How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?

[timsilver]

I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building.

We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer.

I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content?

With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it?

Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.

[donford]

Hi Timothy,

Short answer is content.

Easy to say hard to complete. Here are some strategy's I found helpful in the past.

Customer Reviews (moderated):  these provide additional details that customers appreciate reading before making a buying decision. It also adds long-tail keywords that you may have not thought of along with lots of unique content.

Product Schema / microdata: this gives search engines and shopping listing sites a workable schema to list your products on sources you may not have been aware of.

Research and Self Review: This is one way Amazon gets ahead of its competition to illicit customer reviews. They actually send their top reviewers free products to generate unique review content. (Amazon Vine). Most companies probably can't afford to do this, so is why I recommend self reviews. If you're not a strong writer possibly hire a copy writer to proof-read.

Customer Images (Moderated): Adding customer generated images is an easy way to get additional unique photos and alt text.

Some thoughts, hope it helps,

Don

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

With our blog we don't use it as a product focus - more industry news focus, general category focus, relevant content - since changing to this strategy the conversion rate has improved.

So might be worth doing some less product specific articles and more generic articles - this is also good for long tail SEO keywords.

I don't know what resources you have available, and I am not going to say do infographics as this is wrong (too many people churning out infographics when they are not needed), but if you do have some design resources, either make your articles a bit more unique with images, illustrations - but if you do have some good information that works well as an infographic - then create one. These are usually very good for getting links. Don't just create these for the sake of it though.

But as Don said, more relevant content. Other idea's

How to guides

Unboxing articles / videos

Latest news articles

Explanation articles - help your customers to understand the products you sell, this will lead to more conversions as they can see the benefits.

Hope this is useful

Andy

[timsilver]

Thanks Don,

They are all great points and we do already carry service reviews for the site, but not on products so this certainly something that I am keen to look in to further. We currently just have product page ratings.

One thing though that I am still unsure of and could do with some assistance with is an idea of what kind of strategy should be employed in terms of content. Is it a good idea to put a lot of resources in to the blog content, whilst this does get a lot of traffic, if does not convert particularly well in relation to products. But is it good for the domain as a whole? What kind of effect would be achievable on the domain as a whole by allocating resources in this manner?

Thanks again,

Tim

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi Tim

How are you measuring the success of the blog, simply using Analytics last click model - if this is the case it won't work, but I am currently writing something on how to set up Analytics to track once a user has visited the blog, then how do they go on to convert, which channels do they come from.

Once you start looking at this, you might actually realise the blog does better than you think. I am almost complete and should have it done by Monday to share with you if you are interested.

Thanks

Andy

[timsilver]

Great answer Andy, had already posted my previous response to Don.

We do have design resources in house so this is not an issue, I guess that in the past we have been pretty tied up in grasping at straws to find a post that can relate in some way to a new product. I get the whole concept of content being king but I do also get that there is the notion that in the past we have maybe tried too had to draw parallels between an article and a product in the thin hope of that article bringing in convertable traffic.

Again, a really helpful post that I will certainly look to expand upon further and will be more than happy to feedback any results.

As for the tracking, thats exactly how we do track the conversions from the blog so yes please, would really appreciate any guidance in being able to track customers from the blog better.

Thanks,

Tim