Good Ranking But Low Sale Product Pages - What Would You Do?

[robert76]

Have a fairly large number of product pages on an ecommerce site that rank well in Google but we sell very few of the items and each year it diminishes a little more as Amazon grabs more and more of the business. These are first page rankings, usually below Amazon, then perhaps the manufacturer, sometimes followed by another retailer, then us. I'm trying to determine whether I should leave them or delete. The cost to leave them is minimal but I would prefer to concentrate my efforts on the items/pages that do sell.

This is a seasoned site which was hit hard by the first Panda. What would you do? Am I better off in Google with 1000 products/pages of which 100 products sell, or 100 product/pages?

[dipper]

Firstly, if they are ranking well then they are not panda affected. What makes you think that the high ranking product pages are? Are you 100% sure it was panda? - if so, then this can be fixed with improving content, unique, quality, etc. IF the specific page is not ranking, then it might be panda. In this case, try running a copyscape on the entire site to find duplicates externally. Siteliner to find internal duplicates. Fix, rewrite if necessary.

Secondly, if they are selling, even a few products then why would you ever delete them?

Thirdly, if you are losing more and more, then you need to make these high ranking pages convert better (design/layout, descriptions, data, reviews, etc). Take on Amazon one product at a time (in your niche).

Not every page needs to sell to be helping support and bolster a site which sells other widgets - think of it as 900 themed support pages for 100 selling pages. There is nothing wrong with that! Google don't know (for search ranking purposes) how many sales you get of a product (phone, email sales etc).

[Nutterum]

Depending on the niche and competition, often First Page is just not going to cut it. Often the difference between position 6 and 60 is minimal. In addition you need to explore whether Google shop is stealing traffic altogether from the SERPs, or whether there are other online channels where the real customers dwell? Last but not least, seasonality. If you sell for example winter clothes and it's summer, you might have quite a few window shoppers but only few real customers.

[JS_Harris]

Every URL has a history. Since these are not directly hurting you in any way I'd leave them, there may come a day when you want to rank for whichever terms they rank for and it would be easier to have these to work with than to start fresh urls. I'd increase the value of these urls to your company by designating them as test urls where you perform minor changes on a very limited scale(2-3 pages at a time then wait a month or more) to see if you can gain in rank and traffic with them.

The real question is... are they really not hurting your site? If any of them are unintentionally outranking a better page on your site for any given keyword then they might be. I'd perform an internal link audit to find out.

[robert76]

dipper - yes, 100% Panda 1 hit site. Panda didn't really have anything to do with my question but I was pointing it out. I think we've gone as far as we can with trying to make these pages convert better and if we did further work on them I don't think we would see much in the way of ROI on it. From the answers I'm reading, keep these poor performing but well ranking pages as support for the pages that are generating $. Thanks to you and nutterum and JS Harris for your advice.

[Nutterum]

@robert76 - I always go for the keyword cloud support approach. Say you have 30 topical variants of your money keyword. Making complementary content that interlinks to the well ranking $ page can be a good way to try push for volume without changing much on the landing page itself. If you manage to attract enough window-shoppers and track them properly via Tag Manager or other tools you employ, you can segment them further for banner nurturing campaigns. Note that the complementary content pages can have a call to action for e-mail subscription so after some of the visitors who return via banners or adwords remarketing can be placed in to an automated e-mail marketing campaign. Usually this 3-way approach can increase overal conversion numbers by 10-15% if done right. If you believe your audience dwells on social media like FB or Instagram - be sure to add additional re-marketing campaigns there, resulting in users getting targeted to your funnel no matter the referrer.

I do want to add the disclaimer that this additional effort can be costly if you have a diverse product portfolio, in which case you can try with a small test and if you see good ROI, expand with the knowledge of your customer lifetime value.

Hope I helped with some ideas.