Retailer Ranking Hacks
Welcome back Rankers! This week I’m off to the Gold Coast to Retail Global. If you are coming, please come and check out our booth where we will give you a free audit on your site and tell you what’s wrong with it. We’re also doing AdWords audits and SEO audits this year so come and say hi.
I want to talk to you about a couple of retail things and a couple of things that we’re finding with retailers that are helping a lot. The first one is stars. Getting your stars found in search will help click-through rate in search. Now to give you an idea, you can see these stats that we implemented a few weeks ago and we are seeing an almost 24% increase in revenue from doing that. So it’s worth doing.
Now this client already had a bunch of number ones. You can see from this image that they have many number ones and they are all from the last week or so. You can see that there is a big uptick in click-through rates in search results. That is significant. There are a few where we haven’t seen an uptick, but there are a few good upticks from most of these, and they are all number one already.
Star Power
So there is a bunch of things that you can do to make that happen and it will depend on your site. One of the areas that you can go into is in Search Console. Head into ‘Structured Data’ and you will be able to see which pages that are already on your site have structured data. That’s how the stars are usually displayed. That’s the data Google uses to grab that from your code and display in the search results. Now for the client that I’ve just shown you, they have a particular plugin that does it for their CMS. It’s an eCommerce CMS, not a standard one. Theirs takes an average of product reviews. So for every product, if you are a customer and you’ve bought that product, you can log in and leave a review. So on their site, it works that way. Now I have seen it gamed, and I would advise against it. I’ve seen it gamed sometimes where even if someone doesn’t even buy a product, even if they just get a page view on the product, the developer has made it so that it automatically generates a vote for the product. Don’t do that! It will only end in tears.
If you do have a star product rating on your site though, you can get that showing into search results and you do it using structured data. It’s going to depend on what site you’re on and what the CMS uses to achieve those star ratings. But do it. It’s worth it.
Product Priorities
The other thing was to get your important content as high on the page as possible. We’re finding that a lot of retailers, if someone does a search for a product but they don’t get to see it straight away because there’s all this guff above talking about specials and sales, sliders, and all sorts of stuff. What we’re finding is that if you have content at the top of your page, and you’re a retailer, so the product page, you’re better off placing the content underneath the product. That’s because people want to get to the product first and we’ve found that even just removing paragraphs of content off pages actually ranks the retail page higher. So it’s worth looking at that.
This week we also had a featured answer within ten minutes. This screams that you have to work on your brand. This particular blogger’s site was for a very competitive key phrase, like ultra-competitive. They were ranking around number nine for that phrase, but the page wasn’t very suitable for the phrase they were ranking for. They had such huge authority that they were ranking there anyway. And that’s the thing with bloggers who are building their brand. They are not building backlinks. Everybody keeps saying how they created a great content site but nothing happened. Well did you build your brand? Did you build an audience? Were you out there playing in social and all these other places that help you build your brand?
Build your brand and don’t worry about building backlinks. This is exactly what’s happened with this blogger. This blogger (there’s actually two of them) has hundreds of thousands of fans in Facebook, Pinterest, and all over the place. They don’t have that many backlinks and we certainly didn’t put out any new backlinks. All we did was publish one page and it went to a featured answer straight away. Boom! If that doesn’t scream that you need to be working on your brand, I don’t know what does.
Incidentally, we have detected another change in featured answers, some sort of Google update is going on. If you did have a featured answer and you also had the number one spot like ProBlogger. They were number one for ‘make money blogging.’ You may remember that he was number one for quite a while and we eventually got this featured answer. So he still has the featured answer, but the number one result has dropped further down. It’s almost as if Google has tidied up by saying that if you are number one in the featured answer slot, then we really don’t need to put you in the number one organic spot as well. That’s just something to watch out for. When I first saw it I feared that if the organic ranking had gone then the featured answer would follow, but it’s fine. And we’ve seen that across a number of different sites. If you see it, don’t worry about it.
Big thanks to bookitlive this week too. Up on the Gold Coast. If you want to come and have a session with us then simply book it in using bookitlive. The link is here. One other thing. I’ve been trolling Sensis this morning. They’re the people that publish the Yellow Pages over here. They are sending out emails at the moment saying that you need to have pdfs to improve your ‘online rating,’ (not sure what that is!) and if you have FAQ’s it will help you appear higher in online searches. If you get one of those emails, I don’t know what that means. I’ve asked for clarification. If I get an answer, I’ll share it with you.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Thanks very much. I’ll see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
