Shop.org Blog

My name is Rebecca Kelley, and I am a consultant and the site manager for SEOmoz.org. A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking on the “Customer-Centric Search Marketing” Session at the Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop held in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. I spoke alongside Allan Rimm-Kaufman, Ken Jurina, and Todd Friesen, and our goal was to give the audience some valuable tips on how to provide a positive customer experience through paid and organic search, proper keyword research, and savvy reputation management.

My presentation specifically dealt with some on-page recommendations. First of all, I echoed Ken Jurina’s sentiments that proper keyword research and implementation of those keywords on your site’s pages are essential. It’s important that your site deliver what users are searching for. Think, for instance, of the term “trainers.” In the UK that could mean “shoes,” while here in the US it could mean a personal trainer or a piece of exercise equipment. “Cross trainers,” on the other hand, is a shoe, so if you were selling cross trainers on your site in the US, you’d probably want to target the term “cross trainers” vs. just “trainers,” seeing as how the latter term is more broad and can bring the wrong kind of traffic to your site.

Secondly, I highlighted URL structure. Incorporate your keywords in your URLs–a cross trainers product page’s URL would be something like bestathleticgear.com/shoes/cross-trainers. Notice that the same URL limits the amount of subdirectories–a general rule is to try and use as few subdirectories as necessary. The further your content is from the home page, the less important it can be perceived to be (e.g., bestathleticgear.com/products/shoes/adult/mens/cross-trainers/product12345.htm).

A good rule for URLs is SASS: Short And Shareable, Stupid. Can your users share them easily, or are your URLs so long and unattractive that they take up multiple lines when you paste them into an email? Also, if a user looks at one of your URLs, can he or she figure out what sort of information will be on that page? Compare bestathleticgear.com/shoes/cross-trainers with bestathleticgear.com/cat42/prod12345. With the first URL, it’s pretty easy to guess that the page has something to do with cross trainers; the second URL, however, is more difficult to identify. Read this post at SEOmoz for more URL best practices.

Another on-site consideration is to implement a user-friendly navigation system. For your navigation, stick to conventions that users are used to, and use keywords that your customers are familiar with–stay away from complicated jargon if it’s something only your staff understands. Remember that your website is for your users, not for you. Also, incorporate a breadcrumb navigation system so that shoppers don’t get lost in your site. Breadcrumbs provide a simple, visual path that users can easily refer to, and it’s better than hitting the “Back” button.

Lastly, consider internal linking on your site. If you have a product page, link to some related products that you offer. Or, if you happen to mention a different product on a particular product’s page, link back to it (for example, your cross trainers page can link back to the shoe brand’s landing page, or it can link to related products such as athletic socks or shoe inserts). The benefit of internal linking is that it allows search engine crawlers to quickly access and crawl your site’s pages. Amazon is a great example of a site that does a lot of internal linking, and look at how many pages they have indexed! Internal linking can also boost page rank–if you have a page with a high PR, consider linking from that page to another product page that you want to rank well in the search engines. The stronger page can give the weaker page a bit of a page rank boost.

To sum up my presentation, here are key takeaways that will hopefully help improve both your customer’s experience on your site as well as your search engine rankings:

• Utilize keywords people are searching for
• Have both SEO and user-friendly URLs
• Make sure your navigation is intuitive
• Link to related products or information for better crawling and conversions

I hope that my presentation provided some value for the Shop.org conference attendees. For any questions or comments about my presentation or my blog post, feel free to comment below or contact me.

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