Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?

[Inevo]

Hi !

In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages.

For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category)

Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _

Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides?

Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is.

Looking forward to your answers

 

[EGOL]

** Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?**

Bad?  No way.  It is the smartest thing that you can do.

I spend a lot of my time writing content that explains how to use, repair and select products.  These are posted on my site and they always have links or standard-size banner ads pointing to the page in our on-site store where the item can be purchased.

If you have an article on how to repair a product, and offer links to where the tools, replacement parts and supplies can be purchased then that is a genuine benefit to the reader.  It is actually useful content.   And, the reader will feel good about buying these things from you because they just learned something from reading your article.  And, because you demonstrated your expertise the buyer should be comfortable buying your recommendations rather than going to another site, searching, and questioning... "is this what I really need?".

I am spending a lot of time this month and spent a lot of time last month writing content for the purpose of driving sales.

[ChrisAshton]

If by "content pages" you mean blog posts on your site, I'd suggest not doing this at all. It's not great for your SEO but it won't directly hurt your rankings.

What EGOL said is correct in that providing helpful links in your articles is an excellent idea and something you should definitely be doing, but there's a very big difference between helpful links and self-promotion. Blog posts are meant to be informative and that's why the good ones get shared but dropping a sales pitch in there changes the tone from "here is helpful information you're looking for, share it around" to "here's my product, you should buy it". A link to your products is usually going to feel like a sales pitch, no matter what anchor text you use.

To put yourself in your readers' shoes, imagine if I started dropping links to my product pages here - suddenly my entire comment would feel pretty shady, right?

Linking to your other posts and external sources is a great idea but in most instances, linking to your own products is reason enough for me to stop reading. Of course, there are exceptions to this - the question to ask if whether or not that link is genuinely helpful.

[EGOL]

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews.

The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site.

The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.