Jill Kocher Brown

Articles by: Jill Kocher Brown

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.

SEO
SEO: Auditing Backlinks with Google Search Console

April 12, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The best backlinks are the ones search engines know about. Four reports in Google Search Console help analyze the strength of your backlink portfolio. Search engines use backlinks — the links from other sites to yours — in their algorithms as measures of value and authority.
SEO
13 Free SEO Courses, Beginner to Advanced

April 7, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Being stuck at home due to Covid-19 is an excellent time to improve your search engine optimization skills. The following seven learning sites offer, collectively, 13 free SEO courses. Some include free certificates of completion to showcase your new skills on LinkedIn or elsewhere.
SEO
SEO: Manage Crawling, Indexing with Robots Exclusion Protocol

April 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Indexing is the precursor to ranking in organic search. But there are pages you don’t want the search engines to index and rank. That’s where the "robots exclusion protocol" comes into play.
SEO
SEO: Using Canonical Tags to Reduce Duplicate Content

March 23, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Canonical tags are an essential tool to prevent duplicate content in organic search results. "Canonical" in search engine parlance means the one true page out of potentially many duplicates.
SEO
SEO: 7 Ways Ecommerce Sites Create Duplicate Content

March 15, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

I've never worked with an ecommerce platform that was entirely free of duplicate content. Some platforms are better at containing the sprawl. But one change in the settings or the code could accidentally produce duplicates — i.e., different pages with different URLs for the same piece of content.
SEO
3 SEO Lessons from Amazon for Ecommerce Product Pages

March 8, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Product detail pages on Amazon rank for roughly 34 million keywords in Google in the U.S. In this post, I'll address three tips for optimizing the product pages on your own ecommerce site using lessons from Amazon.
SEO
SEO: Why Your Faceted Navigation Pages Aren’t Ranking

March 1, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The filters and facets utilized by ecommerce sites allow shoppers to quickly narrow a product set by color, style, or other attributes. It's called faceted navigation. It's ideal for targeting keywords with midsized demand. And it can seriously boost organic search traffic.
SEO
Google Downgrades Nofollow Directive. Now What?

February 24, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

On March 1, Google will no longer consider nofollow attributes as commands. Instead, they will be hints, much like canonical tags. Until now, nofollow attributes have been a protective barrier between your site's authority and the potentially questionable sites it links to.
SEO
Scalable SEO Strategies to Boost Category Pages

February 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Large-scale improvements in organic search performance require large-scale changes. Ecommerce merchants tend to optimize product detail pages. Many merchants overlook category pages, which can provide more organic-search opportunities.
SEO
6 Ways to Know If Your SEO Is Broken

February 9, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Gut feel. That's how ecommerce marketers sometimes gauge the health of their search engine optimization program. SEO contains many gray areas, for sure. But an evaluation requires data, not a hunch. Use these six methods — in order — to determine the health of your SEO program.
SEO
SEO: 7 Shopper-grabbing Rich Snippets for Ecommerce

February 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

It’s increasingly difficult for organic search listings — the 10 blue links — to win the click. Rich snippets, which are powered by structured data, can make your links stand out. Here seven types of rich snippets that enhance blue links and thus drive clicks and sales.
SEO
Google’s ‘Host-crowding’ Tweak Impacts Sites with Featured Snippets

January 26, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The term "host crowding" refers to multiple organic search listings from a single domain for the same query. With its latest update, Google changed host crowding by removing the traditional organic listing on page 1 when that site occupies the featured snippet.
SEO
How to Rank in Google’s New Popular Products

January 19, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Facing declining product searches thanks to marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart, Google amped up its ecommerce search game last week with a new organic search feature: popular products.
SEO
Outsourcing SEO Starts with Knowing Your Needs

January 13, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce merchants have many choices for outsourcing search engine optimization. Finding the right agency often comes down to knowing your business's needs, as well as understanding the different types of SEO services.
SEO
5 Obstacles to SEO Success

December 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

I’ve worked in SEO for 14 years. In my experience, the following five deficiencies will likely block efforts to improve organic search performance
SEO
5 SEO Wives’ Tales That Won’t Go Away

December 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

There’s a wives’ tale that white wine will remove a red-wine stain. Another claims that eating an apple a day will keep a doctor away. Similarly, many wives’ tales surround search engine optimization. The five below I hear the most from clients and other marketers.
SEO
How to Make SEO Happen in 2020

December 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Effective search engine optimization takes preparation and planning. Random action produces haphazard results. Here’s how to make your SEO plans come to life in 2020.
SEO
The 8 Benefits of SEO for Ecommerce

November 24, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce businesses live and die by their ability to attract new customers. In the race to increase revenue, traffic from organic search can be essential. Here’s why.
SEO
For Ecommerce SEO, Don’t Ignore the Long Tail

November 17, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization typically focuses on popular keywords. However, long-tail SEO targets keywords that are searched for less frequently but drive value in the aggregate.
SEO
Could Blogging Boost Your Ecommerce SEO?

November 10, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Blogging comes and goes as a fashionable marketing tactic, but its potential for search engine optimization remains constant. Blogging isn’t a slam-dunk strategy for every ecommerce business, however. These seven reasons will help you decide whether blogging could help your ecommerce SEO.
SEO
For SEO, How Fast Is Fast Enough?

November 3, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Page speed improvements are high on most ecommerce to-do lists. The potential for increased revenue as well as better organic search rankings makes the effort worthwhile. But first, everyone wants to know how fast is fast enough.
SEO
SEO: Google’s BERT Update Helps Ecommerce Product Pages

October 27, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s BERT algorithm, released last week, is the company’s latest effort to understand the intent of search queries. For ecommerce sites, the unique details on product pages could now drive more organic search traffic with high purchase intent.
SEO
SEO: Expertise in 1 Area Can Lead to Weakness in Others

October 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Excelling in one area of search engine optimization can lead to weaknesses in others. I've seen it many times. If your organic search channel isn’t growing despite the effort you’re pouring into it, assess whether you are blind to the real issue. Here are three examples.
SEO
7 SEO ‘Rules’ to Ignore for Ecommerce

October 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization tools have evolved into measuring hundreds of variables. But not all of them impact ecommerce performance in my experience. What follows are seven common SEO metrics to ignore, or relegate to a quick glance.
SEO
7 Coding Barriers to SEO Success

October 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Googlebot obeys only certain commands, ignores forms and cookies, and crawls only the links coded with a proper anchor tag and href. What follows are seven items that block Googlebot and other search engine bots from crawling (and indexing) all of your web pages.
SEO
SEO Critique of 3 Ecommerce Blogs

September 29, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Quality blog content can drive organic search traffic. Ecommerce marketers who reject blogging — or give up after a couple of months — miss out. In this post, I'll critique three ecommerce blogs for their SEO benefits.
SEO
Google Muzzles ‘Self-serving’ Review Snippets

September 22, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

With a new algorithm, Google is determined to remove "self-serving" reviews from rich snippets in search results. Thankfully for ecommerce companies, traditional product reviews on product pages shouldn’t be affected.
SEO
SEO: 2 Good Ways to Remove Duplicate Content, and 8 Bad Ones

September 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce sites often create duplicate content, which saps the ability to drive organic search traffic. There are two good ways to remove duplicate content from search-engine indexes — and eight to avoid.
SEO
6 Types of Content That Help SEO (and Shoppers)

September 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Modern search engine optimization relies on providing valuable content that improves a site’s customer experience. But the form it should take often stymies site owners. The six sites below prove that any ecommerce site can create valuable content that appeals both to shoppers and the search engines that send them.
SEO
SEO: HTML, XML Sitemaps Explained

August 30, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

There are two types of sitemaps: HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps guide visitors, mostly. XML sitemaps guide search engine bots, to ensure they find a site’s URLs to index. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each will help with your search engine optimization.