In John Mueller’s hangout on 09/24/2021, a webmaster was concerned about how their product section for their green tea website is ranking.
Basically, their product pages are not ranking.
The first time the webmaster asked this question a few months ago, John’s suggestion was to focus on internal linking.
Again, he recommends internal linking as an avenue to pursue so they can increase the internal linking equity throughout the site.
He also says it could be the queries and how they are chosen or optimized throughout the site.
John also explains that it may be a good idea to make it easier for people to move from the informational pages to the product pages on the site.
It’s also possible that it will take a lot of time to build up, and there’s really no way to avoid that part.
This discussion happens at the 3:28 mark in the video.
John Mueller 09/24/2021 Hangout Transcript
So mine, my business is around green teas, herbal teas. And I’m I don’t think you’ll be able to recall as much, but just to give you some background. So we have a small blog section, we do useful blogs, and we are happy with the way they work in terms of it’s kind of directly proportional to the amount of effort we put in. So then that ranks right away. More or less our experience, that it’s related to the expound style stuff in the article. So we try to kind of collate all the information possible by sourcing out information from all the research papers and authoritative websites. So that is working well.
My product pages do not rank in this is the question I asked you last time. So your one piece of suggestion was to focus on internal linking. So for example, if we have a blog on weight loss green teas, for example. So we’re only linking to that very product itself. Because whenever we write a blog we have this on our agenda to only cater to one topic, one kind of product. And we don’t link to random products, we link to just one product from one blog, we will have a huge blog section, I think there will be around 10 to 12 blog pieces. But all of them work well for us. Oh, we have product structured data in the search pages, I can see that it’s correctly picking up the reviews, quantity, item price everything. And we have enough amount of text, especially compared to the product pages that are ranking. We may not have as many backlinks to our product pages. But when I do a comparison of other websites, I don’t see that a lot of them have backlinks. At this point, I’m kind of lost…some point. I need your help in that direction.
John 6:03
Okay. It’s very hard to understand you because you’re breaking up in between. So I think what you’re asking is you have a blog section with blog posts, which is ranking appropriately. And you have product pages on your site as well. And those product pages are not ranking as well as you would like. Is that correct?
Webmaster 2 6:30
Yes, yes.
John 6:34
Okay, so I think the aspect with internal linking that you talked about, I think that continues to be important. It sounds like you’re already doing some of that. One of the things also to keep in mind is that for some types of queries, we try to understand what the intent is behind the query. And we try to figure out if someone is looking for information about a product, or if they’re looking to buy a product, and then we might try to show one kind of page or a different kind of page.
And it might be I don’t know, your queries and your site. But it might be that we’re interpreting the queries that are landing on those pages as more almost like information-seeking queries that people want information about a specific kind of product. Rather than that, they’re looking to buy one specific product.
And that’s something that you can’t really change on your side because it’s essentially based on what we assume people are trying to find. And the best thing that you can do there is just to make it as easy as possible for people to get to your products, so that you have a clear call to action on your blog posts, for example, so that it’s easier for people who land on the informational blog posts to move on to the product page as well if they want to buy something. And it might be that a lot of these people are just looking for information and they’re not looking to buy and then they might not follow that link.
But that’s kind of something that’s almost a bit out of our control, I guess, what people are actually looking for. With regards to maybe the competition that’s also appearing in search, I think it’s tricky to simplify it to like just the number of words on a page and the number of links that these articles have. Because we use lots and lots of factors in search. And it’s something that sometimes just takes a lot of time to be built up.
And sometimes it it takes a lot of work to build that relationship with your audience to make it so that, I don’t know, that they’re happy to go back to your website that they also recommend your website that it’s not so much like only the links that you placed are reasonable for your website, but actually, people are buying things and they’re reviewing things on your website, they’re giving you information and they’re recommending your your business, your products to other people. And that sometimes just takes a lot of time.
