Case study: The true value of informational content for e-commerce SEO
Reported today on Search Engine Land
For the full article visit: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/UIL2YwFHcUQ/case-study-the-true-value-of-informational-content-for-e-commerce-seo-327692
Case study: The true value of informational content for e-commerce SEO
The true value of informational content for e-commerce SEO is often difficult to prove. Some content marketers and SEOs are convinced that informational content can serve as a link-worthy asset that will attract natural links from other websites. The acquired links are then supposed to help improve the SEO performance of the entire online shop.
But how do we isolate factors to demonstrate that it is indeed the informational content that contributes to a website's overall SEO performance, and not other optimizations and developments? This article presents a case that supports the theory of informational content helping commercial pages rank better and generate additional sales.
Are you in a hurry? Jump straight to the TL;DR summary of this article.
Background: SEO strategy and performance
The e-commerce site we are looking at in this case study was first launched in 2011, but the current SEO strategy was only implemented in 2017. In a nutshell, it consists of the following activities:
Technical SEO:
Making the website's content (60.000 product pages and 80 category pages) crawlable and indexable for search enginesHeavy focus on improving page speed for users and search engine crawlers
Content:
Reorganizing the existing informational content pages and adding new onesAdding contextual internal links from informational content to category pages
Active link building has never played a role in this website's SEO efforts. All links that are currently pointing to the domain were either by-products of other marketing activities and partnerships or were generated naturally by people voluntarily linking to the website's content.
This approach has