At the popular SXSW conference this past March, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced that Google will be soon going after bad merchants with a new algorithm targeted at lowering their rankings in Google.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land first covered this, quoting Matt’s statement during his presentation.
Matt said:
We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.
Excerpts above from http://www.seroundtable.com/google-merchant-algorithm-16477.html
This is probably going to happen 3rd or 4rd quarter, so START NOW!
Don’t be an accidental bad merchant.
Things you can do to help prevent from getting caught in the crossfire:
- DON’T USE STOCK PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS!! Re-write them, or at least convert them to bullet points. Customers shop by skimming, you do it, why do you assume that everyone that comes to your store behaves differently, trust me, they don’t.
- Create interesting content. You are an expert, usually, in your field, make videos/tutorials/post about stuff thats interesting to customers.
- Setup an account on google places (so you show up in local search, 97% of consumers search for local businesses online) http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter We offer a Google Places setup for $199
- Get other sites to link to you (reputable ones!! Link Directories don’t count),
- Build relationships with the bloggers in your niche
- Create ways for people to share your product pages and home page – facebook/twitter/pinterest
- Maybe a sharable monthly sale/promotion/giveaway?
- Create reasons for customers to be repeat/return customers (5% off on your second purchase, free shipping on their second order.)
- ProStores has some really great promotional tools, just don’t give away the store. Keep it small and reasonable.
- link appropriate accessories to products that would benefit from them. like a particular line of cookeware as related items with your nice stoves and vice versa, but make it tasteful, just a few, not EVERY single one in your store.
- be active in your blogging, at least one new, substantive article every 2-3 days with a non-cheezy link back to a page in your store. Make it relevant!
- use social media, like twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.
- if the writing bug bites you then use tools like Bufferapp.com to spread those extra posts over several days and maintain a consistent publishing timeline.
- start using Rich Snippets – http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
You could consider some of our seo services too. 🙂 We offer a Free No-Obligation SEO Review for instance.
- Add the default facebook and twitter buttons to your store.
- Add Google +1 Button to your store.
- Get on Pinterest if you have photogenic items – we even have a ProStores Pinterest Plugin for it
- Make sure you have good breadcrumb navigation
- Make sure your pages load fast. Optimize your product images, file size shouldn’t be much bigger than 30-50k. You can do that and keep them around 600-800px on the longest side still.
Questions? Concerns, call us 810-824-7639 or Contact Us