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-
SEO
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 ...
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Technical SEO
3 SEO Wins (Often Overlooked) for Ecommerce Sites
July 16, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
There is more to search engine optimization than keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and H1s. In this post, I’ll address three valuable, and often overlooked, SEO opportunities for ecommerce sites: PDFs,
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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SEO
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 ...
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SEO
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 ...
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SEO
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 ...
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SEO
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 ...
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SEO
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 ...
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SEO
2017 SEO Checklist for Product Detail Pages
May 22, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Product detail pages are an online merchant’s most potent persuasion and conversion tools. Making those pages findable and desirable on search engine results pages should therefore be an important strategy. For ...
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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Technical SEO
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 ...
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Technical SEO
Using Server Logs to Uncover SEO Problems
April 11, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Sometimes websites have search-engine-optimization problems that Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and off-the shelf SEO tools cannot locate. When this occurs, I often rely on an old-school method: web server logs. What ...
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Keyword Research
4 Types of Keyword Intent That Impact Search Marketing
April 3, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Keywords are the language of search engine optimization, search engine advertising, and even search on a retailer’s own website. So the better an online store’s managers and marketers understand the ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Detect, Correct Duplicate Content Pages
March 23, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Duplicate content remains a common obstacle when it comes to increasing organic search traffic on retailer websites. Here are some of the advantages of addressing duplicate content to increase SEO performance,
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Migrate an Ecommerce Site to HTTPS
March 8, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Google began encouraging websites to move to encrypted SSL connections, which carry the HTTPS reference in the URL, as early as 2014. Google promised a ranking boost to sites that ...
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Technical SEO
How to Avoid SEO Disaster from a Replatform
February 22, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Redesigning your ecommerce site or changing platforms is nerve racking. It’s easy to miss an important step and lose valuable organic search traffic and revenue. I have assisted many ecommerce sites ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Quickly Reverse a Traffic Downtrend
January 31, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
During a website redesign, re-platform, or domain change, it is not uncommon to see a reduction in organic search traffic. The panic generally starts weeks after trying one thing after ...
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SEO Tools
13 Free Tools to Test Website Speed
January 30, 2017 • Sig Ueland
Regularly testing the speed of your website is a good way to catch bottlenecks and improve the experience of visitors. Here is a list of free tools to test websites. There ...
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SEO
SEO How-to, Part 1: Why Do You Need It?
January 27, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization is part science and part art. But the foundational principles of SEO are straightforward. Still, before I can address how to practice SEO, I should explain what it is and why it’s important.
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Technical SEO
Using Caching (and Hardware) to Improve Page Speed
January 25, 2017 • Eric Davis
In “3 Backend Fixes to Increase Page Speed,” my article last month, I explained that caching can be applied to many areas of an ecommerce website. In this post, I’ll ...
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Link Building
SEO: Be Community-centric to Earn Links
January 20, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization requires a unique blend of relevance and authority. Relevance is more easily mastered, but authority requires the community of people that is interested in the things you ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Google Rolls Out Mobile Popup Penalty
January 13, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Right on schedule, this week Google began rolling out its intrusive mobile popup penalty, aimed at reducing the number of results that take mobile searchers to pages that use large ...
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SEO
Embedding SEO into Your Organization
January 6, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Achieving even the simplest improvements to an ecommerce site can feel like a Herculean effort. Effective search engine optimization requires buy in and participation from your entire organization, from the top down ...
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Technical SEO
3 Backend Fixes to Increase Page Speed
December 30, 2016 • Eric Davis
Page speed is an important factor in search rankings and conversion rates. Every improvement to page speed will likely result in more sales. We’ve addressed page speed at, most recently, “10
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Link Building
SEO Study: Backlinks Decline as Ranking Factor
December 16, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
In a practice as complex and seemingly indecipherable as search engine optimization, the clues gleaned from large ranking factor studies can shine some light. To this end, Searchmetrics, a search ...
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Technical SEO
4 Things to Check for Holiday Ecommerce Traffic
November 16, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
The holiday shopping season is here. Millions of consumers are looking for holiday deals. Preparing your marketing campaigns, such as social media ads and email promotions, is imperative. Beyond that,
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Technical SEO
SEO: To Drive Shoppers, Let the Bots In
November 6, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
We rely on search engines to drive shoppers to our sites to purchase our products. Before the shoppers can come, however, you have to let the bots in. It sounds more ...
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SEO
SEO Checklist: 16 Monthly Tasks to Manage Performance
October 28, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization is not a one-time project. If you’re not managing SEO performance and improvements continually, your site won’t remain competitive in natural search — you’ll lose rankings, clicks,