How do you get great content for a small business?
-
We always talk about great engaging content being the way forwards for sites. As a small business this is an expensive commodity to outsource when you have probably in the region of 250 pages that could probably all use some work.
To that end I have some questions.
- how do do you make a product or category description engaging?
- Should they still contain a certain number of words ( personally I hate ready reams of text)
- As on-page SEO what should we be striving to achieve?
I am sure this has all been asked before but what the general consensus right now?
-
So in a nutshell this is how I list out products at present but I don't group size just colours, we then have related items linking through to there sizes.
Egyptian Bath Towels (15 colours) Alt tags all contain colour as well.
Egyptian Bath Sheets (15 colours)A lot of food for thought there. For me, the key is to find the one person who can write the content hit that sweet spot. The search continues!
Egol, thanks for all your advice.
-
they are the same things with a size, colour or quality change so you end up with the same old description re-written several times over to avoid duplicate content...
I have this situation too.
I always place all color and size variations on the same page. If I have six colors I will show a photo of each color and place an "add to cart" button below it.
This accomplishes many things. It makes comparison shopping easy for the customer, It reduces the amount of work that my webmaster must do. It reduces the number of pages on the website (and I believe that makes a more competitive site).
Although that does not give me separate pages for "red wooden widgets" and "blue wooden widgets", I will still get a lot of long tail traffic because I have those colors on the page, often in the title tag and the extra long description helps my page pull long tail traffic.
-
Hi Egol,
Many thanks for your answers, really helpful.The trouble with our products is that primarily they are the same things with a size, colour or quality change so you end up with the same old description re-written several times over to avoid duplicate content.....not engaging, dynamic or enticing in anyway.
I would be interested to scan a site you work on if possible, more from do you have a url? I appreciate this is a bit cheeky so tell me where to go if so
The trick is finding a good copywriter in our domain. The company owners know the products well but like myself lack the ability to put these into good quality content.
Thanks for your help
Craig
-
how do do you make a product or category description engaging?
get a writer who uses the product, knows it really well and has the skill to tell everybody everything that they want to know about it... and what they need to know that they have not realized that they need to know.
how do do you make a product or category description engaging?
For my most important products I often have a short product description at the top of the page... below that I will have paragraphs with subheadings that describe specific details of the project (how to use, maintenance, supplies needed, etc). I also have a lot of long articles (on separate pages) with video and lots of photos that show how the product is used. These article pages often rank higher in the SERPs than my product or category pages. They pull a lot of traffic and I have house ads and links on these pages that direct traffic to purchase pages.
I find it much easier to rank and info page than a product or category page. The more competitive the category the better article pages compete.
** As on-page SEO what should we be striving to achieve?**
I honestly have more success building an info site with a store than building a store and try to make the product descriptions substantive. In some of the areas where I compete my sites have more info than all of the other competitors combined.... and all of those info pages get me out there into just about every possible product, accessory, part and information SERP - to the point of keyword cannibalization.
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
-
If I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by google to be a mixed content page?
With Google starting to crack down on mixed content I was wondering, if I have an https page with an http img that redirects to an https img, is it still considered by Google to be a mixed content page? e.g. In an old blog article, there are images that weren't updated when the blog migrated to https, but just 301ed to new https images. is it still considered a mixed content page?
Algorithm Updates | | David-Stern0 -
Descriptive domain vs business name domain
I originally set up my domain as "overlandparkphotographer.com" and then have my "jpshots.com" pointing to it. What I recently discovered is that even though the pages of my I set Yost SEO Title to be "JPShots Senior Pictures | Wedding Photographer" When you search "overland park photographer" the snippet tile is just "overland park photographer" which sounds super sketchy. I don't know if this is something to do with yost, or if my sneaky Domain isn't worth much, and I should simply use my regular jpshots.com domain as the primary. I know it works like a charm with yahoo, but I'm not sure how much the domain name factors google these days.
Algorithm Updates | | JPRichardson0 -
Landing page redirect along with complete content
Hi Moz community, We have a page with "keyword" we are targeting in slug like website.com/keyword/. This page doesn't have much back-links or visits like homepage. So we decided to redirect homepage to /keyword page along with complete content. Will this going to hurt? Only change anybody can notice is URL. Are there any risks involved. I think this is the best way to highlight the page we been thinking about. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Clean up of Links, What to get rid of?
We have been cleaning up our back office and preparing our .com domain to take all our future traffic and have got into a debate about how far to clean up the old past links. We have not ever had a penalty on the site as far as we know, but did once get the site taken offline by Google as they thought it was a malware site back in March this year. They put it straight back up and running in 5 hours, but was very strange as it is an amazon-webstore retail site. We are not sure why Google thought (edit: typo) this, so just in-case we have been combing through the historical links and now started to disavow any links we cannot get removed manually. So far just a couple of sites that have no relevance to our retail business. However, the debate we have been having is around Directory listings: Should we get rid of these too? Gut reaction is Yes, based on the need for quality relevant links for the end user, but then some are passing proper links to relevant sections of our site albeit in a directory format. Dmoz comes to mind Any thoughts? Bruce.
Algorithm Updates | | BruceA0 -
Have name.org want to get name.com should .com redirect to .org or other way around?
Its a non profit organization. With name.org acquired in 2006. name.com will be acquired soon. In SEO terms it would make sense for me just to get .com and redirect to the original .org but from the standpoint of 7 year history of name.org is it worth keeping or its irrelevant or not that important or really important. I am in the process of rebuilding the site other than the initial domain home links to other pages do not matter at the moment. Thanks Mozzies
Algorithm Updates | | vmialik0 -
Rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or Unique Content?
Hi All, I have 3 sites; brand.com, brand.co.uk and brand.ca They all have the same content with very very minor changes. What's best practice; to use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or to have unique content written for all of them. Just wondering after Panda, Penguin and the rest of the Zoo what is the best way to run multinational sites and achieve top positions for all of them in their individual countries. If you think it would better to have unique content for each of them, please let us know your reasons. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Tug-Agency0 -
Duplicate Content & www.3quarksdaily.com, why no penalty?
Does anyone have a theory as to why this site does not get hit with a DC penalty? The site is great, and the information is good but I just cannot understand the reason that this site does not get hit with a duplicate content penalty as all articles are posted elsewhere. Any theories would be greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | KMack0