SEO On Air: E-commerce SEO: Essential Tips for Brands to Leverage Conversions

In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to Ross Briggs, the Director of Earned Media at Red Door Interactive, a fiercely independent data-driven marketing agency with offices in San Diego and Denver. Red Door Interactive is best known for helping brands effectively connect to customers through full-funnel cross-channel marketing programs.

In this episode, he will speak on the topic “E-commerce SEO: essential tips for brands to leverage conversions.”

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Tye Odom, discusses white-hat SEO. 

Show Notes Explanation

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of SEO On-Air. It’s good to see a lot of traditional businesses trying to get online. In today’s episode, we want to give you guys a basic understanding of SEO for e-commerce.

To speak more on this topic, we have Mr. Ross Briggs. He is the director of Earned Media at Red Door Interactive. He also oversees the social media and content team.

Time Stamp: 02:21-04:12

Q. How different is e-commerce SEO from other verticals?

• It’s definitely somewhat different from other verticals.
• E-commerce sites are much larger than lead-generation sites.
• The approach towards e-commerce sites is often scalable.
• If you try to optimize all the pages on an e-commerce site, it is practically impossible. Hence, you need to go with a scalable optimization strategy.

Time Stamp: 04:38-06:02

Q. What are some of the best content practices for e-commerce sites?

• We need to create value for the business for sites that we are optimizing.
• Oftentimes, it is done through product page optimization for keyword rankings and CTR.
• Once you build authority through product pages, you may then have an opportunity for more competitive and higher-volume keywords through your category pages.

Time Stamp: 06:21-08:33

Q. Which SEO platform is good for newbies in e-commerce?

• I think Shopify is a great platform, to begin with.
• It has a learning curve associated with it.
• It has a strong community to support you with any challenge that you might be having.
• WordPress is also an extremely SEO friendly platform. You have plugins like Yoast SEO and WooCommerce that makes it user-friendly.
• With a forward-looking thought, I’d recommend Shopify over WordPress because WordPress has some security and scalability issues.

Time Stamp: 08:58-11:37

Q. What is your recommendation for e-commerce store owners following the practice of bulk-uploading descriptions from manufacturers?

• It’s a big problem that we often see.
• Duplicate content leads to internal and external duplication of product pages.
• If you’re a small retailer working with a renowned manufacturer, typically, the manufacturer may have bigger DA and had the content indexed before you’ve done it to your site.
• Your content will then be canonicalized to the manufacturer’s content on their site.
• If your page is a complete duplicate, you’re not going to get the number one position on SERP because Google doesn’t want to rank multiple sites for the exact same content.
• I’ve seen success with machine-created content, which is human-readable and can pull in some good amount of traffic.

Time Stamp: 11:58-14:59

Q. What’s your take on beginners taking up high-volume keywords to target?

• There are two kinds of data-driven keyword research approach we do for this.
• The number one is a gap analysis approach. So, identifying a few sites that have similar DA and then doing a gap-analysis approach to look at all ranking keywords for those sites compared to the client’s site that we are optimizing.
• If we identify from this approach that multiple competitors are ranking on page one for certain keywords, we know that going after them will be beneficial.
• The other approach is not chasing the volume but chasing conversions and value from a traffic perspective.

Time Stamp: 16:17-18:50

Q. What are some of the tactics that you’d recommend for e-commerce sites to increase their CTR?

• In terms of CTR for e-commerce sites, enhancing your listings through user reviews, star ratings, price, and availability. All of those can enhance the appearance of listings on SERPS.
• The other thing that we’ve been exploring with is the FAQ markups. You can actually double the CTR through this process.
• You can also improve CTR through other tactics, such as taking user data around CTR for different headline variations and testing them on social media or paid search headlines, meta titles, and meta descriptions.

Time Stamp: 19:52-21:23

Q. What are some of the best ways to get more reviews on product pages?

• One thing you can do is integrate a review and rating system into your email and CRM strategy and follow up.
• Everybody loves giving ratings these days. By allowing this customer interaction on your site, you let them know that you value their opinions.

Time Stamp: 21:54-24:19

Q. What are some of the tactics you’ve used to improve conversions on e-commerce pages?

• A lot of it goes back to analyzing the visitors’ search intent and setting up content to guide them towards the buying goal.
• When you can answer the common concerns of the people when they try to make an online purchase, it makes the conversion process smoother.
• You must adapt the best SEO practices through A/B testing.
• Google recommends using a 302 redirect, which is a temporary redirect.
• You should try to match the metadata and H1 content to be as similar to the original page.