Optimized Product Boxes Can Save Your SEO!
Too many links inside a product box waste link juice and weaken your category SEO. By making the whole box a single link, you reduce links and boost rankings.
Ask a Question (members only)
Optimized Product Boxes Can Save Your SEO!” Transcript
Why Link Juice Matters for SEO
Many online stores don’t take care of link juice and others spend months to optimize the hell out of it. In the case of link juice and SEO, ignorance is not bliss. Optimizing your link juice will surely result in better rankings in Google, so it’s worth the effort. Most steps required to optimize link juice are complicated, but the one I will show you today is a quick fix that is overlooked by way too many online stores.
Analyzing a Typical Product Box
Let’s take a look at a typical product box. If we move our mouse from top to bottom of the box, we can notice that the mouse hand is shown if we hover over the image. This indicates that the image is linked. If we move below the image, the mouse hand becomes a standard mouse pointer again. Let’s move slowly to the bottom. Here is the mouse hand again. So the product title is linked too. Let’s continue to the bottom. The mouse hand is gone. Let’s move on to the button. Ok, the button is also linked. Now let’s hover over the wishlist icon, again linked. So far we counted four links inside one product box. Sometimes the price is linked too and we get five links. On average 24 products are displayed in categories. If we multiply that by 5, we get 120 links only to products via product boxes. That is way too much. If we leave it as is, we weaken our categories, subcategories and all other links on category pages.
The Simple Fix That Can Save Your Link Juice
So instead of that, we can instruct our developers to make the whole product box just one link, so the whole surface is clickable. To be able to do that we need to remove the add to wishlist icon. In most online stores, it is so rarely used, we can get rid of it. The right place for that icon is on the product page and not on the category page. Not sure? Just take a look at big online stores like Amazon and you will see. Now only the add to cart button is in our way. In most online stores the Add to cart button would be more useful if it said “See product” instead of “Add to cart”, but it is best to measure how often it is being clicked and then act upon that data. If you want to keep the Add to cart button, then make the surface above the product box just one big clickable area with one link to the product. And if you decide you don’t need it, make the whole box clickable with one product. Voila! Now you have only 24 links instead of 120 and have saved probably 30% or more link juice. Now you can expect in the next four weeks to see your categories ranking higher and getting you more sales.
Optimize the Link Juice With Just One Click
If you want to optimize the complicated part of link juice with just one click, you can try our Link Juice Control plugin. The link is in the description. And if you want to know why breadcrumbs are so important for SEO and how to optimize them, watch this video next.
