Tony is the CEO of Visible Factors, a data-driven marketing agency whose clients include Ticketmaster, Blue Bottle, and Carbon 38.
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For years, the world of e-commerce has continued to experience explosive year-over-year growth. Recent worldwide events took this growth and accelerated it further than ever seen before. In fact, in this day and age, statistics show that over 2.14 billion people worldwide are purchasing goods online annually. This immense potential for e-commerce brands means there’s also fierce competition.
According to research, 75% of online shoppers say they’ve used a Google product to help with shopping. Growing sales requires e-commerce brands to scale SEO efforts to the utmost of their abilities. Continue on to learn about scaling e-commerce SEO and tips your brand can use for growth.
Scaling SEO Efforts For E-Commerce
The blunt reality is that in order for your e-commerce brand to be competitive and continue to grow, you have to scale SEO strategies appropriately. It’s not enough to simply have a great product or to implement SEO tactics you heard about five years ago. Similarly, focusing solely on popular current e-commerce SEO trends won’t sustain your brand’s organic search visibility in the long term.
So what do you do? The best time for scaling e-commerce SEO is when you’re starting to see positive results from your current campaign strategy—when your resources are at their highest and efforts for scaling SEO are most likely to compound growth for the future as well. Some tips for scaling SEO to grow your e-commerce brand further include:
Automate SEO to scale execution.
Automating SEO isn’t a new concept, but scaling it to its full potential means taking it to the next level. You want to automate execution in addition to data collection and insights.
One of the biggest setbacks for scaling SEO is executing the strategy efficiently. Whether it’s waiting for external teams to execute actions or waiting for project prioritization, being held up allows your competition to continue sailing ahead. Results simply don’t happen unless Google sees the changes you’ve made. Automating SEO execution can make changes on any scale more efficient and boost your site’s organic visibility.
You can start by automating SEO tasks like reporting, keyword research, rank tracking or backlink analysis that previously would have taken much longer. Taking it a step further, rather than manually running crawls, there are SEO audit tools that will schedule and automate crawls and audits on the site and find duplicate content concerns, broken links, etc., and most of them now provide actionable recommendations.
Aggregate SEO insights using AI or machine learning.
As your e-commerce site continues to grow, the sheer quantity of data to sift through can become gargantuan. Effectively scaling e-commerce SEO can also involve using AI or machine learning to aggregate data and process insights, cutting down the time it takes for your team to do so manually. Use these tools to more quickly and easily identify trends and execute a strategy for data representing opportunities for usability, relevancy and authority.
Optimize user experience.
When you’re scaling SEO efforts, optimizing for user experience cannot be overstated. Google has numerous algorithm updates each year, but it continues to insist that the most important factor in organic search is user experience. You should be optimizing for user experience for a smooth interaction on your e-commerce site anyway, but ensuring it’s at the forefront of your strategy will give your brand a leg up.
Creating a clean site architecture is the best way to do this from the start by incorporating a semantic HTML structure to your page that defines your site and page structure. Including clean URL structure, headings on-page and breadcrumbs through the site are all ways to do this.
Another big one is site speed and using Google Core Web Vitals so your webpages load quickly and make it easier for customers to navigate.
Improve Google Core Web Vitals.
Google Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that site owners and marketers can utilize as guidance for analyzing site performance. Paying attention to them is essential when scaling e-commerce SEO as they’re used to assess user experience through site performance. Google Core Web Vitals are made up of:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
• First Input Delay (FID).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
As specific page speed and user interaction measurements that affect your site’s SEO, you can see why they should be at the forefront of efforts for scaling SEO effectively.
Build evergreen content.
Simply put, SEO can’t exist without content. Whether it’s blog content, product pages, category pages or other types of content on your site, it’s the source of what drives value for users. What does that mean for e-commerce SEO? It means that building evergreen content is essential to scaling e-commerce SEO for long-term success.
The cornerstone of most written content for scaling SEO is executing data-backed keyword research. Using this data, you can start producing top-quality content that will last for years, if not forever. This content is often written as pillar content to serve as a hub for a topic cluster. It’s a great way to approach the same subject matter from various angles and add lots of value as you’re scaling e-commerce SEO. More than anything, however, make sure it’s relevant to user intent and is of the highest quality.
Optimize images.
Image optimization is now a more vital part than ever for scaling SEO. This gives your brand advantages for different visibility options in SERPs. For example, images may now appear as a carousel inside an individual SERP listing, making image SEO practices crucial for giving your products as much organic search visibility as possible.
Scaling e-commerce SEO is all about streamlining your data, strategy and execution. Leaning into your brand’s forward momentum is the best time to up your efforts for increased long-term success. Focusing on user experience, ensuring your site is structured properly and creating top-quality content will help with scaling e-commerce SEO and making the most of your brand’s organic search visibility.
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