Show 67 ecommerce-product

Show 6710.19.13

YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE : WHY ISN’T IT RANKING7 WAYS TO FAIL AT CONTENT MARKETING1

• Have you wondered why your nice shopping cart site’s pages aren’t ranking.

• It probably took some time to build the entire site – and you’re scratching your head about why the search engines aren’t ranking you pages at all.

• We know why : It’s about the content of those page – and we’re going to tell you how to fix it.

• ALSO : We have 7 Ways to Fail at Content Marketing – Hope you’re not doing any of them!

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EDGE OF THE WEB

• Good Afternoon / I’m Erin Sparks / Joining Me In Studio

Is Matt Roberts / Thomas Brodbeck from Site Strategics

and Doug Karr From Marketing Tech Blog

• Every Week We Bring You The Latest Internet & Mobile

Marketing Trends / And The Cutting Edge Internet

Marketing News To Use For A More Effective &

Successful Online Strategy / Why? So You Can Spend

Less Administrative Time In Your Business / Make More

Money Without Wasting Your Days Away

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EDGE OF THE WEB

• This Show Is Delivered By Site Strategics / We Are A

Local Indianapolis Web Design And Internet Marketing

Company / We Are Known Locally And Nationally For

Search Engine Optimization / Google Dominance That

Will Actually Translate To Sales – Not Just Good

Rankings / For Your Free Consultation Go To Site

Strategics Dot Com / That’s S-i-t-e-Strategics Dot Com

Or Call Us At 317-882-85 Hundred / That’s 882-85

Hundred

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• HOW YOU GET A HOLD OF US:

• www.SiteStrategics.com

• www.EdgeoftheWebRadio.com

• Simply Google “Indiana SEO”

• Twitter: @erinsparks, @douglaskarr

• Youtube: youtube/sitestrategics

• NOW / LET’S FIND OUT WHAT’S HOT OF THE PRESS IN TODAY’S WEB WORLDINTERNET MARKETING NEWS INTRO

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http://www.sitestrategics.com/

http://www.edgeofthewebradio.com/

Segment 1: News• SEARCH ENGINE WATCH : Foursquare Self-Serve Ads

Now Open to All Local Businesses / Miranda Miller

• SEARCH ENGINE LAND : Google AdWords Third-Party “Review Extensions” Start Rolling Out To All Accounts / Ginny Marvin’

• ECONSULTANCY : Engagement with mobile video is three times higher than desktop: stats / David Moth

• TWITTER : Now available: Scheduled Tweets / Christine Lee

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WE’VE GOT AN APP!

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• Listen to our podcasts

• All of our Videos• Twitter Feed• Facebook• Photos of the Show• Stats Bragging

Page

And….

• Score My Site Tool!Submit your site, and we’ll review it for you – give you some knowledge about hor the engines see you!

•HEY, WE WANTED TO EXTEND OUT AN INVITE TO JOIN UP TO OUR EDGE TALK NEWSLETTER!

•FREE NEWSLETTER – AND COVERS EVERYTHING WE’RE ABOUT TO COVER ON THE SHOW AND MUCH MORE.

•GET A LITTLE INSIDER INFORMATION:

•WE ARE DROPPING A USEFUL PRO TIP INTO EACH NEWSLETTER AS WELL. GREAT TECHNIQUES TO MAKE YOUR SITE SING!

•SIMPLY SIGNUP FOR THE NEWSLETTER ON EDGE OF THE WEB DOT COM OR SITE STRATEGICS DOT COM!

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NEWSLETTER SIGNUP

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Coming UpSo you built a great shopping experience online

But something happened – there are no visitors and Google’s not indexing your pages

Have you been penalized? Is there something that you didn’t know when you rolled out the site that would have scored you well on Google?

Well, we have some points of revelation for you, and help to give you in fixing some of the issues that came “out of the box” with your ecommerce site.

Coming up next!

Segment 2 :

ECOMMERCE PRODUCT PAGES

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INTRO

So you built a great shopping experience online

But something happened – there are no visitors and Google’s not indexing your pages

Have you been penalized? Is there something that you didn’t know when you rolled out the site that would have scored you well on Google?

Well, we have some points of revelation for you, and help to give you in fixing some of the issues that came “out of the box” with your ecommerce site.

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EDGE OF THE WEB• Thanks For Listening / I’m Erin Sparks / Joined By My

Colleague Tom Brodbeck with Site Strategics / Check Us

Out At Site Strategics Dot Com / We Are Your Local

Internet Marketing Management Company / We

Do Cost Effective Web Design / With Google – Yahoo –

Bing Search Engine Marketing Management That Not

Only Provides You Great Rankings On Searches But Also

Translates Into Actual Sales

• Come In, Have A Cup Of Coffee And Let’s Talk About

Your Online Success

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AND – NEW SERVICE FROM SITE STRATEGICS

1-877-SEO-4-WEB1-877-736-4932

We are the fast & easy way for small businesses to make Mobile AppsWe talked about how many apps are being launched daily, more apps are launched than babies being born daily! The reality is that with the adoption of the mobile devices and the “second screen” marketing, the ability to connect with consumer loyalty is stronger than ever. Building an app can connect you to your customer

It’s easy and fastWe have templates for:• Restaurants• Realtors• Lawyers• Bands• Sports• Churches• Professional Services

• Article : SEARCH ENGINE WATCH / Ken Lyons

• Content issues plague many sites on the web. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk, largely due to issues that can stem from hosting hundreds or thousands of product pages.

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#EDGETALK : ECOMMERCE PRODUCT PAGES

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• Typical issues with ecommerce product pages are:

• Duplicate content.

• Thin content.

• Too much content (i.e., too many pages).

• Left unchecked, these issues can negatively impact your site's performance in the SERPs.

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• If you run an ecommerce site and you've seen traffic flat-line, slowly erode, or fall off a cliff recently, then product page content issues may be the culprit.

• Let's take a closer look at some of the most common content woes that plague ecommerce sites, and recommendations on how to can fix them.

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• Duplicate Content

• There are typically three types of duplicate content we encounter on ecommerce sites:

• Copied versions of the manufacturer's product descriptions.

• Unique descriptions that are duplicated across multiple versions of the same product.

• Query strings generated from faceted navigation.

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• Copied product descriptions

• A large degree of ecommerce resellers copy their generic product descriptions directly from the manufacturer's website. This is a big no-no. In the age of Panda, publishing copied or duplicated content across your site will weigh your site down in the SERPs like a battleship anchor.

• How to fix it

• The solution here is to author original product descriptions for every product on your site. If budget is an issue, prioritize and get fresh content written for your highest margin product pages first and work backwards.

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• Unique yet duplicated product descriptions

• With many ecommerce sites, site owners have authored original product descriptions, which is fantastic. Where they run into trouble is they sell multiple versions of the same product (different sizes or colors or materials, etc), and each product version has a different page/URL with the same boilerplate description.

• Now even though this content is technically unique to your site (it's not copied from somewhere else), it's only unique to a single page. Every other page it lives on is considered duplicated content.

• How to fix it

• The solution here is to concentrate multiple product version pages to a single page, with all the different product options listed down the page. Or you can position them as a list in a drop down menu.

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• Once you combine all pages to a single page, 301 redirect the other URLs to that single page, in the event they've attracted links and/or accrued link equity. The redirects will also help Google sort out the true version of your product page, and can help with any potential crawl budget issues.

• Depending on the ecommerce platform you're using, concentrating multiple versions of a product page to a single URL can be difficult or impossible. If that's the case, think about moving to a SEO-friendly platform, like Magento or Shopify.

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http://www.magentocommerce.com/

http://www.shopify.com/

• Faceted navigation issues

• Many ecommerce sites host category pages with a range of filters to help users easily navigate their site and drill down to specific products, like this Weber Grill page on Home Depot.

• A faceted navigation menu like the one above can create dozens if not hundreds of query strings that are appended to the URL, thereby creating duplicate versions of the same page. Faceted navigation can be a fantastic UX feature for consumers, but can problematic for SEO.

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• How to fix it

• There are a few ways to prevent searches engines from indexing duplicate content from faceted navigation:

• Block faceted pages via Robots.txt file.

• Parameter handling via Webmaster Tools.

• Add self-referential canonical tags (rel="canonical") Note: this may help Google distinguish original from duplicate content, but it won't address crawl budget issues

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IF YOU’RE TUNING IN!

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If you just tuned in:You’re Listing to Edge of the Web RadioWe’re talking about a major changes that you can make to your ecommerce site to improve the value in Google’s eyes!

• Thin Content

• Even if a site has 100 percent unique product descriptions, they can often be on the thin side (i.e., a few bullets of text). Now, product pages with light content can still rank well where domain strength helps supersede potential thin content issues.

• But most sites don't have the backlink profiles of Amazon or Zappos, and I like to think in terms of risk/reward. Thickening up descriptions makes sense because:

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• It can reduce any risk that thin content issues might negatively impact SERP visibility

• It adds more content for engines to crawl, which means more opportunities for your page to rank for a wider basket of search queries.

• It freshens up your page, and freshening up your content can definitely pay dividends with Google.

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• How to fix it

• Some of the ways you can address thin content on your ecommerce product pages include:

• Enable (and solicit) user reviews and feedback. User-generated content is free and helps thicken up your content with naturally-written text (not "SEO" content). This additional content can help improve potential relevancy scoring, time on page, user engagement levels, and can help the product page rank for a broader basket of search queries. Also, user reviews offer social proof and can improve conversion rates as well.

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• In the previous example, I spoke about condensing multiple versions of the same product to a single page. Doing this would also help thicken up that pages since you'd list all the different dimensions, size variations, colors available to consumers.

• Write some additional, original content. You can hire a writer to help thicken up these pages with additional features and benefits, or you can do it yourself. Again, given it could be very costly to thicken up every product page on the site, you can prioritize your highest margin products first.

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• Pulling in mashups of links/text of similar products, product accessories, special offers and recently viewed items is another way to add more content to a page, and a tactic many larger ecommerce sites use like Amazon.com.

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• Too Much Content

• Saying that a site has "too much content" may sound contradictory to the issue of having content that's too thin. But when I say an ecommerce site may have too much content, I'm really talking about two distinct issues:

• Too many product pages.

• Improper handling of paginated product pages.

• And specifically how having too many pages of low value content can cause PageRank and crawl budget problems.

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• Too many product pages

• This is really an addendum to the duplicate content issues posed by faceted navigation or hosting multiple versions of the same product on different pages.

• Aside from low value content concerns, hosting a mass of duplicated product pages dilutes your site's PageRank or link equity, which weakens its overall ranking power of your important content.

• The other issue pertains to your site's "crawl budget" (i.e. how deep/how many pages Googlebot crawls each time it visits your website). If a large percentage of your site if comprised of duplicate or low value content, you're wasting your budget on junk content and potentially keeping quality pages from getting indexed.

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• Improper handling of paginated product pages

• Another concern of hosting "too many pages" is not handling pagination correctly. Often times, ecommerce sites can have product categories containing hundreds or thousands of products that span multiple pages

• Like duplicate product pages, excessive paginated results rob link equity from important pages and can hurt your crawl budget.

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• How to fix

• Some of the ways to address equity dilution or crawl budget issues that can stem from too many product pages include:

• Rel=next, rel=previous: This markup tells Google to treat ecommerce product listings spanning multiple pages in a logical sequence, thus consolidating link equity (rather than diluting it) with all pages in the series.

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en




• Canonicalization: It's effective for consolidating link properties (thus solving equity dilution), but it won't solve potential crawl budget issues, since Googlebot will still crawl all your dupe content.

• "Noindex, follow": If your goal is to optimize crawl budget and keep duplicates or pagination out of the index, use brute force and block Googlebot via robots "noindex, follow" meta directive.

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What’s Coming Up

• COMING UP /

• COMING UP / THINK OF HIM AS WHAT THE “E” NETWORK DOES FOR HOLLYWOOD NEWS / WE HAVE YOUR NATIONAL INTERNET TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGY INFORMANT JOINING US IN STUDIO FOR THE SEGMENT OUR ENTIRE LISTENING AUDIENCE CANNOT WAIT TO EXPERIENCE EVERY WEEK / MARKETING TECH BLOG WITH DOUG KARR IS RIGHT AFTER THIS

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Segment 3 : Marketing TechBlog

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• YOU’RE LISTENING TO EDGE OF THE WEB RADIO

• WE’RE TALKING ABOUT INTERNET MARKETING AND INTERNET CONTENT TRENDS OF 2013 YOU WILL HEAR NO WHERE ELSE

• WE’RE PRESENTED BY SITE STRATEGICS

• YOUR LOCAL FACE TO FACE WEB DESIGN AND INTERNET MARKETING COMPANY – CALL US AT 1-877-SEO-4-WEB

• WE’RE ONLINE AT S-I-T-E STRATEGICS DOT COM. You can catch all the information from the Show at EDGE OF THE RADIO DOT COM. We’ve got videos and audio of everything we do on the show and more.

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#EDGETALK#

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WE NOW BRING YOU THE MAN BEHIND THE LATEST INTERNET NEWS AND ONLINE TOOLS

Douglas Karr from MARKETING TECH BLOG INTRO

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If you just tuned in:You’re Listing to Edge of the Web RadioWe’re talking to Doug Karr of Marketing Tech BLog

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Thanks to Doug from Marketing Tech Blog – always bringing a unique perspective on today’s endless internet landscape,

I mean – man, you bring us up to date and help us focus in on the latest trends, Doug, tell the people how to check out what you do and how to follow you.

BreakBack: Segment 4

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COMING UP / ALRIGHT –

There’s a lot to be done inside of Content Marketing – getting the word out about your organization and inbound value.

Want to know what NOT to do in Content Marketing?

We have a great list of major FAILS in Content Marketing

Stay tuned to the Edge!

Segment 4 :

7 CONTENT MARKETING FAILS

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INTRO

• There’s a lot to be done inside of Content Marketing – getting the word out about your organization and inbound value.

• Want to know what NOT to do in Content Marketing?

• We have a great list of major FAILS in Content Marketing

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THANKS FOR LISTENING / I’M ERIN SPARKS / JOINED BY THOMAS

BRODBECK / THIS SHOW IS PRESENTED BY SITE STRATEGICS /

CHECK US OUT AT SITE STRATEGICS DOT COM / WE ARE YOUR

LOCAL INTERNET MARKETING MANAGEMENT COMPANY / WE DO

COST EFFECTIVE WEB DESIGN / WITH GOOGLE – YAHOO –

BING / SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING MANAGEMENT THAT

NOT ONLY PROVIDES YOU GREAT RANKINGS ON SEARCHES BUT

ALSO TRANSLATES INTO SALES

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REJOIN

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•Hey, we wanted to extend out an invite to join up to our Edge Talk Newsletter!

•Free newsletter – and covers everything we’re ABOUT to cover on the show and much more.

•Get a little insider information:

•We are dropping a useful PRO TIP into each Newsletter as well. Great techniques to make your site sing!

•Simply signup for the Newsletter on Edge of the Web dot Com or Site Strategics dot com!

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NEWSLETTER SIGNUP

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WE’VE GOT AN APP!

1-877-SEO-4-WEB1-877-736-4932

• Listen to our podcasts

• All of our Videos• Twitter Feed• Facebook• Photos of the Show• Stats Bragging

Page

And….

• Score My Site Tool!Submit your site, and we’ll review it for you – give you some knowledge about hor the engines see you!

46

AND – NEW SERVICE FROM SITE STRATEGICS

1-877-SEO-4-WEB1-877-736-4932

We are the fast & easy way for small businesses to make Mobile AppsWe talked about how many apps are being launched daily, more apps are launched than babies being born daily! The reality is that with the adoption of the mobile devices and the “second screen” marketing, the ability to connect with consumer loyalty is stronger than ever. Building an app can connect you to your customer

It’s easy and fastWe have templates for:• Restaurants• Realtors• Lawyers• Bands• Sports• Churches• Professional Services

REWIND

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We talked about how to improve your Ecommerce Product Pages for Search

1. Duplicate Content

2. Thin Content

3. Too Much Content

ARTICLE: SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL : Tommy Landry

• The marketing trend of the year is content marketing, so you’ve probably been busting your hump to push out blog posts and other content as fast as possible.

• Now you have an inventory of content, but for some reason it just won’t take off.

• You aren’t alone, so don’t beat yourself up. Instead, start with an objective review of what content working and what is not. But before you audit your own activities, make sure you know what to look for.

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There are many ways to succeed or fail at content marketing. Let’s look at some of the most common ways to fail at content marketing and how you should re-evaluate your approach.

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Overuse of Buzz Words

Many corporate types take pride in using popular marketing buzz words. While that might be fine for in-house meetings, unless you are targeting people just like you it is important to limit marketing buzz words.

Having marketed to a variety of audiences, I found that most of them are turned off by buzz speak. It is especially crucial to avoid them if you target IT pros, engineers, or other technical audiences, lest you open yourself up to mockery.

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What do I mean by marketing buzz words? Here are six of the biggest offenders:

• Leverage (used as a verb)• Game Changer• Facilitate• Synergy• Think Outside the Box• Incentivise

Surely you’ve heard of Buzzword Bingo (a.k.a. BS Bingo). There’s a darn good reason that game exists – non-marketers can’t stand these words.

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• Being a Know-it-All

• If there’s one thing that people hate, it’s a know it all. This isn’t a condemnation of being smart or an expert in your field. If you are knowledgeable in a particular subject, most of readers are completely open to your thoughts on the topic.

• There is a difference between being smart and being haughty. You can easily embrace or alienate readers with the wrong tone or word selection.

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• It amazes me to read blog posts that stake a claim to a point (good), and turn around to say “I dare you to challenge me on it” (not good).

• Instead, make your point but stay open to other opinions and information. No one knows everything there is to know about any individual topic.

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• Writing posts aimed at striking down fallacies, but always including a disclaimer that “if you know something I do not, I’m all ears”. I always respect a writer who is willing to reconsider their stance if presented with a good counterargument. It shows that they are more interested in getting it right than being right.

• Feel free to educate your readers, but avoid insulting them. That should be common sense.

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• Making Big Claims Without Proof

• One of the great things about content creation is that you get to soapbox. Opinions are great, but as the old adage goes, everybody has one. Readers want more proof than one person’s gut instinct.

• Proof can come in different formats. Of course, there is always good old fashioned data. If you can link to market research or other sources with real data supporting your opinion, you build credibility. No data available? Share your own experiences learned through trial and error.

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• Writing “Me Too” Content

• A colleague of mine struggles to come up with good blog topics. This is a common problem, as evidenced by a long list of posts on the topic.

• We have gone around and around about what he should do. He decided to adopt a “me too” approach. He prefers to look at what others are writing about and use the same topics.

• While this is a reasonable way to generate ideas, I caution him not to steal and repackage the ideas. There’s nothing worse than getting a pingback, only to find a post paraphrasing the original content.

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• Piggyback the topic, but make it your own. Say something unique, or at least provide a new perspective. Consider taking the opposite position to the original. Think point / counterpoint here, and link back to the original to share the credit.

• No matter what you do, make it original. There’s too much content out there to rehash good ideas, unless your goal is to be remarkably unremarkable.

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If you just tuned in:You’re Listing to Edge of the Web RadioWe’re talking about 7 CONTENT MARKETING FAILS

• Failure To Provide A Coherent Thought

• Did you ever read a post or article, only to find that you have a clue what point they were trying to make? Everyone is short on time. If you want them to read and share your content with their social networks, always make at least one impactful point.

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• Always Writing About The Same Thing

• Between the growing impact of social factors on ranking and Google’s adoption of Authorship, it has become important to establish individual expertise. The more you write about, discuss, and share content on your key topics, the more Google will associate you with those topics.

• While it makes sense to build that foundation of expertise, be careful not to get myopic. My colleague Jon Loomer is a great example of someone who does this well. Jon focuses 100% on Facebook strategy and marketing. This is a narrow topic, but he keeps his content fresh and unique

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• Lacking Personality

• If you want your content to be engaging and interesting, don’t be afraid to inject your own personality into it. Many companies fall into the trap of writing in corporate speak or avoiding personality altogether. That’s a great way to get ignored.

• I get it. Branding guidelines, style guides, direction on what voice to use, and similar tools are a fact of life for medium-to-large businesses. Standards matter with large, geographically distributed teams.

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• Summary – 7 Content Marketing Fails

• There you have it – 7 of the biggest mistakes you can make in content marketing. If you find yourself caught up in any of these habits, take the time to refocus now.

• What other things have you seen that might fit on this list? Feel free to share in the comments. I’d love to hear every possible angle on this topic firsthand. Thanks for reading.

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#EXIT#

OUTRO MUSIC BED CLOSE TEXT

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THANKS FOR LISTENING TO EDGE OF THE WEB RADIO / A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO MY COLLEAGUE AT SITE STRATEGICS – THOMAS BRODBECK / AND DOUG KARR/MARTY THOMPSON FROM MARKETING TECH BLOG / WE WISH YOU A GREAT WEEKEND AND MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT OUR MUST SEE VIDEOS AND MUCH MORE INSIDER INFO AT EDGE OF THE WEB RADIO DOT COM / THAT’S EDGE OF THE WEB RADIO DOT COM / WE WILL TALK TO YOU NEXT WEEK

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Technology

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