Dan Certain In Utilizing Buying Guides For website positioning

In Part one with Dan Shure We’ve followed his previous advice on Google Core updates and what you can do to make your website better after a core update. In the second part we talk about using buyer guides in your SEO strategy.

Buying guides for SEO content:

Dan Shure has great success creating buyer guides that are medium to low funnel content. A buying guide is somewhere between the category page or blog post and a product page. The buying guide is very transaction-oriented. The buying guides are sometimes higher than expected. To his early surprise, he said the buyer’s guides for the keywords would rank the bottom funnel. You have to find the place to put your guide between the wirecutters of the world and your category page, Dan explained.

Although Google tries to clear out the search results with fewer results from the same domain, Google may show all three for the same keyword phrase in the same search results.

To create buyer guides:

Buying guide pages are created with content, links to product categories, your top products, and product widgets on the page. They’re a mix of product and category pages, he said. This applies not only to products, but also to services.

The buyer guides tend to rank on purchase-related keywords, and then the category pages rank on keywords for sale without having to change anything. He said it was like Google got a better understanding of the site and architecture.

In addition, users react differently to these shopping guide pages than they do to category pages. This is interesting because sometimes he can have content on a category page that users aren’t reading it and it’s like Google doesn’t rank them for that content. But if you move that content to a blog post, Google will rate it.

When do you know you need the contents of the buying guide:

Dan said you know you should try creating buying guide content when your customers are shopping, browsing, or looking for a specific product – then you need a buying guide. He said every industry where consumers research or educate themselves about what they sell deserves a buying guide.

As for the number of buying guides, it depends on the company, its products, and if it works for you. Slowly grow this buying guide and take your time. Remember that the contents of these buying guides are virtually entirely handwritten.

Dan doesn’t optimize these buying guides for featured snippets, he believes that Google will eventually discard featured snippets. However, he noticed that some of these buying guides can be viewed in Google Discover.

Learn more about Dan Shure at Developing SEO.

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