SEO

Ecommerce SEO has a lot of similarly with regular websites SEO, however there are some areas that need more focus or a different approach comparing to content websites, below is a list of the SEO steps that need to be done for an ecommerce site:

1. Keyword research
2. Faceted navigation
3. Directory structure and information architecture
4. Top navigation and IA
5. Content creation
6. Dynamic on-page optimization
7. Sitemap creation
8. Internal linking
9. Internal search engine (site search)
10. Product reviews
11. Google Merchant Centre feed
12. Schema installation
13. GSC (Google Search Console) monitoring
14. Core Web Vitals
15. Tracking
16. Conversion rate optimization CRO

I will go through those steps one by one with examples, and recommend the right approach that will work well for online stores. For my examples I will assume that I am trying to optimize an online store that sells mainly computers.

Keyword research:

The tools that are used for online stores keyword research are similar to ones that are used for regular websites, the main difference for ecommerce will be the large number of targeted keywords and their variations, the three tools below will be very helpful:

• SEMrush, very helpful for keyword research and competition analysis
• Google keyword planner
• AHREFS Amazon keyword research, there is a free alternative to this tool here

For an online computer store here is an example how AHREFS tool can help with keyword variations:

Faceted navigation:

“Faceted navigation” refers to how ecommerce websites allow visitors to filter and sort results based on product attributions (i.e. colour, size, model, brand and features), the tricky decision when it comes to faceted navigation is: should the result pages be served under dedicated pages and made available for search engines to crawl? Or should they be kept under disallowed pages or run by Ajax technology (no dedicated pages), in other words keep them hidden from search engines?

People search for keywords with a pattern like "laptop + colour", in this case creating multiple pages (page for each colour) for the same laptop can lead to duplicate content, so may be this pattern could be kept available only by a filter or an internal search but not for search engines to crawl. There are other situations like the monitor size where many laptop features can change with that, and it makes more sense to create a dedicated pages for each "laptop + monitor size" and making those pages available for search engines to crawl.

A lot of keyword research and product research will be required to decide which levels of faceted navigation must be served with dedicated URLs that are available for search engines and what should stay disallowed or under an Ajax filter.

Directory structure and information architecture :

The keyword research along with looking at Amazon or other competitors should be very helpful to design the directory structure and the information architecture.

The directory structure will be designed based on the products inventory, the URLs must follow logically the directory structure, this will also make building the upper navigation and the breadcrumbs easier:

• mycomputerstore.com/laptops/ (category page)
• mycomputerstore.com/laptops/acer/ (subcategory/brand page)
• mycomputerstore.com/laptops/15inches/ (faceted navigation category page)
• mycomputerstore.com/laptops/acer/aspire-5-laptop-a515-44-r4m5 (product page)

Top navigation:

The top navigation (could be located in the header or on the side) is a very important component from a user experience standpoint and from search engines standpoint. Pages that are linked from the top navigation will gain more weight with search engines as they are internally linked from all pages on the website, users also will be able to navigate the website easier when provided with a well designed/structured top navigation.

Top navigation must be adjusted on a regular basis to follow search volume and user behaviour (especially site search).

Content creation:

Most large ecommerce websites use the manufacturer product description which can lead to duplicate content issues. The solution around duplicate content will be writing a unique product description for every product, which could be expensive for large websites. A good alternative could be:

• Using product features in the database to create some unique information
• Provide relevant products section
• Provide user generated product reviews

The category level must have some text content at the top of the pages if possible.

Dynamic on-page optimization:

The keyword research may reveal that users/searchers include words that have certain patterns/modifiers like, online, store, on-sale, free shipping in their search, if that is applicable to your store those words could be added in the title tag and the description tag of all pages that they apply to (it could be done programatically for all pages).

Sitemap creation:

The sitemap is very important due the high number of pages (products) and the availability of those pages (products will be added/removed on a regular basis), it will be difficult for search engines to stay up-to-date with all the changes happening on the website using only crawling, a sitemap will improve the discoverability and crawalability.

Multiple sitemaps must be added to track each level separately (brand level, category level and product level), or even more granular than that:

• categories-sitemap.xml
• faceted-sitemap.xml
• products-sitemap.xml
• etc

Internal linking:

Internal linking helps users to navigation the website, it also helps search engines to crawl and distribute authority to internal pages (especially pages that are not linked from the upper navigation). The most popular way to provide internal linking for an ecommerce website are:

• Navigation menus
• Bread crumps
• Pagenation
• Similar products, featured products and customer who purchased this product also bought that section

Internal search engine (site search):

An internal search engine will be very helpful for users, best practices to follow for an internal search engine:

• It must be placed at the top of every page of the website
• It must be tracked using Google Analytics
• It must be optimized on a regular basis based on user behaviour data in Google Analytics

In a case where the CMS does not have a sophisticated internal search engine and your website is indexed well by Google, consider using Google Programmable Search Engine.

The results of tracking the internal search in Google Analytics can help to optimize the information architecture and the upper navigation.

Product reviews:

It is very important to collect customer reviews after every successful transaction, this could be done using Google Customer Reviews program or Google partners, doing that will enable the seller ratings extension that could be used in Google ads. A review badge could be also used on the website which can provide enhanced SERPs for some keywords.

A review form also could be added to the product page to allow all users (not only buyers) to provide products feedback.

Google Merchant Centre:

Google Merchant Centere is a vital tool to run shopping ads with Google. Google has announced recently that they will start serving free product listings in their product search for websites that have products feed in GMC.

A key component to create a GMC account is a product feed, most popular online shopping carts provide a GMC compatible feed either natively or using a plugin. GMC can now create the feed using product schema when it is installed correctly on the website.

JSON-LD

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Product",
  "image": "http://example.com/test.jpg",  
  "name": "Example Test",
  "description": "This is just a boring example",
    "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "price": "199.99"
  }
}
</script>

Schema installation

As discussed in GMC section, Schema installation is very important for ecommerce websites, Here is a list of other Schemas that apply to ecommerce websites:

• Product Schema
• Review Schema
• Price Schema
• Product Availability Schema

GSC monitoring:

Google Search Console provides a lot of valuable feedback for any website and more for ecommerce websites, it helps monitoring :

• Structured data (Schema) issues
• Mobile issues
• Duplicate content
• Index-ability, discoverability and crawblity report (index coverage)
• Crawling stats
• Sitemaps analysis
• Security issues

Core Web Vitals:

"Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web."

Core Web Vitals could be measured using Google Speed Insights tool, GSC also provides a section to assess Core Web Vitals, generally a fast website that is easy for users to interact with will pass the Core Web Vitals assessment.

Google score on Core Web Vitals should help also with conversion rate:

Tracking:

It is strongly recommended to setup tracking for all KPIs, Google Analytics advanced setup will be required for that, tracking should include:

• Enhanced ecommerce tracking, it tracks the check-out process step by step and create a funnel for that
• Event tracking where applicable
• Goal tracking with funnels where applicable
• Form abandonment tracking (field by field)
• Feed tracking using the UTM system
• Internal search tracking
• Website heatmaps

Conversion rate optimization

With the right tracking in place CRO becomes an easier task to do, studying users journey and removing frictions (especially in the check-out process) will help the website to better utilize existing traffic, which in most cases has a better ROI than acquiring new traffic.

Summary

SEO fundamentals for ecommerce websites are similar to content websites, however considering the size and the complexity of ecommerce websites a different approach could be required for some SEO steps.

Forecasting organic SEO traffic to fit in a digital marketing plan is a very difficult task to do, there are many variables controlling organic traffic and many of them are not under our control. Let us go through the most popular forces behind organic traffic growth and try to evaluate their impact on our forecast:

Population and internet user growth of the target country:

Most countries grow their population by a certain percentage annually, here in Canada we grow by 1.4% annually, so if all things equal organic traffic should grow by this percentage. Internet user growth (internet penetration) can contribute also to organic traffic growth (please note that there is some overlap between population growth and internet user growth), in Canada our internet users grew by 1.5% last year, for most advanced countries this number will be low, but it could be much higher for developing countries like India where it reached 18% last year.

Do some research and some estimation to come up with a number that you feel comfortable with, if this number is 2.9% and the population of the target country is 1,000,000 then you will get 40,000 extra visits next year through population and internet user growth.

Popularity growth (brand awareness) :

Brand popularity can grow in many different ways:

• Off-line advertisement (e.g. old media like TV, radio and newspapers).
• Online advertisement (e.g. Google and Facebook ads).
• Word of mouth (great products can generate a lot of word of mouth popularity).

First time advertisers in traditional media like TV can expect a large increase in their branded traffic (you can track that number in Google Search Console by monitoring branded keywords impressions and clicks), if branded traffic is 10,000/month a good ad campaign can take it to 20,000/month and that is a 100% YOY increase in branded search, the annual traffic growth as a result of that = (branded traffic grow/last year total organic traffic), let us assume this number is 2%

Please note that an increase in brand awareness can also improve the overall organic traffic for all keywords as people tend to click more on brands that they know in the SERPs (higher CTR is expected in this case).

Authority growth  (link profile):

Link profile's strength is the most important ranking factor with all major search engines, if the website you are working on has:

• A weak link profile.
• Large number of quality unique pages.

Then you know that a with a good link building campaign you can possibly double this traffic, on the other hand if you are working on website with a strong link profile, a good link building campaign will have a smaller impact (in the single digit range at best).

Please note that brand popularity growth should help with link growth as more people will be talking about the brand on social media websites, forums and blogs.

I am going to assume that link building can provide a 10% YOY traffic increase.

Content growth:

Websites grow their content by adding more pages on a regular basis, it is very difficult to grow marketing pages (pages where products and services are sold) on a high rate, that is where a blog can be a good tool to keep a high content growth. First you need to check the average traffic on posts that are 1+ month old that were published in the previous year, then multiple that number with the number of posts you are planning to publish next year to get the traffic gain forecast.

Content enhancement:

There are three type of content that you need to optimize and enhance on a regular basis:

• Pages that are losing traffic YOY, this content could be expiring/outdated content that needs to be refreshed or it is content that is getting a lot of competition and needs enhancement.
• Content that is not getting any organic traction (could be thin content or low quality content), this content needs to be enhanced otherwise removed or redirected.
• Content that ranks at the bottom of the first page or at the top of the second page in the SERPs, with some extra work this content can gain few more spots in ranking which can make a big difference in the amount of traffic it can generate.

It will be very difficult to estimate the amount of traffic growth that content enhancement will generate without going back to historical data and calculate the growth, so for this one you need to wait for year 2 to come up with the right amount, for year one you can:

• Assume you are going to restore the lost traffic for pages that are losing traffic.
• Use search volume on the keywords you are optimizing for and assume you can double their CTR.

The tally:

Once you have the percentages or numbers from the four items above just add them up to find the organic traffic increase forecast for next year.

Disclaimers you need to include in your forecast when you submit it to your manager for review:

Make sure your manager understands that this is an estimate (educated guess) and there are many variables that can throw this plan off like:

• Popularity decline as a result of a brand crisis.
• Algorithmic update (Google does multiple updates every year that can affect rankings positively or negatively).
• SERPs layout update (Google keeps changing SERPs above the fold area by adding featured snippets or more ads which can negatively affect CTR and traffic).
• Technical issues (the website can go down for a while or the technical team can make a mistake that can cause traffic loss like blocking Google bots form crawling the website).
• Production delays (executing the SEO plan is not guaranteed especially in a tight resource situation).

Another disclaimer that you need to include,  the website will go throw a traffic loss situation in a case your SEO plan is not approved. The risk of stopping or slowing SEO efforts could result in:

• Website/content stagnation which is a bad signal to send to search engines and it can cause reduction in authority (if you are the authority in your space you are expected to produce and refresh content on a regular basis).
• Expiring/outdated content (e.g. legal related content will lose ranking YOY if stayed unchanged).

As you are reading this post I hope you have written a good SEO resume and got your first interview, I am going to go through the basics of an interview before going to the technical SEO questions

• Expect more than one person to be in that interview (a technical person and an HR person), some companies do a preliminary interview (could be over the phone) to ask some question and do some personality check before bringing you to an onsite interview
• Research well what does the company (your future employer) do, see also if you can find their HR person and their marketing manager on Linkedin and read more about them
• Remember the old saying "be on time be prepared" try to arrive early, possibly an hour early where you can stop by a close coffee shop for a while then go to their office and arrive 10 minutes earlier than you interview time
• Dress professionally
• Greet respectfully with a smile and mind culture and personality differences, I live in Toronto it is a multicultural city you never know the background of the person interviewing you, to be on the safe side just stand up for them when they approach you and do no initiate a hand shake just wait for them
• Remind yourself every minute during the interview that there are interpersonal skills and personality checks going all the time, failing in the personality check may lead you to lose that opportunity no matter how technically good you are
• Breath well, do not talk with your hands too much, speak clearly and slowly

 

In the second part of this post I will take you through the most popular technical SEO questions that you may face in an interview (I will leave it to you to research the answers, if you have any questions leave them in the comment section):

• How deep is you keyword research experience? What is intent keyword research? what is your favorite keyword research tool?
• Crawling, rendering and indexing, what are they and who does them?
• What is your favorite website crawling technology
• How important a site map is?
• GSC (Google Search Console) experience? what are the most important sections? what do you do if you find bad links pointing back to your website in GSC? how long GSC saves data for a website?
• Have you used Majestic or Ahrefs before? How to find the best links your competitors have using those tools?
• Client move from a page A to page B (The URL was changed) what is the best practice to avoid organic traffic loss
• 301 redirect VS 302 VS meta refresh VS JavaScript redirect VS canonical can you explain the difference?
• What is AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) and progressive web apps (PWA)?
• Where are AMP pages hosted (stored) and how to track them using Google Analytics
• What tools can measure website speed and what numbers to look at? what is speed index? What is rendering path?
• What does Google recommend to use to create mobile website
• What are the best tools to test if a website mobile friendly
• Difference between Schema, structured data and Microdata (expect some trick questions)
• Google analytics, do you know how to install it using GTM? How to create a goal tracking for a thank you page that doesn’t have a dedicated thank you page URL?
• How does Google ranking work and what makes a website rank at the top?
• What makes a quality link?
• The most important on page elements to optimize for a keyword?
• How to find out how many pages of a website are indexed by Google?
• What is negative SEO?
• How to promote a client ranking in the local 3 pack?
• Traffic is down, ranking is down what do you recommend in this case to the client?
• What is Angular JS? Can goolge index JS? What is the best solution to make an Angular website crawlable by Google?
• (Quick technical questions) What is AJAX? what is Cpanel? what is visual composer? How often does WordPress get updates?  what is curl in PHP? What is DOM document object model? how does the browser render a page from reading the code to painting?
• How to get featured snippet ranking in SERP?
• How to optimize for voice search

 

Excerpt more advanced questions if you are interviewing for a SEO specialist role in an agency, the question will be less technical when applying to an in-house SEO role

This post will provide a SEO job listing template, I hope that listing helps employer that are hiring a SEO specialist for the first time to understand what to expect form that role, also helping SEO specialists to understand what employers are looking for.

If you are an HR professional and planning to post for a SEO role the template below is almost ready to use, with some modifications, customization and a quick chat with our technical people you should be able to produce a SEO job listing in a matter of one hour

Company introduction:

Company Inc is a digital marketing agency that provides a full stack marketing solutions to our clients across Canada. Located in Downtown Toronto, we’re a passionate group of innovators that love digital marketing, supporting the career growth of our staff is one of our highest priorities. We are always on the hunt for talented, digital marketing professionals with a strong track record.

Summary of the job (about this position):

We are seeking a SEO specialist to manage search engine optimization activities to increase rankings and improve traffic on all major search engines. This role involves a lot of research and analytics that require knowing on-site and off-site SEO techniques, technical SEO, tracking and analysis.

Key Responsibilities:

• Coordinate of all SEO efforts including link building, keyword research  and onsite and offsite optimization
• Conduct technical SEO audits that analyse crawlability, indexability and mobile friendliness, those audits must provide recommendations to achieve best practices then work with the development team to ensure SEO best practices are properly implemented
• Make recommendations to website information architecture, content, interlinking and other factors to improve SEO positions for target keywords
• Competitive analysis from an inbound links profile point of you and organic market share analysis
• Develop and produce monthly and quarterly metrics reports that track the success of SEO
• Provide detailed analysis by channel (site referral, organic, social etc) along with engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site and conversion rate.
• Responsible for the set-up and maintenance of Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics and Google.
• Develop a consistent process for company tracking needs including UTM, GTM and other tagging
• Excellent oral, written and interpersonal skills; the ability to effectively communicate with all levels within the organization
• Independent learner – ability to learn on their own and discover new industry trends.
• Execute tests, collect and analyze data, identify trends and insights in order to achieve maximum ROI
• Optimize copy and landing pages for search engine optimization

Required Education, Experience and Technical Skills:

• University Degree or college diploma, preferably with a digital marketing major
• Minimum of 1 – 3 years of search engine optimization experience
• Proven track record of results with improving search rankings and/or developing and managing website reporting tools
• Strong knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript;
• Basic understanding of paid advertising methods and platforms;
• Advance Google Analytics certified
• Google Ads certified (Fundamentals, Display, Mobile, search, Videos and shopping)
• Google Partners Digital Sales certification
• Google Mobile Sites certified
• SEMrush Academy certified Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, Google Search Console, Webpagetes (advanced user)

Why to work for us, What We Offer:

• Competitive compensation plan, great perks & benefits.
• An incredible opportunity for advancement within the organization.
• A leadership team that trains and mentors its staff to ensure success for new team members.
• Flexible working hours and working form home days (we understand the importance of a work / life balance, but showing deep commitment to our clients)
• A fun and casual place to work!

Please note that this position requires the candidate to work from our office in downtown Toronto

 

 

Looking for a SEO job in Canada is not a big different from looking for other professional jobs, and if you have a solid career (a good experience and a good knowledge) you should be able to land yourself a job by sending few resumes (so I am not sure if you will need all the tools below but I am going to list them either way)

• Google - This link will take you to SEO Jobs Toronto

Google has added a job list widget that will be triggered automatically most of the time when you search for a term that includes profession + job + locations

• 2- Linkedin Jobs - This link will take you to SEO Jobs Toronto:

Most large companies, agencies and head hunters will start their job posting there, just type in SEO and your location to start searching, an easy apply button is available for every job listing

• Indeed: This link will take you SEO Jobs Toronto

Indeed has a very large database of jobs with a sophisticated search engine

• Workopolis:

It might look old for many people but it is still working, you can subscribe to any job search alert and receive email notifications on a regular basis (this feature is probably available with many other websites), a feature like this is helpful even when you are not looking for a job as it keeps you posted with SEO demand and trends.

• Monster:

Another old website that is still worth checking

• Manual Search in Google something like :  SEO "we are hiring" Toronto

This search will return Google job widgets along with other companies that posted the job only on their website, you can change we are hiring with other phrases like job opportunity

• Work your network:

An old school way of finding a job that still works well, in case you started your SEO career recently many of your old friends and relatives may not know about that (it is difficult to explain what you do even if they know about it), talk to them and let them about the new career you are starting. Updating your Linkedin profile and other social media profiles will also help

• Build your own website and rank for SEO related keywords (make sure you state that you do freelancing work):

This will help you to get attention and to proof that you know what are you doing. Some companies or small business may reach out to you for work, you can also get short term contracting offers or full employment offers

As I said at the beginning landing a SEO job for a skilled experienced individual should not be a difficult task, the more you enhance your career the easier your job search well be

The expected salary will depend on your skills and experience, it will also depend on the position (specialist, manager, director etc), you can check the SEO entry level salary here