Episode 509: Enterprise Ecommerce Sites Can Win Big With an SEO Strategy by Gary Shuey #509

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. Hi, and my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the lead strategist over at EWR Digital. And one of the owners also. So welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. We appreciate you guys being here. We know that our podcasts are getting a little more spaced apart, and we apologize. It is our intent to get back to a more regular schedule. Just know we are busy delivering value to customers, and we love delivering value. So we are going to continue to deliver value to you. Do not worry. These will continue. I know, Matt, you kind of get more questions than I do. Are you still doing the podcast? And you're like... Well, you know, I'm doing the podcast for the BBB now, and then I was filling in for Disruption Nation. So I've been doing a lot of podcasts. We just haven't been doing this podcast. Also, we're going to do some more interviews this year as well. So just trying to get a good cadence with everything. I'm certainly glad to be back talking about SEO. I'll always enjoy that. But yeah, no, we are not going anywhere. Haven't gone anywhere for 10 years. Chris has been consistent in that. So that will continue. Yes. Yes. So please remember, Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas, and we are your Results Rebel. Now, so remember, you know, we're a little outside the box, but focused on results. A little outside the box, but focused on results. We got to tell me, we got to tell me, just a little, we're talking about enterprise SEO, Chris. Yeah. So we got to, you know... I guess it doesn't... I was just going to say, it has the, that phrase has the feel or reminds me of the best little whorehouse in Texas. But I think that's not the direction you're going in. It's the other way, right? Inside the

box, focused on results. All right. Or a little outside the box. Let's just jump into a review. We've got this. It's on Facebook. So it's probably five star. I don't think there's a rating. It is from David Manning. So Patif to him. And the testimonial is, their passion for their craft is unmatched. Yeah. I think you get that. I've gotten that twice this week. So I know that that is, yeah. So that's, that's great to hear people say it. But yeah, no, I've gotten that twice this week. Yeah. And I think that comes through in the podcast. Like you guys get a sense by listening to this podcast, by watching this podcast, that we have a passion for internet marketing, search engine optimization, everything that internet marketing means. And that's absolutely true. And there's so many facets that are still to explore. And we have a passion for those too. We just, you know, we're, we want to be able to deliver incredible value on the things we're focused on right now. And then expand that so we can deliver more. There's a lot with machine learning that's really getting exciting. And, um, you know, uh, we're starting to incorporate a lot of that and, uh, with some great results and, um, you know, but, but again, you got to start with the fundamentals. Uh, we've built actually like, uh, we're going to add it to the website here shortly. We redid the whole website from the ground up. It's really quite fast. Um, I would say blazing fast, but you know, I would say quite fast. Um, and, uh, that might be, uh, inside the box. So we'll just, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, so, so we launched an HTML version of it, uh, while it's recalling from the server. So, I mean, it, it, it hits pretty quick. Um, and so, but anyway, so we built that from the absolute ground up and now we're building out some custom graphics, some interactive things. And one of the things is, uh, basically the autonomy

of the marketing world. Um, and that's something that over the years we've developed of kind of how you need to layer, uh, marketing. And a lot of times there are some really great shiny objects in the digital space that you want to chase. Um, but, but I think focus on the fundamentals, focus on building the foundation first, uh, you get a multiplier effect as you layer those on. Yeah, absolutely. So our article today is enterprise e-commerce sites can win big with an SEO strategy. Uh, this is by Gary Shway. Um, hopefully I'm pronouncing that right. That found this article on search engine journal put if to you, Gary, we really appreciate this is some good stuff in here. Um, without we ready to dive in, let's just dive into the meat of the podcast right away. So, uh, in e-commerce, the pandemic has emphasized the need for organizations to be agile in their marketing strategies and focus on growing organic traffic to protect the brand when paid media budgets may need to be cut. Uh, having a solid e-commerce SEO strategy is a key in positioning your enterprise to weather any storm. How, Matt, how true is that? I mean, we have clients that we've done SEO for that six months later, a year later, they're still, uh, top of the first page of Google. Right. And so it's all about owning real estate. It's not about, uh, renting real estate. I think that there's a, a yin-yang relationship to paid ads and SEO. Um, but, but I think, you know, again, SEO, uh, really is going to produce, uh, over time, those 10 X, those 20 X results. The thing with paid ads is, you know, the margins get, get brought down, uh, even with AdWords, uh, as kind of one of the predominant buckets, uh, it's pretty saturated right now. And so you need to go a little bit more fringe, uh, to get, uh, better, uh, ROI. Um, but certainly, uh, SEO, if, if you need to, uh, trim back, uh, paid

ads, you're still going to be on that first page of Google. So, uh, it's, it's, it's extremely important. So, yeah, yeah, it's, it's incredibly true. In fact, Shopify research found that at the height of COVID-19 pandemic, 10 years of e-commerce growth happened in just 90 days, 10 years. That's awesome. I, I, you know, I felt like, and heard that, like we advanced, um, into the digital space by about five years. So here in 10 years, uh, I mean, the shift definitely has happened. Um, and we've, we've really felt that, um, that's amazing 10 years in 90 days. Uh, I'm, I'm interested to read the Shopify study. I'm going to make a little note here. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. And that's Shopify, which is, I don't think very much focused on, on restaurants. I just think in terms of the things that we did continue to do really to try and support our local restaurants, like they, they made a quantum shift effectively overnight. It's like, Hey, you know, shut down. Now we used to not even have our menu online. Now you can actually order online and come and pick it up. Like that, that happened like overnight. Yeah. I mean, if you didn't, if you couldn't, if you couldn't, uh, deliver or take out, like you went out of business. You closed. Yeah. It was done. Uh, don't forget SEO when making the move from selling offline to online and recent retail survey. There's another good survey. Uh, retailers shared the reaction to how they plan to make the shift when they're shifting from selling offline to online. 23% plan to hire or shift resources to e-commerce. 77% plan to change marketing campaigns. 42% plan to relax their current re, uh, return policies. 28% laid off employees and 42% plan to pause in-store pickups and return availability. So that's kind of a mix mash of stuff, but you know, 77% plan to change marketing campaigns. Like, yeah. Right. How many searches increased? I think they've got some, some, there were some data that

mentioned, I don't see it right now, uh, about how many more searches occurred. How much more, I mean, just think about 10 years of e-commerce growth happening over the course of three months. Uh, yeah. You've got to change your marketing strategy if that shift happens. I mean, I, I love it. I mean, I, I remember when people were afraid to put in their credit card online. Yeah. Now, I mean, it's recommended every site. It'd be great if you had a shopping cart and one of the other things that's really come up for me recently, um, is to stress, uh, how important it is to, to work on that customer journey because you don't know, um, how far down the sales funnel they are until they actually contact you or pick up the phone and call you or even just buy. Right. And so, um, really looking at your online, uh, footprint and, and what you're doing online is critically important to across the board because you're reaching so many more people. Right. And, and business models are, are changing and, you know, e-commerce is, uh, I mean, the big beneficiary, right. In addition to, you know, zoom and some of these other, um, you know, platforms like we're on right now. Yeah. Well, I, I think, uh, uh, the, the numbers for like Amazon's growth are, are staggering. Right. Would you know here, Chris, this is an interesting fact. I didn't know this. Did you know that Amazon makes most of its money from the cloud services over, uh, the, the package shipping? I did not. I did not know that. I know. And I was, it was really quite shocking that that's really where a money maker, the money maker forum, uh, you know, because they're fighting so hard on really thin margins. Right. Um, I mean, economies of scale, they can certainly make some money, um, but really their money makers, the, the cloud services. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah, no, that's, that, that's incredibly interesting. And it's a

cloud service that we use actually was setting up something the other day. Uh, all right. So, uh, Greg got into three key areas of enterprise SEO for winning in e-commerce. The first one was information architecture. So information architecture should be leveraged to structure websites in such a way that enhances findability and usability for both search engines and end users. Right. And I know that you're doing a lot of like structure and architecture right now with the, with the new clients who are coming in first, let's get your website cleaned up. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, you gotta remember, uh, Google was built by engineers, right? The algorithm engineers, AdWords, the engineers, like if you understand AdWords, you kind of understand SEO. You understand kind of everything needs to be clean and it's buckets. You've got to give information. Google, it needs to figure it out where it can kind of rate, um, the trust level of the information that's being showed because it's all through machine learning. So the more signals you can give it, uh, the better. And, you know, uh, just like, um, breadcrumbs, like you gotta, you gotta, you gotta lay out how you're getting where, right. And, and, and the spiders gotta be able to, to find everything. And so if you lay out everything well, um, Google will really bless you because, um, you know, it understands what, who you are and what you're trying to do. And I think that that's probably one of the biggest factors. If you, uh, if you, you know, and before we build a website, that's why we have that planning session, that blueprint is you've got to have the, uh, the architect, uh, digital architect put together how you got to lay it out, where your service is. You know, where, where, how everything's going to interconnect, um, you know, the inner silo is super important. Like it, it tells Google what, what's so important that you have multiple links going to these different pages. How are you laying it out? Um,

and, and there's a, a decent image here kind of, uh, describing a little bit of, uh, how, how they presented it. But yeah, I mean, that's, uh, if, if you don't have the right plan or you don't have that fully optimized website, as I kind of go back to the, the, the, uh, uh, autonomy world that we're, we're, we've kind of developed, you've got to have that structure there. You've got to have that foundation. Um, and then once you start building on it with SEO and whatnot, um, that's where you're going to get the multiplier effect. But if, if you don't, if you don't have a good website to start with, you're not building on a solid foundation. So, yeah, in simpler terms, he says it takes website complexity and turns it into comprehensible structure. That's that kind of architecture problem. Uh, you have to organize filtered content. And this was really important. When you think about e-commerce, you have to organize filtered content in a simple and effective way while giving users options with how they filter and find information. I mean, how it's so important when you're talking about enterprise e-commerce, the ability to be able to search and find, in fact, I was looking for a pool pump, uh, the other day and I like, because I'm in this business, they, I, they gave me a quote and here was the pool pump. I actually searched for the pool pump in the quote on their website and it showed me a different pump. And I got back on their chat and like this, this isn't, I'm not angry. Like I know things like this can happen. And I'm like, Hey, I don't know if you know this, but if I search for the part number that's in this, it gives me something different. And he didn't really seem to care. I'm pretty sure that note or, uh, understanding never got, uh, you know, bounced up the chain of command to somebody who could actually do something about it. But, but it's, it's

pretty great. That's the kind of thing that like, now I have a little less confidence in the guy I'm chatting with and in the website because, you know, somebody has got the architecture wrong. Um, well, yeah, I mean, how, how you're serving up data, right. Um, uh, with these databases is, is a big part of that. I mean, even these legacy issues that you're dealing with and, uh, a lot of people are putting old websites on sub domains and like how it all talks to each other, uh, is important. And I think that this article is more focused on like, you know, the taxonomy of like, uh, e-commerce websites. So I can, I can completely understand that. I mean, that's, it sounds like that's a categorization issue more than anything else. So, yeah. Not only do you need to organize all of the kind of specific product information in those categories, but you also got to make sure that you're doing a good job with your blogs, your community forums, and your guides. Again, both so that the search engines can find them and that your customers can find them once they land on your website. So one of them is if they just go do a Google search and you're the one presenting the information, well, great. You might get that pool pump sale, right. Um, and if they're on your website, cause I've already bought your pump and I'm trying to figure out how to sign, you know, how to connect it, uh, like make it easy for me to find that piece of, you know, find the information that I need in order to get that, uh, that product installed. Chris, I talked to a, uh, e-commerce pool supply company, uh, last week. Oh yeah. And I maybe should connect with them. Yeah. Yeah. Connect me with them. I'll, I'll check out their website and, you know, put in a good word for us. Yeah. So next Greg talks about findability, which he actually really kind of talked about an architecture, but

he says that findability refers to both the search bots, right. And the end user's ability to find content on your website, uh, ordered information ranks higher in Google search due to its availability and discovery of, uh, discoverability. Google uses a crawl budget, uh, based on the site's authority to find and process the information on your website. And you really need to be mindful of that, uh, Google crawl budget, because if your architecture, um, is kind of put together haphazardly, or at least not with the specific thought in mind, like, Hey, this Google bot may only, uh, um, traverse 20% of my site. I want to make sure that the 20% it traverses is the most relevant and the most valuable. You know, like we always like to ask, Hey, Mr. Brand new customer, what do you sell the most and what makes you the most money? Right. Because, uh, a lot of times the one that makes you the most money is not the one you sell the most. And a lot of companies will just say, Oh, you sell a lot of these. Let us help you sell more. No, let's do both. And those are the two focuses that you need to have. I just nodded my head the whole time. That's all good. Yeah. One great way to understand what information Google is finding on your site is by looking at Google search console data, right? By analyzing Google search console data, you can quickly understand what pages Google, they are finding Google's finding and index indexing, use this data to make sure you're using robot text files, uh, that makes sure Google finds the right stuff. And again, this goes to that, um, that Google crawl budget. If, if there are pages that Google just shouldn't crawl, make sure your robot TXT file is telling the Google bot to avoid those pages so that they don't go against your budget. Like that doesn't make sense. Yeah, no, I, I mean, I think that, um, I was reading this and, and really

everything goes back to data, right? That's the beauty of digital advertising and marketing is, uh, you need to see what, well, we're talking about some technical stuff with the robots and, and, uh, you know, uh, the, the files, uh, um, on the backend, but really, well, Google data studio, right. Is new, right. And, uh, like an improvement of Google analytics search console. They've kind of changed that around a little bit. Every time I log in, it's a little bit, um, different, uh, but you need to be looking at that data and making adjustments based upon what that data is telling you. Uh, so many times it's like, here's our strategy, like on radio or whatever, and we're just going to go right. And no matter what happens, this is what we're going to do. And we're, okay. We put up this billboard and there you go. That the agileness is, is so important, but also knowing, okay, Hey, Google's only going to look at how much of my website, what do I want to show them? What did I update on the website? What's new also one of the things I've seen with e-commerce specifically is they're just using, uh, manufacturer, uh, information picture, which is all duplicate content and Google's not going to give you really any credit. And so, um, you know, all the same factors that go into SEO apply here. Um, and, and data should drive everything you do. And, and, um, if you make adjustments based on that, uh, you should be getting a little bit better every time. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right. So any, any outlined, like a, what can you do about, you know, set up your robot text file, get into Google search console and see if it's recognized it. And it's skipping those pages. Um, that's just a matter of following up and, and, you know, just again, add it to your robot text file, get back into Google search console and make sure that it's, that it's skipping those. His next one is

usability, right? And we actually call, you know, talk about usability from the perspective. And there's two things here, right? So we've been really talking about this a lot of the way through here where usability is like, again, how do I find that PDF that tells me how to install that pump? Um, how do I find the pump that matches my old pump, right? Is there a generic version that I can save some money on? Like that's all goes into usability. And we actually often focus on, on CRO, right? And my talk a little bit about that. So conversion rate optimization is typically what we would do after we got somebody to the first page, right? So there's, there's a strategy to get you to rank, uh, for certain keywords and we utilize the homepage for that. And then we move it to the service pages and then we move the service pages up to the first page. And then once we're on the first page, really, that's where it gets fun and gets competitive. And we move, you know, you up to the top spots there. And, and, and really the thing that plays into it the most is, um, how people are interacting with your website, what the dwell time looks like, um, you know, are people able to find stuff? Are they clicking the back button? Are they exiting out? Like, what are they doing once they get to your website, um, you know, videos and pictures and, and engaging content, interact, interactivity, calculators, um, custom images, all these sort of things. Uh, and, and do they take action, right? Do you have good CTAs? Do they take action? Where do they go next? Like Google's following them. I mean, the whole reason that, uh, Google came out with Google Chrome is to just track everything you do on Google and off Google. Right. And so they won't see what you're doing on the site. Um, you know, Facebook, the same way there's an option of Facebook that, you know, if you don't

like Google, Facebook, knowing everything you do, you can turn it off, but they track everything. Like they're, they're like, yeah, we're going to have access to everything. And that's how like, um, creepy these ads are. You think your phone's listening to you. Right. But it's, it's just, they have so much of like in market data and what your friends are doing. And, uh, again, this goes back to the machine learning and data, but, but, but usability, it's easy actually, if you just like put the hat on of a customer of your own website and go through it, like with a new set of eyes, um, you'll discover a lot of things that you're like, Hey, like this could be a little bit better. I should do this differently. Or, you know, Oh, maybe we should add a chat bot or, you know, whatever it is. Um, but, but it's how people are engaging with your website and what Google is trying to do and learn is when someone's engaging the proper, uh, visitors engaging with your website, taking the proper actions, it wants to serve up more of those options to those people. And so the better, uh, you can improve, uh, you know, that's where heat mapping comes in that's where AB testing comes in. Uh, you know, but, but usability, UX, UI, what does it look like on mobile? I mean, I can keep going. Right. But no, we, we group all this together, uh, uh, with us call it, call it CRO or conversion rate optimization. And I'm going to add one little piece. Cause you said, Hey, go ahead and put on your, you know, your, I'm a customer hat, do that with at, at the bare minimum, the newest person at the company or the person who's least technically adept. So if we were talking about pool pumps, go get the guy who, uh, who doesn't do like who does accounting and say, Hey, find this pump and buy it and watch what they do or bring a spouse or

somebody bring people in and watch how they go through it. Because sometimes not sometimes very, very often, especially the owner. And then even people who are on the team that you might like trust and, and, and, uh, assign this task to, they're going to just know how to do it. Like, Oh, I know where that pump is. It's hidden under here. You just go there. And they're not even realizing how much information they're bringing to the table. You got to do that with fresh eyes. Uh, and, and often you can't be those fresh eyes, but you just got to be honest with that. It's very hard to pretend you don't know anything about your product. Google announced in May, they will unveil a new ranking page experience algorithm specifically designed to judge and rank pages based on how users perceive the experience of interacting with your webpage. Um, I, I feel like they've been doing this for a while already. They may be getting more intricate, um, but they've been doing this for a while. Um, yeah, things, things have started to shift for sure. Um, and, and they're just building on the, the core algorithm and they're just getting, they're learning and getting better data on, uh, how people are interacting with that page and, you know, what, what organic, um, searching and interaction looks like. Right. And so, you know, again, um, good SEO is just like good usability. Right. Um, I mean, and you could branch that out and to some other things, but, uh, that's what you always say, Chris, like take care of the user and Google will take care of you. Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, and, and, and, and he points, Greg points out the higher up in your site's architecture of pages, the more likely you'll be able to rank for competitive keywords. Right. So again, that's about constructing the architecture, right? So that those things that you really do want to focus on one get crawled because nothing's happening if they're not getting crawled. And then to

have more weight in terms of the, of, of the Google search algorithm. Well, you never want to go more than three clicks deep typically. Right. Um, uh, you know, sometimes you can't, can't help it, but you know, where, where you fall in the menu, um, and where you are, uh, in, in the sub folders is importance. Right. And that's what Google looks at. And so, um, if you want something to be ranked, um, if it's part of the navigation bar, it's important, right? You're saying it's important to you. If it's five layers deep, it's not as important. It's only important for people that are searching for this category, doing this thing where it can make sense. So you got to make sense of, of how you're going to lay out your menu and what goes where to again, indicate or give some signals to Google. Is this important to me or not? Yeah. So Greg says leverage keyword research or leveraging keyword research will help guide the decision on how to structure the site most effectively for organic search. And I, and I, again, got to, got to kind of bring in yes, keyword research got to be included in all of these decisions and do not forget what do you sell the most? What makes you the most money, right? Cause the thing that makes you the most money potentially, I don't know, 10 times what the other thing makes may not have the search volume. And so if you're just going straight off of search volume and not the actual margin or value it brings to the customer, you might skip it. Right. And I am guilty of doing that with, with my vital C where I said, Hey, uh, EWR team, let's not look at longevity because the search, the search volume for longevity was so low, but I didn't realize it didn't dawn on me until much later. Now it has, uh, that anybody searching for longevity really are looking for my products. So we need to be well-placed for that

phrase longevity. So it does matter, not just search volume, but value that that search volume could potentially bring to your company. Yeah. I was going to say something and my computer's getting really hot and it totally distracted me. Cause I was like, it's getting kind of loud. I'm like, all right, I might crash, you know? Um, but, uh, you know, uh, if you crash, well, leverage. Leveraging keyword research is kind of the subject, the topic. I could talk about that forever. Right. There was something specific I was going to say about, about keyword research. Um, but you know, that's the crux of all SEO. So, um, you know, listen to other podcasts and, um, you know, you, you start with keyword research or you kind of start with target persona and, and, and then you figure out kind of what that customer journey looks like. And a lot of that customer journey starts with like what they're searching for or what they're searching for dictates where they fall in the funnel. Right. And you need to be cognizant of that, aware of that, um, because you want to serve up the right information to what someone's searching for that specific thing. If that's going to be a commercial intent keyword for you. Yep. All right. Next topic is site optimizations to improve e-commerce rankings. Greg says enterprise level organizations have a range of locations, products, services, and support resources that they need to optimize. Some of these will need to be optimized manually. Some of them, and really frankly, as many as possible when you're a larger organization need to be automated. Manual SEO could take a lot of time and resources to implement the most basic changes. Uh, each page to each page, such as title, meta description, uh, content container elements, automated optimizations involve the use of software to implement, implement the desired strategies, which means, yes, it's a whole lot faster, but it's a whole lot more limited as to what it can do. Um, so what is CSS? I'm going to

start with, um, when you structure in your site, um, you know, if you're using WordPress or some kind of builder, like there, there's advantages to, um, being able to make site-wide or global changes, um, and using, uh, uh, uh, a structure, organized structure of templates that if you change one thing, it will, it'll change it somewhere else. So many times there's legacy issues with enterprise level, uh, sites where either, um, there's, like I mentioned before, a bunch of subdomains, uh, on, on the site, um, you know, golly, um, I would tell you that, uh, I mean, there was even one issue that, uh, this company was managing like 16 different brands on multiple different websites or multiple different CMSs or like WordPress, Wix, you know, .NET, Magenta, whatever. And like, how do I control all this? Right. Cause you're going to have to go in and independently make all these changes. Right. And I said, and I, and I said, okay, well let's develop an 18 month plan so you can manage all these things, um, and structure in a way that, that you can, um, handle this without it being, uh, so much manual work. Well, you know, there's a couple of WordPress plugins out there that you can push updates to, right. And it'll update, uh, your whole kind of mini network. Um, and, and so there's things like that, uh, that, that you can leverage. But again, I think it comes back to the site architecture, understanding what changes you're going to make, or for example, um, Hey, you want to put on these pages, uh, an ad, right? So you could put it at static ad on every one of those pages, or you can make that a dynamic ad that, that connects to the, um, carousel on the homepage. Right. And then it dynamically uploads that. Like, so there's ways to think about how, what you want to do and how you want to structure it. Um, so, so you're not doing so many manual changes. Um, and, and I

think working with enterprise level clients, sometimes they have an internal IT team, uh, that is, you know, a little paranoid of, uh, other people getting in and messing with it. You know, there's different strategies of like working on a dev server or giving them the information to upload. But a lot of times people like shy away from, um, you know, uh, enterprise SEO because, you know, you have all these legacy issues and, and, and it's a mess. Um, and, and people think, Hey, I'm going to build a website. Right. And then I'm going to do SEO on it. And like, you gotta be building a website with SEO in mind and what your end goal is in mind. And you need to think through all that stuff in that planning phase. And then, then the websites really, uh, can be built a lot faster and, and it accomplishes a lot more tasks. I mean, you know, we built a website for, uh, what was the website? It was for a, uh, wedding venue, right. Uh, slash B and B slash coffee shop slash, you know, they're, you know, doing, doing all kinds. And this was before COVID, um, their, their first website won a bunch of awards and, uh, didn't, uh, accomplish their personal internal goals. And we took a lot of time to lay that out and then built it out and laid it out in a way that they can one use it after, uh, we're not, after we're done and we hand it back to them. Um, and, and, and I mean, they were just thrilled. Like it was a great experience. Everybody got, um, engagement of what was needed, what they needed to see. And when we do it, uh, learn all that stuff on the front end where we're not making changes after the fact or, uh, trying to, you know, do SEO on a website that is not really, um, structured properly. We have to do a lot. Like, would you rather build a house from the ground up

the right way? Or would you rather like take a house and remodel it? Like what's, you know, what's the better, uh, solution. So, um, the reality is my wife does both of them. So it's pretty easy for me. Okay. For those that this resonates with, that's what I would say is, uh, site architecture. You get what you want. Like what we can say is you get what you want and what you focus on when you build from the ground up, you get legacy challenges when you just try and tweak and, and remodel what you exist. Do you remember that lawyer website, Chris, that was like, it was a bunch of lawyers that kept, uh, combining, combining, combining. And it was five websites. Like websites. Yeah. And they're like, well, what do we need to do to like change this? And I was like, well, whatever that number is times it by five, because we're going to have to go in to each one. It was just a mess. And really based on the changes they want, we were like, like, I really recommend building a whole new website. You know what I mean? And so, so, so, I mean, you're going to, you're going to deal with a lot of those things and, and you've got to come up with some creative solutions. Um, but to have a smaller internal team to be able to manage all this stuff, like all that thought needs to go into the strategy on the front end. Um, and, and there's certainly, uh, ways to, to, to leverage, uh, technology and time, um, and efficiency, uh, with some of these things. People keep building tools for everything. Right. And so, um, there are some really good stuff out there and it's all kind of based on, uh, what legacy issues you're dealing with and what challenges we're trying to solve of how, how we want to approach that. So, yep. He covered a, so when you talk about manual versus automated, uh, the list of manual is a, is

a lot shorter. Um, if you, uh, some of them like core landing pages, category pages, subcategory pages, uh, those should be done manually, uh, going through under your, and, and the reality is at the end of the day, anything that's highly competitive probably needs to be touched manually, right? Because we talk about this regularly. The challenge with e-commerce websites is if you just take the manufacturer description and you plug it in, then you're playing on the same field with everybody else who sells that manufacturer's product. You really need to go in and rework that content so that you have original content and maybe even appropriately focused keyword content for that product, uh, so that you can outperform the rest. And if you're going to do that, you got to get your meta tags, right? You got to get your alt tags, right? You got to get your descriptions, right? Like, so if it's highly competitive, you're probably going to do it manual. The rest you're just going to put together and you may tweak the automation and there's great, you know, most of the, the, the software that you would use for e-commerce has tools that allow you to structure. How do I structure the title tag, the description, et cetera. So, uh, and if, by the way, if you're on some sort of e-commerce platform that doesn't make that easy for you, you should probably get off of that platform. Yeah. That would be called the legacy challenges that you're going to bump into next technical SEO and site enhancements. Um, he talks about numerous tools can help you deep crawl, Botify, Screaming Frog, and the like are useful for crawling massive amounts of pages on a site to understand how a search engine is able to find issues like broken links and code issues. If you need a quick way to understand site performance, uh, use Google Chrome inspect tools to generate a performance report. So just so you know, if you open up Chrome, you right-click on the website and select inspect.

Once the window is open, select lighthouse to generate a performance report that will give you lots of data on performance, accessibility, and SEO. Um, it's a phenomenal tool. It's what I mean. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you can install it as a Chrome plugin. So it's a one click. You can do it. You can get there multiple ways. Um, we use Screaming Frog a lot. Um, you, you know, there's even a free version out there. I think it's up to 500 pages. So that should cover most websites. Um, yeah. Lighthouse, Screaming Frog, recommend them both for sure. So, um, it's critical that the dev team and SEO team work closely once issues are identified so that everyone knows how much dev time is or will be required to fix any of the issues and more. And that's, you know, it just gets more complicated as you get into larger enterprises and these larger e-commerce sites, but it's still true. You've got to have your dev team working with your SEO team. Um, they got to be married and having, uh, I think you're having some weekly meetings with multiple teams right now for, uh, for one of our clients. It's got to work that way so that they interact properly and things don't get broken. Right. I mean, paid, paid media has got to talk to traditional media or, you know, paid digital or paid digital. It's got to talk to traditional. It's got to talk to SEO. SEO has got to talk to the dev team. Um, you know, the marketing team's got to kind of interact with it all. Like, I mean, there's like, everybody can't be siloed. Uh, the left arm needs to know what the right arm's doing. Right. Um, and as again, right. As you grow as an organization, it's more important to be organized and have everyone interacting or you can't scale properly. And, uh, that entity looks kind of discombobulated. Right. So, yeah, uh, here's a couple of things that kind of bad technical, uh, on page, uh, processes

can impact page speed, uh, things that you want to make sure are right. Minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. So that's really good. Um, reduce redirect. So kind of it's, it's understood or theorized that each redirect has a, as a 30% drop in, in the amount of link juice that it passes, that was passed to the original link. So you want to reduce those, make sure those are removed. Um, browser caching can obviously increase your speed significantly. A real experience. Um, you gotta have the XML, XML sitemap. Um, and really that's, that wraps up our, our article. Patif to, to Greg, again, enterprise e-commerce sites can win big with an SEO strategy, um, to be sure, like we're aware of a number of e-commerce sites that really have little or no focus. Would you say Matt on SEO and, uh, and we're helping them shift out of that? Well, Chris, one of your friends that was referred to us, um, and he had a huge site, like 5,000 pages that he didn't even know about. I mean, it was because it's been built on, built on for like 20 years. I think he had like internal redirects, right? So not new site redirect to new site, but I'm talking on page redirects. I think there was, do you remember the number? I don't, I can't, I know it was more than 500. I'm feeling like it was like 3000, but I might be exaggerating. I can't remember. But like, once we cleaned up the internal redirects, it sped the site up. Like I think it was loading at like 12 to 15 seconds. It's down to like three or four seconds. And the main thing that we did not say that we didn't do other things. The main thing that was slowing it down was there was a ton of plugins, right? And so that's like PHP and JavaScript. And like, it's just slowing down the site. Um, but the redirects was like the main, the main thing. So, yeah. So that'll, that'll slow the site

way down. Well, again, Patif, uh, Greg Shuey. Shuey, uh, we really appreciate your article and, um, yeah, if you're interested in kind of enterprise e-commerce sites that can win big, uh, with SEO strategies, you know, reach out to us. We've got, yeah, I mean, the last thing I would say is like, look, our, our most recent hire, um, you know, backgrounds, uh, um, what is it Google, right? And then before that it was GoDaddy, um, really on the backend, like how we're setting stuff up, uh, enterprise wise, um, you know, call us if you need a strategy session, uh, if you're dealing with some issues, if you're, uh, internal and you're like trying to figure it out, um, strategy sessions are quite helpful. We would love to connect with you, uh, build a relationship. Who knows? We might be able to, uh, help you out. We can definitely do some heavy lifting. If you do have a internal dev team or technical team, we can really, we work with a lot of them, uh, really closely and we can, uh, provide, uh, help on the marketing side. Right. And so the, the important thing to know is, um, you know, we're not just a marketing company. Um, we're, we're a technically driven results driven, uh, marketing company, but the reason we have even, uh, our own hosting company, like not a lot of people know that, um, we're rebranding and launching that, uh, very shortly, um, because you need to have those technical capabilities to do some things on the backend, either on the server side, um, or on the backend of the website, uh, to, to help do things like improve speed or, uh, to, to fix issues in coding because what, what is WordPress? Um, and there's a lot of great big websites built on, on WordPress, but like all this is open source, right? And so plugins and code and stuff breaks and you, you, you gotta understand, um, you know, like base level, how this stuff works to be able to

do it, to solve some of these problems and also, uh, really, really, uh, data analysis or data science is, is super important because that's driving the decision-making. And so, you know, if you need any of that, uh, heavy lifting or consulting, uh, reach out to us. Yep. Very cool. Again, Patif to Greg, uh, we really appreciate all of you guys. Um, actually we could use your, uh, your review. We could use a five-star review from you guys. Yeah. So why don't you just go to our Facebook page, facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast and, uh, leave us a review. Hopefully you'll make that review five stars. Uh, and really that's all we got for today. You guys have made us the most popular SEO podcast and one of the most popular internet marketing podcasts in the known universe. So we really appreciate you. Uh, and, uh, unless you've got anything else, Matt, thank you. We'll see you on the next podcast. My name's Chris Burris. Matt Berkson. Bye-bye for now.