I want to talk with you about retail this week: specifically about a couple of hacks that site owners are using to improve their Google rankings.
The first one we’re looking at is stars. If you can get your stars found in search then it will help your click-through rate immensely. The way you can do this depends on your site. Try going into Google Search Console and click on ‘Structured Data’. You’ll be able to see which pages on your site already have structured data, which is how the stars are usually displayed. If you have a star product rating on your site, structured data is the way to get it into search results. We’ve seen remarkable progress in just weeks for some sites, so it’s worth investigating.
Another thing you can do is to get your important product information as high on the page as possible. You might have some regular content currently at the top of the page that talks about specials and sales, or maybe a slider that is taking up valuable screen real estate. We’re finding that the more of this content you have, the lower it will suppress your rankings. Move that content down and put it below the actual product. When people do a search, they want to get to the product first. Moving that content actually makes that page rank higher.
One more thing we’ve been talking about is building your brand. We’ve seen bloggers who love the content they’re putting out, but they’re not doing the work to move it up the rankings. Successful bloggers do the work to build their brands, and the results come to them. Don’t worry about building backlinks. Build your brand instead.
This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au
Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
