Duplicate content is a huge problem for many eCommerce sites, for the following examples we’ll be looking at Magento because that is what we specialize in here at InteractOne. After you’ve done all the basic SEO on your site the rest of the issues relating to duplicate content and/or nearly similar content for products that you’re selling have to be a top priority.Moving on to these advanced SEO tips to solve these issues.Here’s a list of URLs with exactly the same content that you’d find in Magento:
Along with these pages, you’ll find pages like product reviews, with almost the exact same content. Categories are another problem you’ll run into; you get a ton of duplicate content with layered navigation and option sorting. What does all of this mean? Worst case scenario Product “A” is also on 4 other pages.
Ideally you want to get rid of all those duplicate content pools; however you want them to be spidered but not indexed.
You’ll also need to fix the sorting options and layered navigation for categories.
In order to do this you’ll need to add Noindex, follow for non-content pages What this does, is keep the search engines from actually indexing these pages all of the links will still be followed.
The next step to optimizing your eCommerce site is to nofollow all unnecessary links, those links are your login page, checkout, whishlist, and all other non content pages. Other pages you need to include in this list are RSS feeds, layered navigation, add to whishlist, and add to compare types of pages.
The third item on the advanced list is Canonical URLs, these help search engines understand the duplicate content of your pages and suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page.
The last item is XML site maps, XML sitemaps are a way to let search engines know where your content is. It’s not going to get you rank; however it might get you indexed faster.
You can put this line of code in your robots file: Sitemap:http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to point search engines to your sitemap.
Of course you’ll have to remember to generate a new sitemap as your products change.
As always if you need help optimizing your eCommerce site feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
Over the years we’ve run across some things that would flat out blow the average mind and make you shake your head in disbelief.
Like many have said in the past, it’s the version you create that you like the least, put the least amount of time in, that actually out performs what you thought was your masterpiece.
Don’t take anything I say here as a standard because I can assure you that your market will respond differently. The only way you’ll discover what works best is by split testing landing pages you create against each other.
We manage an older packaging supply site that has a 10 step checkout process that in my opinion should cost them orders, however just the opposite occurs.
For people that enter the funnel 28.31% of them convert to a sale.
A few years back I personally worked on a site that did automotive classifieds – let’s face it there’s only 2 paths you can take on a site like that – you’re looking to sell a car or buy one.
The home page handled this, but it gave visitors entirely too many ways to accomplish this simple task. It did well, but not nearly as well as a test where we sent all of the non-cookied visits to a page that only gave you two options and each of those lead to a form to collect at least name email and phone number.
That test more than doubled lead volume. Basically it was a similar to your typical paid type dating site where you have to opt in to go any further in the process.
While it may have turned away some visitors, it took total leads from 8,000 to more than 20,000 a month.
Since their money was made in a call center you can see this could have been a very profitable model.
It’s another great example; if we weren’t testing this out on a small segment of traffic initially we would have never discovered it.
These are just a couple of odd examples of A/B tests and why you should always be testing everything you do online and off.
If you’re looking for assistance with your testing or online marketing contact us today to take your website to the next level.
It is possible to track across multiple domains with analytics, for instance let’s say you have your main site (mainsite.com) and your shopping cart, reservation widget or countless other scenarios (othersite.com).
You can feasibly track everything that goes on within these two domains under one profile so that you can get all the attribution tied into one place.
To get started you will need to have the ability to access both sites or have someone that has access that can install code for you.
First thing first, sign into your Google Analytics account go to the admin tab then the tracking info tab under that, you should see something similar to this:
You will want to select multiple top-level domains from the radio buttons and then copy the code and put it your text editor. This is where you tweak it to fit your multiple domain website.
You’ll notice is there’s a couple of new items in the code:
_setDomainName
_setAllowLinker
Now add to the code, here’s the first trick to remember the domain you set refers to what site it’s actually going on. For instance the code that goes on your mainsite.com is set to “mainsite.com” and when you put the code on the other site you change that to reflect the root so it will be “othersite.com”
Here’s what that looks like: var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'mainsite.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/dynamic funnel tracking']);
There’s a few more steps, however before we get to those let’s talk for a minute about tracking dynamic pages like some shopping carts or lead generation funnels.
In the case of dynamically produced pages you would put something after the back slash to ID that page.
You can build an actual URL like /step_one.html or you can build it to simply be something like this /step1.
It makes no difference whatsoever just name it what you want and write it down so you can build a goal funnel with this later on.
Now for the second component of this set up you will need to link back and forth from the sites, that could be with an add to cart button a link or even a form.
When using a form you need use this piece of code inserted into the form:
When you’re linking to the othersite.com you need to use a different piece of code and looks like this:
<a href=”http://othersite.com/intro.html” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_link’, ‘http://othersite.com’]); return false;”>Add To Cart</a>
Realize that if you’re on the othersite.com linking back to your mainsite.com you need to use something similar to the one above, however it has to have the right link in it and it will look like this:
Now that we’ve gotten through all the tags and what goes where we need to build another profile that will track all of your domains together, this way you will always have baseline historical data for your domains that you can refer to when setting up filters in your new profile.
Here are the steps to accomplish this:
From the account home page of your analytics account select the account under which you want to add the profile.
Click the Admin tab in the upper right hand corner of the page below the “my account’ settings.
Then click on the desired profile
Click on the tab that says filters and new filter and then set up your filter to look like the image below.
There you have it check back later for your data if you run into issues feel free to post your questions below.
Custom reporting is one of my all time favorite tools with in the analytics package and I use it for all kinds of different reports.
Since I’m more of an AdWords junkie and I’m a huge believer in ROI and then being able to point to what is and what isn’t working I use this report below.
This is how it’s built if you just want to build it by hand. If you’re not wildly familiar with custom reports you might want to use my shared URL and then start learning how they work and tweaking them for your needs.
Just copy and paste this into a browser and if you’re signed into analytics it will ask for a profile or populate into your account automatically.
This is what your output will look like if you run it like my example:
All the pertinent information has been deleted to protect the innocent, but you can see from this that you would get all of your basic AdWords data plus an ecommerce conversion rate and ROI.
The graph can be altered to display several different metrics or metrics as they compare to each other.
The other thing I like to do is run the dates to compare to the previous time period and compare so you can show people where it’s been and where you’re going.
Under the campaigns within the list you can click on the campaign and it will show your ad groups and of course when you click on ad groups they will show your keywords with all the same data off to the right.
If you’re not someone who uses custom reports this is a great start, don’t be afraid to save one and tweak it to see different things after all it’s the only way you’ll get comfortable with what data can be found here and how to get it in a moment’s notice.
Everyone wants to lower their cost-per-click while raising click-through rate. By implementing these fixes to the 10 most common AdWords mistakes, you will position your campaigns to have a positive impact on your ROI. Here is an overview of common AdWords blunders we typically see when taking on a new account. First, we’ll peer into some campaign settings:
1. You should never mix search with the display.
Keep your mobile searches separate from your desktop/laptop searches.
3. Separate your mobile and tablets. (see above)
4. Google Search Network versus Google Partner sites – together or separate? I tend not to separate them at first, but since performance is easy to monitor and segregate, you need to monitor closely in case your partner efforts fall off.
5. Locations and Languages. As a rule, I will always separate Canada from the USA. At the very least, don’t assume that an ad should perform equally well in the US and Canada. Try a less forceful approach with our friends to the north.
6. Take the time to add site links. It will assist your click-through rate in a positive manner.
7. Set your clicks to manual bidding to start.
8. Ad rotation is a biggie. First and foremost – run multiple ads and test constantly. So make sure you set your ads to rotate evenly. Now as we dig into the campaign a bit here’s the biggest pitfall you can avoid – it’s number nine on our list.
9. Too many keywords per ad group – I usually run one keyword per group and max out at four. Keep your ad groups slim and relevant to your ads – you’ll get a better click-through rate which will result in a better quality score … which lowers your cost-per-click!
10. If you’re not running negative keywords you’re wasting money.
Looking for someone to manage your campaign? Our Google Certified AdWords Consultants can provide you with any additional details as well as a proposal. Just fill out the form below.
Duplicate content is a huge problem for many eCommerce sites, for the following examples we’ll be looking at Magento because that is what we specialize in here at InteractOne. After you’ve done all the basic SEO on your site the rest of the issues relating to duplicate content and/or nearly similar content for products that you’re selling have to be a top priority.Moving on to these advanced SEO tips to solve these issues.Here’s a list of URLs with exactly the same content that you’d find in Magento:
