Creative ways to dramatically increase content on ecommerce category pages?
-
I need to signficantly boost the content on the category pages on my ecommerce website. Currently, they're pretty thin, with some only having approx 50 words of unique content. In the past, I've intentionally kept the content on these pages quite light, to keep the aesthetic a certain way. It's a fashion-based site, so it's very much about the visual.
However, with the introduction of Panda, I need to change this mindset. But, there must be slightly more creative ways to boost the content to stop the pages looking too text heavy. I'm not talking hidden text or anything, but ways to break it up in different blocks on the page to make it look natural/relevant, while keeping it looking great.
Anyone have any good ideas? Or, any links to ecommerce sites that have employed brilliant methods?
-
Good point, I think I probably need to err on the side of caution and not go overboard, as you say.
Yes, already planning things like product Q&As and reviews to help with the product pages.
Thanks for taking the time to answer.
-
That's probably fine, but you want to be a little careful about how much content is visible. There are perfectly legitimate, user-focused reason for having content that isn't immediately displayed, but you don't want to go overboard. The primary thing is that if someone looked at the page, they would think the way the content is displayed (or not displayed) on the page looks perfectly natural and good for users, not like you're trying to stick optimized content onto a page without displaying it. I'm suggesting your plan is to hide optimized content. I just think it's important that it be said.
Craig's suggestion of user reviews creating your original content is good if you can get them. It's not always so easy. It can be helpful on product pages. Though, it may not really help with your category pages as reviews are usually on product pages.
-
Thanks Kurt, appreciate your reply. I will be using both ideas to incorporate as much text content as possible!
For some of the category pages, it won't be possible to do this as the category only contains, say, 9 products. So, for these categories, I was thinking of using a secondary description below the products. Only the first paragraph will be visible, the rest appears on clicking 'read more' (but all content loads at once). Good or bad idea?
Appreciate any comments you may have!
-
Most ecommerce sites use user reviews to do this.
Encourage your customers to write reviews of the product, or to submit pictures of the product in use with a description of the photo or setting.
That way you'll gain real content from people talking about your product.
You can also engage in some contests to encourage user reviews and that will both help to sell your products and provide additional non-boilerplate content for your ecommerce pages.
-
I can think of two ways to add content and keep the site very visual:
- Use a content rotator. You can have a single area of the page which cycles through content so it isn't all being displayed at the same time. All the content in the rotator is in the code. With some smart coding, you can even make the content rotator itself very visual while including a decent amount of content.
- Setup popup overlays for the pictures of fashion...uh...stuff (not sure what kind of fashion site you have) and, instead of putting the content for the overlays on a separate URL, write it into the category page itself.
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
-
Creating Content for over 50,000 Pages
Hi, Our site is a football (soccer) statistics sites. We gather information on upcoming games and post results of past games. At the moment we have over 50,000 pages of results each having in-game data displayed. The main problem I have is none of these match data pages has any text.Mostly tables of stats. Could anyone suggest a way of creating unique content for these pages? If I created some generic a paragraphic of text that changed based on stats and figures would this be seen as duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | jtatsubana0 -
Do i have to optimize all pages on ecommerce site which is currently 4028 give or take
Hello, do i have to optimize all pages on ecommerce site, as its a lot of pages to developed unique content for my plan at the moment is to start from top down, I have completed top home, featured products etc i have also started on individual team shops my content inst unique to each page more the same and just changing the team name and keyword i was planning on doing that in the blog area of the site and just making the top categories and sub categories. and maybe in time start on the products. I can do all categories in about two months but to complete products would take like 2 years I don't feel that is productive and most would be changed or out of stock by then please take a look at my site and tell me what you think ? sportingdesires.com Kindest Regards, Stephen Kewn
On-Page Optimization | | sportingdesires0 -
Moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. Should we redirect size pages into one page?
We are moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. On Bigcommerce, due to some bizarre reasoning the previous developer had 3 separate URLS for the same product in different sizes - S, M and L. Now we plan to have one product page where the sizes can be selected and 301 redirect the 3 urls to the new one. Is this advisable? Or should we just have 3 separate pages. OR should we have one of the sizes pages as the new page and then redirect the other 2 to this one? I ask this because the site has a LOT of ranking power and we do not want to jeopardise that.
On-Page Optimization | | MashBonigala0 -
Page Layout Updates and Mobile Pages with Ads
I have been trying to do some research on the Page Layout Algorithm and Top Heavy Ads and much of what I read does not mention about mobile pages as apposed to desktop. I am curious if the Page Layout updates can be effected by mobile pages as well and if there is any good articles on this subject. Also is this Algorithm been incorporated into its regular algorithm or do we still have to wait for refreshes to see the impact? Cesar
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Will pushing a visitor to a conversion page hosted on a 3rd-party domain hurt the landing page ranking
Had an interesting question from a client. The client has a page that is optimized for a specific term. The goal of the page is to push users to sign-up for a trial. The trial registration (conversion) page is hosted by a third-party. Will pushing users to the conversion page cannibalize the SEO authority of the landing page. My reflexive answer is to say no, but now am not so sure.
On-Page Optimization | | infoblue0 -
Duplicate pages
Hi I have recently signed up to Moz Pro and the first crawl report on my wordpress site has brought up some duplicate content issues. I don't know what to do with this data! The original page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/blog/ and the duplicate content page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/author/david/ If anyone can point me to a resource or explain what I need to do thanks! David.
On-Page Optimization | | WallerD0 -
E-commerce store having same content different language pages
Hello, I have an e-commerce store operating on PrestaShop. I have four languages Fr, De, En and Nl. The url for each page changes like Example.com/en/product1 Example.com/fr/Product1 Example.com/de/product1 Example.com/nl/Product1 All these pages have same content about product1 but translated in respective language. Is it considered as duplicate content? Should I suppose to write different content for each page?
On-Page Optimization | | MozAddict0 -
How to fix duplicate page content and page titles?
Apologies in advance if this has already been answered (it probably has) - I'm just not seeing it. Is there a guide on here for how to fix the issues brought up by the crawler - specifically, things like duplicate page content, or duplicate page titles? A lot of these seem to have been created by wordpress.org combos that I didn't anticipate - i.e., category pages, author pages, etc. The crawler brings up the problems, but I don' t know where to start to go about fixing them. Also, any guide on best SEO practices or fixing optimization problems, specifically for wordpress.org blogs, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | prospects1