All the "Summer of SEO" tips I found useful
A compilation of tips from "Summer of SEO" that I found useful in one way or another. All credit goes to Freddie Chatt for organising the series and pulling together the community, and the individual contributors for their tips.
Day 1 - Product SEO
Jamie D'Alessandro
"Don't forget to give your Merchant Center TLC, too!
Your PDPs and Merchant Center should be pretty 1:1. Considering the way Google leverages Merchant Center as a data point now, it's important that your account is optimized.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Daniel Foley Carter
"For eCom create STATIC product category routes and control filtering. Make pagination noindex, follow, ensure Google can see products beyond the first page and to ensure that pushstate is used on infinite scroll.
For products, add unique content providing an unbiased opinion of the product to add unique value. Consider vetted UGC for eCom product reviews."
Kev Wiles
"One of the largest opportunities I see brands miss is scaling internal linking from PDP pages back into other areas of the site.
PDP pages typically get natural links from forums and other websites which can mean scaling internal linking back to collections or blogs can be a great way to drive SEO performance.
The below outline some of my favourite ways in which to incorporate internal links on those PDP Pages
Charlie Williams
"Show off your products with more images on your product description pages (PDPs). When it comes to optimising product pictures, we’re not just talking the filename and alt text.
A modern shopping experience boasts plenty of big, beautiful, inspiring imagery, so even shoppers who don’t read your description immediately understand your product.
In particular, we want photos of someone using the product, wearing the item or the product in context somehow. So get hold of the product and capture original images (getting your hands on a product helps you produce better content generally).
Even better - add video. Got a boring product? Show it being used, unboxed or handled. Just give the shopper a way to visualise how they might use it, or look wearing it."
Day 2 - Category SEO
Edward Bate
"Above-The-Fold tiles or image links to subcategory pages is one of the strongest levers you can pull on large eCommerce sites to get results.
Product category keywords generally see huge search volumes.
It's great for UX and getting customers straight to what they are after when you're displaying thousands of products.
It's great for Google in seeing a clear hierarchy of links and structure from categories to sub and sub-sub categories.
Put the time into proper tagging and categorisation of your inventory and it will be worth it!
Bonus - layer in overrides based on product types you know converts well, have higher margins, specials / overstock you want to move etc."
Annika Haataja
"Are your 'Read More' buttons hiding crucial content from search engines?
Many Product Listing Pages (PLPs) use these buttons or links to improve user experience, but they can inadvertently prevent Google from indexing important information and internal links. To quickly check if you're affected, use Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool and compare the rendered HTML with your page source. Look for discrepancies in the content behind the 'Read More' button.
The fix? Most ecommerce platforms allow you to serve your full PLP content in the initial HTML response, rather than loading it dynamically with JavaScript. (Ask your devs for advice if you're not sure!) This ensures search engines can crawl and index all your valuable content.
Remember, while 'Read More' buttons can enhance user experience, they shouldn't come at the cost of your SEO performance.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Day 3 - Audience & Keyword Research
Carl Hendy
Founder Audits.com. Website. Twitter. LinkedIn.
"Branded search queries are an often overlooked and undervalued source of SEO traffic. Improving your branded search can enhance the user experience for both new and existing customers, whilst protecting online brand reputation. Plus, branded queries are typically easier to compete for and often fall into the ‘quick win’ category which most clients crave.
Below are a number of branded search queries that you can easily optimise for:
[Brand] + [Discount Code]: Avoid letting affiliates suck up the last click commission on discount codes. Create a dedicated landing page for current and past codes. Use this opportunity to capture email addresses or convey brand experience.
[Brand] + [Menu]: Don’t let food delivery companies earn your branded menu queries. Publish your menu directly on your website or optimise your social profiles for these queries if you don’t have a site.
[Brand] + [Reviews]: Stop review platforms from owning your brand search review queries. Add a reviews page on your site and embed reviews from these 3rd party platforms if needed. Use this page to showcase positive feedback and include customer support chat processes to reduce bad reviews.
[Brand] vs [Competitor Brand]: Create ""vs"" style pages to prevent customers from ending up on competitor websites. Make these landing pages factual, unbiased, and helpful to appease that query intent.
[Brand] + [Logo/Images]: Create a dedicated landing page for company images and company branding. This can drive links to image sources. Add a message for journalists on how to contact or cite your brand for ‘expertise’ commentary.
[Brand] + [Size Chart]: There are affiliates dedicated to this niche. Create a dedicated size area, categorised by shoes, gender, age groups, etc. Transparency in sizing builds customer trust.
[Brand] + [Black Friday]: Don’t wait until the last week before the event. Get this page ranking early. Journalists should find and link to this page. Make it evergreen so it’s ready for future events.
[Brand Name] + [Opening Hours], [Address], [Telephone Number], [Customer Service], [FAQs], [Return Policy]: Ensure these searched for details are easily accessible to Google and users.
Create dedicated pages or sections on your site to provide clear and accurate information.
By implementing these strategies, you can effectively control and enhance your branded search presence, benefiting both your SEO and your customers."
Andy Chadwick
"Identify and resolve keyword cannibalization to improve your site's performance. Start by extracting URLs from your sitemap and tokenize them into keyword-like forms.
Upload this data to a clustering tool to group similar keywords, representing URLs that should be merged. Create pivot tables to spot content overlaps easily. Address cannibalizing content by merging articles, using 301 redirects, and re-optimizing content.
Regular content audits and a centralized content strategy can prevent future issues.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Corina Burri
"Are you having a hard time coming up with new content ideas? I’ve been there. Don’t fret. There’s relief in sight, It’s called ‘inurl:forum’.
I love this tactic because it goes beyond the big forums such as Reddit and Quora. The SERP shows topically relevant user-generated content. It’s an excellent source to understand what people are curious about in your niche. You can then create content which solves their pain points."
Day 4 - Content strategy
Monty Mathur
"The rise of user-generated content (UGC) is one of the most important advances in modern marketing. It has the power to shape how your target audience perceives your brand, drive engagement, and increase conversions.
As Andy Crestodina says:
”When you say it, it’s marketing; when your customers say it, it’s social proof.”
Key strategies for e-commerce brands:
Effectively leveraging UGC builds trust, improves SEO, and fosters a strong community around your brand."
Day 5 - Technical SEO
Marie Turner
"Most e-commerce sites I onboard over the last 7 years are large, and often have crawling & indexing issues, and/or duplicate content. Always make sure the fundamentals are in place and in good working order:
领英推荐
The best content SEO strategy will not outshine a site that can’t be crawled in its entirety or indexed, or has large duplicate content issues hindering growth."
Day 6 - Backlink SEO
Nathan Gotch
"Use the reverse silo technique because it's the best way to grow site authority (without risk). In short, you'll create linkable assets, drive backlinks to those assets, and use internal links to send link equity to your category and product pages. My favorite link bait angles are data, free tools, and epic how-to guides. You can always use ChatGPT for inspiration if you're short on ideas. Use a prompt like: "Give me 10 link bait ideas for an e-commerce business that sells baseball cleats." Ideally, you'll create as many of these assets as possible because the more lines you have in the ocean, the more likely you will attract passive backlinks.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Amy Irvine
"How your subject matter experts are your secret weapon to earning links
Sit down with your experts and gather as much information as possible. If you have different specialists for different topics, interview them all. Ask questions such as:
Once you have all of this information, you can start proactively promoting thought leadership and newsjacking relevant news topics for your subject matter experts.
Journalists are always looking for expert insight, and introducing your experts is another way to earn links.
Ellie Morgan
"Website owners often ask why build links abroad if they don't sell there. However, this overlooks the key benefits of international backlinks.
After a year or two of local backlink building (e.g., UK publications), opportunities may dry up. Instead, focus on international backlinks to diversify your strategy and increase referring domains.
Here’s why international backlinks are valuable:
They will expand your backlink profile further: For instance, if your fashion site is featured in British Vogue, seek backlinks from US, Australian, and other international fashion sites to boost relevant referring domains and improve authority and rankings.
Enhance EEAT: International backlinks position you as a global expert, boosting EEAT signals even if you don’t sell in those countries.
While clients may initially question the relevance of international links, make clear the goal is to acquire quality backlinks that enhance authority, improve search rankings, and potentially drive referral traffic.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Day 7 - Analytics
Ben Luong
"By leveraging Google Analytics 4's (GA4) standardised e-commerce events and Google Tag Manager (GTM), you can set up e-commerce tracking with ease. Use a simple regex pattern
^(view_item|view_item_list|select_item|view_cart|add_to_cart|remove_from_cart|begin_checkout|add_payment_info|purchase|refund|add_to_wishlist|view_promotion|select_promotion|view_search_results)$
in GTM to capture all 14 recommended e-commerce events.
Utilising this setup allows you to take full advantage of GA4's funnel reports and Google's machine learning, providing deeper insights into your website's performance. With platforms like Shopify, it's even easier: their native app automatically sends key events to GA4, eliminating the need for GTM configuration.
Import these events as conversions in your ads to enable Google's machine learning to optimise your traffic and enhance your user acquisition strategies. In this AI world, if you are not feeding the algorithms data, you are behind.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Day 8 - International SEO
Owain Lloyd-Williams
"One of the biggest hindrances for international ecommerce SEO visibility can be the use of IP redirects which sends users to the relevant language or country variation of the website depending on where they are based.
While easy to deploy across product page variants and friendly to the front-end user, the trouble here is that as Google crawls primarily from the US, Google will only be served the US version of your website which risks your international versions not being crawled indexed properly in their respective markets.
Check if you've got these in place and if so, instead focus your efforts on comprehensive hreflang markup and great localised content using localised keyword and audience research."
Day 9 - CRO
Emma Russell
"As e-commerce SEOs, we think like this: the more (quality and qualified) entrances to the site, the more traffic, the more conversions.
Developers and designers think like this: the more efficient the landing page is a conduit, the higher the conversion rate, the more conversions.
Though we have the same aim, the different approaches in getting there leads to impasses. One impasse is the menu.
Designers will want to get people to product pages as quickly as possible with few distractions. SEOs want that too, but we also need more landing pages, and internal linking to get them ranking well. So for SEOs the menu is the perfect place to add these inlinks and showcase what the site has to offer. For designers, this can lead to unclear user journeys.
Looking at requirements from a shared understanding of the eventual goal can lead to better outcomes and working relationships. Ask questions such as “what is a better route to purchase - the blog in the menu or a drop-down of category listing pages?”, “Can we use the footer?”, “Can we have a secondary menu?” and so on. By doing so, you can come to a conclusion that will, hopefully, increase both traffic to the site and conversion rate.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Ryan Webb
"In order to improve completion rates through your checkout, concentrate on reducing the number of FORM FIELDS, not the number of STEPS.
New research from Baymard, using their UX Benchmarking, suggests a correlation between the number of fields in the checkout increasing as the quality of the User Experience declines.
Previous research had assumed it was the number of steps that had the biggest impact, but now they think the stronger correlation is the number of form fields.
Here are 5 specific recommendations to help reduce the number of fields in your checkout:
1/ Hide the address line (allow it to be revealed if needed) 2/ Hide the coupon code (allow it to be revealed if needed) 3/ Hide billing address fields (allow it to be revealed if needed) 4/ Delay account creation until after purchase 5/ Have a single password field and allow the password to be "seen"
Remember, these are suggestions based on previous experience, but ideally you should TEST them on your own website. Also, keep an eye on Customer Lifetime Value, not just checkout completion rates (especially for tip #4).
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Day 10 - BONUS TIPS
Piotr Olesson
"Here is my super simple and very effective tip I use for my all SEO e-commerce clients is to focus on revenue generation. This is my exact steps:
1) Get a list of all products by profit margin from the client (or get a rough estimate)
2) Map these products against current ranking and traffic
3) Put this data into a pivot table and filter by highest profit margin against current rankings and traffic.
If highest profit margin products are performing poorly there is your key SEO gap you can focus on."
Grace Frohlich
"Align your SEO strategy with paid search, especially for bottom-funnel transactional intent. I can’t tell you how often I see search results where the paid ad and organic listing are completely different, especially for product queries. Integrating channels will avoid unnecessary spend, unify brand messaging, and offers a better experience for the user. How do you integrate your channels?
For more details, check out my Whiteboard Friday where I talk about how to integrate SEO and paid, and offer a FREE checklist for you to start your holistic strategy.
Want to go deeper? Check out this guide."
Lana Phillips
"This works well with well-known brands (in my case, a legacy shoe brand). Anytime we went into a Sale, we would change the homepage SEO title to call attention to it, so that it appeared in SERPs. For example "[Shoe Brand] Official | Up to 20% Off Now". It was just an extra lever to pull as an SEO. Some may be worried about rankings, especially if your homepage ranks well for non-brand terms via an optimized title... but with 92% of our traffic being branded, the risk was low. Our CTR always increased by at least 25%. I'm now at a cannabis-adjacent company that is more reliant on SEO than brand recognition, so we leave our keyword-heavy homepage alone, but make sure to apply the same strategy on a PDP and PLP level."
Sophie Brannon
"Don't forget your Merchant Center listings. While many people think this is only useful for paid media, this is the only way that you can show up in organic shopping listings which are becoming even more prevalent for a wide range of commercial and transactional searches. Review your shopping feed, optimise your product titles and descriptions, make sure your imagery is high quality and provide all of the required information. Regularly review your GMC account to pick up any potential errors that could be taking down your listings - the most common are usually unavailable landing pages (404 errors) and information in the feed not matching the landing page."
All credit to Freddie Chatt and the individual contributors.
Audits.com - SEO Audits Trusted by Brands, Investors, and In-House Teams.
2 个月Nice summary, thanks for sharing.
SEO at Chalk & Ward
2 个月excellent article Slaits! a really solid round up! Shared it with my co-workers that ate it up! :D
Such a useful tips you have shared with us and it gone e really helpful as SEO is a constantly evolving field, and staying updated is key to maintaining strong online visibility. Here are a few of those tips worth highlighting: - Faster loading times improve user experience and can positively impact search rankings. - With the growing use of voice assistants, optimizing content for voice search can capture new traffic. -Using schema markup helps search engines understand your content better, potentially enhancing your site's appearance in search results. These tips offer valuable ways to stay ahead in the SEO game.
OffPage-SEO-Expert || Guest Posting || Press Release || Forms & Web2.0 links || Pro Content Writing || 500+ Orders Completed || Link building on websites with High (DA) (PA) (DR) (TF) (G.index) (Traffic) & Domain age 5y+
2 个月Insightful! Your SEO tips helped me boost my site traffic last month. Thanks for sharing!
Service Operations Director
2 个月Nice round up and great to see Marie Turner make the update too. Enjoyed the Summer of SEO updates, and looking forward to the next ones.