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
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 ...
Technical SEO
SEO: How to Perform a Flash Audit, to Restore Traffic

November 14, 2017 • Hamlet Batista

I’m often asked to help reverse drops in traffic from organic search. It usually occurs from major site developments, such as redesigns and ecommerce platform changes. Traffic drops can be ...
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 ...
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 ...
SEO
The Essential Component of Viral Videos

October 26, 2017 • Stephan Spencer

Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As marketers, we often wonder why only a tiny percentage of those uploads go viral. We lament why it ...
SEO
B2B SEO Requires an Integrated Approach

October 19, 2017 • Armando Roggio

Complex products and long buying cycles make search engine optimization for B2B sites different than for B2C. The difference, however, is not in the specific techniques, but in the way SEO ...
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 ...
Technical SEO
SEO: How to Improve Site-specific Ranking Factors

October 10, 2017 • Hamlet Batista

A client recently attended a webinar where a presenter provided a list of the top search engine ranking factors. The client wanted me to confirm the list, or provide my ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Technical SEO
How to Incrementally Move an Ecommerce Site to HTTPS

August 27, 2017 • Hamlet Batista

In October, Google Chrome will release version 62, which will warn website visitors with a “Not Secure” message when they type in data — such as site searches and newsletter ...
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 ...
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,
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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,
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 ...