Should products descriptions be made in to blog posts?
-
Howdy,
Here's a situation I got myself into. For the past few months, I've been planning to start up an e-commerce business. I've got my homework done - created product design, wrote value-adding product descriptions and a few regular blog posts in order to start providing content right away. Recently, I've got some news that the product I was about to sell won't be arriving for at least a month longer. Here's what I am considering:
In order to make the start of the business smoother and gain attention quicker, it would make sense to start building a presence in advance. What I am considering now is instead of using the product descriptions I have for their original purpose, I could make them into a handful of blog posts with WordPress. I am relatively sure that with proper promotion, people would find them interesting, as they answer common industry questions in a unique, entertaining way. However, I am not sure what implications would such move have for my business in the longer term, especially when it actually starts selling products. I would switch to the Shopify platform, which would probably mean I would have to transfer my blog posts onto another platform? Maybe I should just wait till I have all my products ready and stick with the plan, instead of using the content I have for the blog right now? If I should indeed go through with the blog first, what content would I later put in the product descriptions and what are the possible SEO consequences?
I hope it is at least somewhat clear what my situation is. Thank you in advance for the help.
-
I think it's a great idea to stoke demand by creating blog posts before the product pages are up.
If you think about it you're suggesting two options: do nothing or do something. If your product pages won't be up for awhile, might as well put that content to use, which will help you uncover a few things:
- How difficult is it to rank for product related keyword?
- How much natural demand is out there for my products already?
- Are people willing to sign up for a waiting/mailing list for my products?
- What types of content do readers find most compelling on my site or in my niche?
I wouldn't wait because you never know what delays there will be in the future, so might as well start now.
Switching platforms, such as to Shopify, is always a pain, but if you're going to be migrating pages anyways, a few blog posts won't be a huge technical challenge.
Possible SEO consequences/recommendations between blog posts and product descriptions:
- They are two different things. When reading blog posts, people are looking for information, stories, ideas, etc. When people read product pages they want to know details and FAQs about that product specifically. There will be some overlap, but keep the goal of the user in mind.
- That said, you can use some of the product descriptions within blog posts, but I wouldn't just copy/paste. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, but it's usually not a good idea to replicate pages across your site word for word.
- When you write blog posts about your products, link to the product pages from within the post. You always want to prioritize product pages for your money keywords, and blog posts for more informational/long-tail/high volume, but low difficulty keywords - two different strategies.
Hope that helps! Let me know if you have follow-up questions!
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
-
Product Schema Markup for All Products
Hi Team, Google search console used to allow you to use their structured data markup helperhttps://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ to markup multiple product pages at once that were similar. I do not see this feature anymore with the new search console. Does anyone have a recommendation for marking up multiple product pages without having to have schema markup firing in GTM for each product page?
Technical SEO | | agrier0 -
How do I customize Magento product urls?
I would like my product urls to be /category/manufacturer/name/part#. This would be the only url the item uses and how the product is accessed. It would also be used for product feeds. My first attempt was to use https://amasty.com/magento-unique-product-url.html This creates a single url but I can not customize it. Sometimes it selects the manufacturer and sometimes the category. My second attempt was with https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/custom-product-urls-seo.html I have it installed but it doesn't change the urls. Has anyone been able to do this successfully?
Technical SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Discontinued Product on a Ecommerce site
To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
I am looking for the best post and page title template
There seems to be a few schools of thought as to how the title templates in the yoast plugin. currently mine are set with the default templates posts title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) page title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) What are the best options here for proper SEO. I am learning as much as i can but i have searched for a concrete answer here on the net, but found many different responses. What do you all think? What is my best option?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
What's the best Blogging platform
A year ago an SEO specialist evaluated my Wordpress site and said she had seen lower rankings for Wordpress sites--in general. We moved our site off any cms and design in html 5. Our blog, however, is still on Wordpress. I'm thinking about moving to the Ghost platform b/c I only a blog. The drawbacks are one author, no recent post lists, no meta tags. Is it worth it to move the site off Wordpress. Will it affect my rankings much if I have great content? Does anyone have experience with or opinions on Ghost?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Moving a blog from Blogger
A client just setup word press. They have a ton of content on their blogger account. Today they stated they were moving the content to their blog. My knee jerk response is to leave it where it is. I am posting this question to re affirm my position. Unless there are some pro's to moving this over.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Duplicate Title/Meta Descriptions
Hi I had some error messages in the webmaster account, stating I had duplicate title/meta descriptions. Ive since fixed it, typically how long does it take for a full crawl if Ive fixed these issues? Webmaster is still showing problems with various Title/Descriptions. Also was wondering if I should block individual pages on a large ecomerce site? EX of a Large site - http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/ (Page is structure and optimized) Then you have all individual games http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/bears-vs-lions-soldier-field-4077064/ they have an H1 and a meta description, should the page above be blocked from google and concentrate only on the Pain page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Should I include A Description Tag for an article page
Hi, I am wondering if i should include a description tag for an article page where the news on that page will change around five times a day. I am not sure if to fill a description in for local news or to leave it blank so the search engines pick up the latest local news and then the next day they show the latest local news again in the search engines instead of having a static description of the news page. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860