Top 3 SEO Strategy/Research Practices
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am launching a series of new e-commerce websites and wanted to know before I started the content writing what are the TOP 3 strategy/research practices and techniques I should be doing before building my website?
Bonus points for those who can give me a Top 5!
Thanks,
Luca -
Hi Becky,
I found adding 200-300 words for the category pages worked best for my ecom site. I use 400-500 words for the main body on the products I sell. I (somehow) ranked number one on Google the previous 2 years based on organic content writing - no backlinks
My ecom site is LikeChimp.com - you can see how I use good content to rank, check out the page categories vs the product description: http://likechimp.com/product-category/buy-facebook-event-attendees/#
Hope this helps.
-
Hi
I have the same issue. I have an ecommerce competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages, under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer.
I work on an ecommerce site, and I have tested adding content to some of these category pages - with some performing better than others
But if an ecommerce site is expected to have thin content on these category pages then what can we do to help them rank? I don't have much control over the layout of the page, this is controlled more by our parent company.
Any tips for improving rankings of these category pages?
-
Thanks! I am stuck now between thin content vs juicy content for my ecom products!
-
Hi James, what do you mean by 'thin' content? How could Google recognise thin content as good...
-
Hi Luca,
Content for e-commerce sites should be focused on conversion; if it is strictly an e-commerce site (no blog etc) then ensure your content helps people get the product they need, rather than providing a guide on a subject - you don't need to inform people how to use a knife, rather why they need a knife and how it can improve how they perform a certain activity.
I've experimented with a number of different content combinations in e-commerce and the two that have performed the most positively are 1) dedicated landing pages (400 - 600 words) with 3 or 6 items included below the text, and 2) item listing pages with 12 items visible but less written content than in example 1.
It can depend on what your niche is; there can be much more content written about certain items than others, but targeting your audience is a must.
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
-
Menu impact on SEO
we have a single page web application for an ecommerce website. I think it is built in angular. One UX features we are exploring is the use of a "Products" Item on the menu with the categories showing on a menu rather than directly present on the header. The aim being to keep the header nice and clean. The result of this is that the categories which would typically sit in the header will now not be immediately visible until the menu is opened. Let's say I want to rank well for "building materials". Traditionally the view would be that this word would need to be in the header and marked up with the appropriate h tag. Will moving "building materials" into a product menu be detrimental for SEO? My initial thought is that as long as it is coded correctly there shouldn't be any impact on SEO. Can anyone give me their expert SEO view?
Technical SEO | | built_bot0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
I cannot find a way to implement to the 2 Link method as shown in this post: http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218
Did Google stop offering the 2 link method of verification for Authorship? See this post below: http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218 And see this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget In both articles the authors talk about how to set up Authorship snippets for posts on blogs where they have no bio page and no email verification just by linking directly from the content to their Google+ profile and then by linking the from the the Google+ profile page (in the Contributor to section) to the blog home page. But this does not work no matter how many ways I trie it. Did Google stop offering this method?
Technical SEO | | jeff.interactive0 -
Videos for SEO & Profits
Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Differences in Sitemaps SEO wise?
I'm a bit confused about sitemaps. I'm just learning SEO so forgive me if this is a basic question. I've submitted my site to google webmaster using http://pro-sitemaps.com and the sitemap generator it creates. I've also seen sites do this: http://www.johnlewis.com/Shopping/ProductList.aspx and http://www.thesafestcandles.com/site-map.html so I did something similar for my site (www.ldnwicklesscandles.com). You figure you see everyone do it you might as well try it too and hope it works. 😉 So I've done both 1 and 2. Which sitemap is best for SEO purposes or should I do both? Is there any format that should or shouldn't be used for Option 2? Any site examples for good practice would be helpful.
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
SEO Benefit/Liability of changing URLs of a 2 year old site
I sell RV Parts online. Our organization is called The ROUTE 66 RV Network, so we brand everything around ROUTE 66. When we launched our store 2 years ago, we launched it with the domain: parts66.com We have a PR of 2, and we have been doing an SEO linkbuilding campaign ever since it has been around. Our primary keyword that we are trying to rank for is RV PARTS We also own the domain: rvparts66.com My question is: Is there a significant benefit to switching our URL to RVPARTS66.COM? Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? If so, what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain? We are in the process of a complete site overhaul which will launch in a couple weeks, so if there is ever a time to switch domains, the time is now. Thanks! jc
Technical SEO | | steve-2886180