I have quite a few stores, and you know how it goes having so many stories it is just not realistic to have unique content unless you hire a team of writers at a mere cost of $1000's per month, it is just not possible; besides that, how effective is your unique content on getting more traffic? I have been adding unique content to my blog section on some of the stores, and so far I have not noticed anything shocking or huge traffic jump, etc, sure the content gets indexed, but that is all I am seeing at this point, and to my knowledge, none of the unique content has produced any sales, and since the content is laser targeted, then I would know if sale comes from a particular piece of content compared if it was sold in the store itself...
Well, @dscurlock this is a harsh truth, I have tried doing that with my blog it just gets 3 - 4 organic traffic and majority of the traffic do come from the referral, I know my content is good but i also haven't seen any woww factor, it just so..... disappointing you keep working hard and majority of the traffic get suck by some ...... I think there is a need of search engine that is dedicated to the blog only !!
Are those websites already ranked in top 3? (are you getting traffic from SERPs?) If not, of course you are not getting more traffic, what does articles have to do with getting you ranked? I can product unique content with Kontent Machine (although not completely readable), but it passes Copyscape every time, so what are you expecting from posting some articles (that are unique)?
I know it can be frustrating. Fours years ago I started an ecommerce site (in my language, italian) for a customer of my agency. We wrote in four years something like 10,000 unique descriptions (for products), more than 300 unique descriptions (for categories) and something like 1000 blogs posts (more or less 1 per day). If I run the site:xyz.com operator there are 175,000 indexed pages. Well, the organic traffic is less than 10% of the total. We have a daily spend for 200 euro in PPC (yaknowuh) and - if we'd turn off that, the traffic would drop for 70%. The remaining 20% is coming from referrals, mailing list (weekly) and social properties. That said, that experience lead me to suspect that produce TONS of content it can be only a small part of the puzzle. Once I read on another forum a post stating "how to build an authority site by writing 3 posts per day". Well, in my experience, that is bullshit. To get strong traffic, you must pay for. Period. IMHO of course
Agree 1000%. Good to read an intelligent answer from time to time because a lot of replies are: ""insert Matt Cutts quote", write lots of unique content, you make monies, k bye" And than people start threads "Why I'm not getting traffic" "My sales are 90% down" "What is happening!??!" lol
LOL! I just had to login and "LOL!" on that one! Yeah, I see it often here. The best case was a few threads down now where a guy bullet-listed several answers to the OP's question, then right after... and I mean the very next post, a gal comes in and almost copy/paste the EXACT same answers! LOL! Agree... Touche'. =========================== dscurlock, Adding fresh content just keeps you in with Google and when they see the new content, hopefully it's indexed, then they'll(the googlebot) will come again to see new info. It keeps you in their radar so to speak. What would also help(for traffic) is to get those articles you're writing published off-site with other sites and to make sure your articles are properly optimized. You get some traffic and a little love juice from Google. I find the less competition there is, the quicker the reaction you will see with your SEO at the SERPs.(search engine results pages) So quality niche specific link building, YouTube videos and article matches are things you could see immediate on the 1st page of Google. The smaller the niche with the lesser comp. the longer the results will stick. In larger comp., then your results may only be a very short while. I see this whenever I start a new campaign for myself or a client. Aurelius