Episode 7 - E-Commerce and SEO

Hey Everyone! Welcome to another episode of the Digital Marketing Dive Podcast. I’m Seth Goldstein from Goldstein Media, with me is the self-proclaimed king of the Internet, Shawn Swaim, of Shawn Swaim Consulting. We have a great episode for you today. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to his royal highness’ heart... E-Commerce and SEO. What makes E-Commerce and SEO a different beast than regular optimization of a non-commerce site? Three words… Tech- Ni- Cal Crawlability, Canonicalization, Pagination, etc. Optimize Your Meta Titles, Descriptions, and H1’s All on different levels - Content/Category/Product Your URLs MUST be human readable. If you have a bunch of “gobbledygook” in the URLs it will hurt you in the rankings. Write unique product titles and descriptions DUplicate content is still duplicate content Keyword rich content is still needed Rant possibility: People say SEO is dead for ecommerce… “It doesn’t work”... in reality, laziness is what doesn’t work. Canonicalization Shawn… enlighten us. Focus on ranking individual product and category pages for less competitive terms A saturated market for direct match terms Find Long‐Tail and Related Keyword Variations Need SSL (HTTPS) sitewide. You should have this regardless. An XML sitemap is key Difference between Sitemap and Sitemap index? Look at your competition and what they are ranking for. Look at the pages they are ranking for… 20/180 Principle Use Schema.org to mark up your site with schema tags to make the site that much more user and bot friendly Start with Brands, Contact Info, Reviews Great resource, but highlights their tool is Ahref’s article on this topic. As you know both Shawn and I are big WordPress CMS fans. We’re going to start sharing our favorite plugins and tips for making your WordPress site even better here. Here’s our picks this week: Shawn: Classic Editor - Get rid of the that pesky Gutenberg! Seth: MainWP - This is a great plugin that allows you to setup a quick way to update all your customers’ sites in one swoop. E-Commerce Related Pick: WP SEO Structured Data Schema Pro Well that was fun. As always please give us a review in the podcast directory of your choice. We’re all of the major directories. We also want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Leave us questions, comments, critiques, rants, you name it. If you don’t want us to read the note on the show, please tell us, because we probably will! Also feel free join our Facebook group to continue the conversation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/digitalmarketingdive/ So that’s it. It’s been fun! See you on the flip side!