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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SEO
SEO in 2019 Is More Than Blue Text Links
December 17, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The future of search goes beyond blue links on a search results page. In 2019, more results will come in the form of voice response, images, and before the searcher even enters a query.
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Technical SEO
6 SEO Myths about Alt Tags
December 10, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Alt tags are a frequent to-do item for search engine optimization. But there's much confusion surrounding the importance of optimizing alt tags. So it’s time for some myth-busting around this oft-misunderstood topic.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Why Is Metadata Important?
November 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
This article will describe at a high level the types of metadata most commonly used in SEO. Pay careful attention to the terminology. Meta tags are metadata, but not all metadata are meta tags. Some elements commonly called “tags” are actually attributes of a tag.
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SEO
SEO in 15 Minutes a Day
November 9, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
If search engine optimization is only a fraction of your responsibilities, this article is for you. What would happen to your business if natural search bottomed out tomorrow? Instead, spend 15 minutes a day on improving your site’s SEO.
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Content Marketing
8 Content Tips to Drive Organic Search Traffic
November 4, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Content marketing can drive natural search performance. Shoppers engage with the content and share it. Or so we hope. The more links from high-quality sites, the more likely your site will rank. These eight tips will help you generate more links to the content you create.
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Link Building
SEO: 6 Ways to Increase Backlinks
October 26, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The number of high-quality sites linking to yours is one of the most important organic ranking signals. But obtaining those links is among the most difficult and the most necessary aspects of search engine optimization. Here are six ideas to help.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Driving Content Strategy with Keyword Research
October 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research, the foundation of search engine optimization, also drives content strategy. Searchers want something: information or a product. When we research keyword data, we mine the search engines for information ...
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Content Marketing
7 Tips to Optimize Content for Search Engines
October 12, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization hinges on content relevance. No relevance means no rankings and no revenue from natural search. Follow these seven SEO tips to ensure that your site is optimized ...
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SEO
4 Steps to Better SEO in 2019
October 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Use these four steps to create your search engine optimization strategy for 2019. Start with keyword research. The idea is to understand the market for keywords — what consumers are searching for relating to your offerings and in what volume.
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Technical SEO
Technical SEO: 15 Critical Areas That Impact Performance
September 30, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The technical aspects of search engine optimization can seem mysterious, especially for content marketers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The 15 areas below cover the major areas. 15
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SEO
SEO: 2 Ways to Collect Competitive Ranking Data
September 23, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Your organic search competitors may not be the sites you think. What matters is who Google and Bing and other search engines think your competition is. They determine which sites rank for individual keywords based on criteria that have little to do with your business model.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Building a 301 Redirect Strategy
September 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
When a site’s URLs change, 301 redirects are crucial to preserve and grow natural search performance. Organic search rankings depend in large part on link authority: the quantity and quality of ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Retaining Performance on Site Migrations
September 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Site migrations are risky for natural search performance. Whether you’re migrating a site to a new design or rebranding, what you do before the new site is live will determine its natural search performance.
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SEO
SEO Is the Center of Ecommerce Marketing
August 31, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Natural search has become the doorway to your site. That door can open any page. Sites were once developed so that visitors would land on the home page and follow a prescribed path with tailored messaging along that path to a specific destination where they could convert.
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Staffing
11 Essential Tasks of an SEO Agency
August 24, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
One of the challenges of working with a search engine optimization agency is knowing what it should be responsible for. Depending on the scope of the contract, an agency should provide these 11 core services.
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Technical SEO
SEO Is Way More Than Metadata
August 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Metadata is just data about data. In the world of organic search, that means title tags and meta descriptions, schema structured data, canonical tags, meta robots tags and the like.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Reasons Your Site’s Indexation Is Down
August 3, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Without indexation, there is no possibility of ranking in natural search results. When indexation numbers drop, there are a handful of potential reasons. Site Speed Increasingly, slower site speeds are masquerading as ...
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SEO Tools
Search Console Is the Gateway to Google’s SEO Data
July 27, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search Console is Google’s way of communicating with webmasters and search engine optimization professionals about the status of their site within its search results. If you want more information about your site’s natural search performance, Google gives it to you.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Shaving Seconds Off Page Speed
July 9, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
For customers, site speed matters. For search engines, site speed impacts organic rankings. With its mobile Speed Update rolling out now, Google is applying site speed to mobile search results ...
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Content Marketing
9 Ways to Break Your SEO Writer’s Block
June 29, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Contextual relevance is one of the primary elements that determines search rankings. But relevance requires words, and words require inspiration. As search engine marketers, we have access to many resources to overcome writer’s block. Here are nine of my favorites.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Google Changes Keyword Planner for the Worse
June 22, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The end is near for the Google Keyword Planner interface. The new user interface provides (mostly) the same data with (mostly) the same features. But some key differences will force search optimizers to change the way we think about and collect keyword research.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Harnessing Facets to Drive the Meaty Torso
June 15, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Natural search performance on ecommerce sites often suffers from an invisible problem: a missing torso. For search engine optimization, a “torso” describes keywords that drive too many searches to be called ...
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SEO
SEO: Driving Cross-functional Projects
June 12, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization often requires planning and implementation from cross-functional teams. For example, what initially seems to be a simple request to modify the header navigation may actually result in ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: 3 Paths to Crawlable JavaScript
June 3, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Last week’s primer described some of the reasons that Googlebot, in particular, has trouble with modern forms of JavaScript. This article addresses solutions to compensate for bots’ limitations.
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Technical SEO
SEO: No, Google Does Not Support Newer JavaScript
May 25, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Some search engine optimization professionals and developers have concluded in the last couple of years that Google can crawl JavaScript. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sites using Angular (the ...
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SEO
Consumers Search by Voice. Do You Listen?
May 20, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The future of search is, increasingly, spoken. At its annual I/O conference earlier this month, Google made 100 announcements. More than 20 related to voice interaction. (Many others involved visual ...
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SEO
Google Lens Ups the Ante on Image Search
May 11, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce businesses have a love-hate relationship with image search. They appreciate the conversion benefits, but they are wary of the labor required to optimize images and the risk of competitors ...
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Technical SEO
301 Redirects May Save Your SEO
May 4, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
A search engine professional’s lucky number is 301. That’s the server header status code for a type of redirect that performs many critical functions for natural search performance. What Is a ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Managing Modern Algorithm Updates
April 27, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google launched a broad core algorithm update last week that impacted web search appearance and rankings. Algorithm changes typically center on rankings improvements tied to determining the quality of a site’s ...
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SEO
How to Implement SEO Tactics in Large Companies
April 22, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
There’s a perception that search engine optimization requires no resources. Executives sometimes think that SEO is simply a matter of editing existing content. As a result, they don't fund or staff SEO adequately to see real organic search performance gain. In reality, SEO isn’t about changing keywords here and there. It’s about optimizing a digital marketing presence to meet the needs of the business and its customers.
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20 Recommerce Brands, Marketplaces, Platforms
Testing 7 AI Logo Generators
Charts: 2023 Global Shopping Trends
Charts: U.S. Retail Ecommerce Sales Q1 2023
How to Evaluate Sales Channels in 2023
