Using content to rank products

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: Just in case anyone is confused, Magento Extensions work like WordPress plugins. I would look at the backlinks, search referrals, and search visibility for the blog. If it`s not bringing in links or traffic then make the choice that requires least effort and allows you to go forward with a plan for growing traffic. If you decide to move the blog just be sure to set up proper redirects. In the long run it shouldn`t matter. I`ve moved sites from one platform to another and as long as the redirects were done properly the transitions were smooth (as far as SEO was concerned). You lose continuity in historical analytics data sometimes, depending on where/how the new site is set up. So you might want to schedule the changeover to go live at the end of a month or other reporting period if you can do that.
• 
  Ashley Lewis: Hi Michael, I guess my concerns have been geared around the information I read in this article. I`m worried about how the blog will continue to help my site rank. If it`s on a standalone wordpress will I still benefit as much as if it`s through my same platform (magento). I`m wondering how accurate this article is. https://magecom.net/two-ways-to-implement-a-blog-in.../
• 
  Michael Martinez: Ashley Lewis If the blog is helping then maintaining the interlinkage between blog and shop is the most important factor. Search engines don`t care if you publish a "Website" on multiple hosts, servers, hosting services, etc. I`ve interlinked disparate portions of Websites in all scenarios since the 1990s. They`ve never experienced any problems earning links or search referrals. What matters is how you implement the design. If you break something along the way that will have an impact. Some of the biggest sites on the Web occasionally shift their content around and they don`t implement redirects from old URL structures to new ones. Even so, I`m eventually able to find old content that I was trying to get to via old links. In time the search engines will figure out what you did (unless you did it very poorly) and get everything sorted out. If you make a mistake you`ll have time to find it and fix it.
• 
  Michael Martinez: In fact I just moved an 18-year-old forum from a subfolder to a subdomain and from VBulletin to MyBB. Hundreds of thousands of URLs. I had no way to implement page-to-page redirects. All I can do is ensure the search engines find the new forums and crawl them efficiently. I know what to expect. I had to make the change for security reasons, so it wasn`t a question of "what is best for SEO". It was a question of what is best for the site, business, and users. SEO has to support the business decision, not BE the business decision.
• 
  Ashley Lewis: Michael Martinez great info to set my mind at ease. I guess that leaves me to make a decision on which is better for conversion. My blog posts sell products for me so it sounds like a magento extension might be my best bet for a seamless look and easy shopping. On the downside, I won’t have the capability to have a recipe card plug in for customers to print recipes. I’m not selling recipes, I’m selling the products to make them but my customers love being able to print the recipes 🤦🏼‍♀️ at least I’ve narrowed it down.
• 
  Michael Martinez: Ashley Lewis You could set up a recipe site elsewhere and link from it to your Magento store. You might attract some good links that way and pass on some value. But concentrating on your store and blog should be your first priorities.
• 
  Ashley Lewis: Michael Martinez what if I created pdf versions of the recipes to include in my posts for customers to download and print? I’ve read google likes recipe cards but if I’m doing this solely for the customer, a pdf file might be a helpful work around?
• 
  Michael Martinez: Ashley Lewis That`s an option. Don`t make more work for yourself. And don`t worry about "what Google likes". Google likes diversity. You can`t hit every potential signal nail on the head every time.
• 
  Jayasanker Jayakrishnan: Also, Just make sure that its domain.com/blog & not blog.domain.com
• 
  Richard Hearne: Another option - migrate off Magento. I understand that Magento will not offer the Community Edition for much longer, after which you`ll need to use a paid version. And it is a well-known resource hog, especially if your catalog is not large.
  
  You could migrate the entire system to WordPress - blog and e-commerce together.
• 
  Ashley Lewis: Richard Hearne I believe my inventory is too large for that.
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: I have clients with 10, 000+ products on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The only area where any real speed issues are noticed are in product search - and this is easily overcome with optimized server settings and upgrading to semi-dedicated or dedicated server scenarios. There are also options available for site search services which cost a bit of money, but can be worth if it you want "smart" searching as well as lightning fast results. Even a Magento site can benefit from this.
  
  I`d say that up to 4, 000-5, 000 products should STILL work fine on most modern managed wordpress hosting platforms. Maybe not ones that are doing it for tens of dollars a month, but I`ve got people on the lowest level plans at WPEngine ($35 a month) with up to 4, 000 products and it`s all still lightning fast. Just make sure database maintenance is part of your regular update/maintenance plan.
  
  There are also services out there which can grab all your Magento products, blog posts, standard pages, and all that and transfer everything to your new Wordpress install - and keep things in pretty good shape so you don`t need to rework all the content to make it look nice. If I remember correctly, it was just under $500 to move that 10, 000+ product site - much much cheaper than doing it by hand or exporting all the Magento tables and then manually remapping the fields to import back into Woo/WP - plus the transfer service managed redirects if page names weren`t going to be the same and also transferred all the images and things over (which is problematic when trying to do things by hand).
• 
  Ashley Lewis: Stockbridge Truslow good to know!