advanced seo for ecommerce sites - patrick altoft at ecommerce expo 2013

Advanced SEO for Ecommerce Sites

By Patrick Altoft, Director of Search

@patrickaltoft

The current

CITATIONS

BUILD

CONVERSATIONS

NEWS

Sentiment

SOCIAL

Authority Relevance

Freshness

is listening to…

DESIGN

CONTENT

BLOG

Engagement

Satisfaction

Structure Quality

Ecommerce SEO challenges • Content strategy

• Adding value

• User generated content

• Return to search

• Design, usability and making users love you

• Link clean-up & penalties

• Link strategy

• Reporting ROI with 100% of your keyword data “not provided”

What Google wants “The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs. ”

Matt Cutts

Our strategy therefore is to create a better search result for our clients than their competitors.

This can be split into two simple to understand factors:

• Creating more authority and being a better/more reputable company

• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages

Content Audit Document

•Typography

•Readability

•Spelling/grammar

•Shareability

•Keyword use

•Copyscape report on

stolen content

•Social media shares

Shareable Content

•Brainstorming

•Competitor Analysis

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors

Informative Content

•Research Q&A on

Yahoo Answers,

Quora, Facebook,

Twitter

•Search for questions

in Analytics data &

keyword tool data

•Gap Analysis of

current content

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors etc

User Generated Content

•Reviews –

implementation,

incentivisation etc

•Q&A section or Q&A

on product pages etc

•Forums, blog

comments, guest

blog posts, in-depth

content reviews

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors etc

Site Structure

•Where does content

need to go (blog or

Q&A etc)

•How should the

sections be

structured

•Design & UI

• Interlinking between

sections

•Examples &

screenshots from

competitors

Content Roadmap Document

•Monthly or weekly

content plan

•Special events &

calendar

•Blog calendar

•PR calendar

Content strategy framework

http://b3.io/TBXFpw

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/

Reviews If you don’t have a user review strategy – why not?

Questions & Answers Why wouldn’t you do this?

The Future (& present) of SEO

Return to Search You have a few seconds to get the visitor’s attention and persuade them that they have arrived at a site that will answer their query.

If they go back to Google, that’s a negative signal.

Manual Penalties

Penguin 2.0

Clean-up is Future-proofing

Doing real stuff Would you do this if it didn’t help with SEO?

When you release a new page or piece of content would your MD or PR department tweet about it? Would they tweet a link built by your SEO team?

If not then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

SEO has to be integral to marketing.

Data Sources Not provided will be 100% soon, attribution modelling becomes largely useless

• Total organic visits to top landing pages

• Total search visits minus brand clicks from WMT data

• Estimated visits per keyword via rankings, CTR & search volumes

• Click share for product categories

Thank you!

Please email any questions to patrick@branded3.com or get in touch on Twitter: @patrickaltoft