Jill Kocher Brown

Articles by: 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 Corp., managing the home page and corporate sections of Intel.com. After that, Jill managed and developed SEO consulting practices at Netconcepts and Covario, specializing in ecommerce, and served as Groupon’s first in-house natural search marketer.

She now heads up the thriving SEO team at IBM iX.

Jill holds a B.A. in Communications and American Studies from Stanford University. jill@practicalecommerce.com

SEO: Making Recommendations on Mockups

September 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Mockups are a key part of creating new marketing campaigns and redesigning entire websites. As partners in the process of producing those new experiences, search-engine-optimization professionals should offer feedback at... Read More »
Creating a Content Optimization Plan for Organic Search

September 8, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Last week I addressed the data involved in the content optimization process, and what to base content decisions on. In this post, I’ll get to the meat of creating a... Read More »
SEO: What to Base Content Decisions On

September 3, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content is the first thing that comes to mind with search engine optimization. There is a process, however, to creating and optimizing strong content. The process involves four separate tasks: data... Read More »
Why Do Companies Underfund SEO?

August 25, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization is often underfunded and misunderstood. When resourced appropriately, however, it can produce a cycle of positive performance that keeps building. The most common reason that organizations tend to... Read More »
Measuring What Matters for SEO (Hint: It’s Not Rankings)

August 18, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

When measuring natural search performance, use the key performance indicators that matter to the bottom line. While each piece of data has its place in managing SEO, only visits and revenue... Read More »
How to Hire for Ecommerce SEO

August 6, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the hardest parts of search engine optimization is finding the right professional to manage it. Since there are no universal SEO accreditations, hiring comes down to a resumé... Read More »
SEO: 8 Free Sources of Content Inspiration

July 28, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the hardest aspects of providing meaningful content on ecommerce sites is trying to determine what your audience members read as they’re shopping. Coming up with ideas for new and... Read More »
SEO: Design for People, Develop for Bots

July 21, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the frequent reasons given for ignoring search engine optimization is this: “We’re not selling to bots, we’re selling to people.” This argument highlights an ignorance of the role... Read More »
SEO: 7 Reasons to Use a Site Crawler

July 14, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

No matter how well you think you know your site, a crawler will always turn up something new. In some cases, it’s those things that you don’t know about that... Read More »
9 Trusted SEO Blogs

July 9, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization is always changing, requiring constant investigation to keep up. One of the best ways to identify new trends, in addition to research and analysis on your own... Read More »
5 Scalable SEO Projects, for Faster Results

June 30, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

To maximize your search engine optimization budget, look for scalable projects that can improve natural search performance across the site with a single action. Scalable SEO tends to require a... Read More »
6 Tips for Managing an SEO Team

June 23, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Whether your search engine optimization team is in-house or at an agency, staying in touch with what they’re working on is critical. A team left to their own devices may... Read More »
SEO: 7 Questions to Fix Analysis Paralysis

June 16, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Analysis paralysis, that tendency to want to find problems rather than resolve them, destroys your ability to grow the natural search channel. One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization is... Read More »
How to Optimize for Voice Search in 5 Steps

June 9, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content sites may have a natural advantage in voice search. But ecommerce sites can garner visitors from voice searches, too. Follow these five steps to learn how to optimize your... Read More »
SEO: Voice Search Is Here. Are You Ready?

June 2, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

For search engine optimization, the implications of voice search are subtle, but increasingly important. In her 2017 Internet Trends report this week, Mary Meeker, partner at venture capital firm Kleiner... Read More »
SEO: Keep Rankings Up while Site Is Down

May 26, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Website outages are disruptive enough to business without having to worry about your natural search performance. How you handle server outages and site downtime can impact the length and severity... Read More »
Bad Product Data Hurts SEO

May 19, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

The quality of product data impacts natural search performance on ecommerce sites, far beyond whether meta tags are optimized. Product data isn’t traditionally thought of as contributing to SEO, but... Read More »
SEO: Your Faceted Navigation Could Be Better

May 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Faceted navigation drives traffic and sales for valuable long-tail search phrases because it applies increasingly refined attributes to shoppers’ searches for their desired products. Optimizing your faceted navigation is the... Read More »
SEO: Faceted Navigation Is Your Biggest Opportunity

May 7, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Regardless of what your ecommerce site sells, the biggest opportunity for improving your natural search performance is likely optimizing faceted navigation. Also known as faceted or guided search, faceted navigation applies... Read More »
SEO: Creating the Perfect URL, or Not

April 28, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

URLs are what search engines use to aggregate all the data they collect regarding a page of content. For search engine optimization, what’s in a URL can be the difference... Read More »
SEO: Harnessing Domain Authority across Multiple Websites

April 24, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Every domain acquires authority based largely on the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. When your business model necessitates multiple domains, harness them in a mutually beneficial linking... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 12: Your Technical Toolbox

April 16, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

For every far-reaching strategy that can improve your site’s natural search performance, there is an equally important and far more mundane technical task that can disable it, often with a... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 11: Mitigating Risk

April 10, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization requires change. You can’t optimize something without changing it in some way. All change comes with a performance risk as well as a potential improvement Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 10: Redesigns, Migrations, URL Changes

March 31, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Changes in content, linking, and URL structure dramatically impact natural search performance. Knowing the risks as well as the rewards involved in these site changes, before you launch, will help... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 9: Diagnosing Crawler Issues

March 24, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

In order to rank in natural search, your site has to first be crawled and indexed. Sites that can’t be accessed by search engine bots will drive neither the traffic... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 8: Architecture and Internal Linking

March 19, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

The way in which you cobble your site together — how you categorize products, which categories you choose to make most prominent, and how you name them — has an... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 7: Mapping Keywords to Content

March 10, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

When optimizing a large site for search engines, you need a plan of attack. Keyword mapping is the process by which you determine which keywords of the thousands identified in... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 6: Optimizing On-page Elements

March 3, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

The best keyword research will have zero impact on your site's search engine rankings unless you actually use the research, to optimize. But where do the keywords go? What are... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 5: Keyword Research in Action

February 24, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research is the data that informs content strategy and optimization in search engine optimization. In this post, I’ll address how to collect and analyze keyword data. For the conceptual... Read More »
SEO How-to, Part 4: Keyword Research Concepts

February 17, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research lays the groundwork for all content activities in search marketing. Before I can review how to analyze keyword data, however, I'll address, in this post, some of the... Read More »