Tag: Shop SEO

Shops & restaurants: easy curbside pickup with WooCommerce and Local SEO

Edwin Toonen

With restaurants, shops and other businesses closing due to the Coronavirus pandemic, their owners are looking for other ways to keep their business going. Luckily, many customers are searching for ways to support their local businesses. One of the ways for a restaurant to keep serving people is by offering local pickup of meals. All you need is a WordPress website, a simple ordering system using WooCommerce and a Local SEO plugin. Let’s see how that works. 

Thinking outside the box

At times like these, we all need to step outside our comfort zone and do things differently. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so to say. In this post, I’ll take a look at what a restaurant can do, but many of these things apply to other local businesses as well. 

All restaurants are closed for eating in, but if you try to get creative, there are still ways to keep the business going. For one, that would be offering gift cards for your restaurant to be cashed when you open again. Or, you could keep serving menus to customers and having them come pick it up at your location.

What do you need?

Of course, you would need a site for your restaurant. If you have a WordPress site, it’s quite easy to add a shop of sorts using WooCommerce. You wouldn’t even need a very complex setup with a thousand payment options and user account management or something. Keep it simple, you just want people to select a menu, pick it up and pay for it on the spot using contactless payment. If you wish to extend these options, feel free to do so. 

Besides a WordPress site with a WooCommerce shop, you can improve how these two work together by installing our Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO plugins. These not only enhance your site in a technical sense but also improve the chance of it showing up properly in the search engines.

How to start an online store for local pickup

In this post, you won’t find how to set up a WordPress site. I’ll assume you have a WordPress site. If not, there are a lot of guides on how to make a WordPress website out there that describe how to build one. We have a free WordPress for Beginners course that helps you get going quickly.

Whenever you are working on your site, it’s a good idea to set up a test site that mirrors the real one. This way, you can experiment to your heart’s content without breaking the actual site. Here’s how to set up a test environment for WordPress.

It goes without saying that your hosting plan should be able to facilitate WooCommerce. You should also serve your site over HTTPS (check the green lock icon in the browser bar), this is essential now that you are going to handle customer data.

Install WooCommerce

Go to the Plugin section of your WordPress site and click add new. Here, you can look for the WooCommerce plugin. This is the number one e-commerce solution for WordPress. It powers online stores in all shapes and sizes, including the one on our site. After downloading, the plugin installs and asks you to activate it. WooCommerce is now ready to set up. 

How to install the WooCommerce plugin in WordPress
Install the free WooCommerce plugin to transform your website into a webshop

Set up WooCommerce

WooCommerce has an awesome wizard that guides you through the setup process. If you follow these steps, you’ll have most of the essential things in place. If you want to do it by hand, you need to go to the settings in WooCommerce and go over the screens by yourself.

WooCommerce setup wizard
Easily configure your new webshop through WooCommerce’s setup wizard

Even if you’ve done the wizard, it’s a good idea to go over the settings to get acquainted with everything. Need to rerun the Wizard? Click the Help button in WooCommerce to find it on the left-hand side.

Go to the WooCommerce settings and set up or check the following settings: 

  • On the General tab:
    • Make sure your store address is correct and that you’ve limited selling to your country and location
    • Enable or disable tax calculation if needed
    • Enable or disable the use of coupon codes if needed
    • Pick the correct currency
  • On the Product tab:
    • Select the page where you want the shop to appear
    • Want users to leave reviews on your product? Activate that option here
    • On Inventory: Disable stock management unless you need it
  • On the Payments tab:
    • Pick an easy payment option, like cash on delivery or bank transfer
    • If needed, you can add more complex payment providers like PayPal
  • On the Accounts tab:
    • Allow guest checkout
    • Allow account creation if needed
    • Select the Privacy policy
    • Review the other options on this page carefully, you may need them
  • On the Emails tab:
    • Check the different email templates and activate the ones you want to use. For every email, change the text to match what you want to say
    • Scroll down to check the sender options
    • Also adapt the email template to fit your brand
  • Skip the Integrations tab
  • On the Advanced tab:
    • Map the essential pages for your shop, i.e. the cart, checkout, account page and terms and conditions. You can make these pages in WordPress:
      • Add the `[woocommerce_cart]` shortcode to the cart page
      • Add the `[woocommerce_checkout]` shortcode to the checkout page
      • Place the `[woocommerce_my_account]` shortcode to the account page

These are the settings that get you up-and-running quickly. WooCommerce is a solid piece of software with loads of options and it can be used to power tiny webshops selling one item to megastores carrying millions. Go over the settings to see if you need to set something that fits your goal.

Install Local SEO by Yoast SEO

The Local SEO plugin by Yoast is a great addition if you want your business to rank locally. It comes with a lot of cool options, like managing multiple locations, getting your correct business details to Google easily and creating an awesome map where customers can find your business.

One of the coolest options of the Local SEO plugin is the local store pickup option it adds to WooCommerce shops. As WooCommerce doesn’t offer this natively, the Local SEO plugin makes it much easier to offer this important option to your customers. Simply activate and customize it, that is all. It truly is a must-have addition!

WooCommerce local pickup settings
The Yoast Local SEO for WordPress plugin adds these options to WooCommerce

The same goes for the WooCommerce SEO plugin. This is optional, of course, but it is a great help if you want to get serious with WooCommerce. The plugin improves the product structured data WooCommerce generates, it cleans up the XML sitemap making it faster to load and it makes products stand out more on social media platforms by adding specific code.

Adding a shop to your theme 

You might use a WordPress theme that your developer built especially for you. Adding a WooCommerce store shouldn’t be too difficult. Often, it works out of the box or with limited edits. Look, you are not trying to build the world’s most beautiful restaurant website with a fully functioning online shop with all bells and whistles. You are looking for something quick and dirty to get you started.

A restaurants menu on display in their webshop
This is what your online store, displaying your menu’s, could look like

For most instances, you could simply add a special shop page to your site and accept the design it comes with. Or, you could override your own theme with a WooCommerce enabled restaurant/shop theme from the WordPress repository. Please see what works for you.

Payment options

Like you don’t have to have an astonishing design, for your shop, you don’t need to offer a gazillion payment options. Please pick the bare necessities. Simply offer contactless payment on the spot, or a low-cost payment method like we have in the Netherlands called Tikkie. This lets you easily send payment requests via a link that your customers can use to pay the invoice using their own bank. Big payment providers often charge big money and you want to save as much as you can, right? Plus, these can be a pain to implement and maintain.

WooCommerce payment options
Set up the payment options for your online store

Also, it might be a good idea to offer gift cards. In that case, you also need to turn on those settings in WooCommerce.

Add your products

Once you’ve set up a store for your restaurant, you can add products. Again, do this as you see fit. You might offer all dishes separately, but you can also offer complete menus. Or maybe you have a different idea on how you would go about this. There’s no wrong way, pick what works best for you.

Adding a product consists of giving it a strong product name, plus a description and images. You should also give the product a price. There are a lot of options here, but you probably won’t need most of them. Do take a look, though. To help you write great product texts that also do well SEO-wise, you can always have Yoast SEO take a look at them.

This image shows how to create a product in WooCommerce
How to add a new product to your online store

Publish your online store

After you’ve filled your store, it’s time to do a test run. Open your store, click all the buttons and make a test order. See if everything works. Check if all the order emails come in. Fulfil the order and celebrate! Now, if you haven’t run into too many errors, you should be good to go. Publish your store and communicate it to your customers. Hopefully the orders for your tasty food will come in quickly.

In WooCommerce, you can easily track the orders that come in and you can do all kinds of analysis to see how the money comes in. Click to your Dashboard to get an overview of what’s happening at the moment. There’s so much more you can do in WooCommerce, it’s silly. Read the WooCommerce documentation to see what else you can do to run and improve your shop. 

Communicate your new store

Now’s the time to start marketing your store. These are not exhaustive and you can probably think of a few good channels for your business. If nothing else, think about your social media and your email newsletters. Also, there might be a collection of other local restaurants that are in the same boat as you are. It might be a good idea to build a platform together?

Another important thing is your Google My Business account. Please update it with the latest information! Google is adding COVID-19/Coronacrisis management options as we speak. Restaurants can now pick special attributes if your restaurant is available for take out or delivery. This will show up in Google Maps. You can also use the Posts features in My Business to communicate with your customers.

Google's display of local restaurants
A new feature on Google’s search engine result page showing whether your restaurant offers takeout and/or delivery

WooCommerce and Local SEO help arrange local pickup

This post was meant to give you an idea of the steps you need to take to run a small-scale, WooCommerce-powered online store. Even a local shop, a restaurant or a cafe can run one just like it. The technology is there, and most of it is free to use. Of course, paying for a couple of premium plugins will greatly enhance the experience and save precious time as well. WooCommerce alone has a ton of purposely extensions for improving parts of a store for specific industries.

We hope you enjoy building your own online store. 

Stay safe!

The post Shops & restaurants: easy curbside pickup with WooCommerce and Local SEO appeared first on Yoast.

Earn money on Pinterest with Yoast WooCommerce SEO

Caroline Geven

With over 250 million users, Pinterest is a platform many online shops cannot ignore. According to the platform, 84% of its users use Pinterest to decide what they should buy next. Whether you have a small business or sell all over the world, Pinterest is the place to invest your time in. Want to start using Pinterest for your business or want to get more out of it? Here, we’ll explain not only how Pinterest works, but also how you get the most out of it. You’ll also find out how the latest schema update of Yoast SEO 11.0 helps you with reaching your goals.

Pinterest explained

Unlike common belief, Pinterest is not a social media platform: it’s a visual search engine. Users browse for ideas, called pins, and go to other websites to read about or buy something. The pins are vertical images with an optimized meta description.

Because Pinterest creates a personal feed for all of its users, it can place your pins in feeds of people who do not know you yet. This is based on the recent search history of your users and based on the people, subjects and boards someone follows. If you like a pin, you can repin it on one of your own boards, which spreads the message even further. So if you optimize your own pins well, it can go viral if it reaches the right audience.

Unlike social media such as Facebook and Twitter, a pin can generate traffic and customers to your website for months to come. It’s actually more common for a pin to generate traffic a few months after you first put it live, as the power of sharing is incredibly important on Pinterest.

Consider it a snowball effect: as your pin gets repinned, Pinterest will learn more about your pin each and every time. It bases this knowledge on the boards it’s placed on, as well as the description the pin has and the kind of people who interact with it. A pin that doesn’t seem popular at first, can suddenly spike a lot of traffic 4 to 6 months after your first placed it online.

Claiming your Pinterest account with Yoast SEO

Pinterest has two types of accounts: personal accounts and business accounts. If you have an eCommerce site, make sure your account is a business account. It’s incredibly easy to do so in only three steps!

  • Log into your account on Pinterest, go to your settings and find the ‘Claim’ option. Here you can insert the URL of your domain.
  • Next, Pinterest will ask you to verify your website. Choose ‘insert HTML-tag’ and copy the code within the content quotes, as displayed below.
Pinterest’s HTML tag to verify your website
  • Go to your website’s dashboard in WordPress and click on SEO in your left-hand menu. Then, click on Social and go to the Pinterest tab. Here, you’ll find a box for the Pinterest confirmation. Paste the code you copied in step 2 here and save the changes.
The Pinterest tab in the Social section of Yoast SEO

You’ve now claimed your website!

The Claim section in Pinterest

The last thing you need to do is to make sure your pins will show up as rich pins. With rich pins, the metadata is shown on the pin itself. This increases engagement as more information is given. To make sure your website is ready for rich pins, follow the steps on the rich pins validator page of Pinterest.

A rich pin, including price, stock and a link to your website, encouraging people to check the product out in your online store.

Product pins: the most important pins for you as a store owner

Pinterest has four kinds of pins:

  1. article pins;
  2. app pins;
  3. product pins;
  4. recipe pins.

We’ll focus on product pins, as these are the kind of pins you need to create as a shop owner. Product pins make it easier for your possible customers to see what you’re selling, how much it costs, whether it’s in stock and more. By providing this information immediately, you’re grabbing the attention of your audience and will drive more traffic to your website.

Yoast WooCommerce SEO and Pinterest

The WooCommerce SEO plugin stitches the Yoast SEO schema output and the WooCommerce schema output together, making sure it’s one, coherent, graph. At the same time, it also enriches the output with several attributes.

This means that, when you own an online store that runs on WooCommerce, you only need the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin on top of Yoast SEO to make sure Pinterest can get all relevant information. You just have to install the plugin, we’ll do the rest for you!

The moment you or someone else shares the product on Pinterest, we’ll make sure Pinterest understands it’s a product, what the price is and who the seller is. On top of this, we’ll also explain to Pinterest that the main entity of the page is the product you sell.

Schema.org explained

Implementing structured data properly on your website has always been a hassle. In Yoast SEO 11.0 we made this easier for you: instead of focusing on the technical specifics of your website, you can now focus on selling your product. We’ll focus on the right schema implementation for you!

Schema.org is used to markup products, recipes, articles and more. Search engines as Google and, of course, Pinterest can read this implementation and present it to their users. On top of this, search engines understand a page or website that has schema.org implemented better. Here’s a little story to show how it works.

All in all, Schema.org is incredibly important for SEO. It will make your website a better search result as it will give your visitors an easier way to pick a result from the list of links.

Read more: How to use Pinterest to grow – my experiences »

The post Earn money on Pinterest with Yoast WooCommerce SEO appeared first on Yoast.

What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?

Edwin Toonen

Breadcrumbs are an important part of almost every good website. These little navigational aids don’t just tell people where they are on your site, but they also help Google work out how your site is structured. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to add these helpful little pointers. Let’s take a look at how breadcrumb navigation works.

What are breadcrumbs?

A breadcrumb is a small text path, often located at the top of a page indicating where the user is on the site. On yoast.com, for instance, the path to our Yoast SEO plugin page is Home > WordPress Plugins > Yoast SEO for WordPress. This breadcrumb trail immediately shows you where you are. Every step of that path is clickable, all the way back to the homepage.

But why is this navigational help called a breadcrumb? When Hansel and Gretel went into the woods, Hansel dropped pieces of bread onto the ground so they could find their way home if they got lost. These breadcrumbs eventually became the model for the breadcrumbs we see on websites these days.

You can see the breadcrumb clearly in Google

Breadcrumbs also appear in Google search results, and you can take advantage of this if you use Yoast SEO or add the correct form of structured data to your site. Breadcrumbs in search results give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site. Yoast SEO automatically adds the necessary structured data — a BreadcrumbList — in JSON-LD format for you. Just flip the switch in the settings and you’ll see the relevant lines appear in your source code — although, sometimes, you need to add a small piece of code to your theme as well. Find out more on our breadcrumb structured data in our documentation.

Different types of breadcrumbs

You may have noticed that there are different types of breadcrumbs. These are the three most common ones:

Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs

These are the most common and it’s how we use breadcrumbs on our site. Breadcrumbs like this tell you where you are in a site structure and how many steps there are to get back to the homepage. Something like Home > Blog > Category > Post name.

breadcrumbs hierarchy

Attribute-based breadcrumbs

Attribute-based breadcrumbs are seen most commonly when a user has searched on an e-commerce site, and the breadcrumb trail is made up of product attributes – for example: Home > Product category > Gender > Size > Color.

breadcrumbs attribute

History-based breadcrumbs

History-based breadcrumbs do exactly what it says on the tin; they are ordered according to what you have been doing on the site. Think of these as an alternative to your internet history bar, so you get something like this: Home > Previous page > Previous page > Previous page > Current page. It’s also possible to combine these like Macy’s does in the screenshot below.

breadcrumbs history

Advantages of using breadcrumbs

There are several advantages to using breadcrumbs on your site. Let’s take a quick look at them:

1. Google loves them

Your visitors like breadcrumbs, but Google does too. Breadcrumbs give Google another way of figuring out how your website is structured, but, as covered earlier, Google may also use your breadcrumbs in the actual search results, which makes your result much more enticing to users. To increase the chances of your breadcrumbs appearing in Google, you need to add structured data like Yoast SEO does.

2. They enhance the user experience

People hate being lost. When confronted with a new location, people often look around in search of recognizable objects or landmarks – and the same is true of websites. You need to keep visitors happy and reduce friction as much as possible. Breadcrumbs can help your user experience since they are a common interface element that instantly shows people a way out. There’s no need to click the back button!

3. They lower bounce rates

Hardly anyone enters a site via the homepage — It’s all about organic search. That means any part of your site could be an entry point. You need to come up with a way to guide these visitors to other parts of your site if the selected page doesn’t meet their needs. Breadcrumbs can lower bounce rates because you’re offering visitors an alternative way to browse your site. Don’t you think it’s better to send a visitor to your homepage than back to Google?

How to add breadcrumbs

There are several ways of adding breadcrumbs to your site. Firstly, if you use WordPress, you can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins or – of course – Yoast SEO. If you use a different CMS the process will be different. It is also possible to add them to your code by hand. If you also want them to appear in Google results, you need to use structured data in a way that Google understands. You can find more information on this in Google’s developer documentation on breadcrumbs.

Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. It will add everything necessary not just to add them to your site, but to get them ready for Google. To add breadcrumbs to your site, you need to add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:

<?php
if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
  yoast_breadcrumb( '</p><p id="breadcrumbs">','</p><p>' );
}
?>

This code can often be placed inside the single.php or page.php files, just above the title of the page. Some themes want it at the end of the header.php file. It’s not a good idea to add it to functions.php since this could cause problems.

After adding the code, you can go to the advanced settings of Yoast SEO and switch on breadcrumb support. You can also control how the breadcrumb structure will look and what prefixes will be used. Find out more on our document on implementing breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO.

You can find the settings for breadcrumbs in SEO > Search Appearance > Breadcrumbs

Conclusion

Despite using breadcrumbs, Hansel and Gretel still got lost in the woods. Don’t let that happen to your visitors! Breadcrumbs provide an easy-to-grasp way for visitors to navigate your site and they instantly understand how your site structure works. Google loves them for the same reason. So use Yoast SEO to easily add breadcrumbs to your site.

Read more: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

The post What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

Ask Yoast: Is my site structure too deep?

Joost de Valk

If you own a website, you have to think about the structure of your site, whether it’s a blog or a shop. Site structure is essential to help users find their way on your site and it helps your site to rank. So your site’s hierarchy needs to make sense to both users and search engines. When you’re creating one, you might wonder if your structure is too deep or too shallow. Let’s take a look at an example.

Milada Sejnohova, emailed Ask Yoast with the following question:

“How deep can I make the site structure of my blog? Can I make it for instance:

  • Elemis
    • products
      • anti-aging?”

Check out the video or read the answer below!

Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! »

Site structure training$ 99 - Buy now » Info

Depth of your site structure

In the video, I answer Milada’s question:

Well of course you can!

First of all, if you have a products section, then it’s not a blog, it’s a website.

And two, your structure (products and then anti-aging) is a perfectly reasonable way of setting up your site. As long as it’s useful to users and it makes sense, you’re okay. It has to make sense for someone who has never been on your site.

What you really should be thinking about is: if I come to your site and I’m on any page on your site and I know that something should be there, do I know how to get there easily? Because that’s determined in large by your site structure. So make it as easy to understand as possible! 

Good luck!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘The ultimate guide to site structure’ »

Out of stock product – what to do with product page?

Joost de Valk

If you own an eCommerce site, a product can run out of stock. When a product becomes permanently unavailable, what should you do with the product page in your online store? Delete that specific page? Set up a redirect? Show alternatives? Or just leave the page as it is? This Ask Yoast will help you make the best decision when a product goes out of stock.

Brad Griffin out of Texas USA emailed us:

“When a WooCommerce product is out of stock, I’ve got a couple of options: a redirect; a fallback URL; a waiting list; or delete it and do nothing. Let’s assume that the product is a one-time sale, it’s not coming back. What should I do with that URL?

Check out the video or read the answer below!

Want to outrank your competitor and get more sales? Read our Shop SEO eBook! »

Shop SEO$ 25 - Buy now » Info

Best practice product out of stock

In the video, we explain which options you have when a product goes out of stock and what would be the best decision:

” Well, Brad, simply delete it and do nothing is not an option, because people might have linked to that URL, so you want to send them somewhere decent. And a waiting list would be weird, because the product is not coming back.

So, I think you’ve got two options:

1. Redirect them to the category that the original product was in and make sure that they land on something that feels somewhat close to what they were looking for if they wanted to get to that URL.

2. Show them a page saying: Hey, we had this product. We’ve sold it, but we’ve got these other options:…, …, …,  (show alternatives).

Those are really your only two real options.

Good luck!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide’ »

Ask Yoast case study: SEO of an online shop

Marieke van de Rakt

SEO can be really complicated! How do you start with improving the structure of a site? How do you write amazing and SEO-friendly articles? To help all of you with your SEO strategy, I’m writing a series of Ask Yoast case studies. In these case studies, I’ll take a look at a specific site (the owner knows about it of course :-)), and I’ll give some SEO advice. In this second case study: SEO of an online shop!

Ask Yoast Case studies

Want Marieke to look at the content of your site? Send an email to ask@yoast.com!

Improve the SEO of an online shop!

In this case study, the SEO of an online shop is the central topic. We were given the chance to take a look at the SEO of Knock Knock, independent makers of clever gifts, books, and whatever else they can think up.

The Knock Knock team didn’t have a specific question for us, so we just took a look at their website and give advice on how to improve the SEO

First impression of KnockKnock

I want to buy those notebooks! I want to have those pens! Great fill-out books! I love the products Knock Knock offers. It’s original, it’s fun and I really get some sort of brand-feeling if I browse through their website. Fantastic!

Technically, Knock Knock seems to be a solid site, which is great. Some general SEO quick wins would be: creating alt tags for images and adding meta descriptions to tag pages and on some category pages.

KnockKnock has a lot of potential to become really successful. Maybe they already are! I believe that with certain SEO improvements they could be generating even more traffic than they’re getting right now! 

Want to outrank your competitor and get more sales? Read our Shop SEO eBook! »

Shop SEO$ 25 - Buy now » Info

Content content content

My initial thoughts for improvements when I saw this site were: 

“This site screams for a blog! Knock Knock’s products are very original and one-of-a-kind. Writing blog posts about, for instance, how to use these products and why you would need them, won’t be hard at all! Blogging is a great way to promote your stuff and to show to your audience how to use your products. In case of this specific online shop, I’d post lots of photos too.

For SEO reasons, starting a blog is very important too. Knock Knock doesn’t show a lot of content on their site. It’s an online shop with quite some products and, therefore, product pages, but the copy on these pages is quite short. That’ll make it hard to rank high in Google. Blogging, or in other words, publishing fresh content on a regular basis, will definitely improve the SEO of this online shop.

I would advise Knock Knock to start with some solid keyword research. Maybe they’ve already done some research. Which words do they want to be found for? After that, they should start creating some real quality content. I’d love to read blog posts about the origin, benefits or appliance of their products. They do have nice product reviews written by their audience, perhaps these reviews could serve as a starting point for a blog post.

KnockKnock sells products that are quite witty. I’m sure their blog could be entertaining too. Apart from a great SEO strategy, an entertaining blog would also be a kickass marketing strategy!”

After showing the draft of this post to KnockKnock they got back to me telling that they already have a blog! So I had rework my advice a bit… I started with checking out their blog first, where they write about the origin and creators of the products, the use of the products and more fun stuff. Their blog post are very original and entertaining! They also post quite regularly, a couple of times a month.

So now, my main advice is: make your blog more visible on your site! I noticed that we can easily get from your blog to your shop, but the other way around is a lot harder (or perhaps impossible?). I’d suggest to just add the blog in the top navigation of your site. That way, visitors can easily read more about your products, creators and all the nice things you do, apart from creating awesome products!

Read more: ‘5 tips to find inspiration for your blog’ »

Site structure

In case you would be starting a blog from scratch that would be quite hard. On the other hand, if you’re starting a blog, you do have the chance to create an ideal structure for it. Think about the topics you’d like to blog about. These could be the same as the product categories of your online shop, but it also could be different categories. Write a few long, really awesome, articles on each of these categories. These articles will be your cornerstone pages. Make sure to write lots of blog posts about similar topics (but all slightly different and more niche/long tail). And link from all of these articles to your most important cornerstone article. If you start your blog from scratch, make sure to structure it in an excellent way! Read more about this in our ultimate guide to site structure.

Conclusion

If you have an online shop that’s focused on an awesome niche like Knock Knock, your SEO will benefit most from a solid content strategy. Writing lots of texts, articles, posts will have an effect on your rankings. Besides that, it’ll be a great way of marketing your stuff. Combine your blog with an awesome social media strategy and you’ll increase both your rankings and sales!

Keep reading: ‘10 tips for an awesome and SEO friendly blog post’ »

Improve local SEO with Google My Business

Edwin Toonen

Every business owner with a website is looking for ways to get noticed in the search results. Now, during the Coronavirus pandemic it’s essential to offer customers an up-to-date Google profile for your business. There are loads of tactics to rank well as a local business, but there is no silver bullet: as with most SEO issues, this is a combined effort. One of these pieces of the local SEO puzzle is Google My Business, a dashboard for managing listings. But what is it exactly and why is it so important for local SEO?

What is Google My Business?

My Business is Google’s one-stop shop to manage how your business will look and perform in the search engine. It is an essential tool to find out and adjust how your site shows in Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+, and organic search results. According to the most recent edition of Moz’ Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, Google My Business continues to be the biggest driver of local SEO success, with quality links coming in at a close second.

You can manage your business listing by adding NAP details, opening hours, photos et cetera — there are even special options to manage your business listing during the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to that, you get a lot of other options, like managing the reviews your customers leave behind. As you know, reviews should be a key factor in your local SEO efforts.

How does it work?

Getting started with My Business is easy; you have to make an account and claim your business. After filling in your details, you will get a real-life postcard from Google on the address you’ve specified. This card is the only proof you’re the owner of the business listed at the address. For some types of business, it’s also possible to get verified via a phone call or an email. Google has a special page that helps you check your verification status.

Once verified, you can fill in all the necessary details and check how your listing is doing. You can even get regular insights to see how many impressions, clicks and subscribers your listing got over a period. It’s a great way of getting a feel for how your business is perceived by Google and customers alike.

Keep in mind that My Business is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with your on- and off-site SEO efforts. You won’t climb the charts if your profile is inaccurate, but you also won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content. These things go hand in hand.

Ranking factors

Google My Business uses many factors to determine rankings for businesses. We’ll highlight the three most important ones:

  • Relevance
  • Distance
  • Prominence

Relevance

Relevance determines how well your business fits the search intent of the customer. Is your focus identical to what the customer needs or are you a bit opaque about what your business does? Vagueness doesn’t rank. Be as clear as you can be. Keep your focus.

Proximity

Proximity is a well-known factor for ranking local businesses. You can’t rank in a local search for (dentist New Jersey) when you have located your company in Manhattan. The exact way Google determines which businesses to show in a local search is unknown, and it can be pretty hard to rank in a given area. The other factors play a significant role as well. It helps not just to say you are located in a particular area, but also to show it by creating local-oriented content around your business on your site. Google uses what’s known about the location of the searcher to present the most relevant local businesses.

Prominence

Prominence is all about the activity around your listing; this could be the number of reviews, events, local content et cetera. It also helps if you can get loads of quality links to your site. It is somewhat hard to determine what prominence means exactly, but one thing is sure: no one likes dead profiles. You have to keep it updated with new photos and manage your reviews. As said before, this works in tandem with your site, so make sure both listings align and that you publish local content.

You can read more about local SEO in our ultimate guide to small business SEO.

It is vital that you keep your business listing accurate and up to date

Optimize your Google My Business listing

To start, you need to claim your listing. After that, you can use the following tips to make your My Business account a success. Keep in mind that everything you add must be in line with the information you provide on your site. Inaccurate information kills your listings and could kill your rankings:

  • Claim your listing with your actual business name
  • Choose a category as accurate as possible
  • Provide as much data as you can – your profile has to be 100%
  • Check your phone number
  • Check your opening times – think about holidays!
  • Review your photos – are they accurate and good or can you improve them?
  • Create citations on other sites as well – pick well-regarded business listing or review sites and directories, stay away from spammers
  • Keep your My Business listing in line with your site – and use Schema.org data
  • Above all, keep your data up to date

It’s critical to remember that this is not a set it and forget it type of thing. Things change, your business changes. Keep everything active, monitor reviews and stay on top of things. It’s frustrating if your listing doesn’t perform as well as you’d like, but keep putting in the hours, and it will work.

Managing your Google My Business listing during COVID-19

Many businesses must — temporarily — close during the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic that’s happening now. It’s a good idea to let customers know how this affects your business by managing your Google My Business correctly. Always keep your profile updated. Let people know about changes in opening hours, or if you’re a bit slower in shipping out products. Use Google Posts to notify customers of updates. You can also mark your business as temporarily closed. If you manage these via Google My Business, your business profile in Google and on Google Maps will be updated. Check Google’s documentation on handling COVID-19 updates for more information.

Structured data and Yoast Local SEO

Google increasingly depends on structured data to find out what your site is about and which elements represent what. This is most certainly true for your business information, including the information that My Business uses. Make sure you add the correct structured data to your site. Enhance your NAP details, opening hours, reviews, product information et cetera, with Schema.org data. This will make it much easier for Google to determine the validity of your listing. Several tools can help you with this, including our Yoast Local SEO plugin.

Your local SEO is critical, even with Google My Business

So, you should activate and maintain your My Business account, and make it awesome. But to get the most out of your listings and to get good rankings, you must have your site in order as well. Optimize every part of it. Create local content for your chosen keyword and business location and get quality local backlinks to build up a solid link profile. Ask customers to review your business onsite or on My Business. Make sure your listing is active and attractive. Inaccurate profiles are no good.

Read more: The ultimate guide to small business SEO »

The post Improve local SEO with Google My Business appeared first on Yoast.

Ask Yoast: duplicate content issues on my shop?

Joost de Valk

If you own an eCommerce site, you might wonder how to optimize your category pages and your product pages. Could you have the same content on your category page and your product pages? If you have the same content on multiple pages of your website, would Google know what to rank first? Or would it cause duplicate content issues? This Ask Yoast is about the optimization of category and product pages of your online shop. Hear what I have to say about this!

Jeroen Custers from Maastricht, the Netherlands, has emailed us, asking:

“My product pages and category pages have 99% the same description, except for the color. Although the category page gets all the links, one product page ranks. Does Google see my pages as duplicate content?”

Check out the video or read the answer below!

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Duplicate content on your shop?

Check out the video or read the answer below!

The answer is simple: Yes. So what should you do is optimize your category page for the product. And only optimize the sub pages, the product pages for the individual product colors, and then make sure that the category page gets all the links for that product. So you should improve your internal linking structure so that when you mention the product, you link to the category page and not to the specific color page underneath that.

If you improve that category structure in the right way, then that should fix it. If it doesn’t, then noindex the product pages and “canonical” all of them back to the category, so that Google really knows that the category is the main thing. That’s what you want people to land on. Most people want to see that you have more than one option.

If they search for the specific product and you do not noindex it, so if you choose for the first option, then Google should send them to the right page. So try that first. If that doesn’t work, noindex as product page and then “canonicalize” them back to the category.

Good luck!

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need help with SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘Crafting the perfect shop category page’ »

SEO copywriting and writing for sales

Marieke van de Rakt

Writing is hard. Writing for search engines is even harder. What about writing for the search engines and writing for sales simultaneously? Is that even doable? Because, in the end, you want to write copy that ranks in the search engines AND convinces people to buy your stuff, contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or return to your website. In this post, I’ll share some of my discoveries in the field of sales copywriting. Also, I’ll show you that copywriting for sales and SEO is perfectly compatible (and not even that hard).

Why sales copywriting is useful

A while ago, I attended a workshop by sales copywriting specialist Amy Harrison. At the time, I was a bit skeptical. I am a writer, I know about writing, so what were the chances I would hear something new? I was totally blown away by Amy’s story, though.

Having a sales perspective on a text is very useful. And I’ll tell you why. Although I write a lot of blog posts and like doing research, I do not particularly enjoy writing marketing texts or sales copy. But of course, this is important too. Because it’s what actually pays the bills. But more importantly (at least for SEO addicts like me), copywriting for sales is also a very useful SEO strategy.

Focus on your audience’s needs

Your sales copy should address the needs of your audience. What problem (that the audience encounters) does your product solve? To give an example: in Yoast’s case, our audience wants more traffic to their site, higher rankings in Google, and perhaps more sales. The problem our audience has is that they don’t have as many visitors as they would like to have on their site. They’re not outranking their competition yet. These problems should be addressed directly in our sales copy. On Yoast.com, however, our sales copy used to be largely product-driven. In other words, this copy mainly consisted of a list of features of our products.

We actually rewrote parts of the sales copy on Yoast.com, trying to really keep our audience and their problems in mind (and focus less on our products and what features are in it). Writing in such a way – with room for the problems your audience encounters – is a very good SEO strategy. Because you’re focusing on the problems your audience has. Most likely, these problems will be what they’re searching for when they start their search for a solution. Thinking about the problems your product or service can solve, will result in good sales copy as well as in SEO-friendly copy.

Read more: 8 practical tips to engage your online audience »

Use words that appeal to your audience

In our ‘old’ product-focused sales copy, we used the word ‘optimize’ quite often. We just really like that word. But optimizing can mean so many different things. Optimizing for the search engines, optimizing for readability, optimizing the UX of your website, optimizing the images on your site. Is the word optimizing really appealing to our audience? Is it the word they would use? Could we be more specific? What do we actually mean by optimizing? Of course, we know that with ‘optimizing for search engines’, we mean ‘ranking in Google’. And that with ‘optimizing for readability’ we actually mean ‘writing a text that people would want to read.’ But does our audience know this as well? Perhaps we should use these specific phrases instead of ‘optimizing’.

Sometimes the words you’re using in your copy, aren’t the words that your audience is using to define their problems. If that’s the case, your words won’t be appealing to your audience and they won’t recognize the solution to their problems in your sales copy. The text will be less convincing to your users, than if you write a text with words people can relate too. In addition to that, a text with words that are not used by your audience, won’t get much traffic. But, a text with words your audience actually uses, will definitely result in more traffic to your site.

How to find out what words they’re using

To get started with either SEO or sales copywriting, you should get to know your audience. You have to find out which words they’re using, how they describe their problems, and how they begin their quest in Google. Talking to them in person or online could be a great way to start. If you’re using reviews or testimonials, these could be a really helpful source too. What words do your most satisfied customers use to describe their experience with your product, service, or website? What things, elements or features of your product did they like the most? These words, these things, should definitely be included in your copy and also give you insight into the keywords you should focus on.

This is where sales copywriting and writing for SEO come together. By researching what words your audience uses and how they describe their problems, you’re able to write copy that’s findable and relatable for your audience. By focusing on these words, you will be able to rank on terms people actually search for and provide them with an answer they want. As discussed above, getting to know your audience is a great starting point to get an idea of the focus keywords they use. Not only does this provide you with the right input for your sales copy, but it’s also one of the first steps of proper keyword research for SEO.

Conclusion: SEO and sales copywriting

Focusing on your sales copy isn’t just beneficial for your sales, it’s also a very useful SEO strategy. Because good sales copy should address the needs of your audience, and when you address the needs of your audience you’re probably using terms they’re searching for. To get an insight into the needs (and problems) of your audience, you should get to know them by conducting audience research. This will help you find the words your audience uses and by adopting these words, you can make sure your copy is findable and relatable!

Keep reading: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

Or, if you really want to write engaging copy that ranks well, check out our SEO copywriting training, which is part of our Yoast SEO Academy training subscription!

Take me to Yoast SEO Academy now!

The post SEO copywriting and writing for sales appeared first on Yoast.

Ask Yoast: nofollow layered navigation links?

Joost de Valk

If you have a big eCommerce site with lots of products, layered navigation can help your users to narrow down their search results. Layered or faceted navigation is an advanced way of filtering by providing groups of filters for (many) product attributes. In this filtering process, you might create a lot of URLs though, because the user will be able to filter and thereby group items in many ways, and those groups will all be available on separate URLs. So what should you do with all these URLs? Do you want Google to crawl them all?

In this Ask Yoast, we’ll answer a question from Daniel Jacobsen:

“Should I nofollow layered navigation links? And if so, why? Are there any disadvantages of this?”

Check out the video or read the answer below!

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Layered navigation links

Read this transcript to learn how to deal with layered or faceted navigation links:

“The question is: “Why would you want to do that?” If you have too many URLs, so if you have a layered or a faceted navigation that has far too many options -creating billions of different types of URLs for Google to crawl – then probably yes. At the same time you need to ask yourself: “Why does my navigation work that way?” And, “Can we make it any different?” But in a lot of eCommerce systems that’s very hard. So in those cases adding a nofollow to those links, does actually help to prevent Google from indexing each and every one of the versions of your site.

I’ve worked on a couple of sites with faceted navigation that had over a billion variations in URLs, even though they only had like 10,000 products. If that’s the sort of problem you have, then yes, you need to nofollow them and maybe you even need to use your robots.txt file to exclude some of those variants. So specific stuff that you don’t want indexed, for instance, if you don’t want color indexed, you could do a robots.txt line that says: “Disallow for everything that has color in the URL”. At that point you strip down what Google crawls and what it thinks is important. The problem with that is, that if Google has links pointing at that version from somewhere else, those links don’t count for your site’s ranking either.

So it’s a bit of a quid pro quo, where you have to think about what is the best thing to do. It’s a tough decision. I really would suggest getting an experienced technical SEO to look at your site if it really is a problem, because it’s not a simple cut-and-paste solution that works the same for every site.

Good luck!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers! Need help with SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘Internal search for online shops: an essential asset’ »