SEO
Our huge library of search engine optimization articles addresses strategies and tactics for ecommerce businesses. Our 12-part “How-to” series explains the basics. Advanced topics include faceted navigation, crawling and indexing, cross-border optimization, and much more.
Keyword Research | Link Building | On-page SEO | SEO Tools | Technical SEO-
Link Building
SEO Link Building Tactics for Ecommerce Businesses
July 17, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Link building, the process of getting links from other websites, improves search engine rankings and traffic, ultimately generating more sales for your business. Link building is one of the tasks a ...
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SEO
How to Attract Clicks on a Search Engine Results Page
July 10, 2018 • Armando Roggio
You’ve done the technical search engine optimization steps. You’ve worked hard to create useful, even authoritative content that answers common questions — keyword queries — for your industry. You’ve earned ...
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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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On-page SEO
SEO: How to Drive Traffic to a New Ecommerce Site
July 3, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
Larger companies can typically hire or retain competent assistance to help with search engine optimization. But smaller businesses often have to do it themselves, especially when those businesses are new. In ...
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SEO
SEO: How to Win against Giant Competitors
June 26, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
Why is it so difficult to rank for highly competitive keywords? I'm often asked about this topic. Can a small company with a limited budget compete on such popular search terms as "fashion," "shoes," and "jewelry"? I'll address that question in this article.
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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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Technical SEO
How to Optimize Mobile Search for Voice, Barcodes, and Images
April 18, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
The traditional behavior of typing keyword phrases in a Google’s search box is being replaced by searches for voice, barcodes, and images. It is impractical to type long-tail searches on mobile devices. But this difficulty also presents opportunities. In this post, I'll address how to optimize mobile searches for voice, barcodes, and images.
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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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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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Technical SEO
Gzip Compression Could Make Your Site 90-percent Faster
March 16, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Not using gzip on your web server? Your company should be. Enabling gzip compression could improve initial page load times by as much as 90 percent. Your business's faster web pages may even lead to better search engine rankings, an increase in site traffic, and more sales.
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Technical SEO
How to Quickly Drop Seconds from a Site’s Load Time
March 13, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
There are good reasons to improve your online store’s page speed, especially for mobile. However, I’ve found that improving speed can require a lot of expensive developer work. usually following standard best practices over many months. In this article, I will share simple tricks to eliminate seconds of page load time, in just a few hours.
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SEO
5 Ecommerce SEO Tactics to Try Today
March 9, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Search engine optimization seeks to help search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo understand a page's purpose and content in the hope the search engine will serve up a highly-ranked link in search results. An ecommerce business could spend months or even years optimizing search engine traffic. Some SEO techniques require wholesale changes in site structure, a nearly constant flow of new content, or days of keyword research.
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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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Content Marketing
Content Marketing Can Drive Long-tail SEO
March 5, 2018 • Armando Roggio
A robust content marketing campaign may attract shoppers searching on long-tail keyword phrases, which could generate additional sales. The term “long tail” describes statistical distributions where there are many points, if ...
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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
What, Exactly, Is Barebones SEO?
February 22, 2018 • Kerry Murdock
Organic traffic from Google and other search engines remains critical to many merchants. It generates a steady stream of prospects. And it insulates merchants from over-relying on Amazon for sales. There is no greater authority on search engine optimization than Stephan Spencer. He's the co-author of The Art of SEO and the sole author of leading digital marketing books. I recently spoke with him on bare-minimum SEO tactics for ecommerce.
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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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On-page SEO
4 Ways to Increase Revenue from Organic Search Traffic
February 13, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
If you have been working for months trying to get higher search rankings with little to show for it, you are not alone. Chasing high rankings typically falls flat. You can easily spend six months or more — and a lot of money and effort — and have nothing to show for it at the end. In this article, I will share four ways to increase sales from organic search traffic that don’t require high rankings.
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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.