Category

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: Where to Start When You Need to Fix Everything

August 25, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Optimizing a site for organic search can be overwhelming when you’re staring at a blank slate. Where do you start? The good news is that there are three definitive steps when you're getting started.
SEO Tools
SEO How-to, Part 12: Technical Tools

August 18, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Implementing a search engine optimization strategy typically requires tools that can be dangerous when mishandled. Knowing those tools — when to use them and how — can make all the difference. This is the 12th and last post in my “SEO How-to” series.
Technical SEO
Google Lighthouse SEO Scores of Every Shopify Theme

August 12, 2020 • Hamlet Batista

This post addresses the SEO capabilities of every Shopify theme, using Lighthouse, across various page types — home, products, collections, blogs — for desktop and mobile.
Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 11: Mitigating Risk

August 10, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The risk to organic search performance from altering a website usually comes from changes to content, linking structures, or underlying technology. With careful planning and execution, however, you can mitigate the risk from those changes and increase the likelihood of better rankings. This is the 11th installment in my "SEO How-to" series
Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 10: Redesigns, Migrations, URL Changes

August 4, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Changes in content, linking, and URL structure can dramatically impact organic search performance. Thus it's critical to understand the search engine risks and rewards from a new design before you start developing it. This is the 10th installment in my "SEO How-to" series.
Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 9: Diagnosing Crawler Issues

July 27, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines must crawl and index your site before it can rank in organic search. Thus optimizing your content is pointless if search engines cannot access it. This is the ninth installment in my “SEO How-to” series.
Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 8: Architecture and Internal Linking

July 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The structure of your ecommerce site — categories, subcategories, attributes — heavily impacts search engine optimization. This is the eighth installment in my “SEO How-to” series.
Keyword Research
SEO How-to, Part 7: Mapping Keywords to Content

July 13, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words that consumers use to search for your products on Google and other search engines. Keyword mapping assigns those terms to pages on your site. This is the seventh installment in my "SEO How-to" series.
Technical SEO
Understanding Core Web Vitals for SEO

July 8, 2020 • Bill Sebald

On rare occasions Google provides expectations of upcoming algorithm changes. For example, Google alerted us to the mobile-first index change and, also, the inclusion of SSL signals. Once again, Google has given us a heads-up with Core Web Vitals.
On-page SEO
SEO How-to, Part 6: Optimizing On-page Elements

July 3, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research can help improve your organic search performance. Search engines attempt to sync the words and intent of consumers' queries with web pages. Ecommerce merchants should therefore align their pages using the right keywords to convey the proper intent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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