Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Nafsika in Hamburg, Germany, who asked:
“I have two page rankings for the same keyword: a product page and a glossary article.
Glossary articles rank better, but product pages are more important (and therefore should rank higher).
Is there a way to rank product pages higher without compromising the performance of glossary articles? “
Nafsika, this is a good question and pain point for many SEO professionals.
Emmanuel asked me a similar question in London and it was: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Targeted Landing Page?
Many of the same principles apply, but I’ll relate them specifically to product pages and informational articles (i.e. glossary articles).
Here are some things I would do.
1. Analyze the top-ranking pages
If you haven’t already done so, determine which pages are in the top 5 to 10 search results.
I recommend that you use SEO tools to help you with this task.
For example, you can use spy, SE ranking, Sam Rush, or Areves (I can go ahead and use tools…there are plenty that can do this for you) to see which pages are ranking for your target keywords.
Then you will determine the following:
intention
When you look at the homepage, what is the intent of the page? In other words, is there a “buy” intent or a “know” intent?
If a top-ranking page is information-centric, such as an article or blog post, then that’s a sign that search engines have identified the keyword’s intent as “know.”
You’ll need to get creative with your product pages to go beyond your glossary articles, which I’ll get to later.
You can read more about intents in my other article: How to Drill Down on Keywords: Preferred Tools and Techniques.
Side note: I’m pretty sure I mention intent in almost all of my articles.
Yes, I’m a record breaker, but for good reason.
Search engines do their best to address searcher intent, and we should too.
We need to ensure that searchers find pages that satisfy their query.
word count
When it comes to SEO advice, word count is a bit of a debate because there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how many words should be on a page.
add, John Mueller We were told last year that the word count of an article is not a quality factor that Google considers.
However, I believe word count comes into play when you look at the top ranking pages.
Often, when it comes to top-ranking pages, there is a natural behavior.
If those front pages have a lot of content, this may be the reason why your glossary article is better than your product page, assuming the word count of your glossary article is higher than your product page.
2. Adjust your content
Now, what do you do with the information from this analysis?
If you find that the intent is to “know” or to be informative, and your top-ranking pages have higher word counts than your product pages, then you’ll need to get creative with the content on your product pages (because that’s what you say you are want to rank for the target keyword).
One of the things I did while working on an ecommerce site was Add FAQ to category and product pages.
This adds more content in a useful way and can even increase conversions.
must also Mark up your pages with structured data.
3. Follow the link
When I say focus on links, I mean backlinks and internal links.
Let’s start with internal linking.
When linking to your internal pages, you should use optimized anchor text, which is your keyword.
For your product pages and glossary articles, when linking to these pages, double check that you are not using the same keywords as your anchor text. Also, consider linking your product pages from your glossary articles (again with optimized anchor text).
This is a Keyword Mapassigning keywords to pages can really come in handy.
Finally, look at your glossary articles and product pages for backlinks.
Backlinks are one of many ranking factors to consider.
If you find that your glossary articles have stronger backlinks than your product pages, that will be an area for improvement.
Watch this webinar, How to Build Links for Ecommerce and Affiliate Websitesto get some ideas.
4. Consider revising your keyword list
All the advice I’ve given is to help you get your product pages to rank higher than your glossary articles, but it’s probably not the best move.
Instead, you might consider finding new keywords to target and updating your keyword mapping.
Aleh Barysevich wrote an excellent article that discusses the topic and dives into keyword cannibalization: How to Identify and Eliminate Keyword Cannibalism to Improve Your SEO.
Thanks for your great question, Nafsika, and good luck!
More resources:
Editor’s Note: Ask about SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by some of the industry’s top SEO experts, handpicked by Search Engine Magazine. Have questions about SEO? fill out our form. You may see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
Featured Image: Photoroyalty/Shutterstock
