Rob Snell – #Pubcon South Top To Bottom Ecommerce Site SEO

This is a live blog so please expect some typos and errors.

Rob Snell. (Sorry for the sideways image).

Real World SEO for Retailers.

When folks are searching to buy what you sell,,,,can they find you?

Follow the money!  You don’t have a lot of time so focus your time on the things that are the highest and the best use of your time.

Homework:  How much $$$ from SEO did your company make last month?  How much would it cost you to replace that traffic with PPC?  You need to focus on your SEO plan and backup SEO plan.

SEO 101:

• Google drives the majority of SEO traffic.
• 90% of clicks in search come from the 1st page.
• 70% of the clicks come from organic and 30% from PPC.
• You need to include shopping to be in the top ten.
• You have to have good reviews listed.  Get a third party review account set up for your company.  They use reseller ratings.
• Title is the most improtant on page SEO elemant.
• Write keyword rich text.  Repeat two or three times.
• Don’t forget internal linking and breadcrumbs or indents.
• Link text for backlinks are the most important offsite.

Keywords:

Keywords are what people type into the search engine for products that you sell.  Collect converting keywords.  Keep focused on the converting ones.

Prioritize your keywords based on the traffic they generate…(I personally think you should weight it with the aov as well and go for high traffic and high revenue.  If your traffic is high but not converting or high profit then that becomes secondary.)   he actually just said this.

The next thing to prioritize is the total orders by keywords and then focus on the highest orders with highest amount of revenue.  (He didn’t comment on margin or employee time if the largest orders are low value and time consuming to package.)

Put your keywords into Buckets.  If you have $5 you want 5 $1 buckets.

• Bucket 1.  20 keywords worth the first $1 Million. (If you are getting beat by a cheater, focus on bucket 2 and then come back).  You have 4 million more to worry about.
• Bucket 2.  180 keywords for the next $1 Million.  These are easier to optimize for.
• Bucket 3.  800 keywords.  Much easier to optimize for because they are long tail and mostly vairations of higher terms.
• Bucket 4.  2000 keywords.  Don’t ignore these.
• Bucket 5.  16,500 keywords.  These are the very long tail.  Add in modifiers and let it rank naturally as your site grows.

So now you figure out your keywords by sales.  A keyword that has 2 or more sales counts. A long tail with one does not.

Organize your keywords by variations and include them.  Dog Boots becomes Bird Dog Boots, Dog Boots Coupons, etc…  add buy modifiers like these to your copy to get this long tail Bucket 5.  Some include Buy, Cheap, Best, Reviews.

Prioritize seo pages based on Revenue.

20K pages total.

• 5K are pics
• 5K are ppc landing pages.
• 10K pages that are good to work with SEO on.

Look in Google for how many are indexed then look at analytics to see how many have given you sales.  How many of the 10K gave you sales and how many of the entry pages resulted in repeat.  This helps you learn where to start writing your content.  use the site:yourdomain.com to find which are the most important pages according to Google.

Figure out what your top 100 traffic driving pages are.  Then optimize and learn where to build your links from, for and to.

Find two relevant pages for each of your top 100 keywords.  Work with those pages.

Work on your site structure.

• Link the top 40 pages on your site from your best keywords for those pages from your homepage.
• Don’t link to multiple pages from the same keyword.
• Add 100 top products to your products pages and link to it from your run of site sitemap and homepage.  This gets your top 100 products crawled fast and on the second and third tier.
• Use multiple templates with multiple navigation and layouts (I disagree with parts of this.).    Each page will be unique and can index better.
• Do not link off of terms like Click here.
• Link from inside your product body text and link to that product from the page.
• use yahoo.co.uk -link:http://yourdomain.com “keyword phrase”  this result will give you all of the results for the terms you want that don’t have a link to your page on your site.

Rob Snell Kicked Ass!  You have to go see him speak!