Episode 038 - online seller
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Welcome to SEO Day Studio with your hosts, the Findability Queen Denise Millet, and the entrepreneur Whisperer, Kim White. This is a space to hear the questions that fellow entrepreneurs have about SEO and get them answered. So many discussions involving techy topics like SEO are loaded with jargon and unnecessary complexity.
So much so that anyone outside the tech industry has difficulty getting to the real meeting inside the information. Denise believes that every entrepreneur can benefit from search engines. Once they hear how they work in a clear and straightforward way. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs get the content and they spend hours creating included in search engines.
So when their customers search online, they're findable because she believes if they can't find you, they can't do business with you. So stay tuned. The fun starts now.
Welcome to the SEO Day podcast. I am the official mailbag keeper, Kim White, and I am here with the Queen of all findability, Denise Millet.
Denise, thank you for joining me in the studio today because I can't wait to hear your answers to some incredible SEO questions.
Thank you so much for being here with me again today. I appreciate it. So
you're so welcome and I'm really excited about this week's letter that we dove into the mail mailbag and came out with, it's actually a friend of both of ours and.
He is asking some questions. He's an online seller who is doing in fun things. We'll just say that and we didn't know for sure. He didn't give us permission in the letter, so we're not going to call him out because you can stay anonymous on the podcast if you want to, but you know who you are, I hope. Let's just say that.
So question number one. If I want to sell something on my website, do I put the item on the front page of the website? Will it get into search engines that way?
Good question. The thing that search engines do is they read a page at a time and they take that page that they're reading and try to create the listing for that page in their catalog.
So if you think about a front page of your website has more than just the item you might be talking about, it's not really just about the item. The front page is about your business or is about you as a seller or is about other things. So my answer is I would put the item on its own page so that the search engines can create a listing just for that item.
That's the way you can get it into search engines. As opposed to adding it on somewhere else, and then it will just become a part of that other page, which isn't really about the item. So if that front page isn't about the item, then it doesn't belong there.
Great answer, Denise.
Thank you.
So his next question is, I have an eBay store.
Do the items in my store show up in search engines automatically.
No, the store there is an entry for the store in eBay by the name of your store. But, and I know when you create a store on eBay, because I have one myself, that your description that you put in there, the first 160 characters or whatever, just like any other page, shows up under the name and it's, shown on eBay.
But that's it. What's the content within it is not search, read or searched on, it's just the store itself. So that's more than you get if you just have an eBay account. If you have an account, you don't show up at all. That's not shown up, but the store gives you that listing there that you could link to, but it is definitely not read underneath that.
Gotcha. Well, question number three is, is it better to connect my eBay store to my website or put my things for sale on the page?
You know what? This is going to be spicy here, so I guess we have to think about what it is you're selling. How long you're going to be selling, what your purposes are. If you have an eBay store, then you're invested in being there more than just a one-off listing, right? So you're going to have. Many things that you might be selling.
the store itself will get linked and you could naturally link your website under your name to that store to get traffic to go there, which is great. You can still put items of note that you want to get more traffic to. On a separate page or, and then point them to the item in the store. Point them to the store to see the item or however you want to do that.
I guess what you have to decide is what are people searching for? Are they searching for, that specific item that you think is really going to great, create more traffic for you? Is it something popular? Is it something that they're really looking for? Then it will, from your website, you could create a, an entry in the search engine that'll point them to the store, or you could actually sell it yourself if you have a way to do that on your website, right?
But that's a lot of maintenance, right? So if it's a, if it's an item that talk a different strategy, if that item isn't going to last that long, if you're going to sell it fast, having a page for it, then when that is sold, then that page is going to be an invalid link. On your website, right? So yes, you can do that.
And if it's an expensive item or something that's sought after that, you know, people are searching for when they go to find things, absolutely. But if it's like listing every item you have out there, then that's a lot of maintenance to do. So you have to weigh the, how long it's going to last, what you're going to do when it sells, all those things.
I love it. Well, let's head over to a word from our sponsor for today.
This episode is brought to you by the findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel youtube.com/@findabilityqueen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day.
Welcome back to the SEO Day podcast with our findability queen, herself, Denise, Millet. Denise. Same, same sweet person, same sweet friend that's an online seller. Has another question. If I list an item on my website and it sells, what happens to the item in search engines after.
We just started to talk about that a little bit.
I covered that in the last question. I guess I gave it away. Well, you have a broken link if the page, well, if the page is there with your item on it and you got all the information on your website, it'll be there as until you take it away. The question is you can't just delete that page because it's a broken link.
So that's something we don't like to do to our visitors at all. We don't want to date and switch them. Try to send them somewhere and have it fail. That is, most people don't go beyond that. They go, okay, I don't like you back. Go find somebody else. So maybe what you have to decide is if the title of that page stays generic enough that you can then add different items to it as things change.
Right. So if, let's say it was a pair of sneakers, a nice pair of popular sneakers on there, and the page was called My Favorite Shoes or something like that. The title was about the sneakers, the headlines, the texts, the pictures, but then the sneaker cell. Well, you can edit that page. Put something else there.
Leave the name of the page the same, so it's, the link stays the same, but you change the description, you change the title, you change the images. So the next time the search engines read, they'll update the information on that page because it'll show that it was changed. So it'll update, it'll take a little while, it won't happen overnight, but you can update it so you don't want to delete pages.
You don't want to create something that's going to expire, and if you do put something on your site and it sells, you have to update that it was sold, because that'll make people really angry if they try to go buy something and they're super excited and they can't get it anymore, so they'll be not happy. So you just have to manage it.
Great way to reuse and repurpose though. Thank you. Yes. So our last question from our sweet friend is, do Facebook marketplace items show up in search engines?
From what I know or have seen, you don't get an individual line item listing for your Facebook marketplace thing. However, if somebody does a search and a search engine and says like, jigsaw puzzles, Facebook Marketplace and their town, they'll get a listing of all the jigsaw puzzle matches on Facebook marketplace, buy that regional will be in there too, and they'll get a summary. So they'll get little sales blocks, like in the shopping things for Google, right? So they do go to Facebook Marketplace and they will do a search within Facebook marketplace information to pull things together. But as far as I know, they don't show individual listings.
Just like if you're rolling through a list, you have to actually specifically ask for a Facebook marketplace and that type of item, and then it'll give you a res result.
Thank you so much, Denise, for answering all these questions. We're going to close the mailbag for today and we'll jump back in next week.
You did a great job, as always, of making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses. So thank you very much.
Thank you for being my partner in crime for the podcast and keeping me on topic and organized. I appreciate it. We are going to close this episode of things about our online selling things, but I know part of what has to happen when you get SEO going is getting these keyword things that finding the things your people are going to be looking for.
And so I created a guide that gives a couple of tips on how to do that. It's called Quickly Find Your Perfect Keywords, the Simple and Easy Guides Being Findable, and it's free. Head over to the link in the show notes. Get your copy today and hopefully it'll help you refine or find some new keywords for your business.
And thank you again for doing this with me, Kim, and for everybody listening, we'll see you next time.
Thank you for joining Denise and Kim in the SEO Day studio for today's discussion. If you would like one of your SEO questions answered in the future episode. Head on over to denise Millet.com/questions to let us know. The link is also in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the SEO Day podcast.
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