This is the 12th step in my 12 part series on SEO. In this article I’m looking at the role of voice-of-customer programs to help SEOs learn what is, and isn’t, working on their website, helping to inform optimisation and testing programs. It’s going to be short and hopefully sweet.
Why is Voice-of-Customer relevant to SEO?
Consider this scenario: You’ve got a webpage ranking well for a primary keyphrase. It’s driving muchos traffic, but your bounce rate is over 90% and has blown the site average for organic landing pages. As a result, you start to see your ranking drop. The search engines are starting to think your webpage isn’t so great after all.
You can dig into your web analytics data to find out what is happening – visits, bounce rate, time-on-site etc, but...
What web analytics data won’t tell you is why that’s happening
This is where voice-of-customer (VoC) programs can help. VoC techniques…
2 examples of a technique to use for retail SEO
Advice to create quality content is a recurring theme from Google. It’s the recommendation every time someone raises a complaint about their latest algorithm. It’s also what Matt Cutts recommends in response to almost any question from the broad brush, like ‘What’s the best way to rank higher” to narrow focus such as ‘how do we avoid duplicate content’.
If you have already created well-written content on your site describing your products and services, and cracked the keyword conundrum, (appropriate use in page titles and headings, not too many, not too few, plus a smattering of synonyms) you may be wondering what else you can do. One approach is to look carefully at your product pages; earlier this week on Smart Insights, Jimmy McCann showed 5 tips for optimising product…
Creating effective landing pages for SEO
If you have followed the first six steps in this series on SEO (plus added your own twist and freestyling) you should now be seeing increased coverage (pages & keywords) in search results for your target keywords. Now the real fun begins since...
Being visible and getting clicks doesn’t guarantee you success. Success depends on many factors, of which landing page quality is one. It’s almost impossible to create a landing page that caters for the needs of all natural search visitors. Your aim should be to improve your landing pages over time, using proven optimisation methods, so that the natural search traffic you get positively contributes to your website’s KPIs.
Please note that you don’t have to make immediate conversions and revenue the primary goals for all natural search traffic – there may be some research terms (head and mid tail keywords) for which your…
Page Layout Algorithm update to affect a small proportion of sites
Value/Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended link: Google : Page Layout Algorithm improvement
A minor update compared to the major announcement last week of Google Search Plus Your World update (still only available on Google.com). This release seeks to penalise sites which have a high proportion of ads above-the-fold, according to Google:
“This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.
This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads”.
This change is expected to effect…
Part 5 in James Gurd's website optimisation series
In Part Five of this SEO series, I'll show how to improve page titles and meta descriptions to increase traffic from natural search. This type of testing should be an integral part of any optimisation program and these two elements are often overlooked.
As many of you will know, there are two key elements that appear in every listing, regardless of whether or not you have optimised your webpages to display targeted content:
Page title
Meta description
Why is this important?
It's simple, the words that people see on search engines results pages (SERPs) influences their click decision. The more persuasive the copy and the closer it appeals to the needs of the searcher, the greater the propensity to click. Google rewards pages which have a higher relative click through rate since this is a positive relevance signal. Furthermore, the title…
4 Things to consider when writing page titles
In our recent post giving 21 simple SEO ideas we said how important titles are. Here we go into a bit more depth to show how non SEO specialists writing web copy can improve SEO through refining their page titles within the SERPs.
Titles are undoubtedly a primary signal for each page that search engines use to determine the focus of a pages content. There is no real black vs white hat techniques when it comes to optimising page titles, but there is a suite of best practices you should follow to ensure you are making the most of this element of a page.
Page titles often become the problem of "SEO teams" or agencies which tend to be technically led than creatively.
However, there is an argument that some of the best people to work on page titles (and meta descriptions) should be those that were highly…
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Inside Search intro
Sometimes Google is just too clever, interpreting spelling mistakes, adding synonyms and based results on previous searches. Creating “a search in quotes” can help here, but sometimes you don’t want these additional features.
It’s now introduced “Verbatim” to turn off it’s main “user intention assumption” which you can access as with other Advanced Search features from the left (ex-Jazz) sidebar:
The announcement about the update is interesting for SEOs since it lists the normal improvements Google can make:.
making automatic spelling corrections personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding…
7 ways to optimise for strong product pages
This article touches on specific items for product pages, assuming basic on-page optimisation processes have been followed, we have covered these in my Smart Insights On-Page optimisation Guide if you're not familiar with these basics.
1 Check Products have Unique URLs
Ecommerce systems are complex, they have a lot to do and unfortunately are not usually designed with things like Unique product URL's in mind. An example of what I mean by this could be:
www.example.com/product-1.html = The primary shortest product URL you can visit to see the product
www.example.com/category-1/product-1.html = Navigating to the product page after viewing a category page
www.example.com.category-1/sub-category-1/product-1.html = Navigating through two categories before selecting the product
Each of the pages above are unique to Search Engines as the URL's are different. However, the content on each will be exactly the same. To ensure you are not display all these duplicate pages to Google…
Covering Basic SEO, Social and Mobile SEO
Value: [rating=4]
Source: Internet Advertising Bureau Guide for Retailers
Our commentary: Running online retail sites presents a whole raft of specific complexities for businesses, whether its systems, process or marketing related .
While only focusing on the marketing (specifically SEO, PPC & Social aspects of running a retail business) this guide from IAB is a very nice simple suite of tips & best practice guidance for running retail sites.
There is a fair bit missing from the guide in terms of what you can do with SEO for retail sites, but if a guide covered everything it would be enormous & not actionable. The simple, sector-specific approach from the iab is what makes this a useful piece of content. To give you a flavour, here a a couple of less obvious tips from the guide:
…
Check your live preview image and messaging against competitors
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Blazen Web Marketing Analysis
On 22/09 Google announced the new version of its Instant Previews feature, which Mark Reynolds of Blazen explained when he spotted Google’s testing of the feature.
The new Google Instant Previews can be accessed from Google’s organic results and in the PPC adverts at the top, as well as in the Site Links. Mark’s video shows how it works.
[No audio]
Marketing implications of Google’s update
Google’s announcement clearly shows that this innovation is to make searching quicker (and to reduce load on it’s server?) through encouraging more use of this feature:
(more…)…
