Should your Ecommerce Create and Optimize Informational Content for SEO?

Should your ecommerce or online store start investing further in informational content, whether guides or resources that will help you to keep or improve further your organic search visibility for those terms or queries that Google is showcasing much more and giving more visibility to informational content rather than transactional or commercially oriented one? This is a question that I'll be answering While going through certain type of features and functionalities of SEO tools that will allow you to answer them by a very straightforward analysis. And if you want me to ask questions that I'll be answering through Crawling Mondays videos or through SEO FOMO, you can subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter and click on the link to subscribers there to ask me anything. So let's go and take a look at how you can answer this question in a way that it is actually meaningful for you to start investing in informational resources. So we have seen that in the last few years, Google has started to give much more visibility to informational content, whether guides, reviews, user-generated content, rather than to those commercially focused content, such as PDPs, PLPs, that are generally used by retailers to rank for these terms. This is happening because Google sees that this more informational-focused content is able to provide a better experience and connect better with the user search needs at that stage of the journey. So should retailers start to also targeting these topics with informational resources? It's important to validate for which product lines or for which topics it is more meaningful to do so, because at the end of the day, you might have some resources, but not unlimited resources, right? So to help to answer this question, the first step that I like to take is to go and compare the SERPs, the before and after. For those very important queries for my online stores that I have identified that I have lost rankings and traffic, there are many tools that provide the SERP comparison functionality like Sistrix or Ahrefs too. So I like to compare before I started seeing the negative shifts and today, and I analyze and validate which were the players ranking before and which are ranking now. Do we see now guides, reviews, informational resources ranking further for these SERPs, right? We can see that in these 2 cases, there have been shifts, but actually we can see how a YouTube video was ranking here at the top and not being showcased anymore. It can be very time-consuming to go through all of your top different types of queries that you are targeting in this way. So recommend to do this in bulk by grouping your queries per topic or per type. So for example, for your different product lines, if you sell basketball-related goods, products, or hoodies, for example, I like to group each one of my product types and to check which are the top websites with the highest market share for this group of queries for each one of them. So if you're offering basketball-related products, you can go and take a look at which are the top websites with highest ranking keywords that you want to rank for. And we see here quite a few online stores ranking well first, and then you see YouTube, and then you might want to take a look at, oh, which are these pages, which are these videos about? Are they targeting topics and queries that are actually meaningful for you? And you might want to also do this both from a mobile and desktop perspective and see what changes there. We can see that in this particular case, when I change and take a look at which are the top websites ranking for this group of basketball-related queries on mobile, I see Reddit in the 4th position that has increased and Is a new player has been added in the last few months for this group of queries. And then I take a look at which are the top pages attracting rankings for more keywords for this group of terms. And if these are topics or content that actually makes sense for you to cover from an editorial standpoint as an expert in this particular area, if you're selling these goods, especially if you also get reviews, testimonials, Q&As from your users too. My recommendation is to do this through the different topics. The top players can change a lot depending on the topic. Maybe you're an online store or retailer that offers quite a few product lines. And in this case, we can see that for bike, for example, the top players change a lot. The first player is Amazon. The second is Reddit. Third is Walmart and so on. So again, we can take a look which are those pages attracting more and ranking for more keywords. And start seeing their opportunities characteristic of this type of topics. Now that we know which are those players that have the highest market share for the keywords that I want to rank, we can select those top players that we have seen that are ranking with informational content to analyze further. So here's an example. We can see that REI is ranking a lot with their category pages, but they have some Here, the next 100 that are also under the learn path because they also invest in guides. So let's please validate further and not necessarily because it's a website that is also a retail might not mean that they are already leveraging informational content to rank well. So once that we have identified those players that have informational resources that they're leveraging to rank, we want to analyze further. Let's imagine that we're Amazon here and we are seeing that Reddit is ranking for many of this group of terms that I am tracking, and I want to take a look at how they are ranking for which particular terms they are ranking me and with which content, right? So we can do this with the functionality here that Semrush provides with the Keyword Gap tool. I will here select, give me those keywords for which my competitors are ranking in the top 10. And here I include the term of the product that I want to assess, right? In this case, basketball. All basketball goods, and I want to take a look at, okay, which are those terms for which in this case Reddit is outranking me? I want to take a look at, for example, basketball positions. In some cases, these are terms that are not necessarily relevant for me to rank for, but take a look, pink basketball shoes, the player that we want to validate how are they ranking and if they are ranking with informational content and if it will be meaningful for me to do the same, right? Here's another example of how we can do this. With some of the players that we might be seeing are getting a lot of market share for the same topics that we're targeting. So in this case, again, let's imagine that we're Amazon and we want to take a look at the New York Times because we can see that they're ranking for many of the same terms that we want to rank for related to bike or biking. So again, I will add my website here, my retail website, and the more information player that I want to analyze, and I want to take a look at all of those top terms for which the competitor is ranking related to the topic that I want to analyze, in this case, bike. And I can see how, for example, for the balance bike term or the bike rack term, the competitor is ranking in a better position than I am. And I want to take a look at how they are doing it. So if it is an informational resource, what is the plan of the top 10 ranked pages that are ranking in the position and if it is indeed a very high informational blend rather than transactional. And of course, I can export this and do this in bulk. And this will give me an additional source for assessment for those terms that are actually meaningful for me. This can be an excellent source to identify the opportunities and to prioritize accordingly. Last but not least, I like to do this assessment to from a click-through rate perspective and potential organic search traffic perspective. So we know that many of, especially the most popular queries, more ambiguous, more generic terms won't necessarily generate a click at the end of the day. For that, I like to create keyword groups and leverage this functionality that Similarweb has of creating my own group of terms for each one of the product lines and do an assessment for this terms to see where are the clicks going. So we can see that for the overall basketball group here that I have created with basketball-related terms, top ones that I am tracking and targeting here, there is a non-trivial number here of zero-click searches, but I want to take a look at where the actual clicks go to. And I can see how for the overall group that I have created for basketball, the biggest players that are attracting the clicks is YouTube, surprise, surprise, then Nike. Then NBA, ESPN, basketball reference, et cetera, et cetera. So, and you can click here and take a look at, okay, which are the terms that are generating more traffic to YouTube? And you can see that of course the broader ones are the ones going to YouTube. Maybe these are also generic, very generic terms that are not worthy even for you to try to target from an informational perspective either. And then we can see which are those terms for which Nike is attracting more organic search traffic from. The groups that you have created, like basketball shoes, Nike basketball shoes, best basketball shoes, and which are the URLs that are using to rank for these terms. Again, you can take this as a reference saying, okay, let's see how these players that are getting more clicks for this group of queries are doing it so to attract the clicks from them. And take that also into account, not only from an overall visibility standpoint, but the potential clicks that you will get. So I hope that by going through all of these functionalities and questions to ask and validations to make, it will be much easier for you to decide if it is worth it to actually start investing much more on informational resources that can be ranked for these broader terms, that will be much more likely endorsed by users at the beginning of the customer journey. Also, that will tend to get backlinks in a much more spontaneous way versus when it actually makes much more sense to keep investing in commercially oriented content. I hope that you have liked the first edition of the SEO FOMO Ask Me Anything. And again, if you want me to answer your question, just subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter, click on the form to leave me a question that I will answer here or in the newsletter. And remember, subscribe to this channel to keep up with all of the videos. Until the next one.