← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Tactics To Compete With ECommerce Retail Competition
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- [00:00]
Jordan Cooney
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Eric Hoover who is the SEO Director at Jellyfish. Jellyfish specializes in digital marketing strategies providing innovative solutions for businesses worldwide. With a focus on creativity and data driven results. They help clients achieve their marketing goals effectively. Yesterday Eric and I talked about the power of search experience optimization. Today we're going to continue our conversation by discussing tactics to compete with an E commerce retail competition. Okay, here's my conversation with Eric Hoover, the SEO Director at Jellyfish. Eric, welcome back to the show.
- [01:25]
Eric Hoover
Hi. Nice to be back.
- [01:26]
Jordan Cooney
Great. So yesterday we went through a ton of material on a really important topic which is how you build your online page experience to really drive search experience optimization. We covered concepts of brand awareness, we covered realities around how you can have better coverage in the serve. We really unpacked what UX and page experience expectations we should be investing in to drive better conversion and business KPIs. But we really kind of unpacked a lot about where the landscape is going and how our listeners should better utilize their their UX and design tactics to help drive better results. If you didn't catch that episode, please go back to yesterday's episode. Eric did a phenomenal job sharing some examples of his past work within that show. But today we're going into E commerce in where E commerce is going in the competition here. Eric, I'm going to ask you a hard question right off the bat. I'm sorry but does E commerce SEO really exist? Is this just all ads at this point? Like where, where is the landscape for organic non paid E commerce?
- [02:40]
Eric Hoover
So yeah, it's in there. It's somewhere. What it really comes down to is, I mean obviously, yeah, you go on Google, you search for a pair of like Hoka running shoes and you get, you know, the big banner of sponsored sponsored ads. Disclaimer. Hoka is one of my clients. Hoka. I hope it's okay that I said that and they're all, and they're awesome. But you know, once it comes, when it comes to the organic positioning of that, it is, you know, you've got your paid results and then under that, even before your traditional organic results, a lot of times you have that secondary block of popular products, related products. Google has changed the name of that element multiple times over the last year. But that is where you get your sort of organic visibility from that feed. The caveat to that or I guess sort of pitfall to that is you know, your website, your brand will rank in there if you have your organic listings up and running on Merchant center, but so will other E retailers. So. So for the HOKA example, we come across partners that the brand has, Dick's Sporting Goods, rei and that's great. At the end of the day, HOKA gets the money no matter where the person shops, I suppose. So that's awesome. But that is where we try to focus on kind of perfecting and tweaking the organic presence. And while there's some content focused SEO around that within the actual shopping feed, making tweaks and optimizations, making sure, you know, the product listings page on the website is optimized, it really comes down to two things. It's a more of a technical play. So making sure that you're working with the shopping team or with the paid media team that's running the feed, ensuring that all the elements are switched on, making sure that your site is optimized from a shopping standpoint as well, making sure there are, you know, there's the ability for users to leave reviews, there's clear descriptions, there's proper schema, product markup on the site, all that is relevant to those organic shopping listings. And also the traditional results a little lower down now as well. So it becomes much more tactical. But it also, and one of the things I think is great about it is that it kind of forces you to work with other teams in the same way. We talked last time about working with your UX or CRO team. Now you're working with whoever is managing shopping or if it's a paid team, it really forces SEO to come out of the silo that it can get stuck in a lot. And I think that's great. It provides a better opportunity to really understand more of that landscape and of course gives you a better opportunity to rank more within different types of organic results.
- [05:29]
Jordan Cooney
Let's go down this path because this path of collaboration, partnership, supporting the whole ecosystem of the business, I fundamentally agree with, I think a lot of our listeners will agree with that too. I think that that's where SEO has been going for the better part of a decade now. And fundamentally great collaboration in SEO goes beyond just the paid team, but it goes into product engineering. All these different functions within a business. But then I think the big question then, Eric, is is our game when it comes to E commerce? SEO is our, is our main focus now about driving the conversion regardless of where it comes from and being that partner in that the reality that is this multichannel mix that just happens in commerce because consumers are just bouncing around from various different experiences to make their buying decisions.
- [06:22]
Eric Hoover
I think I'll use the old SEO adage, it depends. But I do, I do think it depends on a couple of things. I think the main thing is that, well, yes, we want the user to. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, regardless of where they click, if they're clicking, that's great for the business. From a pure SEO standpoint, I'd prefer them to click on the organic shopping result versus the sponsored result. But I think there's still that more traditional thought of education. Ensuring that that information that we're providing recommendations on that product is fully optimized to speak to the consumer in the way that they're talking. So, you know, SEO tends to be a little more, for lack of a better term, long form. So ensuring that there is a, and I'm not talking paragraphs of information, it is a product description, for example, or a product title, but ensuring that what the user is searching for based on your data is represented there, but also making sure that it is in that description is the best example I could give that the description matches what users are searching for, how they're speaking about a product. In turn, I have found that that will also help from both the regardless of whether they're clicking on a paid shopping ad or a free shopping listing, it will help them understand, oh, this is what I'm looking for. They are more likely to click. It really does kind of come around to making a better experience overall and ensuring that you will appear more times outside of just the regular paid shopping ad as well.
- [08:11]
Jordan Cooney
I think there's a lot of parallels here to other verticals, not just E commerce, right? Where the SERP landscape has evolved so much that we need to be more aware and fundamentally invested in a multi SERP experience strategy, right? Whether it be paid, whether it be knowledge graph, whether it be crafting your narrative. I'll give you a good example of this. Crafting your narrative in forums like Reddit, because Reddit has been here to stay for a while. We'll see what happens in the next update. But fundamentally this all drives conversion. This all drives the event that we want in our brand and in our E commerce business. So I think it's, it's absolutely critical to, to rethink our focus and our drive there. You mentioned though technical, because there's so many technical components to, to kind of really decipher here when you're, when you're going to go after that multi serp experience effort. How do you prioritize that technical work? Where do you start? Right? And in every brand, every E commerce sh has a multitude of complexity and some have aggregated reviews, some have their own in house custom things, some have really good category pages, some don't have category pages. It can be a wildly disjointed approach from one brand to the next. How do you prioritize? How do you, how do you get started in this technical journey to unlock growth in E commerce competition?
- [09:47]
Eric Hoover
So it's funny you mentioned earlier about SEO and product in the sense of products that show up on the feed, but also SEO. It's funny, I'm seeing a lot of SEO and product teams, as in the product of the SEO offering, really becoming front and center. And I think that's where SEO as a product is really important because that tends to lend SEOs and working with like development teams. So that right there having that relationship is very important. And where we start is typically just with an audit. It's understanding how your site from a technical standpoint, specific to these sort of shopping needs. So I mentioned schema before I mentioned, you know, other, other markups and making sure that your reviews are populating all that sort of stuff, making sure that those kind of basic functions are working properly on the relevant pages. You know, again it's primarily the product page, but you mentioned category pages too, making sure those are loading properly, making sure the search filters work, all that sort of stuff. So starting with an audit and prioritizing sort of like what's the easy to win low hanging fruit kind of stuff that we think a team can implement quickly or that might show the best result based on, you know, maybe how those pages are currently performing and then working with a development team. And that's what I say, SEO is a product because you tend to see like SEOs working with web dev or engineers. It tends to be like more SEO product manager kind of work. But that is really where you, and again this goes back to working with other Teams SEO, being kind of forced to work with other teams, you know, bringing your assessment to them, bringing the data that shows, we think, you know, implementing certain product schema elements across the product pages is a quick win and easy win and will drive the most impact. Working within their sprints to get that implemented on maybe just priority pages at first, even if it's one of those brands where, like I mentioned, brands I work on have hundreds, if not thousands of different products. So really helping kind of sell in like what we think is the most impactful areas to start and then kind of working backwards off of that. It's about building a roadmap, honestly, and working with the relevant team to get that work going at the end of the day. We've talked a lot about what's good for the business, mapping SEO goals to business goals. It's the same thing, except you're mapping it to the development or the engineer goals, what they have on their plate, really working with them to see what they can implement in a timely fashion.
- [12:29]
Jordan Cooney
Right. And this concept of the roadmap is absolutely critical, Eric. You have to have that technical roadmap and those priorities. How have you been seeing that change with either some of the clients or projects you've been working on as AI becomes a bigger player in E commerce, as we start to see maybe different needs for E commerce brands with AI overviews or different AI expectations that may be coming for consumers who are looking to buy these products.
- [13:00]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. So AI comes into play with a lot of this. And within the roadmap, all about. It's all about scalability. So, you know, a big thing in E commerce, SEO for many years has been what's now programmatic SEO, but it's essentially the ability to sort of recreate or launch or update pages at a quicker pace at the same or larger volume. You know, we've been doing a lot of that with AI tooling. The company I work at, Jellyfish, has a tool that we're able to do that, where we're able to include sort of the basic information keywords. We're looking to target products we're looking to have on a product listings page, a category page, or an actual product page itself with different variants. And it will produce a template, kind of a content brief for those types of pages. And in turn, we're able to quickly turn that around with some human editing, some human qa, and then launch these pages with also all these technical elements set up on the back end as part of that process. When it comes to the roadmap we're able to fast track certain elements of that roadmap, turn them around quicker or at least get them over to the teams that are in charge of implementing those pages, finally getting them launched. So we're able to get those, get that visibility, get those pages and keywords ranking quicker because they're launched quicker in theory and sort of see the initial results a little faster because we're answering those gaps, answering those needs, building out both the template from a technical and content standpoint quicker and getting it live in a timely fashion. So it's very cool. I've been a big proponent of AI to a certain extent. You know, I think in certain places it's overused. You know, there's a joke about you just throw AI on the name of something and suddenly everyone wants it. I will say, if I may talk about jellyfish for a second. Sure. We have some actually very cool, actually useful AI tools, not just SEO related, but, but we do have a couple of. We have a research tool and then we have the tool that works on kind of developing, like I said, product pages and listing category listings pages at scale that are really cool and actually work well. And those are being put into our roadmaps because, you know, in this E retail space and we have so many clients that are like E retail focused, from apparel brands to beauty brands. Right. It's great for the client for us and for us to be able to go to them and say, you know, we have this gap in category landing pages or we have this gap in product type pages that we can answer, you know, twice as fast with X amount of pages, targeting X amount of products and keywords. You know, what do you think? Typically, you know, they're all for it and it gives us the ability to roll that out quickly and efficiently. And it also frees the team up to both the development team that's working on the back end and the SEO team to have more time to work on other priority items as well or to do more strategic thinking because we have something that's producing pretty solid SEO focused templates, things like that, really quickly. We just have to go in and make sure this sounds like a human and it's not completely AI because sometimes the output's a little weird. But it's really helpful to give us some of that more important priority time back to work on bigger picture strategy stuff around the E retail or just stay up to date with how the shopping landscape is changing. That alone can take up half the week of an SEO.
- [16:58]
Jordan Cooney
No doubt. No doubt. So Eric, in closing this episode, one of the key components to any E Commerce SEO strategy or marketing strategy in general is driving results. Right? It's conversions. I mean this is the quintessential channel that is performance driven in all aspects. Right. I mean E Commerce has such clear connection to genuine KPIs. Unlike many other, say B2B or healthcare companies or other industries, it's very hard to kind of make your way all the way through to the end customer in the event that they, that they're engaging with on the website. So with that, what are your thoughts in terms of how the changing landscape may be impacting conversions, how we might need to be rethinking that journey for users and businesses? Love to get your thoughts there as we, as we close up this episode.
- [17:54]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, I mean it all goes back to sort of the main kind of point around all this is being present regardless of where the user is within the search result. And if that means, you know, showing up and getting more clicks within the shopping element, you know, in the case of this discussion, the free listing, that's where you have to be and it is where you have to be. That is where all the conversions are going. You know, I'm seeing conversions, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10% click through rates on there, then I'm going to my, you know, traditional result, the top blue link position one is getting like 1.1 click through rate. So you know, you really need to be where the user is at. That's why it's important to own both of those areas as much as you can. And it also again goes back to context. We talked earlier and also in the last episode around context, what actually matters and mapping it back to what the brand need is when we do reporting now for our E retail clients, we are reporting on both our traditional SEO, our GSC data, our rankings, keyword visibility, all that. And we're pulling in data from Merchant center, we're filtering by free listings, we're showing what the free listing results are, how much traffic they're driving, their impression, share, things like that and you know, kind of combining it all together so doing like an all up view of anything organic, any data we can get that's organic from the first page. So that's shopping, that's if it's showing up in AI, if we're getting any visibility, if we're able to track that visibility, it depends on the tool in AI or for getting referrals from it and then our traditional results. So combining all of it and kind of an all up value and showing those KPIs at the AS that all up total and then breaking it out by here's all the shopping results for the month, here's the traditional results, et cetera. But again, it's context. It's all about that context.
- [19:49]
Jordan Cooney
100% context. I think that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search Podcast. Thank you to Eric Hoover from Jellyfish for joining us. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Eric, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or visit his personal and company website erichooverdigital.com and jellyfish.com okay, thanks to.
- [20:11]
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is Voices of search on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H E and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed. We're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.