Give one reason why publishing products on your own site first before publishing to other retailers improves SEO, or why it doesn’t.
To help you see why publishing products on your own website first may or may not improve SEO, we asked marketing experts and webmasters this question for their best insights.
From ensuring your site is part of your multichannel strategy to building on relationships with your own readers first, there are several reasons why publishing on your own site first before publishing it elsewhere may improve your search ranking and product visibility online.
Here are 11 reasons to publish products on your own site first:
- Ensures Your Site is Part of Your Multichannel Strategy
- Garners Links To Your Own Product Pages
- Gives You Control Over the Entire Customer Experience
- Allows You To Optimize Images On Your Website
- Increases the Number of Curious Website Visitors
- Helps Improve Rankings on Search Engines
- Helps You Maintain Content Ownership
- Keeps Your Content Unique
- Prioritizes Your Own Product Page Before Outsourcing
- Gives Your Site More Authority
- Builds on Relationships With Your Own Readers First
Ensures Your Site is Part of Your Multichannel Strategy
A multichannel sales strategy increases your reach and revenue potential. Ensure your site is part of this by listing optimized products on your site. Ideally, your site should rank for terms related to your product and these listings will aid in that effort. Because you don’t have as much control over your customers when selling through third-party platforms, strengthening your own site and having products readily available on it is key.
Claire Routh, Markitors
Garners Links To Your Own Product Pages
Use marketplaces for additional marketing reach if your website already has a well-established Domain Authority. The upside of using marketplace platforms is reaching many more customers you may have otherwise not reached.
While the SEO rule of thumb is to garner maximum links back to your own product pages and website, an established business should leverage marketplace traffic and visibility to continue building their audience after reaching a comfortable Google ranking for their website.
SEO ranking depends on the age, the number of links to and from, and the crawlability of a website. Small businesses should focus on building their ranking, but established companies should try to grow the largest audience they can for their brand.
Zach Goldstein, Public Rec
Gives You Control Over the Entire Customer Experience
If you publish your products on your own website first, you control the entire customer experience. This includes the design of your product pages, the content of those pages, how customers can purchase your products, and what information they receive about your products.
You also won’t have to fear duplicate content. In addition, it will be good for SEO if you get relevant links to your new product pages from third-party vendor sites that post your new products later than you do. As a bonus, you can also keep all customer data and contact information collected on your site.
Julia Ivanova, Regex SEO
Allows You To Optimize Images On Your Website
When you publish products on your website, you have control over the visuals. SEO rankings value high-quality images and videos as well as keywords, and when you publish products, you can include optimized images that help customers find your brand first. You can also capitalize on AR technology, giving website visitors the chance to view your product in 3D, an opportunity they likely wouldn’t have through a third-party retailer.
Ankur Goyal, Coterie
Increases the Number of Curious Website Visitors
Consumers who discover your products through a separate retail site might want to visit your company website directly to learn more about your products resulting in boosted domain traffic. For example, when I find a product from a brand I’ve never purchased or heard of, I navigate to the brand’s website.
Usually, the product page on the brand’s website tends to have more detail and supporting information than the product listing on a retail website such as Nordstrom. Always offer products on your company website first before selling with other retailers, as it will increase the number of visitors to your site.
Amrita Saigal, Kudos
Helps Improve Rankings on Search Engines
By listing a product on your own website before adding it to third-party vendor websites, it allows Google and other search engines to index your content as unique before it crawls and indexes the products elsewhere.
This canonicalization means that Google will see your product as the original post and will be less likely to allow your third-party product listings to outrank your website –– even if they have a vastly superior domain authority (i.e. Etsy).
Connor Hewson, Assured Marketing
Helps You Maintain Content Ownership
You need to keep ownership of the published content and the traffic you generate from them. If you publish your products on a different platform before your own, there is the worst-case scenario of you losing access to the content because most platforms technically own all the content published there.
Search engines may also mistake the other sites as the original source of your content, especially if there is no proper attribution to you. Thus, it is most sensible to publish your products on your site and require all other sites to put up a canonical tag linking back to you to maintain ownership of your content and the traffic it will generate.
Collen Clark, Schmidt & Clark, LLP
Keeps Your Content Unique
We believe all channels should have unique content. The reason for this is that Google does not like duplicate content. It causes confusion, and typically the site with a higher domain authority will outrank your page if they both share the same content. Besides, each channel is created uniquely and requires different, nuanced content to succeed on that particular channel. Not all channels are created equally and content shouldn’t just be sprayed to all channels equally either!
Chad Rubin, Profasee
Prioritizes Your Own Product Page Before Outsourcing
To get the best SEO value, you want to drive traffic to your website as much as possible, especially from backlinks from other websites. Having users purchase your products on other websites does virtually nothing for your SEO, so prioritize your own product page before outsourcing.
SEO is all about driving traffic from other parts of the web to your own domain. If you want the most exposure for your time and money, you need to focus on optimizing your website for users and Google crawlers and then getting your domain URL published on as many other high-DR sites as possible. So make your own product page before sending out your product information to other marketplaces to market! You may make sales on other platforms, but you will ultimately get the best ROI from investing in your own website.
Kevin Miller, kevinmiller.com
Gives Your Site More Authority
Focusing on your own website first gives you more opportunities to increase its authority. It provides visitors with more content to help educate them about your brand and make it more trustworthy, which greatly enhances the user experience. This also improves your chances of earning backlinks from credible sites in your niche, boosting your SEO score, and making your business more competitive.
Milo Cruz, Freelance Writing Jobs
Builds on Relationships With Your Own Readers First
One of the most beneficial elements of sharing content on your own site, before you start guest posting, is the ability to build on the relationships with your own readers first. When you are the person (or website) where your readers find their answers, you get brownie points. It’s all about relationships when it comes to your readers.
Bobby Bruno, Mad Marketing
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