products, I've studied the keywords and phrases people give Google to find certain products and I have utilized those keywords to create content people WANT to read as well as content that crawlers are going to love.
Being the biggest does help you rank. However, if they try any blackhat techniques, Google will penalize them just as hard as you or I. But do you need to use Google to reach Amazon? Or do you just go directly to Amazon? They have no problem with paying $$$$$'s a month to sit pretty at the top of the serps sponsored section.
Just my two cents
Tom
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
-
Can I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?
My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teachbanzai0 -
A Really Specific Question about 301 Redirect Strategies
Hi there: As part of a site redesign project, we've been doing a lot of 301 redirects, as we retire old URLs or rename them. My question is: is it necessary to redirect ALL old URLS? What about URLs with no links and low authority? Are these really necessary to redirect, since they're not referenced on the web and there's obviously a global redirect happening at the level of the root domain? Just curious; I'm not sure I've ever really understood this...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Best support site software to use
Hi Guys We currently use Desk to run our company support site, it seems ok (I don't administer it), however is it very template driven and doesn't allow useful tools such as being able to add metadata to each page (hence in our Moz crawl tests we get a large number of no metadata errors (which seems like a lost opportunity for us to optimise the site). Our support team are looking to implement MadCap Flare as an information management tool, however this tool outputs HTML as iframes which obviously make it hard for google to crawl the content. We recently implemented HubSpot as our content marketing platform which is great, and we'd love to have the support site hosted on this (great for tracking traffic etc), however as far as I'm aware MadCap Flare doesn't integrate directly with HubSpot....so looking for suggestions on what others are successfully using to host/manage their SEO optimised support sites? Cheers Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SnapComms0 -
SEO best practices for embedding content in a map
My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015 From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map. We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I? The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank. so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love? Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!1 -
Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Keyword Phrases - Can You Break Them Up?
Can you break up a search query across a sentence and have Google still recognize which query you are targeting? Let's say I'm trying to rank a page for the phrase "best haircuts calgary". Is Google's algorithm advanced enough to look at page title "Best Haircuts - Where To Get Them In Calgary" and know it's targeting the query "best haircuts calgary"? If it can't do this right now, I could see it advancing to this at some point in the future, which would then change the game quite a bit in terms of how creative you can get creating pages for queries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Can multiple redirects from old URLs hurt SEO?
We have a client that had an existing site with existing rankings. We rebuilt the site using DNN 7 and created/tested 301 redirects from all the Original URLs to the new DNN URLs which are nasty and have /tabid/1234 and will not allow for dashes (-)'s We have found a DNN module that will make the DNN 7 URLs search friendly. However, that will cause us to 301 the current DNN urls to the new URLs so in fact the original will redirect to the DNN and the DNN will redirect to the rewritten SEO friendly URLs. What should we know here before proceeding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tjkirgin0 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0