figaro search seminar: futureproofing ecommerce seo - patrick altoft

Future proofing Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO Challenges • Content strategy

• Adding value

• User generated content

• Return to search

• Design, usability & making users love you

• Link clean-up & penalties

• Link strategy

• Reporting ROI with 100% of your keyword data “not provided”

What’s happening in SEO?

You can’t rank unless you

deserve to rank

SEO can’t push you higher

than you deserve in the long term

No cheating

No shortcuts

What Google wants The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs.

Matt Cutts

Our strategy therefore is to make our clients a better search result than their competitors. We make them deserve to rank.

This can be split into two simple to understand factors:

• Creating more authority & being a better/more reputable company

• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages

Deserving to Rank

The current

CITATIONS

BUILD

CONVERSATIONS

NEWS

Sentiment

SOCIAL

Authority Relevance

Freshness

is listening to…

DESIGN

CONTENT

BLOG

Engagement

Satisfaction

Structure Quality

Our

Interdependent Approach fits this landscape

Putting your brand at the centre of

Feeds the

Focus on Users

Content Strategy is driven by people Branded3’s study of a leading ecommerce website found that users who engaged with content before moving to a product page were 5x more valuable than those who landed on a product directly

It is essential that a content strategy centres around answering users’ questions

Identifying users Every site needs content that:

• Entertains

• Educates

• Persuades

• Converts

A content strategy means creating the right content to target the right users – we call this our conversation strategy.

Google Analytics

Social Listening

Market Research

Personas

Existing Contacts

Conversation Strategy

Keyword Research

Content Strategy Brainstorm

Define Assets

Asset Production

Technical Development

Publish

Blogger Outreach

Social Outreach

PR Activity

Visits

Shares

Rankings

Seeding

Blogger outreach

Media databases

Media relations

Response Source

Google Alerts

Paid media

Forum seeding

Social Bookmarks

Doing Real Stuff Would you do this if it didn’t help with SEO?

When you release a new page or piece of content would your MD or PR department tweet about it? Would they tweet a link built by your SEO team?

If not then you probably shouldn’t be doing it

SEO has to be integral to marketing

Hummingbird

Understanding which words in a query matter most & giving them more weight

Long tail & badly thought out queries get much better results

Users are more satisfied

Example Google wants to rank the best result for the query

Not just the one that best matches the keywords the user searched for

Satisfaction Other than low quality websites, the biggest cause of searchers not being satisfied is the fact that Google showed them something they just were not looking for

Even if most people are satisfied there are always certain segments of people that are totally unhappy with a search result

Hummingbird will allow Google to dramatically increase satisfaction rates by gaining a better understanding of what people actually want, rather than what they type into the search box

Return to Search You have a few seconds to get the visitors attention and persuade them that they have arrived at a site that will answer their query

If they go back to Google that’s a negative signal

Content Strategy

Content Audit Document

•Typography

•Readability

•Spelling/grammar

•Shareability

•Keyword use

•Copyscape report on

stolen content

•Social media shares

Shareable Content

•Brainstorming

•Competitor Analysis

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors

Informative Content

•Research Q&A on

Yahoo Answers,

Quora, Facebook,

Twitter

•Search for questions

in Analytics data &

keyword tool data

•Gap Analysis of

current content

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors etc

User Generated Content

•Reviews –

implementation,

incentivisation etc

•Q&A section or Q&A

on product pages etc

•Forums, blog

comments, guest

blog posts, in-depth

content reviews

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors etc

Site Structure

•Where does content

need to go (blog or

Q&A etc)

•How should the

sections be

structured

•Design & UI

• Interlinking between

sections

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors

Content Roadmap Document

•Monthly or weekly

content plan

•Special events &

calendar

•Blog calendar

•PR calendar

Content Strategy Framework

http://b3.io/TBXFpw

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/

Reviews If you don’t have a user review strategy – why not?

Questions & Answers Why wouldn’t you do this?

Not Provided

Data Sources Not provided will be 100% soon – no more keyword data, attribution modelling becomes largely useless

Solutions

• Total organic visits to top landing pages

• Total search visits minus brand clicks from WMT data

• Estimated visits per keyword via rankings, CTR & search volumes

• Click share for product categories

Thank you!

Please email any questions to patrick@branded3.com or get in touch via twitter.com/patrickaltoft