Category: SEO

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Sometimes You Can’t Fight the Rankings

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well blog: “Why You Can’t Fight Search-Engine Results.”

Searchers ultimately control what a search phrase “means” and what types of content are relevant for a search query. A business selling furniture pads might be 100 percent certain that they sell “protective pads,” and therefore have the right to rank highly for searches for “protective pads.” But they’d be wrong.

A quick search in Google shows that nine out of 10 of the results for “protective pads” actually refer to sporting goods like knee pads for skaters. For a bit of diversity, one listing for incontinence pads also shows up on page one. At the bottom, the “searches related to protective pads” section displays some suggests for furniture-related queries. Google doesn’t consider any sites featuring furniture pads highly relevant to search queries for “protective pads.”

So, if you sell furniture pads, do you want to hang your SEO hopes on the phrases you think you should rank for, like “protective pads?” Probably not, and here’s why….

Read the article in full at Inc. Well » “Why You Can’t Fight Search-Engine Results.”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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How Information Architecture Impacts SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Impact of Ecommerce Catalog Structure.”

Information architecture and search engine optimization are both critical aspects of developing an ecommerce site. During the process, early decisions made about the structure of a site and its product catalog can have surprising ramifications for SEO.

Which product types and attributes are assigned as categories, subcategories, and filters within the catalog impact much more than user experience. They also impact which pages the ecommerce platform will generate and how they’re interconnected in the navigation, both of which impact SEO.

Let’s use a hair care products site as an example. Say we’re selling shampoo, conditioner, and styling products for men, women, and children. Our products are tailored to normal, dry, oily, and chemically treated hair and offer an array of benefits like curl and shine. Two ways of organizing the product catalog begin with categorizing products by product type or by gender/age….

Read the article in full with helpful diagrams at Practical Ecommerce » “SEO: Impact of Ecommerce Catalog Structure.”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Every Page is an SEO Landing Page

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well blog: “SEO Conversion Challenges: When Every Page is a Landing Page.”

Searchers aren’t like your other online customers. As a result, converting searchers to customers requires a different way of thinking.

Sites are typically designed with a series of paths or funnels in mind. Customer A starts at the homepage, wants to buy Product Z and click click click — there’s your path to purchase. This path assumes a single start and finish, with each page along the way contributing to the experience and the customer’s decision-making process. This is the way it works for direct traffic customers — folks typing in your domain.

Or the customer may interact with an email newsletter, display ad or paid search ad that makes a promise and delivers a specific landing page designed to fulfill that promise.

With organic search, you can’t control which page the customer lands on in the same way. For many of them, this will be their first experience with your site and possibly your brand. Customers from organic search know what they want and ask a search engine to find it for them. Then they drop into your site on any page the search engine feels is relevant to that query. That makes every page on your site a landing page with the responsibility of engaging and converting customers….

Read the article in full at Inc. Well » “SEO Conversion Challenges: When Every Page is a Landing Page.”

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Social Media’s Role in Search Result Domination

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Search Result Domination with Social Media.”

Social media and organic search work hand in hand, but not in the way most people think.

Building up a grand social media presence will not drive link authority back to your ecommerce site. The major social networks have long since stripped the link authority from their outbound links to discourage spammers. There are, however, many other ways that social media benefits search engine optimization, including search engine result page — SERP — domination.

Both social media and organic search are essential pieces of a strong content marketing strategy. Organic search helps drive customers to social media, and social media helps customers discover content they want to share and link to. SEO is not the only or best reason to run a strong social media marketing program, but it is certainly one more compelling argument for social media marketing.

A form of reputation management, SERP domination refers to the control of as many ranking slots on the first page of search results as possible with a brand’s own content. To promote diversity in the search results, the engines favor including a variety of domains. Even on a purely branded search, which the brand’s own domain should rank number one for, some portion of the first-page SERPs will feature other domains.

The more content a brand controls on those other domains, the more likely searchers are to choose one of the brand-owned results, and the better the brand can control the messages that searchers see in the SERPs….

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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The Impact of “Not Provided” Keyword Data on SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at Resource’s weThink blog: “Empty Analytics: How “Not Provided” Keyword Data Affects SEO.”

Search engine optimization is based on content relevance and authority—how closely does the content match the search query’s context and intent, and how many other sites across the Internet consider it to be valuable enough to link to? The growing “not provided” bucket of organic search keyword referral data in a site’s web analytics reports, therefore, can have a profound impact on our ability to effectively optimize our sites to drive organic search visits and conversions.

The “not provided” issue was originally predicted to impact less than 10% of all Google searches. Today, the impact varies between 20% and 50% of all organic search keyword data.

Among Resource’s clients, sites have lost visibility into between 21% and 39% of their organic search keywords. There’s no detectable pattern based on the site’s size, brand strength, industry or ecommerce ability on Which to predict the size of the keyword data loss. A large ecommerce site faces the same data challenge in this instance as a small consumer brand site.

The problem stems from Google’s secure search. Stating privacy concerns, Google defaults to secure search for every user logged into a Google account. That includes Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, and any of the other Google products. When signed into Google, the searcher’s keyword referral string is stripped from the information passed to analytics packages in the referring URL, rendering the keyword data “not provided.”

In addition, most major browsers have defaulted to Google’s secure search. Most recently the problem has been exacerbated by mobile devices using Android 4 and iOS 6, which have also defaulted to using Google’s secure search. With so many of the major software players funneling their search queries through Google’s secure search, you can see how the “not provided” issue has increased in scale from the original prediction.

What does it matter? Can’t we just ignore the “not provided” data? Read on to find out.

Read the article in full at Resource’s weThink blog »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.