Advice on outranking Amazon and other big names in eCommerce
-
I have a client that is targeting some product related keywords. They are on page one for them but Amazon, OfficeMax and Staples are ranking in the top 3 spots for this specific product.
Before I start targeting completely different words, do you have any advice on how to tackle big name eCommerce sites who are ranking higher than you.
Thank you!
-
Thanks!
Creating instructional content would be a great way to capture more of those long tail searches about their products. Thanks for the idea!
-
Amazon, OfficeMax and Stapes are powerful sites owned by established and popular brands. They have a lot of links, a lot of social mentions, a lot of domain queries.... I could go on listing a lot more of their their assets. You get the idea.
If you look in their product SERPs only a few sites are able to beat them in a direct frontal attack. That means... out of thousands of sites trying only a few are successful. The odds are not looking good for your client.
Where I am able to beat them I have a whole website dedicated to a small group of products and they have one or two product pages. My sites have product pages but more important they have information pages that explain how to select the products, how to use them, how to maintain them and a lot more.
I regularly beat them on informational queries about the products. I sometimes beat them on product queries, but it is often an information page on my site that out ranks them. That's OK because I have lots of calls to action that take the visitor to a product page.
I can't offer a strategy to beat them with product pages on a product site. My strategy to beat them is to have many times their content depth with useful information about individual products and a website that earns the respect of the visitor - who, buying from you will probably pay more than amazon is charging.
I beat them a lot on long tail queries, again, it is information pages on my site outranking product pages on their site.
Beating them 4 to 1 or 8 to 1 with content is really expensive and very time consuming. Most people are unable to do that because they are not into content production or they are into content production and their content sucks and is not engaged by visitors. It has taken me years to get into a position where I can sometimes beat them in a very specialized niche.
It bothers me to have a website that on the basis of content deserves top rankings for lots of queries. But, that's the way things are at this time. How the future will go, I don't know. I am getting stronger and they are getting stronger and I don't know for sure who has the velocity advantage. Right now Google likes brands so I am not betting on getting to the top of all of my SERPs anytime soon.
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
-
Ecommerce Migration - Criteria To Redirecting Products
Hi Guys, We have an e-commerce migration of a site moving from Magento to Shopify. The URL stuctures are changing so we will need redirects in place. They have over 50,000 skus/products. We need to setup redirect mapping - from old to new pages. Now setting up redirects for every single product seems overtop. Thus what is a good minimum requirement to determine if its worth redirecting a product page? We are thinking about going based on referring domains and google analytics data (for the last 12 months). If any product page has 1+ referring domain or more then 50 organic sessions during 12 months then setup a redirect otherwise no redirect required. Thoughts? Thankyou.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup0 -
BetterWidget or Better Widget? Brand name effect on SEO
I have a company that produces widgets. People generally search for "widget". I need to decide how to brand my company. Stylistically, I like BetterWidget, but I worry about the effects on SEO. If people are commonly searching for "widget", and my page title contains "BetterWidget", but no other use of the term, that may have a negative effect. 1. Is Google able to parse through these joined words? (this is similar but distinct from the discussion on common compound words like ice cream) 2. Does capitalization of the second "word" in the joined word help signal to Google that these are two terms joined together? 3. On the flip side, is there a negative effect from not having a unique "brand". In other words, articles that are about my company Better Widget may seem to google just to be about better widgets in general. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | galenweber1 -
New g(TLD) advice needed
Hey all, I'm a bit confused by conflicting advice, need some direct input. We're quite experienced in SEO but that doesn't mean we can't get better 🙂 I manage a very old, well established, very generic TLD portal that ranks very highly in MANY keywords. (If you know our domain, I'd appreciate not naming it here) (145 1-3 ranks, 342 1-20 ranks) but there are also many topics we want to improve upon. Lets say, for example, I own gold.com, but I've failed to rank for 'gold events' and I acquired gold.events. What is the thought as to using some of the g(TLD)s versus the original .com? In the example events.gold.com or gold.events or gold.com/events/? I really can't find a consensus on which would bemost effective for SEO purposes. In a more general aspect of the same question, we own MANY "gold.newg(TLD)" domains and are conflicted as to best use of all of them. All advice greatly appreciated. Nat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorldWideWebLabs0 -
Ecommerce Site homepage , Is it okay to have Links as H2 Tags as that is relevant to the page ?
Hi All, I have a Rental site and I am bit confused with how best do my H Tags on my homepage I know the H1 is the most important, Then H2 Tags and so on.. and that these tags should really be titles for content. However, I have a few categories (links) on my homepage so I am wondering if I could put these as H2 Tags given that it is relevant to the page . H3 Tags will my News and Guides etc , H4 Tags will the whats on the footer. I am attached a made up screenshot of what I propose for my homepage if someone could please give it a quick look , it would be very much appreciated. I have looked at what some competitors do a lot of them don't seem to have h2's etc but I know it's an important factor for rankings etc. Many thanks Pete dJSFQwI
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Domain Name Switch Considering Special Circumstances
Thank you kindly for taking the time to read this. The company I work with is a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. They've had the same domain since about 2001. Their organic placement has been stellar since about 2008. With the most recent Panda update some results did slip, but they are still strong & I feel that the SEPRs that slipped will be back up shortly (hopefully!) The company recently bought the url www.VegasWeddings.com which happens to be a generic key phrase, BUT ALSO IS THE NAME OF THE BUSINESS. They want to switch, but I am in a bit of a conundrum of this. It seems really risky, but also makes a lot of sense. Help? Insight? Anything? Thank you dearly!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leslieevarts0 -
Best solution for facets in ecommerce store for optimum link juice distribution?
Now I have facets setup with ajax and ajax just adding parameter #facet1... at end of URL and I have setup canonical so that domain.com/category/#facet1 refers to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
domain.com/category/ Would you make the facet links no-follow or better better not to add no-follow for better link juice distribution?
Would you hide the whole facet block from google and if so how? Any thoughts?0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Linkbait outranks actual target page?
Interesting dilemma I've run into. Working in an extremely boring B2B space and started making some quality content to grab some .edu links. Well, it worked. Let's put it this way, our target keyword is "{keyword} services" and we pulled in so many .edu links the resource page which is an educational resource with our target keyword in it, has now surpassed every commercial site and ranks second. The problem is, the page doesn't have much in the way of services on it, it's strictly educational and targets a different audience than our customer. The home page, our desired landing page, jumps back and forth between third and twelfth depending on the week. Any thoughts on how to make these flip flop? We're getting a ton of traffic to the wrong page and bouncing most of them at the moment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0