Jill Kocher Brown
Jill Kocher Brown is a writer and search engine optimization expert in Chicago. She has been living and breathing search engine optimization since 2005, and has been in digital marketing since 1996.
Jill cut her digital teeth at Intel, managing the home page and corporate sections of Intel.com. After that, Jill managed and developed ecommerce SEO consulting practices at Netconcepts and Covario, served as Groupon’s first in-house SEO director, and pioneered IBM's SEO consulting practice.
She now heads up the SEO practice at JumpFly, a marketing agency.
Jill holds a B.A. in Communications and American Studies from Stanford University. Email JIll.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Google’s New Keyword Planner
July 19, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. They’re what searchers type in Google’s search box, and what marketers incorporate into their web pages to attract searchers to their sites. Google recently launched a new tool that changes the way we research keywords: AdWords ...
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Technical SEO
SEO Audits: What to Expect
March 15, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
One of the challenges that plagues the search marketing industry is a lack of standards around the quality and scope of work. Different agencies and consultants will use similar words to describe very different deliverables and processes. One of the most abused of these is the SEO Audit...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Impact of Ecommerce Catalog Structure
March 1, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Information architecture and search engine optimization are both critical aspects of developing an ecommerce site. During the process, early decisions made about the structure of a site and its product catalog can have surprising ramifications for SEO. Which product types and attribute...
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Social Media
Search Result Domination with Social Media
February 15, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Social media and organic search work hand in hand, but not in the way most people think. Building up a grand social media presence will not drive link authority back to your ecommerce site. The major social networks have long since stripped the link authority from their outbound links...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Optimal Ecommerce URLs
February 1, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
The ecommerce platform that hosts a site determines the URL structure, which in turn can have an impact on the site’s search engine optimization. Each platform creates URLs according to its own rules, but nearly all can be modified for greater SEO and brand recognition. In years past, ...
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Social Media
Facebook Takes on Local Search
January 17, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Consumers use the Internet to search for local businesses, events, and topics. Google is a major player in local search, but so is Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp, YellowPages.com, Foursquare, and other sites. Local search now has a new competitor: Facebook Graph Search. Launched this week, Facebo...
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SEO
SEO New Year’s Resolutions for 2013
January 4, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
With a new year ahead, it’s time to think about New Year’s resolutions. What do you want search engine optimization to do for your site in 2013? The most likely goals for any ecommerce site revolve around driving more traffic and converting more visitors. Let’s look at some steps for an...
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Technical SEO
SEO: When Product Facets and Filters Fail
December 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce sites rely on filtered or faceted navigation to make their product catalogs more easily digestible for customers. Depending on how filters and facets are implemented, however, they can either be fantastic for search engine optimization or a big failure. SEO is based on three ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Working Around a Redesign
December 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
When a redesign or platform change looms in your site’s future, it’s easy to turn off all search-engine-optimization work and focus on planning the new site. After all, why bother making changes that will just be overwritten when you launch the new site? Focusing on a few key areas will...
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SEO
The SEO Benefit of Infographics
December 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization professionals don't usually recommend creating more images, but infographics can have a real benefit to SEO. Typically, images are used in place of textual content to convey the same message visually. Consequently, images tend to be viewed as detrimental to SE...
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Keyword Research
Using Keyword Research beyond SEO
November 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is one of the foundational pieces of search engine optimization because it illuminates the exact words real-life customers use to search for the products we sell. But why stop there? The insights that keyword research provides can inform other many other areas of the bu...
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Analytics & Data
How to Measure SEO Performance
November 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization may be a mix of art and science, but it’s as measurable and accountable as other online marketing channels. Knowing what key performance indicators to measure for SEO is the first step. Establishing a regular routine for monitoring and measuring performance wi...
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Technical SEO
4 Fast Ways to Kill Your SEO
November 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization experts usually focus on what you should do to improve your site’s organic search rankings. In this post, I'm asking the opposite question: What are the fastest ways to destroy your site’s SEO performance? Here's a list of my top four mistakes. Mistake 1: Lau...
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Link Building
SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site
November 2, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO effo...
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SEO
Understanding Google’s Algorithm Updates
October 26, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
The term "webspam" refers to low-quality sites that use manipulative search engine optimization strategies to win rankings and traffic. Google’s war on webspam has reached an all-time high, with the search giant churning out an average of one-to-two updates a day. Understanding these al...
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Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update
October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army
October 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re...
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User Experience
Smartphones, Tablets Account for 1 in 8 Visits
October 5, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
One in eight pages accessed on the Internet in the U.S. today are viewed on mobile devices, according to a report by comScore. Mobile phones account for 9 percent of Internet visits and tablets make up another 4 percent. It begs the question: What sort of experience are those mobile use...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Putting Navigation to Work
September 28, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Navigation does more than shuttling customers around your site. In addition to its obvious usability and design functions, navigation can be optimized to improve organic search traffic. Well-optimized navigation strengthens the flow of link popularity throughout your site while sending ...
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SEO
SEO Ranking Forecast: 74 and Sunny
September 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization is determining whether changes in your site’s organic search results are based on changes to your own site or external influences like algorithm changes. SEOmoz created MozCast weather report to help answer this question, and tod...
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On-page SEO
SEO: Using Automated Landing Pages
September 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Marketing automation tools make creating landing pages a snap. They focus on making it more efficient to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times via email and paid search campaigns. So why not use them to create landing pages for search engine optimization cam...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Avoiding Penguins and Pandas
September 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s recent penchant for naming major algorithmic updates after animals has the world of search engine optimization sounding more like a zookeeper’s dilemma. But with rumors of an impending Penguin update — see this article from Search Engine Roundtable — right around the corner, e...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Launching a Redesigned Site
August 31, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part one, "SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign," we published last week. Launching a redesigned site is filled with potentiall...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign
August 24, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor's Note: This is part one of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part two, "Launching a Redesigned Site," we will publish next week. Site redesigns can create a period of intense instability for organi...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis
August 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Excel is the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content. This article lists my favorite Excel formulas, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts for search engin...
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SEO
4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO
August 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
When talking to marketers, it can be nearly impossible to get them to look beyond the brand imagery and user experience they’ve crafted for their customers online. And while they’re locked into that perception of their sites, it’s very difficult to explain why search engines don’t perce...
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Local Business
SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?
August 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Online location pages of physical stores should provide much more information than just the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many consumers already know where a store is, based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holid...
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Technical SEO
5 SEO Shortcuts to Avoid
July 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines are programmed to reward relevance and popularity, and are striving to algorithmically determine quality as well. Ecommerce sites are programmed to sell product to customers as efficiently as possible while offering a positive brand experience. Ecommerce sites often striv...
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Google Ads
Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO
July 6, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Over the next several months, Google’s free Product Search feature will start costing ecommerce sites a lot more. Since the launch of Google’s Froogle in 2002, Google has provided a free product search service. The newly launched Google Shopping marks the first time that the company has...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding XML Sitemaps
June 29, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
XML sitemaps serve a very niche purpose in search engine optimization: facilitating indexation. Posting an XML sitemap is kind of like rolling out the red carpet for search engines and giving them a roadmap of the preferred routes through the site. It’s the site owner’s chance to tell c...
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