Category: SEO Tips

Well what is duplicate content and why is it so bad in the first place? More content, even if it’s the same…is good…no?

No. It’s not.

Duplicate content is just as it sounds, a duplicate page of a page that already exists. Or the same content that appears in multiple places on the web. More specifically, and according to a site that would know a thing or two about how this stuff is treated, Google spells it out as:

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

Now, yes, the above definition is directly lifted from Google and is thus technically duplicate content. It’s also copied verbatim to most prominent pages on this topic though. It doesn’t quite constitute a substantive block so we’re good. 

You don’t exactly get penalized per se but there are real consequences to having a site chock full of duplicate content.

Why You Don’t Want Duplicate Content on Your Website

In a nutshell, duplicate content can slay your SEO.

How?

Let’s consider that very quote above. If you pop that sucker in Google, you’ll see pages after page after page of search results with those exact words. The question becomes, how does Google sort those results? That’s part of the issue with duplicate content and your SEO. Search engines need to figure out how to rank those results. It’s perplexing to have duplicates and it simply doesn’t help your cause.

Ultimately Google, and humans, like distinctive and valuable content. The good stuff. Unique content. And it tends to rank those higher.

Another issue with duplicate content comes from the URLs themselves and, again, these are largely not deceptive in origin as Google points out. If your website is like most out there, you’re running a theme on a CMS like WordPress or something of the like and that CMS/theme can end up creating duplicates of pages. The content, article, blog, service page, etc. may be unique but multiple URL’s point to it.

An example from Google of what that might look in practice is:

http://example.com/green-dresses

https://example.com/green-dresses

http://www.example.com/green-dresses

Or

https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/

https://blog.example.com/green-things/green-dresses-are-awesome/

The content exists only once but is unintentionally duplicated.

This can become an even bigger problem from eComm sites that have tons and tons of products on offer. It affects SEO which in turn dings your traffic and potentially creates a poor user experience.

How to Fix It 

Rest assured though, there are solutions!

Those URL issues can be easily, but perhaps tediously, fixed with something called 301 redirects that solve the issue of people accessing your site via www/http/https/etc.

You can also set up what’s known as a canonical URL. If you have duplicate pages for products or whatnot, you’re telling Google that the canonical version is the original. More importantly, what the means is that you’re saying that duplicates of that page should point back to and bolster that URL. That works to improve SEO for that page.

It’s pretty common for eCommerce sites to use session IDs in their URL for tracking behavior as well as making it possible to use a shopping cart. However, when those session IDs are added to a URL, guess what…you get a duplicate page. A fix for that is the aforementioned canonical URL or tracking with cookies.

There are tools out there that can crawl your site for duplicate content, CopyScape and Siteliner being a couple of examples.

Perfect Your Internet Presence With Help From the Snow Agency

It’s tricky and convoluted business to chip away at duplicates but it’s necessary work. Your eComm and SEO health depend on getting these details in order. Get in touch with us at The Snow Agency and let’s get you an audit to see where you stand and take the confusion out of the process.

Ahh, the Click Through Rate (CTR), increasing this even incrementally can create massive revenue growth. That golden click-through isn’t quite a conversion but it’s a pertinent and vital threshold to cross en route to a coveted conversion.

Quite frankly, you can almost draw a straight line from click through to conversion. If people aren’t making that leap of clicking through on your ads or email, they’re not getting to your offer. Without dedicating resources to improving and optimizing CTR you’re missing out on a lot of potential converts.

Rest assured though, there are ways to make it happen with the help of The Snow Agency. A campaign with a low click-through rate just is not going to yield the results you’re looking for in the ROI department. 

Copy

What does your ad say? Are your emails engaging and captivating? Do they stoke so much curiosity that the viewer has no other choice but to click and see what’s on the other side? If not, you need to step up your copy game to get people to your eComm site.

There are no excuses for bland and uninspired writing nowadays. Writers are a dime a dozen, we get that, but you don’t want a good writer, you want a great writer. These are the investments that move the needle, paying slightly more for text that connects and packs a punch can yield big results on the back end.

Nail the Call to Action (CTA)

This is huge so don’t waste it on “click here for more”. Sure, it’s technically an extension of your copy but it’s so important that we wanted to give it its own section, so you’d be drawn to it. Totally worked.

Images/Video

It happens to you any time you pop on the Gram or Facebook, you scroll right on by dozens of ads when on a bathroom break or waiting for your food to arrive at lunch. It’s standard.

Are people rushing right by your ads too though?

The media you use need to strike a chord. Unfortunately, that chord needs to be struck instantly. If your images and video aren’t grabbing people’s eyeballs, they’re moving on and missing whatever killer offer you’re making over on your website.

Targeting and Segmentation

Who are you getting your ads and emails in front of? Are the people that you know would love your eCommerce site getting the invite to go there? Targeting your campaigns isn’t something to take lightly.

Studying and learning your exact target audience takes longer than a minute or two. Devote the time to researching and creating customer personas.

Once you’ve got that in place, and as you continue to learn more about your audience, segment them so they’re all not getting the same thing. Some need more info than others, to be taken further down the funnel so send what matters to them and what watch the CTR fly.

What Is a Good Click-Through Rate?

Great question.

It varies.

For Google AdWords, the average CTR is 1.91% on search and .35% on display ads. Facebook Ad average CTR is .5% to 1.6%.  And email campaigns have an average CTR of 2.5%.

Those are averages so good is better than that…naturally.

Why the Best CTR Is Important for Ecommerce

The numbers vary by industry but as you see, they aren’t exactly barn burning figures. Nonetheless, focusing on getting the best CTR for your eCommerce outfit can translate to big numbers depending on the scope of your campaign and how well you target.

Remember, click-through leads to conversion and the more people you can get to your store, the more sales you stand to make. 2% of something is still 100% more than nothing.

If your CTR is giving you the blues, hit us up at The Snow Agency and we’ll deliver the clicks.

eCommerce ain’t a breeze, you’ve probably noticed that and that’s why you’re out there looking for tips and ways to improve. Reading this here content. And that’s grand! Wanting to improve and actually doing the things necessary to improve are two different things and learning is imperative to making sure you make the right move.

Without further ado then, The Snow Agency would like to jump in to some eCommerce optimization tips.

Take Your Brand Online

This sounds goofy in a piece about eComm since by definition you’re already online but just because you’re on the web, doesn’t mean you’re necessarily knocking it out of the park.

For starters, are people finding you? Is your SEO game on point? If you aren’t ranking highly on search engines in the keywords you know will help you drive traffic, your eCommerce is going to take a hit. That’s not just your individual keywords, it means going next level and getting your long-tails optimized.

While we’re talking about off-site/off page SEO, what does your on-page SEO look like? This is not always at the forefront of the mind but getting this right is big. What it means in practice is things like having an easy to navigate structure and ensuring you’re incorporating your keywords throughout, in your headers & subheaders, metatags, product descriptions, text, file names, etc. even your URLs need to be looked at. Making sure your page is optimized internally means it’s inherently more user friendly and therefore more highly regarded by Google.

Have you checked what you competitors are up to, particularly if they’re doing better? What can you implement from that research into your own operation?

How is the overall design and user experience of your eCommerce website? Poor design and an intuitive layout could very well be the death knell for your sales. Think about how frustrated you get when you’re on a site that doesn’t make sense to navigate or takes too long to load. Do you give the courtesy of your business or do you move on to green pastures and plant your money there?

Is your online store mobile friendly? Internet usage on mobile surpasses that of desktop now so if your eCommerce site isn’t built for mobile you are without a doubt being penalized, for sure in outright sales losses and perhaps with a hit to your SEO as well. 

This is what we mean by take your brand online, just because you’ve claimed a domain and popped a site into existence, don’t expect people to flock to it unless you’ve done the work to get it firing on all cylinders.

Importance of eCommerce

The Snow Agency knows if you’re in the business of selling anything, eCommerce needs to be at the forefront of your efforts. Brick and mortars offer slimmer and slimmer margins and you likely aren’t keeping your store open 24/7/365. With a well oiled eComm site, you can do just that.

The ability to buy online is also insanely convenient for your customers. They don’t even have to wear shoes or pants to get your products and with less and less people going to stores because of Covid-19, now is the time to lean into eCommerce.

Taking off from the access side of things, having a robust eCommerce site allows you the ability to scale and add to your business more quickly and with less roadblocks all without a need to move into a larger storefront.

Optimize With The Snow Agency

These days, eCommerce optimization is a must, not a luxury. While you’re focusing elsewhere and not doing it, you’re falling behind and leaving money for your competitors to grab. If you need help getting your eCommerce house in order, reach out to us at The Snow Agency and work with you on a solution.

What are SEO Keywords?

SEO keywords range from singular words to complex phrases and are used in website copy to attract relevant organic search traffic. A website that is well optimized for search engines will help connect searchers to your site. In other words, you need to know how people are looking for the products, services or information that you offer, to make it easy for them to find you—otherwise, they’ll land on one of the many other pages in the Google results. Implementing keyword SEO will help your site rank above your competitors.

Long-tail vs. Head Keywords

Keywords can be broad and far-reaching (usually called “head keywords”), or they can be a more specific combination of several terms (often called “long-tail keywords). 

Singular keywords might appear to hold the most important because of the high search volume. However, they typically have extremely tough competition. For example, you may want your new clothing store to rank for “clothes,” but it’s going to be challenging to rank above Zappos and Nordstrom. Aside from the intense competition, single keywords can be vague. If someone is searching for “dog,” for instance, you don’t know if they want a list of dog breeds, information about dog food, a place to buy a dog collar, etc. Although longer searches such as sentence and descriptive phrases draw much less traffic, the conversion probability increases. These longer keywords have a clear and defined intent, which allows smaller sites to break through and establish their mark on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Here are a couple of suggestions to help you select the right keywords:

1. Understand Your Audience

First and foremost, conduct your marketing research to gain some real insight into your target customers. To create content that ranks organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of those visitors, the language they use, and the type of content they seek. You can do this by talking to your customer, creating forums, and doing your keyword research on sites such as Moz.

2. Brainstorm a List

Once you’ve gathered some insight about your target audience, and know where your customers’ needs and your business solutions intersect, brainstorm an initial list of words and phrases that adequately describe your core offerings.

3. Gather Current Keyword Data

Generate a list of what is currently driving traffic to your site using Google Search Console and decipher the strongest ones. 

4. Expand the List

Choose 1-4 primary keywords (most essential keywords) to target on each page based on a careful balance between keyword difficulty, relevance, and search volume. Once those are determined, find long-tail modifying terms to help support your primary keywords.

5. Use Keywords in Strategic Places

Instead of repeating the keywords several times in the body, focus on placing them in strategic places on your site. Whether it’s a heading tag, early body copy, or a bolded phrase, the most visible content is generally the most influential for SEO. For instance, URLs rarely change, are highly visible, and describe the entire page.

Understanding the CTR or click-through-rate of your Facebook ads is the best metric for assessing the performance of your marketing strategy. Knowing the exact percentages of those click-through-rates will provide a great indicator as to whether you’re targeting the right audience.

As Facebook Ads are becoming exponentially more expensive, the importance of optimizing your ads for higher click-through and conversion rates is increasing as well.

Here are a few recommendations designed to help you increase engagement, drive more traffic, improve your Facebook Ads CTR at a lower cost…

1. Refine Your Audience

Increasing your CTR through audience refining means removing users who are least likely to click your advert. You want to start by narrowing your marketing outreach to a specific segment. For example, if you’re selling digital language learning courses, you don’t want to target a broad audience to promote your entire catalog. By focusing specifically on individuals from Spanish speaking countries, for instance, you’ll more effectively promote your service. The tighter your targeting and the more defined your target audience, the easier it becomes to create ads with a high clickthrough rate.

2. Create Eye-Catching News Feeds

News Feed ads appear above and below people’s photos and status updates on Facebook. This allows them to stand out much more effectively compared to sidebar ads, which appear in a section of the page reserved exclusively for advertising and notifications. To reap all the advantages of using News Feeds, make sure to utilize images that look and feel natural as opposed to generic stock photos. Stock photos tend to blend in with other content most users see on Facebook and will likely not attract much attention. Replace these typical photos with an eye-catching, “real” image that are easily recognizable and will communicate your message concisely.

These ads, for example, use bright colors to immediately catch the viewers attention.

3. Speak directly to your audience

Of these two statements, the majority will agree that the second one stands out as more engaging and personal. Replacing “people” with “you” allows you to speak to your audience more directly and with more relevancy. This is the difference between an ad that talks about something and an ad that talks directly to a specific audience. With this example, instead of visualizing someone else relaxing on the beach or enjoying the French Riviera, you visualize yourself doing what the ad describes. The more your ad speaks directly to its target audience, the stronger the response it’s likely to receive.

4. Add Urgency

Push your prospects to take action. Adding limitation or urgency in your offer can lead to instant action on their part. Try incorporating some of these words to drive more engagement:

5. A/B test at least five ads

Before you consider any ad campaign a success, it’s essential that you test a variety of different images to find the top performer. Start your campaign by A/B testing at least five different images. Preferably, you want to begin by choosing images that are vastly different from one another to gain a better understanding of your target audience and their responses. Once you find the winning image, start testing a variety of headlines and ad copies to learn which combination is the most effective. This helps you avoid spending money on ads that aren’t producing optimal results.

Over time, you’ll create a campaign that separates you from your competitors, lets you generate more results, more leads and more sales at a lower average cost.