SEO For eCommerce Blog Series Part Five: Blogging, Content and Links

It’s part five of this six-part SEO for ecommerce blog series! We’ve already covered:

This time, we’re taking a look at blogging, featured snippets, duplicate content, internal linking, breadcrumb trails, and link building from the point of view of SEO for ecommerce.

Blogging

As explained in the first blog post in this series, while products may be the stars of the show when it comes to ecommerce sites, that doesn’t mean we should abandon other content such as blogging. In fact, there are lots of opportunities to blog, as you could write about:

New product releases
Buying guides (this product versus that product, how to choose the right brand, version or model for you, and so on)
“How to” guides for using products
Other advice or educational content related to your industry
Industry news
Company news

When you’re blogging, think about the entire buying journey – from a user’s initial investigative, “What is…” searches when they are just starting to look, to buying guides or other content for people about to make a purchase. This way, you can meet people at all stages of the buying journey so your company is at the forefront of their minds when they are ready to convert.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are links that you may find at the top of Google’s organic search results. They aim to answer a user’s query straight away, which is why they are also known as answer boxes. If your website appears in a featured snippet, it takes up more real estate than other search results, making it more prominent. You can optimise content to make it more likely to appear in featured snippets using bullet points or numbered lists, great images, graphs or tables, particularly near the top of your page. The keyword research you do for this should look at questions people are entering into search engines, which you could use as H1 or H2 headings for your content and then answer succinctly before going into more detail.

On ecommerce sites, you could optimise a variety of different pages using featured snippets, including:

Category pages
Product listing pages
Product description pages
Landing pages
Manufacturer pages
Blog posts

Consider user intent for each search query as well as your pages, to decide where would be best to optimise for this content.

Duplicate Content

Avoiding duplicate content is an important rule for SEO, and this means avoiding having multiple pages on your own website with the same content, as well as avoiding copying content on a different site. When you sell products that lots of other stores also sell, it’s important to write your own product descriptions rather than using the copy supplied by the manufacturer. Why? Because if you’re using the manufacturer-supplied copy, not only will the manufacturer’s website also be using it, but so will several other websites who are selling the same item – and that isn’t a way to make your website stand out. So make sure you write original, unique content that describes the product well, outlines the benefits to the user (rather than focusing on features) and also aligns with your own brand.

If it’s difficult to avoid duplicate content as many products are similar, try diluting the duplicate content with more unique content for each page, such as user reviews or case studies.

It may be that you have duplicate pages on your website, for example, if various versions of faceted search pages return the same product listings. Use canonical tags for these duplicate pages.

Internal Linking

As we’ve previously discussed, category pages and product listing page introductions give you the opportunity to link to other pages on your website, such as buying guides. This internal linking tells search engines that the pages you are linking to are important, and gives them more “SEO juice”. Internal linking between your blog posts and products will also help with this, so take any opportunity you can to add links between pages on your website.

However, do think about what you want the user to do when they are on each page of your site. Adding links from your blog posts to product pages makes sense because not only does that tell Google that those product pages are important and should be ranked highly, but it also gives the user an opportunity to visit those product pages when they have finished reading the blog post and convert. It doesn’t work quite so well the other way because if you’re moving users away from product pages and towards blog posts, that’s taking them further away from converting instead of closer. However, it can still be useful, for example if a user gets to the bottom of a product listing page and hasn’t found what they are looking for. In this instance, they may benefit from being led to a buying guide, and if they subsequently make a buying decision and convert, you benefit too.

Breadcrumb Trails

Another way to improve internal linking is by using breadcrumb trails. These are links that sit at the top of a page and show the user where they are in the website, with links to pages higher up in the site hierarchy so they can easily go back if they need to. As you can imagine, this has usability benefits, but it also provides more internal linking and makes it easier for search bots to crawl your website and find more pages. Breadcrumb trails are especially important for large sites with many categories and levels of sub-category, and they work well in blogs, too.

Link Building

Our last stop in this blog post is link building – we’ve looked at internal linking for ecommerce sites and how that can benefit SEO, but another important aspect of SEO is those external links. Are other websites with high authority linking back to your website? If so, this can help improve your rankings and also increase referral traffic. Here are some ideas for link building for your ecommerce site:

Request to be listed as a supplier on manufacturer websites.
Target unlinked brand mentions. These are instances where a website has mentioned your company name but not added a link to your website, so you could request that they add it for you.
Reclaim lost links. Use an SEO tool such as Moz to find websites where you used to be linked to but no longer are, to see if it’s worth trying to get the link back.
Offer to replace broken competitor links. If a third-party website links to a page on your competitor’s site but the link is broken, approach them with a suitable similar link on your own website and suggest they use it to replace the broken link.
Create sharable infographics for social media and other websites, with a link back to yours.
Repurpose old content and syndicate it on other websites, with a link back to yours.
Review competitor links for guest article or link opportunities.
Research other guest article opportunities on websites with high domain authority.

We hope that’s given you some food for thought! Read the final instalment of this comprehensive SEO for ecommerce guide, where we’ll be tying up this series with FAQs, reviews, user-generated content, calls to action, reports, and goal setting.