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Technical SEO
13 Ways to Kill Organic Search Traffic
April 15, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Skill and effort influence organic search success. But any number of actions can harm search engine optimization efforts. In this post, I’ll describe 13 SEO blunders that I’ve seen over ...
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SEO
6 Spring Cleaning Tips for SEO
March 30, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
It’s spring, and that means it’s time to peer into your site to find the often-overlooked items that drag down natural search performance. In our homes, we tend to put off cleaning the closets, dusting the baseboards, and clearing the spider webs out of the hard-to-reach places. Similarly, some aspects of search engine optimization we tend to put off for another day. Today is the day for SEO spring cleaning! These six steps will make your site shine, and boost its natural search performance in the process.
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Local Business
SEO: Store Locators Good for Bots, Good for Shoppers
March 23, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you have more than one physical location, in addition to your ecommerce site, you need a store locator. Slapping all your store addresses on a single web page and calling it done doesn’t cut it for shoppers or for natural search performance. An optimal store locator should be searchable for your customers and also crawlable for the search engines.
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Keyword Research
SEO: 8 Reasons to Stop the Addiction to Keyword Demand
March 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search marketing is all about experimentation — testing and learning. Slavish obsession with the average number of searches per month as a sole metric for optimization or a forecasting revenue will only hurt a natural search program. It’s time to end our addiction to search demand.
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Staffing
When Hiring an SEO Pro, Look for These 11 Skills
March 14, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Hiring a search engine optimization professional is challenging. It’s relatively easy for a would-be practitioner to portray “book-learning” as actual, on-the-job experience. But I’m a firm believer in the importance of soft skills — personal qualities that enable someone to work well in a role with others — in hiring a quality SEO pro.
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SEO
SEO: How to Rank against the Heavyweights
March 8, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Merchants want to rank number one in Google for search terms that are seemingly important to their business, such as “dog food.” Or “office supplies.” Or whatever popular term describes their products. The problem, however, is that not every company can rank for high-demand keywords. The workaround is to be realistic about ranking potential and develop search engine optimization strategies accordingly.
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Technical SEO
4 SEO Requirements for International Ecommerce Sites
March 2, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Multinational ecommerce businesses with country-specific websites have distinct search engine optimization requirements. A searcher in Australia, say, must end up on the site containing Australian English, currency, and content. A searcher in Germany must land on that website. And so on.
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Technical SEO
SEO Tips for New Ecommerce Sites (and Redesigns)
February 26, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The battle for organic search performance can be won or lost before a site launches. Choices made in the design and implementation stages impact the ability of an ecommerce business to change critical elements for search engine optimization, handcuffing what is typically one of the largest drivers of traffic and revenue.
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SEO Tools
Indispensable SEO Tools, from Free to Expensive
February 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization is rooted in data: technical data, analytical data, and contextual data. The tools you use to access that data fuel your ability to make smart SEO decisions, to keep your performance moving in the right direction. In this post, I'll recommend SEO tools in eight categories. Some of the tools are free or low cost. Others are more expensive, with many more features
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Technical SEO
HTTPS Is Important for More Reasons Than SEO
February 9, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
A website’s use of the secure protocol — as evidenced by the HTTPS designation and the presence of a security certificate — is a priority for search engines. But recent changes to Google Chrome make it important for web browsers, too. Google is tackling the security challenge across the web via its Chrome browser. Google is tackling the security challenge across the web via its Chrome browser. This week, the Chrome team announced that all web pages without an HTTPS certificate will display a “Not Secure” label in Chrome 68, scheduled to be launched in July 2018.
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Technical SEO
6 Ways Web Developers Can Improve SEO
February 2, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The relationship between web developers and search-engine-optimization teams is sometimes contentious. Seemingly unrelated technical decisions by developers can impact organic search traffic. But there are enormous SEO benefits in working with development teams and their release planning and testing cycles. In 13 years, I’ve encountered just one developer who refused to consider SEO recommendations.
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User Experience
SEO: 8 Ways UX and Design Could Reduce Traffic
January 29, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
For more than a decade I've optimized organic search traffic for big and small companies. They often come to my team with greatly diminished search performance stemming from decisions on overall strategy and design. The decisions resulted in changes to internal linking structures and reduced textual content, which affected the authority and relevance signals that search engines rely on to rank pages. Here are eight common strategy and design decisions that, in my experience, often harm organic search traffic.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Google to Make Mobile Speed a Ranking Factor
January 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you weren’t already focused on your mobile site’s performance, Google is giving you a reason. In July of 2018, Google will use a new ranking signal focused purely on mobile site speed: the “Speed Update.” Google will dampen rankings for slower mobile sites to help mobile searchers find sites that deliver what Google considers to be a better mobile experience. Desktop site speed has been a Google ranking factor for almost eight years — its obsession with speed isn’t anything new. What is new is that Google will now include mobile sites in the site speed ranking equation.
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SEO
7 Ways to Integrate Natural and Paid Search
January 12, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
It’s not a matter of organic search traffic being more important than paid, or vice versa. What matters is integrating the two — paid and natural search — so that the whole is larger than the individual parts. The goal of integrated search is to use the data available from both organic and paid search programs for strategies that maximize visits and revenue.
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SEO Tools
Optimizing Google Search Options for Android Apps
January 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Apps for iOS and Android mobile devices represent a chance to sell to captive prospects — if they can find your app to download in the first place. The first place to start is the Google Play Store, where Android users install apps. Google web search is another opportunity for app search, but most of the optimization focus should be on the Play Store itself.
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SEO
How to Create Your 2018 SEO Strategy
December 22, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you don’t have a search engine optimization strategy for 2018, it’s high time to create it. Writing an SEO strategy can be intimidating. It sounds like such a lofty document,
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SEO
How SEO Impacts the Ecommerce Sales Funnel
December 17, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce marketers spend a lot of time thinking about the sales funnel. Search engine optimization plays a major role in filling that funnel at the various stages. In aggregate, we can ...
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Staffing
For SEO, Better to Hire an Agency or an Employee?
December 8, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
The decision to hire in-house search engine optimization talent or to contract with an agency is not easy. Consider these points when deciding for your company. In-house SEO In-house advantages stem primarily ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: For Redesigns and Migrations, Prepare for the Worst
December 1, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
You spend months preparing for your ecommerce redesign or migration. You take search engine optimization into consideration and anticipate an increase in organic search traffic after launch. But what happens ...
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SEO
SEO: Enabling Performance beyond Home Page and Brand
November 26, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce sites with the strongest natural search performance drive visits to every page, not just the home page and not just for searches for the brand. A search engine optimization channel ...
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Product Pages
Include CRO in Your SEO
November 17, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization professionals often consider their job done after the click is won from the search result page and the visitor has landed on his site. That’s when user ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Ways to Kill Duplicate Content
November 12, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Duplicate content is endemic to ecommerce sites. Seemingly every platform, no matter how SEO-friendly, produces some form of duplicate content, holding a site back from peak performance. First, let’s look at ...
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Content Marketing
SEO: 7 Ways to Jumpstart an Ecommerce Blog
November 3, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Blogs can be excellent way to rank for informational searches that might otherwise be difficult for an ecommerce site. But ecommerce marketers who implement a blog sometimes conclude early on ...
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SEO
Store Locators That Work Harder for SEO
October 27, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Does your store locator receive natural search traffic, or do yellow-page sites and Yelp win the clicks from keyword searches for your brand? Without an SEO-friendly store locator, you may ...
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Technical SEO
SEO Fire Drill: ‘Traffic Is Down!’
October 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Organic search traffic often drives significant revenue for ecommerce sites. As a result, it is prone to fire drills around performance. Here’s how to determine when there’s a critical problem ...
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SEO Tools
Mobile-first SEO Makes Search Console More Important
October 6, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
In 2018, Google will judge your desktop search ranking by the signals from your mobile site. Google’s mobile-first index, the algorithm update that will flip the importance of desktop sites compared ...
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On-page SEO
Optimizing Your Mobile Presence for Natural Search
September 29, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s mobile-first index is coming in 2018. Search-result rankings for your desktop site will be based on the signals from the mobile version. Will you be ready? More people search Google ...
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On-page SEO
SEO: Preparing for Google’s Mobile-first Index
September 22, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Most searches on Google are from mobile devices. In 2018, Google will judge your desktop and mobile sites’ worthiness to rank based on your mobile implementation. If your mobile experience isn’t ...
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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Content Marketing
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 ...