Get ready for a deep-dive into the world of SEO for E-Commerce in the next episode of the Majestic SEO Podcast, with expert guests: Luke Carthy, Yvie Ansari, Paul Ryazanov, Ritu Goel, and Dominic Lill.
Tune in to this episode for an in-depth discussion on which eCommerce platform reigns supreme, how to handle ‘out of stock’ pages, how to deal with duplicate content and much more!
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Transcript
David Bain
SEO for E-commerce. Which platform is best for E-commerce, SEO? What are some of the most effective techniques for E-commerce SEO in 2023? And how on earth do you compete with Amazon? Those are just a few of the questions that I’m going to be asking today’s panelists on the Majestic SEO podcast. So who’s going to be on the panel today? Let us find out and ask them to introduce themselves.
Ritu Goel
Hi, folks. My name is Ritu Goel, and I’ve been in SEO for over 13 years now. I’ve handled different things, technical content, my main strength is technical and and also, I set up my own company. Algo Digital, after working as a freelancer full time for almost 10 years.
Paul Ryazanov
Hey my name is Paul Ryazanov. I’m CEO of the MageCloud agency. We support probably 100+ ecommerce businesses on the various platforms. What brings me to SEO, it’s literally the option to fix any technical SEO issues on the website are not that much about the content, but the technical SEO or indexing, that’s probably my expertise on this topic.
Dominic Lill
Hi, I’m Dominic Lill. I’ve been working in SEO for probably about eight or nine years. And yeah, I mainly work with like smaller clients. I’m more of a content person so I use content to drive kind of like, you know, traffic towards websites and improve rankings.
Luke Carthy
Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, depending on whereabouts in the world you are. I am an e-commerce consultant and I’ve been in e-commerce since the age of 16. I started on eBay selling all sorts of stuff at my bedroom, and then I got told off by my mom, and decided to make it serious. I’ve kind of been running around e-commerce companies for quite some time. But I love tech, SEO, CRO, and analytics, and I kind of just smash all three of those together on a day to day basis.
Yvie Ansari
I’m Yvie Ansari and I am the director of YVA Media, which is a digital marketing agency. I have over 11 years of SEO experience and across all three different areas. But my core strengths are in content and technical SEO.
David Bain
So a wide ranging panel with a great deal of experience in SEO but specialist experience in different areas. So anyone watching, feel free to ask any questions about e-commerce, SEO, and hopefully we can incorporate that as part of the livestream. If you are listening to this afterwards, of course, try and hop on and join us at some other livestream in the future majestic.com/webinars is where you sign up for that. But first topic, let’s focus on what platform is best for E-commerce SEO, and we can approach this from different perspectives. We’ll come to you Paul first and we’ll talk about platforms from a technical perspective, and what are the pros and cons of each platforms. But then we can get different people’s perspectives on perhaps actually content driven SEO using an e-commerce platform and other ways of evaluating whether or not that platform is the best for that particular task. So Paul, from a technical perspective, how do you go about selecting which platform to choose?
Paul Ryazanov
To be quite honest, when we advise our customers about which platforms they want to select, we’re probably not really thinking much about like a SEO in place. I’m always trying to say, hey, Google does not really care if it’s Shopify or Magento, or WooCommerce. It’s more about like the structure and stuff like that. So when we pick up the platform, the number one for me, it’s the business of the customers, right? So, for instance, if the clients really like a big websites with a lot of customizations, your piece systems and stuff like that depends on the revenue as well. I can suggest them, either, I would say Magento or Shopify. If its website, with say 20 products, I will never probably recommend them on Magento because this will be overcomplicated. So long story short, I think the number one decision should not really be based on the SEO in place, but more about the business needs and the standard you want to solve. Again, we can go very much deep. Historically, as of right now, let me tell you the truth, the top five platforms that I can see based on the migrations, because when I’m working with the clients, I can see how many clients want to leave one platform and move elsewhere. So the top five now, Shopify, WooCommerce, WIX, Shopware, and BigCommerce. That’s five, which is the top. Magento that I’m also specialized in, it’s out of the top in terms of the migration, right? There are a bunch of upsides big one that still build and develop on Magento, but I do see the trend of clients moving away from this platform for a different reason, probably cost. So that’s that’s kind of what I have in mind.
David Bain
Wix is an interesting name that I wouldn’t have necessarily initially put together with e-commerce there. So what type of business is using Wix for e-commerce?
Paul Ryazanov
It’s all starting with a small, small companies who just want to build something out, right. But they also have like e-commerce module that you can activate. I think the reason why this platform is in the trend for the migrations is just like probably the smaller guys who eventually started something with other platform. Once they reached out the level when they have to update the plugins or manage the security and stuff like that, especially security is the key now, to be quite honest, that’s one of the biggest factor. What do you want to do and why you want to maybe utilize cloud based solutions, rather than self hosted. I think Wix, it’s kind of the easiest platform to start. If you’re just a one solo guy, you know, and you want to test to test the market. That’s what makes weeks now, one of the platforms that’s trending in e-commerce, specifically.
Dominic Lill
Yeah, and can I just say that? Yeah, I actually came across a Wix e-commerce store that was ranking really, really well, in the UK, for a beer shop and I was looking to buy some beer. I just kind of had a quick look on Semrush, and it was ranking really, really well, and it was growing which kind of almost proved to me that regardless of the reputation that a platform has had, it can rank well, if you do the right things.
Luke Carthy
That’s a good point. I had the benefit of being on the Wix board for for a short stint, and I got to see some incredible stuff. So anyone that’s kind of throwing Wix out of the ring, for various reasons, whether you believe it’s not developed enough, or the SEO isn’t strong enough, I can tell you without bias it is it’s really powerful, really, really powerful. And they’ve just this week actually announced Wix Headless. So if you’ve got the budget for it, if you’re thinking of a headless platform, it’s a really good option. It’s also incredibly fast. Wix has spent a lot of time and resources on making sure that their default ecom themes are incredibly quick, which can always be a tricky one to get. Right. Right. It’s always theme dependent. But I think what we’re kind of alluding to here already, we’ve kind of listed, you know, Paul’s listed or five, we can probably chew through the pros and cons of all of them individually. But yeah, there’s never really a one size fits all, but the ones that I feel are best for low barrier entries for sure, Shopify, a cliche answer because it’s good. And Wix, I’d actually seriously consider if you’re a small business, but equally, if you’re enterprise enough, and your products are simple. And actually the one thing that a lot of people forget about when we think about SEO, is whether it works from a business perspective as well. So integrations into warehouse, fulfillment, customizations, that’s a big part of something that we as SEOs often neglect and forget to think about. Put that’s the one side Shopify, Wix is, is great. And I’ve seen a lot of people migrating to, as per Paul’s point, those platforms particularly.
David Bain
So does that mean that WooCommerce is perhaps losing out a lot to Wix? Because I would think that the similar kind of startup or trader selling a low number of individual items, would be possibly selecting for WooCommerce or Wix? Or is that not necessarily correct?
Yvie Ansari
I don’t necessarily think that’s correct. I think there’s still quite a bit of competition between, like WooCommerce and Shopify, for example. But I think WooCommerce is more of a smaller business platform, because they don’t tend to have the budgets to essentially pay for something more custom, I would say, I think my one sort of bug bear with Shopify, is that they tend to just introduce random subfolders into the URL structure, which most of the other platforms don’t do. So from a tech perspective, that’s not always the most ideal thing to sort of work with.
David Bain
Ritu, what what are your thoughts?
Ritu Goel
So the one of the clients that I’m working with, the website is on WooCommerce, and that’s working really well. So they are like right now deciding whether they should move to Shopify. And the reason being with WooCommerce, they are finding difficult to modify the designs, or the landing pages, which they think it’s going to be very easy in Shopify, I completely agree with Yvie. So they there is an apprehension that once they migrate to Shopify, there will be unnecessary folders in the URLs and they have to set up 301 redirects, so there is a risk of losing ranks as well for the URLs that are already indexed in Google. So that’s the risk of moving to Shopify, and also, it is more expensive. Moving to Shopify compared to WooCommerce.
Luke Carthy
Convenience costs money, right, like, you got to pay for it. I think there’s definitely a few inexcusable things that Shopify does. We’ve already spoken about the classic, multiple collection URLs for similar products and all that sort of stuff. And it can be fixed. But you know, but what I cannot forgive, is the redirect manager. Right? If you’re migrating from another platform to Shopify, it is a real pain to be the person in the driving seat who has to be responsible for potentially 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of redirects. BigCommerce are the same, so they’re not free of smoke, either. They get smoked, just like everybody else. And I would say, the most comprehensive redirect module that I have seen, personally, my experience is one that you build yourself, or WordPress. WordPress redirect managers are typically incredible. But then on the other side, Shopify is incredibly easy to use, so that they all have their accolades. They all have their challenges. Pros and cons. It really is case by case. What’s gonna work best, where are you coming from? What size? How many products? Is SEO that big of a deal? Let’s be honest, if you’re someone like Sony, and you’re selling B2C, and SEO probably isn’t much of a consideration compared to something like UX, and simplification build and all that sort of good stuff. Yeah, the thing we could talk about forever.
Ritu Goel
I agree. Yeah. I agree. I was just gonna conclude that I completely agree there is no one size fits all solution. So it really depends on the business, number of products, and what’s their end goal, or what’s their strategy, whether it’s a b2c, or direct to consumer.
Dominic Lill
I just think it’s important to also say that each of these platforms are constantly improving, as you can see, with the Wix Headless announcement. All of them know what Google want. Every business is looking for the best platform, and it depends on who you speak to, an agency that specializes in WooCommerce then they could recommend WooCommerce because it’s easy for them. But then WordPress is continuing to improve, Shopify is continuing to improve and they want to give the best platform possible so that they are chosen because obviously the market is busy.
David Bain
So I think that’s a great summary of the top five or so ecommerce solutions out there. So let’s say that someone’s made the decision now they’ve chosen the platform that they want to go for. So maybe we can get everyone’s view on maybe the top three things that you have to do initially, to get it set up effectively for SEO. So shall we go back to Paul, for the first one there? And what platform do you want to choose, and what would your first few steps be?
Paul Ryazanov
From my experience was I’m looking at my clients, the number one to make sure what you do is register your domain in Google Search Console. You can’t even imagine how many clients that I work with, they don’t really have this set up. And some of them set up by HTTP, without the proper URLs, like a domain management. That’s like, that’s insane. Like, again, sounds like a basics, but that’s number one. Number two, what I can see, the biggest mistake that I’ve seen so far, when the client paying for SEO agency to build links to your website, and then when you can, when you check the Google Search Console, you go into the sitemap, and you can you can see how many pages actually in Google index is like maybe like 20% of pages, compared with what’s in your Sitemap. Sometimes I’m trying to ask my clients, hey, if a percentages of your pages not in Google index, how you can expect this to rank. And especially when we work with the businesses, they have, I don’t know, 20,000 parts or products, that’s became a challenge. And in many cases, what they do is they basically grab the data from the suppliers, and then the supplier share this content with so many different other sources. And that’s to my best knowledge, if I were talking about technical, so on, let’s forget, forget about link building for now, I think that’s the two factors that you have to definitely keep in mind as the number one metric. Set up a Google Search Console, watch out what Google recommends you and pay attention to what actually in the Google index, that’s, that’s to the best of my knowledge, probably the two main things to watch.
David Bain
Yvie, once you’ve got your e-commerce platform, set up and running. What is the first thing that you do from an SEO perspective?
Yvie Ansari
So my first thing, and this is actually quite interesting, because I came across this challenge quite recently with a client is actually to look at the site structure and what the site structure needs to look like, not just for now, but longer term. Because if you’ve got a client that sells a specific product, and they have done their site structure just on that product, over time, you’ll see as they expand their product base, they start bolting on to the site structure, rather than doing it in a way that’s scalable and actually sensible from a user perspective. So what ends up happening is that it looks really confusing in the navigation and the URL structure and all of that. So actually planning the site structure in line with what it’s going to look like in the navigation and the URLs is the thing that I would look at first.
David Bain
What tool do you use to plan that?
Yvie Ansari
So it’s a combination, because it’s not really an easy way to put it into a tool and it just spits out a site structure situation. It’s more that you should do your keyword research and look at what people are searching for, then go and use a tool like Miro to visualize what that ends up looking like, and then translating that into the platform to essentially structure it.
David Bain
Miro is one of those cool tools that I’ve always intended to try, but I’ve never really tried, but you’d certainly recommend. Luke, what are your first steps from an SEO perspective after you get going with your e-commerce platform?
Luke Carthy
Yeah, I’m actually going to tack right onto the back of Yvie’s point on on site structure. I think taxonomy is the absolute underdog of a number of things right. One is internal linking, because that as we know is the lifeblood of SEO. Secondly, it impacts more than SEO, because if your customers can shop and browse easier via a great structure. I’m working with a client right now in the world of skincare, we’re doing exactly this. Their skincare collections, because they’re on Shopify, are a mess. They’re fragmented. Theres sale ones here, there’s this product specific ones over there. It’s a madness. So we need to rebuild it in a sense that allows people to shop, flow through the category structure with a parent-child relationship. As I said, internal linking, building the right landing pages to bring all those experiences together. Yeah, it’s easy to overlook this stuff, because it’s not really the bowels of technical SEO, but it is in such a way, it almost kind of seems like the meat in the sandwich between content and technical, right? Because you really could think about your category names, your category descriptions, how they’re laid out, pagination, attributes, it’s all incredibly important. And that’s a lot of technical SEO that normally gets forgotten about. A lot of people focus on product page level, or they think of Sitemaps, homepage, canonicals, and they’re all incredibly important. But it’s all in vain if your core category structure isn’t working correctly. And the analogy I like to use is, how would you experience this if it was a physical store? If it was a supermarket? If it was a department store? What ailse would you expect to find this in. What complementary aisles would you expect to find this in, and clients that I work with, that are multifaceted across lots of departments. So I’ve worked with a client in the world of beauty, stationery, so broad. And if your categories are too tall or too thin, it can cause all sorts of problems. So spending a lot of time there is a heck of a lot easier to do now at point zero than it is in two years time, where your product is everywhere. And you’ve got to then redirect a load of things and it gets messy real quick. Lastly, to tack on to that, navigation, it goes hand in hand. Right? If your site nav is out of order, people aren’t able to find anything, and normally, it is the number one most clicked element collectively on your entire e-commerce site is your navigation. So it’s really important to get that right.
David Bain
I just want to ask you a quick follow up question Luke, and that relates to taxonomy and the categories that you were talking about there? Obviously, each item can have potentially 10s of categories. How do you go about selecting the number one category that you will reflect in URLs?
Luke Carthy
One thing you’ve got to do is to make sure you only have one permutation of categories to exist, right, so let’s say you sell shoes, so you’ve got shoes, and then a subcategory might be men’s shoes and women’s shoes, you don’t then have women’s shoes, and then shoes. And then another alternative where it’s the opposite way around, you always want to have one global way to address that collection or category or even products, right? So the overall structure you should really have is your product URLs should be fully independent from your categories as per Yvie’s point early with Shopify it’s a nightmare, right. But saying that, there’s a quick one, when you fix that in Shopify, you lose your breadcrumb trail, which is there’s a compromise somewhere always. It’s never straightforward. But that’s incredibly important to make sure you’ve done that. And then lastly, which is something a lot of people sleep on as well is make sure your pagination is accessible. So many people canonicalize their pagination back to the page one of the other category. Stop doing that. If you’re on webflow, webflow is guilty of this all the time I’ve worked every single web flow site I’ve touched out of the box canonicalize is page seven, page a page nine, page two, back to page one, infuriating. Don’t do that.
David Bain
There’s one other topic in relation to that whivch we’ve probably talked about before, is that you’ve got a brand and that brand is popular among male and female audience. Now, how do you actually go about determining which URL to try to rank for that particular brand? Do you create an entirely different landing page for that brand or try and zone in a particular male or female style of clothing?
Luke Carthy
I’m going to try my best not to say it depends here, but I would say create multiple subcategories within that brand. So let’s say, Let me think of a brand that hits many bases, let’s say Nike, right? So kids, men’s, women’s, you can have Nike, as a brand parent, so just /brand or /nike, but then you can absolutely have subcategories of that. There’s no reason why you can’t then have women’s, men’s, children. And then on top of that, you could also have running, fashion. You know, whatever it is, and you create the structured subcategories, which allows you to then target all of these granular keyword sets, you can actually do this at scale with an automated tool called similar.ai, which works for the serious kind of enterprise PrettyLittleThing, kind of level, you know, e-commerce retailers, where you’ve got 10s of 1000s of categories that are built for you automatically to hit that. But on a smaller scale, where you work with independent brands, then yeah, look at the search volume. If theres search volume for it, build the collection, build the category, internally link it create the right silos and URL structures. But the more categories you create, you kind of create more running some more problems. But typically, what you find is, the benefit of creating those structured categories offsets the SEO risk, and complications. So as long as you have really good foundations, you should be fine. But do not be afraid of creating the right category structure to make it easier for your customers to access your site. And as I said before, that impact email, SEO, paid search, direct, traffic in general. But it’s great for SEO as well.
David Bain
Dominic, once you’ve got your e-commerce platform chosen, what are your first steps with SEO?
Dominic Lill
I want to speak to the client and see what their goals are, and what they kind of really want to achieve with their SEO, because as much as we can throw all the research and all that kind of stuff at them, if it’s not what they want, then you kind of need to keep the client happy, as well as their customers. So that’s kind of an aspect I think, is kind of almost after you set up the Search Console, because obviously Search Consoles can be a massive, massive bedrock of your strategy, and how you kind of understand the website and how you can understand the changes that you need to make.
David Bain
It’s a great thought. And something that every SEO needs to emphasize as well, because it’s very easy to get lost in technical success from an SEO perspective. But unless you actually understand the business and what they’re trying to achieve, then your own objectives and goals aren’t necessarily marking up with what the client wants to achieve. And even though you might be doing great things for them, they might not be satisfied with you because you’re not achieving what they want to achieve. Ritu, what are your thoughts?
Ritu Goel
Yes, I think always similar to what other guys said. So first would be the tracking and the Google Search Console errors. So yes, it’s one of the things that’s been overlooked, and Google Search Console is a box of opportunities, especially the index section, it can give you can actually surprise you with so many things that can be fixed, or there’s so many problems that are hanging, so can be fixed. And that could be my starting point, followed by looking at the taxonomy and site structure of the website, how the categories are, how the categories are done, and the products. So what’s the URL structure because one of my clients, the URL structure was really poor. So what they have done is it’s a jewelry website and the nomenclature of the product is, is they have used numbers so, if it’s jewelry-1, jewelry-2, so I would check what kind of product names they have used. So I would use Screaming Frog for that. I will just do a crawl of the website and get the site structure in Screaming Frog. So in Screaming Frog there is there is an option where you can see the site structure in a tree graph, so I find that quite helpful visually and to understand how that site is structured.
David Bain
If a client, a new client of yours has horrible URLs that maybe don’t describe what a particular category is for you the numbers in them or whatever? Are you a fan of potentially changing the URLs even though that they’re alive and potentially bringing in traffic?
Ritu Goel
So that would be the plan. I would check the traffic, what traffic they are driving, make sure what I’m suggesting to them, we should not see risk of losing the ranks they have already achieved. So it will have to be changed, certainly, but I’ll make sure that the redirects are set 301 redirects are set. But yes, it will be difficult to continue with the with the names that are that are not really describing the product.
David Bain
Is anyone in the panel uncomfortable with that? I mean, if you’re inheriting an e-commerce site that has suboptimal URLs, but is already bringing in traffic organically to these URLs, will you just leave it as it is?
Paul Ryazanov
Well, some platforms, they have a limitation, some platforms, you cannot get rid of this. So that’s number one. Like specially I have a client on PrestaShop which wewe don’t really handle but they literally already have numbers in front of the URLs. And I find there seems like a limitation that, in many cases, business owner will say, hey, we cannot just do it. Right? Well, developers will say, hey, we can just do it everything is technically possible, but then the cost of doing this and the benefits could be could depend, right. So I think we have to also keep in mind, if there’s any backlinks to this page already established, before you start changing the URLs, if there’s a lot of websites linking to this already URL its probably on case by case basis, you have to make a wise decision whether you want to do.
Ritu Goel
Yeah, I completely agree. So that’s why it’s better to see the history of that URL, how much traffic it’s driving, and what’s its performance, like? And then also, you need to analyze what is the cost involved in changing the URL name? And so on. But yes, the site structure overall, has to be one of the things that needs to be looked after, as the starting point.
David Bain
Luke, you’re gonna jump in about that one as well, aren’t you?
Luke Carthy
Yeah, absolutely. It’s difficult, isn’t it? If you inherit something that’s driving, good traffic, good cash, also kind of a pillar page from a paid search perspective, you know, you’re playing with a different department there potentially, or a different person, at least, don’t fix what’s not broken, you know, like, URLs aren’t the be all and end all. There’s definitely, almost like a process and an audit to approach things in before you go and attack URLs. So if you know, for example, is there content on the page? Is it the right format? Is it quick? Is it addressing the query as best as possible? Is it mobile friendly? Like all of those things are way more important than, you know, eight or nine numbers at the end of the URL? Yes, of course, it scratches an itch for us, to make it the URLs nice and clean. But at the end of the day, this is money. No one cares about the URL as a user, this is purely search. But yeah, there’s always that trade off. And I think, you know, certainly, working on Shopify sites, these limitations kind of come up all the time, attribute parameters is a real pain, because you can’t index them, for the right reasons, mostly, but you know it interferes sometimes. It’s just a case of making the call and really bringing it back to the point of, is it going to make the client more money? And if the answer is no, then you probably should just leave it alone. Because then we’re doing something for us, not the client, if it’s your own project site, and you’ve got your own side gig and you want to make it perfect, hey, go ahead. But when you’re playing with someone else’s till (cash register) and livelihood, you’ve really got to be careful or be or make absolutely sure that you redirects are watertight and that you can pick it back up afterwards. But yeah, it’s Paul’s point. Sometimes it’s just not worth the effort.
David Bain
That’s a great phrase when you’re playing with someone else’s till you’re not just mucking about with your own site, theres real money you’re playing with and it’s not your money, it’s someone else’s money, so be careful with it. Let’s move on to what an e-commerce SEO strategy is, and maybe how you create one, what’s incorporated one, how often you have to visit one. Yvie, how would you go about creating an e-commerce SEO strategy?
Yvie Ansari
I think, first things first, speak to the client about their goals, right? And really understand, what are they trying to achieve? And also, who is their target audience? Who are they trying to reach? And it might be multiple different types of people. So that strategy might not be just one strategy, it might actually be multiple different strategies, depending on who they’re trying to reach. So based on all of that information, it’s then down to understanding search behaviors. And, you know, what are people looking for? What kind of content do they want? What are competitors doing? How can you look at leveraging what competitors are doing within your own strategy. And then off the back of that it’s a case of, so what I tend to do is put together a strategy that hits all stages of the marketing funnel, because SEO doesn’t just sit across one stage, it sits across all of them. So you look at your top of funnel content, mid funnel content, and then bottom of funnel. And then it’s also a case of just looking at revisiting that. So it’s not just one and done. It’s not once a year, it is a continually iterative process of really understanding what’s performing well, what isn’t performing, who’s engaging with what content, what content isn’t working so well. All of that sort of stuff.
David Bain
So Dominic, what would you agree with? What would you disagree with? And what would you add?
Dominic Lill
I agree with everything. I think it does, it does all start with the client, you know, I tend to work with kind of smaller kind of businesses, and you’ve got to kind of understand what they want, what they understand from their own business, because you’ve got to understand what’s profitable for them, they could sell 1,000 different things, but there might be just one thing that if they sell 10 of these, they’re set for the year, so you’ve got to have an understanding of the business and the business element of the client, rather than our own ideas about what’s going to bring them traffic. I think sometimes as SEOs, and I know I do as well, I get carried away with the research and the clicks, and the impressions and these things, and being like, Yeah, I’m gonna go and get all these amazing things for you. And then the client is like, Well, I haven’t made any sales, then you’re kind of answering some uncomfortable questions. So yeah, it does all kind of start from that and gaining an understanding what their website is, what thye’ve been doing before, and where the traffic’s been going. For example, I had one client who’s homepage ranked for everything they could possibly want to rank for. But then when you’re thinking about the end user and the customer, you know, when I’m shopping for something, I don’t necessarily want to come to end up on the homepage, I want to end up on the category page where I can see some products. So the strategy became this, take away some of these keywords from the homepage and move them on to the category pages, it was a WooCommerce store. So we started doing that. And it’s been really effective. So yeah, having an understanding of the overall business is where any strategy starts and what they want to target,. and then you can do research based off that and you can explain to them, okay, this person is searching for this word, because it’s more commercial. Let’s go for this, and, and then develop a strategy around that.
David Bain
How do you actually tailor an e-commerce SEO strategy to business goals?
Luke Carthy
It’s really simple. I think we humans like to overcomplicate it. If it makes money, it’ll probably go on the list. It’s really as simple as that. If it commercially makes sense, either by making a profit or saving money then should probably be there right. You could have something for example, that cleans up 30% of all their bloat URLs into the millions, as an SEO, that’s a huge tick in the box. But commercially that might that might make absolutely no difference at all. Versus to Dominic’s point, you might have a situation where you’ve got a lot of traffic going to the homepage from lots of different times, but the experience is terrible. So in that sense, redesigning and re-looking at the homepage experience is way at the top of the list comparatively, to the point where so you kind of feel like your original question, David was kind of like, how do you approach a strategy, I typically have a really big audit at the beginning, which is written for the C-suite rather than a technical document which talks about it, this is where you’re losing money, this is where you’re making money, these are the solutions. I actually don’t do big strategic documents outside of initial audit, because things move around so quickly, that I used to put so much effort into a strategic document, and then I felt like a quarter would pass, and everything that we propose would do is no longer important because there’s an inventory issue, or this, like, I don’t know, Adobe’s bought another company again, and now it’s gotten to a corporate level where they can’t afford it. So we need to look for an alternative. Or there’s a new products about to come out, or the CMO is obsessed with ChatGPT and wants to replace all the content. And it’s like, just like, you kind of just have to be in a situation where I have really like frameworks of where we want to focus commercially, and just allowing myself to work almost as if I’m in-house. Because strategies for me are tedious, I find them difficult to do. I love the bigger picture. But writing a big piece of documentative work for me is it’s hard for me to do mentally. And normally, things don’t always go to plan, particularly ecommerce. But yeah, as long as you’re sticking to what’s making money, or fixing things that are hemorrhaging money, as an SEO or as a business owner, in general, probably going to be alright.
David Bain
If a client comes to you and says, in two years time, or in one year time, we want to be in this position, we want to be selling double the amount of these products, and we’re focusing on this. How do you deal with that? I mean, will you try to hit their goals? Will you try and push back if you find that their goals are unrealistic? And will you potentially even suggest other goals? If you think there are better goals that would bring more profit or more revenue?
Luke Carthy
Yeah, absolutely. If someone’s going to sit there and say we want to 5x our business over the next two years, then that might be feasible? Because it depends on what 5x looks like, doesn’t it? But if it seems or feels unrealistic, then you’ve got to be communicative. But one of the really important prerequisite questions that I love to ask clients before I start with them is, why is it your business needs SEO? Or why do you feel your business needs SEO? And the answers you get are quite profound. Because everybody believes that more of something means more money at the bottom, more traffic at the top, bigger paid search, bigger budget, more SEO, send more emails, add more products, add more discounts, right, all of these things end up wanting to result in more sales. And rarely, when you turn the volume on something, does it have the impact at the other end. So for me, when you get into the nitty gritty of why they want SEO, they don’t want SEO at all. Nobody wants SEO. Everybody just wants to make more money or to stop losing money. And that’s where you can look under the hood and think Ah, okay, you don’t just have an SEO problem, you’ve got a tech stack issue, you’ve got a site search issue, your GA-4 is over representing your data, you’re not even GDPR compliant, email is not even part of your strategy, we should look at that. And you get to a point where actually, maybe SEO doesn’t even touch the worksheet so to speak for the first six months, but you’re sticking to their plan of making more money. So I, for example, I have a client I’ve working with for a year, and we haven’t touched SEO yet, but their revenue is up 3x Because we’ve focused on everything that makes money, but they think they’re getting SEO, right, which is you know, whatever, they don’t care what they’re getting, they just care that the money is coming in at the end of it. And I think that’s what’s really important is you follow where the money is, you understand why they want SEO, you kind of communicate one thing I might say lie to them, but you communicate in a way but you underneath the skin you’re working away. Lastly, an analogy I love to use is when someone walks into a dealership to buy a car, you are not buying a four cylinder engine with a gearbox and four wheels and everything else you’re buying a transportation device to get you from somewhere to somewhere. So my point is no one is buying SEO, they are buying business growth. And that’s what we as SEOs, we as marketers in general should absolutely be delivering, not a four cylinder engine with four wheels and a gearbox.
David Bain
Paul, at the beginning of this conversation you talked about about five different e-commerce platforms and you said that different clients will better suit different platforms. So what will be an example of a client goal that they want to achieve that would lead you into selecting a particular platform?
Paul Ryazanov
So first of all, let’s talk about Shopify. If I’m not mistaken, 800,000 a month, then you automatically switch to as minimum 2,000 a month Shopify fee. Now the question is, are you as a business willing to do pay this fee? Or do you want to be on the self-hosted stuff? Maybe it’s not related to SEO, but that’s probably one of the stuff that you have to consider platform wise. The second thing is, depends on your business. If you’re in the vape, CBD, stuff like that, there are some niches that, for example, automatically exclude Shopify as one of the choice, right? Because you want to probably control and you don’t want to be depends on the Shopify to make a final decision, hey, we just shut down your store. Right? So in some niches self-hosted is just the number one way to go. Everthing else like Magento, for example, a lot of Magento for the fact that you can utilize effectively b2c and b2b on the same platform, while by default on Shopify, b2b is just not even there. Again, we’ll come back to the store to the question how I decide. That’s just a quick samples. In terms of 2023 question that you asked me before, I would probably add here a couple of things like when someone asked me, like, typical problem. I’ve got the response, I’ll get like a feedback like, hey, we just launched this website, can you check my SEO? That’s the most common mistake, please don’t even publish this website, before the SEO guy will check it. Because the cost of fixing issues that’s already indexed by Google could be way more than just launch it with noindex, nofollow, run some Google ads, or Google Shopping, leave it alone. And then like, something like that, right. So I want to make sure that everyone who was watching is not coming to the SEO at the end, you should come at the very beginning of the project. What I find that Google loves, if you keep producing new content and new pages, it’s gonna be landing pages, targeting, something like ‘best Nike shoes design 2023’, like a recent content stuff and stuff like that those pages can be optimized for featured snippet. I feel this is very underestimated nowadays. If you will be let’s the question how you can beat Amazon, right? If you will create a page that Google will love because of the data and the Featured Snippet. That’s how you can beat any other very trustful sources. Right? So I think if if, if the SEO as a strategy is in your plate, think about producing new pages, and getting them optimized as a featured snippet as much as possible.
David Bain
I’m glad that you incorporated Amazon as part of your response briefly there, Paul, because I think we’re gonna have to try and cover Amazon at some point and another discussion panel on the future, because I don’t think we’ve got enough time for everyone to have their say on that. Is it possible to compete directly with it? I think you gave some indication as to how you have to be really niche focused, and then that will give yourself an opportunity to compete with them and understand things like schema. But let’s move on to Ritu, to have your last thoughts on this particular topic. So what would you like to agree with disagree with or add to yourself?
Ritu Goel
So regarding the business, regarding the strategy, SEO strategy for the e-commerce website, I think I agree with most things that others have said, understanding the business goal of a client is the foremost thing that I would do, and understanding the flagship products that they have that makes them money, like what Luke said, whatever is making money, that’s what they’re interested in. And if they are coming to us, they are looking for business growth, and they are not looking for traffic or they’re not looking for rankings. They just care about revenue. So one of the clients that came to me, he worked with me for two months. He was persistent about the sales. He will only talk about sales, he’s not interested in clicks or impressions or anything else. He would just measure his performance, how many sales he’s getting, every month, and he just launched the website and he was expecting to have to 2x performance, 3x performance in two months. It is not possible. So it’s better to set the right expectation from the very beginning when you when you start and be transparent. But yes, I try to talk with clients in terms of sales or revenue, or whatever their goals are, instead of rankings or, instead of impressions and with the reports that don’t make much sense to them. But it’s important for SEO to understand the strategy or how to go about it, but not to them. So all they want is more money.
David Bain
I’m your host, David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO podcast. Let’s go around the panel, just one last time just reminding everyone who they are and where you can find them.
Ritu Goel
Thank you guys, thank you for listening to me. Hope you liked it. So you can contact me anytime on LinkedIn. My name is Ritu Goel.
Paul Ryazanov
It’s very easy to reach me my first name dot last name@gmail.com, and if you Google Paul Ryazanov you can find me easily.
Yvie Ansari
You can find me on LinkedIn as well, and much like Paul, you can also just Google Yvie Ansari and find me at the top of the search results.
Luke Carthy
It’s been awesome to be part of the conversation. You can find anywhere really Twitter, LinkedIn. Just Google my name like everybody else. I mean, if we as SEOs couldn’t allow people to Google our names and find us, then we shouldn’t be here.
Dominic Lill
Thank you very much for listening, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search me and there’s a picture of me with London Eye behind me.
David Bain
Thank you everyone. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars, and of course, check out our other series at SEOin2023.com.
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