SEO and SEVO for your E-Commerce Site - #seopodcast 185

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing Podcast. This is podcast number 185, the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all y'all. Thank you for tuning in. We keep getting more and more interactions from our audience. We really appreciate you guys. If you are in a position to write this minute, what we would like you to do is take your electronic device and... Whether it's a mobile, whether it's a tablet, or whatever it is, hop on Twitter, hop on Facebook, and tag us. Hashtag SEO Podcast, this is number 185. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle, and on that one we can link up and network and do all of that social stuff. Give you a punch in the face. A punch in the face. I'm actually going to turn my phone off because it could ring at any moment. Done. All right, so remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers. Yes. And our mantra is... Don't be a douche. As always, we have a tip from a previous podcast, and that tip is determine what forms of content will be necessary for effective link building. Yeah, you want to make sure you understand what sort of content you're going to need in order to build the kind of links you want. For example, if you're looking to maybe get some viral link building, a lot of people linking and sharing, then you will likely need video content. Right? If you're looking to have something that may be shared and downloaded, which will build links, then you'll probably need some sort of infographic or something like that. So determine what kind of content is necessary in order to get the sort of links you want. Exactly. You could do us a small favor. If you're a regular listener to our podcast, and frankly, you probably are, you could... Three

steps. Go to iTunes. Create an account. Write a review. Yeah. And if you choose to, send us an email, podcast at... E-Wolfstyle.com And we'll give you a punch in the face. We've got a couple reviews here, so let's dive right into those. We're going to... So when somebody asks you, hey, I got some good news and some bad news, where do you go for it first? Bad news first. Bad news first? All right. We're going for bad news first. Get the bad news out the way, and then that way I can leave on a good note. So this one isn't even an audio complaint, audio quality complaint. So the title of the review is, meh, which is actually kind of cool. Yeah, yeah. One star. This is by Sizzlin' Bacon. Literally, it's... Sizzlin' Bacon? Yeah. Literally, it's a five-word review. It says, too much fluff and fanfare. All right. All right, Sizzlin' Bacon. I got a guy named Gino that he should meet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He should just meet him. How much did you listen to, Sizzlin' Bacon? Yeah. And, you know, did you get through the whole thing and felt that? Then so be it. That's okay. We do get to an actual meet, you know, of this podcast. And so my idea or my assumption is that Sizzlin' Bacon, you probably didn't get past the first 10 or 15 minutes because it is some fluff and fanfare and, man, it didn't get to the meat. Yep. I went ahead and clicked his username and most of the reviews he writes are negative, so... Oh. Man, you kind of... I like Sizzlin' Bacon, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. You can't be giving me a negative... That's like the comedian who says, bacon is so good, you wrap other good food in bacon to make it better. It's so good when it's cooking, it sounds like it's cheering for itself. That's just awesome. All right, the next one is, title, The Best When You Can Hear. All right. Out. We get it.

Four stars. This is from Ron Gilliland. Gilliland. Gilliland. I listen to every episode and the information is spot on and current. I enjoy the banter and the Q&A. Dudes, get a professional on your sound. You advise people to hire SEOs, hire a sound pro. Ron, if the sound doesn't get better from here on out, we may just stop the podcast. Because we have brought in some sound guys, we have bought some equipment that we think has helped. I think we were losing a lot of sound quality. Basically, the sound was pulled out of the video that is created when we stream the video of our podcast live, and that's from Ustream.com. And there's a significant, we now know, degradation in the quality of the sound as it gets pushed out to Ustream. So, we're now recording it live here, and we are going to be using the live recording for our podcast. Instead of the sound that's modulated with the video and broadcast live. Yeah. So, it should be a lot better now. By the way, punch in the face. Four stars. We'll take it. Advising people to hire professionals. We'll take it. Yeah. That's, you're absolutely right. Thank you, Ron. Next one. S-C-O-E-R-I-O-S-L-E. Isn't that obvious? Seriously. Yeah. Okay. S-C-O-E-R-I-O-S-L-E. Entertaining while highly educational. Five stars. Five stars. I like this. Money plan S-O-S. You gotta just like that tag. So, that's the name? Yeah. That's the handle. Yeah. I listen to a lot of podcasts related to the financial industry and growing my small business. My search for SEO themed content came up with a lot of results and I gave a few of them a shot. However, E-Web Style's podcast was short, helpful, and the chemistry between Chris and Charles is similar to that of a radio morning show. Hilarious. Yes, what's up? Thank you. Punch in the face for that. I'm learning while listening and laughing. Appreciate it, man. So, we try to create great, you know, infotainment or edutainment or whatever you want to call it. Probably another one. Yeah,

it's like interformative. Interformative. I like interformative. So, appreciate it, man. Thanks for tuning in. And one more piece of fanfare from my side. This is a gentleman by the name of Ben Reeder sent me an email. He says he's a big fan of the podcast, loyal listener. He's listened to at least 50 of the podcasts and got plenty of other people hooked. That requires a hook, a referral. Since you've helped me out a ton, I want to point out a few simple things on our SEO pages. He pointed out that we don't have 301 redirects on our page, on our homepage. So, www.e-webstyle.com is separate from www.e-webstyle.com slash index.asp. That is fixed already. As soon as I saw that, I was like, okay, yeah, that's ridiculous. We've got to fix it. So, that's fixed. Now, one thing that, so he gets a patoof and then a kick in the shins. Because he included www.e-webstyle.com slash hash. So, that's the pound symbol. Yeah, that just goes to whatever page you're already on. Yeah, and so I was like, okay, well, how do I get rid of that? So, I'm in my htaccess file trying to get rid of it, trying to get rid of it, trying to get rid of it, trying to get rid of it. You can't. You can't in an htaccess file. Servers ignore that. Remember, that hash, also known as the pound symbol or the sharp symbol, is used to identify anchor text. And I found a really good video by Rand Fishkin about the hash and how you can use the hash for multiple different purposes on your website, not just anchor text. And so, the kick in the shins for me, well, it's a kick and then back in a punch. I had to spend a lot of time to research it because I was trying to fix it directly in htaccess. And then I learned something new because you couldn't do it. Yeah. Yeah, punch, kick, punch. Duck. Combo or something. Yeah, in the hook because you gave the

referral. Yeah. Out. Yeah. All right, here we go. He's injured. Maybe. Maybe not. You're not a fan one day, right? So, what do we have next? We have next our famed segment. Oh, the cataclysm. Yeah. The Algorithm Cataclysm. All right. Yeah, so today's Algorithm Cataclysm came from, this happened earlier this week. This was this past Wednesday. They were at, SMX was going on. And so, Danny Sullivan had a chance to interview Matt Cutts. And some of the questions he asked him, he asked him about a panda. And so, Matt Cutts came out and said that they're going to stop doing the manual panda refreshes that they push out that usually update data, you know, probably once a month. And instead, they're making panda a part of the actual algorithm process. And so, no longer will it be a manual push out. Instead, they're calling it Panda Everflux. We're going to call it Panda-matically. Yeah, exactly. They're calling it Panda-matically or Panda Everflux for short is now part of the algorithm process. And so, just be on the lookout for that. And that's happened this past Wednesday. By the way, if you're in the middle. And today's Friday. Of Everflux, while you're driving down the road at 80 miles per hour, you could be teleported back into time. Yeah. That it on the algo cataclysm? That's it for the cataclysm. Oh, well, the last thing, Matt also announced on that same interview that they have no timeline in mind for branded authorship. So, that kind of sucks. So, branded authorship. Right now, obviously, people are doing a lot of work to make sure their image shows up next to their listing in the SERPs, search engine result pages. And currently, you cannot have a company as the author. Yeah, you have to have your personal brand, your image, your avatar that you have with Google+. And so, even though you may have a Google+, business page, you can't use that page to control the authorship. It has to be your personal page. And the problem is,

you get companies like us, for example, who may blog some content, and we would rather our logo be shown as the avatar and not necessarily Charles Lewis or Chris Burris. But, since Google doesn't allow branded authorship, company branded authorship, we're supposed to either, I'll author this one, you author that one sort of situation. Right. And you'd like to have all of the authorship related, the juice, the link juice that comes with authorship associated with one entity, right? Exactly. So, you've got 20 writers writing, whatever, two articles a day. That's a little steep. One article a day. You want all of those to be credited to one person, because that's going to have more value. But, that's apparently somewhere in the future. Something, yeah, they're working on it. It's not on the Facebook timeline. All right. A little bit of news. Oh, I got a couple more patiffs. I got a patiff to Mark. He's at Google Offer. I was meeting with a potential client, and she had a call from Google Offers. You guys may have seen the logo. It's on Android. It's on a couple different places. And he was helping her set it up, and I was invited to sit in and help her do that. And so, we have a new listener over at Google.com. So, Mark, cool. Punch in the face. Punch in the face to you. Appreciate it. And when I told him that he was going to get a punch in the face at the end of the call, he was a little disconcerted. So, hopefully, he's okay now. Yeah, punch, that's a good thing, Mark. Yeah. That's a good thing. Another patiff to Sonia. It was her birthday last night. We're going to be getting together. You'll hear more, I think, about a relationship that we'll have with Business Magazine here in Houston. So, happy birthday to you. Hopefully, you're not too hungover. We got a couple patiffs, too. Okay, yeah. Let's keep the patiffs. My arms are warmed up. All right, cool. So, one more. Well, two

more, actually. One goes to, this punch in the face goes to Phil Greger. This came from Twitter. He's at SEO zero, spelled out, then the number one. Says one of his clients just claimed five times number one positions for different key phrases. Hashtag top position snatcher. Uh-oh. So, appreciate that. He tagged us in it, at eWebStyle. And the second one is Elton Vinson. He's at E-L-V-I-Z-Z-I. Says, hashtags became relevant in Facebook. Shout out to eWebStyle for preaching that for months now. Yeah. Appreciate it. Yeah, I remember saying that. Yeah. Use them anyway, because eventually. They're going to catch on. I think they'll be active in G+, as well. And so. I just got a couple, actually, literally two pieces of news. The Galaxy S4, the details of it were announced. And I thought it was funny. A collective sigh of relief among Apple shareholders. And then the stocks went up. So, they were apparently waiting for this monumental launch. And it was just an incremental upgrade. Yeah. The other thing I thought this was pretty cool. Apparently, EA Sports Real Racing 3. So, driving game. Actually, I believe it's on the iPad. I'm pretty sure. Came out February 28th. And these were some interesting statistics. So, that's 15 days ago, roughly, right? For sure. Some of the, here are some of the statistics. 350 million races have been completed in 15 days. On average, 25 million races are completed each day. With players spending an average of 25 minutes a day on the game. In total, players have spent 14 million hours playing the game in the last, that's a million hours a day. Wow. That's what's up. Close to it. But, you know what? Now, I want to play. Now, I'm going to go get it. Yeah. Now, I need to know. What's all the fuss about, right? If we had a little more time, I was going to download it and say, make that 14 million, make it the 351 million and one downloads. Pretty impressive. All right. That's all I got. That's

the potatoes. That's the potatoes. Let's get to the meat. So, hopefully, sizzling bacon. You know what I'm saying? Right now, this is where you're supposed to start listening now. Yeah. So, I pulled an article today. We're going to talk about e-commerce, right? What you can do to improve your e-commerce SEO. And what you can do to improve your e-commerce SEO to help encourage people to make that purchase or to follow up with them after the purchase. So, I began perusing the web. I came across this article on SEO Moz, which was pretty cool, posted by QBlocks.com. So, I figured I'd check it out and I'll bring it to you guys. Holy Grail. Holy Grail of e-commerce conversion optimization. The part about the title that caught me was 91-point checklist and infographic. And I was like, okay, 91 points? Really? How much of these are going to be redundant? How many of them will be probably promoting some other software, some other platform? And so, he's going after half of the 200 or more. Things you can do. Triggers that Google uses to identify. Exactly. But I did figure out of the 91 deals, there had to be some that could work for us that I could bring to you guys minus all the fluff. And so, here we go. I went through and I pulled some. They are broken in sections. So, when we're talking about an e-commerce site, homepage optimization. I like this one. Show your top selling products on your homepage. You'd be surprised how many people launch an e-commerce site and they go with this kind of grid look and they're just featuring products. Like 99-cent parts when they sell $400 RC cars or something. Exactly. Show your top selling products. If that part happens to be one of your top sellers, then feature it. But don't feature all of the parts if half of those never sell. I would take that one step further. Sell the things you include the things you sell the most on the front page and the

things you make the most money on the front page. Exactly. One or two of those. Yeah. If not both, depending on how much real estate you have. I like this one too. Offer more ways to order from your store. So, let's say this is a, you have a physical brick and mortar building, right? But you also offer e-commerce sales. Then allow people to come into the store. You know, a lot of e-com sites that may have a physical building, they look so e-commerce that you don't realize that there's an actual store you can go to and buy these products. And so, let people know that. Let people know about all of these ways they can get it. Whether it's online ordering, whether it's coming to the store and buying it, whether it's through a distributor or some other retailer. Let people know all of the ways they can purchase your products. Because, frankly, they may be comfortable with a different way that they've already experienced before. I like this one here. Number three for homepage optimization. Show videos on your homepage. This works in two places. Reason one for SEO purposes. Just good to have that video there. But from a conversion perspective, if this is a video that's about one of these products we were talking about earlier, your top selling product, then that video is likely to get viewed more and help encourage people to take that next click and add it to the cart. So, you definitely want to show videos on the homepage. Let's talk navigation. And I'm going to reach through these. The one I chose in navigation was avoid vague category structures. So, what does that mean? If you sell, let's say, electronics and you sell tablets, you should have a category. Instead of having a category that says tablets, break it down some. Maybe go with a category that says iPads or Android tablets and things like that. Because people will search for that and it's a more descriptive category. You'll likely reduce the amount of clicks people

have to take to find whatever product they're looking for. Cheap Android tablets. Exactly. Avoid, you know, kind of vague category names. I want to get into product search. First off, if you're running an e-commerce site and you don't have a product search, shame on you. Turn that on immediately. Yeah. But once you turn it on, number one. Make sure it works. Yeah. Definitely. Test your search for accuracy. You want to make sure that if somebody searches, you know, again, that they not only find that first, but any products related to that should show up as well. You know, and that goes back into your optimization, which we'll talk about in a minute. If they're searching for, again, Apple iPad, then that should show up and the new iPad charger should show. Frankly, whatever adapter you need should show. Any related cases should come up. And if you have any affiliate accounts, there are a link to AT&T or something where you can actually sign up for service. Yeah. And so, you know, but you make sure all that's working in your search. I like this one. Implement an intelligent search. That'll cover misspellings or singular versions or plural versions, things like that. So in regards to the product page, some of the things you want to do here are use high-quality product images. It sucks going to get to an e-commerce store looking at products and the pictures suck. Yeah. Whether it's the exact picture you've taken or the one given to you from the manufacturer, use a high-quality product image. Show product videos. We said that before. Don't let the price be a surprise. How many times you went to a cart and finally got to the checkout page and they showed the price and you're like, oh, hell no. It's not going to work. It's not in my budget. Exactly. So don't let price be a surprise. I like this one. Allow them to select a delivery date if you can. So rather than have them choose UPS, ground, or FedEx, next day

air, or whatever, just have them select the date that they want it delivered and then have the shipping calculator calculate which shipping entry they need. And then that way it's priced according to what they want. Well, I think what I think is it should be both ways, right? So maybe I want it cheapest, but I'll pay $1 more if it's two days or whatever. So I'm not sure I agree with that one all the way. Well, my thing to that one was I think if you display the time and the cost next to each other. So for $20, two days. Yeah, it should be the same grid. But, yeah, I don't think because I just don't see many people saying, ah, I'll have it in a week. Yeah, they're just doing two of whatever you have available. I want it today. But it depends on how expensive it is to get it today. Is that possible? Yeah. Like, can I order something right now and get it today? Well, I did. Our sound recorder that we're using now to improve our audio, Friday, it was Thursday night because we were doing the podcast last time, bought it on bestbuy.com, went and picked it up. Okay. Well, that's what you did. I'm waiting to see if it was here Friday when we got here. It's like, wow. Okay. I had a Thursday. Punching the face to Best Buy. I had an hour later. Let's see here. I like this one. Encourage users to leave reviews. This is extremely important. This should be done, frankly, on that product page and on the checkout page. And then you should also include a link to where they can leave those reviews in the emails that you send out the follow-up. If you're sending out a shipping and tracking email, hey, don't forget, leave us a review here. Once you get confirmation that that product has been delivered, you should be sending out another email. We notice your product has arrived. Is everything okay? Great. Leave us a review. Click

here sort of deal. So encourage people to leave reviews. Back to the cart. Checkout optimization. Offer a persistent shopping cart. I've been to sites where they have a combination of different things going on. And so once I begin adding to the cart and I get to the final checkout page and it looks a little different, yeah, drop, bounce, I'm going. And so offer a persistent cart. And I'll take it a step further. Make it visible on each page. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, make it visible. And not with the view cart button, but just make it visible. Let me see what's in my cart and how much tax has already been applied throughout my shopping process. That way that just makes it convenient for me, the user. I like this one. Keep the form linear. And we're almost done. Keep the form linear. So if you're asking name, email, phone, keep everything lined up instead of having text fields to the left and then text fields to the right and then below. Those happen to get missed. And then for some reason you get a validation error and the person knows it's their card, but they left off, you know, middle initial or something. And so now they can't process the paper. Or the apartment number. Or the apartment number. Exactly. They don't receive the product. Here's a good one. And it's actually two different ones. I'm going to merge these. These will definitely help increase conversions. It says make account registration an optional step of the checkout process. And then the next one says make the guest checkout option more prominent than the registration. I think this is key. Give people the option to check out without registering. They may not ever plan on coming back to your site. And that's okay. Make it easy. Make it easy. You know, and then after they check out, give them the option to register. Yeah. And frankly, I'm going to skip this other one by saying not only give them the option to register, but if

they do register, make that an automatic, like, opt-in to your newsletters and things like that. And so that way you won't have to feed them through that process again. They'll already be there. So, let's see here. Don't surprise users by adding extra cost. You know, like if I have to order a filter with this vacuum. Yeah, don't add that. You know, don't tell me that the filter was extra. Yeah, the worst experience would be it arrives and I need to get the filter afterwards. And I need to get the filter. That's the worst. The next one is I get it into my shopping cart and you tell me I have to get a filter or the price is different because it includes a filter. Yeah. Exactly. And so the last one I have here is check your autoresponder emails. And so this really goes back to following up with clients, kind of like what I was saying earlier. You know, check the content on there. Tailor that autoresponse as much to that user as you can. If you can have it pre-populate their name, do that. If you can have it pre-populate the product they bought, do that. If you can have it, you know, make sure it includes any links to social and things like that and the reviews we talked about earlier. What you have to do is you want that email to be as personal as it can be and not generic. Everybody hates it. Hey, client, thanks for giving me your money. Instead, you know, hey, Charles, thanks for buying this Gatorade. Why don't you write us a review and tell us how much you like Gatorade? You know, something like that, that I'm like, okay, I do like Gatorade. I'll write a review and I'll actually, I'll probably take action more than somebody who didn't. So those are just a few tips of what you can do if you're running an e-com site. There's plenty more. I'll post the link on Facebook so you guys can check it out. Cool.

Speaking of Facebook, if you want to find us on Facebook, you can find us at facebook.com slash ewebstyle. I said that at and it threw me off. You can also find us at twitter.com slash ewebstyle. And youtube.com slash ewebstyle. And you can pop us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. I think we have a little blank stare news, right? A little blank stare. Yeah. Yeah, there was this cool kind of gangsta-ling blank stare right here. So this blank stare goes to eBay. eBay. Yeah, eBay. So eBay released an article saying that how they use paid search through Google AdWords and it sucks how they felt like it was a waste of resources and that people shouldn't be using it. And so then we began doing some research. And it turns out they were indeed using AdWords, but... In a major way. In a major way. A huge, big budget account like, you know, and it's eBay. And so what I didn't think about was why they would do that. Like, because they're not, it's not their own products. These are products that individuals are selling. Right. Anyway. So they're doing, they're doing AdWords and apparently whoever's running it knows a little bit because they're using DKI. It's Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Think at their budget amount, Google was, had staff helping them. You would have thought, right? I would hope not. I mean, you know, you would think so, but I would hope not. It would be better, yeah, given, given what actually happened. Yeah, I would hope not. That would be horrible. And so what happens is, what happens is, so they're using Dynamic Keyword Insertion for, and that's, that's essentially running your AdWords ad and whatever keyword the person searched. You can have that keyword show up in the title or in the ad text or both. They were actually doing both on a broad match. So if they were did pets, for example, you could search for live pets or dead pets or, or hurting pets and Google would show your ad for all

of these. And so, so eBay, eBay's ad was like with the dead pet search, for example, dead pets on sale. New and used, dead pets. Check out the deals now. We took it a step further and did it for several other, other keywords that happen to be out there. Severed heads on sale. New and used severed heads. You know, check out the deals now. Or even boogers. Yeah, new and used boogers for sale. And so, I like body fluids. Yeah, body fluids. New and used body fluids for sale. Wow. Yeah, check out the deals now. So, baby Mexican. New and used baby Mexican for sale. That's when people started just messing with it. Yeah, but the point is, come on, eBay, like, AdWords does work. There's a reason why Google makes a lot of money on it. There's a reason why that's one of our top selling services here. It's like billions? Yeah. What is it, billions? Billions. It's like quarterly, billions. Billions. And so, it sucks that you're a campaign. I wonder how much money they lost on that. Oh, man. Well, I agree with you. It's almost like so many of their things, if anything's selling under $10, their cut is like less than a buck. Exactly. Right? So, you can't afford to do pay-per-click for a used notebook. Used baby head. That's even worse, right? Let me just, wow. Yeah. It's blank stare-worthy. It's blank stare-worthy, definitely. So, come on, eBay. Holler at us. Yeah. We'll help you out. I mean, we have a Google rep. We can, you know, we can. Bounce some ideas off of, ask them why we're paying for baby heads. Baby Mexicans. Or baby Mexican or farts. Other farts could be, you know, somebody doesn't know the name of a whoopee cushion. They're like, fart, noise, pillow. Oh, but even in though. New and used fart, noise, pillow. Yeah. Maybe. That's actually a decent ad, right? But new and used farts? I got a used fart. Yeah. And you don't even got a paper. Yeah. Just hang

around. It's a paper. I give them out. All right. That's a great note to end our podcast. Remember, you've been listening to the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on iTunes. Yes. That is because of you. We really appreciate you. You know, you could do us one other favor. If you get any good value out of this podcast, you could write us a review on our G Plus local page. And the best and easiest way to get there, well, there's kind of four. Go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus and G Plus and Google Plus and Google Plus. Any iteration of that will take you to our G Plus local page and write us a review there. We really appreciate it. We've got some fans who are writing reviews there. We can't tell you how much we appreciate that. So, patoof to everybody who's kind of hooking up with us on our Facebook page, on our G Plus page, on our Twitter account. Yeah. A lot of activity. And until the next podcast, we really appreciate you. My name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow. My way. Go.