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-
Technical SEO
Assessing Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals’ on Shopify Themes
June 23, 2020 • Hamlet Batista
Google recently announced "Core Web Vitals," which are new performance metrics that will become a search ranking signal next year. Google displays the new metrics in Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and the Chrome User Experience Report. “Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme,” my article in April, included a table of those speeds at that time.
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Keyword Research
SEO How-to, Part 5: Analyzing Keyword Data
June 19, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is a search engine optimization tactic to identify the words and phrases of consumers who are looking for the types of products and services that your company sells. In this post, I'll cover four steps: seeding keyword research, collecting the data, organizing it in my free keyword analysis template in Google Sheets, and analyzing it to understand intent and demand.
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SEO Tools
SEO: Search Console Is an Untapped Source of Keyword Data
June 5, 2020 • Bill Sebald
Search Console now has more than enough data to return us to the glory days of natural search keyword data. But many businesses are not aware. I’ll explain the Search Console data in this article.
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Keyword Research
SEO How-to, Part 4: Keyword Research Concepts
June 3, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is the process of analyzing the search-engine queries of real people. That data — a window into the desires of searchers — is a gold mine for search engine optimization.
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SEO
SEO How-to, Part 3: Strategy and Planning
May 29, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The planning phase of search engine optimization involves identifying a strategy and roadmap to reach your goals. The process can be daunting. This post is the third installment in my “SEO How-to” series.
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Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 2: Understanding Search Engines
May 21, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Nearly half of shoppers turn to Google before deciding what to buy and where to buy it. Understanding how Google and other search engines work can help you choose which optimization strategies to apply. This post is the second installment in my "SEO How-to" series.
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SEO
SEO How-to, Part 1: Why Use It?
May 13, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
This post begins a weekly primer in SEO, with the goal of addressing all foundational aspects. In the end, you’ll be able to practice SEO more confidently and converse with others regarding important SEO challenges and opportunities.
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Link Building
Yes, Toxic Backlinks Can Still Harm Search Rankings
May 12, 2020 • Armando Roggio
When a website links to your online store, that site is indicating it finds your content valuable enough to share with its own audience. Google and other search engines recognize this vote of confidence, which may boost your site's ranking. For this reason, many search engine optimizers covet backlinks.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Target Informational Rankings with Pillars and Clusters
April 21, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Unless it's a major brand, an ecommerce site’s category and product pages may not rank organically for informational search queries. Creating pillar and cluster pages can help.
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Technical SEO
The Role of Accessibility in SEO
April 14, 2020 • Bill Sebald
In the early years, search-engine optimizers typically equated accessibility with rankings. We focused on algorithms. A website that's accessible to users with disabilities would also be accessible to Google. Or so we thought. Things are different today.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Auditing Backlinks with Google Search Console
April 12, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The best backlinks are the ones search engines know about. Four reports in Google Search Console help analyze the strength of your backlink portfolio. Search engines use backlinks — the links from other sites to yours — in their algorithms as measures of value and authority.
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On-page SEO
Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme
April 7, 2020 • Hamlet Batista
I recently worked with a developer to help a merchant speed up its Shopify store. We improved the page speed for mobile and desktop. But the biggest takeaway was how a Shopify theme impacts the page speed. This post lists page speeds of all 72 Shopify themes.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Manage Crawling, Indexing with Robots Exclusion Protocol
April 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Indexing is the precursor to ranking in organic search. But there are pages you don’t want the search engines to index and rank. That’s where the "robots exclusion protocol" comes into play.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Using Canonical Tags to Reduce Duplicate Content
March 23, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Canonical tags are an essential tool to prevent duplicate content in organic search results. "Canonical" in search engine parlance means the one true page out of potentially many duplicates.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Ways Ecommerce Sites Create Duplicate Content
March 15, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
I've never worked with an ecommerce platform that was entirely free of duplicate content. Some platforms are better at containing the sprawl. But one change in the settings or the code could accidentally produce duplicates — i.e., different pages with different URLs for the same piece of content.
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SEO
Should Internal Search Results Pages Be Indexed?
March 10, 2020 • Armando Roggio
No, your website's own search results pages should not be indexed by Google and other search engines in most cases. Long-standing search-engine-optimization wisdom says the results pages from your site-search should block search engine bots and not be included in a search engine's index of pages.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Why Your Faceted Navigation Pages Aren’t Ranking
March 1, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The filters and facets utilized by ecommerce sites allow shoppers to quickly narrow a product set by color, style, or other attributes. It's called faceted navigation. It's ideal for targeting keywords with midsized demand. And it can seriously boost organic search traffic.
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Technical SEO
Analyze Competitors’ Breadcrumbs for Categories, Products
February 25, 2020 • Hamlet Batista
Knowing the breadcrumb navigation of your ecommerce competitors can be helpful. It could identify missing categories on your own site, navigation ideas, and even competitors' best-selling products.
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Technical SEO
Google Downgrades Nofollow Directive. Now What?
February 24, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
On March 1, Google will no longer consider nofollow attributes as commands. Instead, they will be hints, much like canonical tags. Until now, nofollow attributes have been a protective barrier between your site's authority and the potentially questionable sites it links to.
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On-page SEO
Scalable SEO Strategies to Boost Category Pages
February 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Large-scale improvements in organic search performance require large-scale changes. Ecommerce merchants tend to optimize product detail pages. Many merchants overlook category pages, which can provide more organic-search opportunities.
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SEO
SEO: When to Scale (or Not)
February 17, 2020 • Bill Sebald
Most ecommerce platforms have improved their SEO functionality to enable easy, sitewide changes. But it's impossible to scale SEO entirely.
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Technical SEO
6 Ways to Know If Your SEO Is Broken
February 9, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Gut feel. That's how ecommerce marketers sometimes gauge the health of their search engine optimization program. SEO contains many gray areas, for sure. But an evaluation requires data, not a hunch. Use these six methods — in order — to determine the health of your SEO program.
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SEO
Compare SEO Stats for Acquisition Candidates, Guest Post Options
February 7, 2020 • Armando Roggio
There are plenty of instances that require an in-depth analysis of organic search performance. But other times a quick overview is enough. An example of the latter is a brief comparison of multiple domains. In this post, I will address the benefits of contrasting SEO across multiple domains.
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Content Marketing
Analyze Competitors for High-traffic Content Ideas
February 3, 2020 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce competitors can be a good source of inspiration and ideas. Analyzing a competitor's content could generate ideas for your own company's articles, videos, podcasts, or similar. In this post, I'll look at a simple way to produce content marketing ideas from your competitors.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Shopper-grabbing Rich Snippets for Ecommerce
February 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
It’s increasingly difficult for organic search listings — the 10 blue links — to win the click. Rich snippets, which are powered by structured data, can make your links stand out. Here seven types of rich snippets that enhance blue links and thus drive clicks and sales.
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SEO
Google’s ‘Host-crowding’ Tweak Impacts Sites with Featured Snippets
January 26, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The term "host crowding" refers to multiple organic search listings from a single domain for the same query. With its latest update, Google changed host crowding by removing the traditional organic listing on page 1 when that site occupies the featured snippet.
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SEO
Lessons from 20 Years of Google Algorithm Updates
January 23, 2020 • Bill Sebald
I have been optimizing sites for over 20 years. Still, I sometimes fail to reach the improvements I expected. A strategy may look good on paper but not align to Google’s latest (and secret) algorithm.
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Technical SEO
How to Rank in Google’s New Popular Products
January 19, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Facing declining product searches thanks to marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart, Google amped up its ecommerce search game last week with a new organic search feature: popular products.
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Technical SEO
Speed Up Your Slowest Pages with Prefetching
January 3, 2020 • Hamlet Batista
In previous articles I’ve addressed ideas to improve page speed, such as with HTML caching and isolating slow loading resources. In this post, I'll explain how to determine your slowest pages and apply a simple fix to speed them up.
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Technical SEO
5 Obstacles to SEO Success
December 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
I’ve worked in SEO for 14 years. In my experience, the following five deficiencies will likely block efforts to improve organic search performance