This post will explore how ecommerce retailers can most effectively display product question and answer content to get the best results on Google through proper page schema, structured data, and qualifying for getting that content displayed as rich results on Google.

What is the SEO goal for Product Q&A Content?

Potential customers are asking questions related to a product purchase every day on Google. If you’re an ecommerce merchant, your goal is to have content that fulfills that content demand and is displayed in results to drive traffic to your site and converts the sale.

Take a look at this great example of how this can be effectively done on a search result where product Q&A content results in a featured snippet result on Google.

That result is simply content that was created by the ecommerce merchant answering questions that were posted by their current visitors. The content has been published and distributed in a way that Google recognizes and in turn, other customers who are asking similar product-related questions on Google see that content, see the product that is related to the answer, and then is driven to the purchase.

What is the Value of Search Visitors to Product Q&A Content?

Ecommerce retailers see that the value of search visitors to Q&A content can notably impact their store through increased overall traffic and more valuable customers coming to their store through search.

These results show how relevant searches that match product Q&A content are, and where those potential customers are within the marketing funnel as they’re looking for product related information on Google.

Also, as you continue to answer questions from your existing visitors, it continues to grow brand new visitors to your site year over year. Here is a chart that shows only organic visitors only to Q&A content landing pages over several years.

As you continue to publish value product Q&A content, that fills the demand of thousands of inquiries every month as potential customers ask similar questions through Google and are led to that content.

How to Distribute Product Q&A Content for SEO

Online retailers with traffic will recognize as soon as they integrate a product question and answer tool into their product pages, they’ll start to receive questions about the products for them to answer. As they have their team (and sometimes other customers) post answers to the questions, then it’s a matter of distributing that content in a way that takes advantage of that content to get results in conversion and search.

Questions and Answers on the Product Page

The most obvious place to ensure effective distribution of Q&A on your site is on the product pages. This not only helps convert more visitors to paying customers but also ensures that Google can recognize that content on your page and you’ll start to see your product page coming up for queries related to that content.

See this example of a product page coming up as a result of the product question and answer content on the page as a customer asks ”Best performing Chamois for a 100 mile ride?” into Google:

Google recognizes that the product Q&A content matches a question that was asked by a previous customer on the page, and as a result the product page pulls up in the results.

There are ways of identifying structured data for Q&A content which we’ll cover below, but for your product page you’ll be using the Product Schema which doesn’t currently support identifying the specific Q&A content on the page. As product Q&A is becoming a staple on product pages we do expect that to be worked into the product page schema…but until then it’s enough to simply get your product Q&A content displaying on your product page which will get you results like mentioned above.

Product Question and Answer Landing Pages

You’ll notice when you view one of Best Buy’s product pages, that they display the most popular Q&A content on the product pages but each of the product question titles is actually a link that leads to a page dedicated to each Q&A thread.

Those landing pages get picked up by Google as they’re recognized as a page dedicated 100% to that product-related question…which leads to results like this on Google:

If this is optimized appropriately for Google and you’re ensuring quality answers are being posted to address those product questions, you’ll start to see that content showing up as featured snippets in Google’s results and many times showing the related product image along with the content.

These landing pages ensure that you have a page dedicated to ensuring each specific product query given the attention it should get, because other customers all over the world are asking similar questions on Google…and Google is looking for the content that most effectively answers the question.

It’s great to have some of that content on your product page, but when you start getting into having more than 10 Q&A pairs that have been posted per product….you’ll not want to publish all of that content on your product page to display by default. Sometimes that Q&A content gets up into the hundreds of Q&A pairs per product over time and you don’t want to lose the value of that content that you’ve created. Expanding that content onto other pages is the way to ensure all your valuable Q&A content is available for Google to crawl and display in results.

Product Q&A Schema for Google’s Rich Results

Google recognizes structured content related to product Q&A with the QAPage schema, so you want to take advantage of that for your product question and answer content when it makes sense.

The QApage schema is specifically for Q&A content pages where multiple answers can be submitted by a community of users, so it’s perfect for ecommerce merchants who want to not only answer questions themselves…but also want to get other customers who have purchased a product involved in providing answers. If appropriately executed, Google will be able to recognize the structured content on the page in order to identify the question, the suggested answers, the accepted answer, etc.

If you enable this schema for your Q&A landing pages…you can use the Google Rich Results Checker to ensure it appropriately picks up the structured data within the page. The results will look something like this if only one answer has been submitted to the question:

If more than one answer is available, Google shows a carousel of the potential answers to ensure they click into and view the answer that they find the most valuable as shown here:

The power of rich results is that it communicates to the person searching that Google has recognized that they’re asking a question…and showing within the results content that is specifically catered towards answering that question. This helps increase CTR and leads the user effectively to the answers which then drive product conversion.

How to Add Product Q&A to Your Ecommerce Store

Answerbase powers product Q&A for ecommerce merchants to ensure they can achieve the goals laid out above, and get the most out of their product question and answer content. We encourage you to Schedule a Consultation to discuss what product question and answer content can do for your store.

If you’d like to dig into the technology that powers effective product Q&A, you can also Start a Free Trial of Answerbase to review the platform and preview the tools to integrate into your storefront.

The post How to get Rich Results for Product Q&A Content on your Ecommerce Store for SEO appeared first on Answerbase.

Why Should You Care About Internal Links?

By setting aside an hour or two to add internal links, you can make your website more valuable in Google’s eyes, giving you a boost over your competition.

Internal linking may sound like something mystical, but it’s actually pretty simple. It’s just linking one page to another on your website. They’re called internal links because they’re all located inside your own website.

Seriously, that’s it: a link in the text of your pages that points to another page on your site.

What makes adding a few links so powerful? By pointing several pages at one really important page on your website, you’re helping Google understand the architecture of your website better, and which pages are the most important and relevant. Search engines love this kind of organization!

Adding internal links may not be exciting or complex, but it’s important and powerful. How do you figure out where to put an internal link? Let’s dig into the details.

3 Steps to Adding Internal Links to Your Website:

#1 – CONTENT CREATION & ORGANIZATION

You need to have at least a few pages of content on your website to get started. This content can be: articles, blogs, FAQs, product descriptions, customer reviews, or video posts on your website.

If you don’t yet have a lot of content on your website, then your first mission is to create some. Creating content can be overwhelming, but here’s how to get started:

• Brainstorm some ideas for content your customers could use. Making a list of your top 5 frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) is a great place to start. You could write an article or make a short video to answer each FAQ. Now you have a piece of content! Keep going!
• Once you have these 5 pieces of content, publish each piece to its own blog, web page, or FAQ entry on your website. Enlist the help of your web developer if needed. Each piece of content should have its own URL (web address).

Once you have a lot of great content on your website, then your next steps will be to determine which pieces of content should point to which other pieces of content. Is one piece of content, such as a product explainer page, more important than the others? If so, all your supporting content should point to the most important page, like this:

I’ll show you exactly how to add these links in the next step.

#2 – ADDING LINKS WITH ANCHOR TEXT

Now, you have all of these pages with great, helpful content so you can assist your site’s visitors – and Google – in understanding how your whole website works together.

Try to link from one section of your website to another. For example, when you post a new blog, include a link to the product page you mentioned in your blog. When you post a new product, include a link over to your FAQs page about how to assemble and use the product.

This cross-linking creates a web effect from one section to another on your website. The more you point to the important pages (like your main product collections), the more Google can understand those are the most important pages on your website.

When including these links, you should use anchor text, which is a word (or words) that you use as a clickable link in your content in place of typing the full URL (web address). Anchor text makes your content more readable.

Let’s use a real world example from a site I worked on, www.stickdulcimer.com. The site is focused on selling Stick Dulcimers, which are simple stringed instruments…similar to a guitar. The goal for this site is to get the website ranking for anyone who is searching on Google for “Stick Dulcimer” and related queries with those key words within them.

See these two approaches in linking to that site, one using just the link and then one using “anchor text” which Google values much more for the purposes of helping to drive their search results.

• No Anchor Text: “Shop our instruments at https://stickdulcimer.com”
• With Anchor Text: “Shop our Stick Dulcimer instruments”

Do you notice how the anchor text stands in place of the URL, but you can still click on it to get to the page? You still get the benefit of having an internal link, but your content is way easier to read for your website visitors and much more valuable to Google to understand what the destination page is about! If you need help creating anchor text links in your articles, talk to your web developer.

Your anchor text should always include one of your keywords. In our example above, we included the keyword “Stick Dulcimer” in the anchor text to communicate the product keyword we’re going after.

Adding a relevant keyword to your anchor text helps Google understand the content and architecture of your website better, and which pages are the most important and relevant. As I mentioned earlier: Search engines love when you organize your content for them. They reward this effort with better ranking for your website. Hooray!

#3 – Keeping Up With Your Internal Links

Once you get the hang of adding internal links, it’s easy! However, it’s not a “one-and-done” task. This can become overwhelming.

Here’s how to fight the overwhelm. The key is to dedicate a little time each week to work on internal links. You’ll want to keep a log of the various content you’ve created and identify where internal linking opportunities are.

For example, take 30 minutes to scan through last year’s blogs to see if you forgot a place you could link to a more recent post. Or if you’re posting new blogs regularly, add 5 extra minutes to your posting process to add an internal link from your new content to your most important page that it relates to.

Better yet, automate some of your efforts. There are tools available that automatically can recognize what pages are related to other pages on your site, and create those internal links automatically. For example, Answerbase’s ecommerce product questions and answers tool does this for ecommerce stores. When a new product Q&A page is created from a customer question and answer combination, Answerbase automatically creates relevant links going back to the related product page with the appropriate anchor text, automatically creating internal links for Google to crawl. If you own an ecommerce site, take advantage of easy tools like this in order to put your internal link building on auto-pilot and see the SEO benefits over time as that content continues to grow.

Wrapping Up:

Internal linking can sound intimidating. But as I mentioned earlier, if you just put in the time to regularly comb your website for linking opportunities or put the appropriate tools in place to automate it, you can make some serious headway in your SEO efforts. This will pay off big time when you start passing your competition in Google’s rankings!

If you have more questions about how to implement internal links on your website, feel free to reach out to us at Trigger.

In the meantime, happy link building!

Guest Post by: Ryan Pryor from Trigger, a Digital Marketing Agency for Ecommerce Businesses.

The post How to Add Internal Links: An easy way to maximize your content for better Google rankings appeared first on Answerbase.