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
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
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Technical SEO
Are SEO Audits Worth the Money?
December 17, 2019 • Bill Sebald
An SEO audit can cover any number of components — technical, content, competitive, backlinks, mobile, and analytics. Or it can be even more detailed. The risk of a generic SEO audit is that it scratches the surface, with little benefit.
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SEO
5 SEO Wives’ Tales That Won’t Go Away
December 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
There’s a wives’ tale that white wine will remove a red-wine stain. Another claims that eating an apple a day will keep a doctor away. Similarly, many wives’ tales surround search engine optimization. The five below I hear the most from clients and other marketers.
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SEO
How to Make SEO Happen in 2020
December 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Effective search engine optimization takes preparation and planning. Random action produces haphazard results. Here’s how to make your SEO plans come to life in 2020.
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SEO
The 8 Benefits of SEO for Ecommerce
November 24, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce businesses live and die by their ability to attract new customers. In the race to increase revenue, traffic from organic search can be essential. Here’s why.
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SEO
How to Monitor SEO Topic Clusters, Silos
November 18, 2019 • Armando Roggio
An internal linking strategy around topic clusters or silos can improve site architecture and help search engines understand your content. But topic clusters are not a set-and-forget strategy. They require monitoring.
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SEO
For Ecommerce SEO, Don’t Ignore the Long Tail
November 17, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization typically focuses on popular keywords. However, long-tail SEO targets keywords that are searched for less frequently but drive value in the aggregate.
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Cross-border Selling
Hreflang Explained
November 12, 2019 • Bill Sebald
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that allows Google and other search engines to recognize localized versions of web pages. If you have sections of your site for a French audience, for example, an hreflang tag helps Google understand that the section should appear in search results on Google.fr, not Google.com.
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Technical SEO
For SEO, How Fast Is Fast Enough?
November 3, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Page speed improvements are high on most ecommerce to-do lists. The potential for increased revenue as well as better organic search rankings makes the effort worthwhile. But first, everyone wants to know how fast is fast enough.
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Link Building
SEO Link-building for Ecommerce
October 29, 2019 • Bill Sebald
Link-building is tough. It's especially tough for ecommerce sites. Long gone are the days when consumers linked to products. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be seeking links. It may be even more necessary.
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On-page SEO
SEO: Google’s BERT Update Helps Ecommerce Product Pages
October 27, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s BERT algorithm, released last week, is the company’s latest effort to understand the intent of search queries. For ecommerce sites, the unique details on product pages could now drive more organic search traffic with high purchase intent.
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SEO
SEO: Expertise in 1 Area Can Lead to Weakness in Others
October 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Excelling in one area of search engine optimization can lead to weaknesses in others. I've seen it many times. If your organic search channel isn’t growing despite the effort you’re pouring into it, assess whether you are blind to the real issue. Here are three examples.
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Technical SEO
7 SEO ‘Rules’ to Ignore for Ecommerce
October 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization tools have evolved into measuring hundreds of variables. But not all of them impact ecommerce performance in my experience. What follows are seven common SEO metrics to ignore, or relegate to a quick glance.
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Technical SEO
Chrome’s ‘Mixed Content’ Updates Could Impact Ecommerce Sites
October 7, 2019 • Hamlet Batista
Google Chrome just announced important changes that could impact ecommerce. The changes address "mixed content" — sites with HTTP and HTTPS resources. In this post, I'll review steps to ensure the changes do not affect your ecommerce site come January.
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Technical SEO
7 Coding Barriers to SEO Success
October 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Googlebot obeys only certain commands, ignores forms and cookies, and crawls only the links coded with a proper anchor tag and href. What follows are seven items that block Googlebot and other search engine bots from crawling (and indexing) all of your web pages.