Today we spoke to Fili Wiese, SEO Expert at SearchBrothers.com, an SEO Consulting agency by ex-Google Search Quality employees. He talks to us about e-commerce trends, how to improve your rankings with SEO Audits, Google Penalty Recovery and more.
What trends do you think are defining e-commerce in 2018 and that will be key during 2019?
2That’s technical SEO. What’s been coined advanced SEO really is just approaching the topic from a data perspective. The volume and quality of data applied to get ahead in the SEO game is growing. To give just one example, in previous years using server logs in order to actively manage crawl budget was rarely talked about. Much less applied. Nowadays, the understanding that this is both an absolute necessity and a winning strategy is slowly growing. That trend will inevitably enhance the development of tools, both for data gathering but also for data processing. Another effect is that pricing for SEO services will continue to grow since any data-driven projects come at a cost.
Name 3 bad practices that you see in the day to day SEO of e-commerce, and how you would correct them.
Not saving and preserving server logs is a cardinal sin in SEO terms. Redirecting 404 URLs to category pages or other product pages when the product is gone is another bad practice. Lastly building links for PageRank sake is not only a bad practice, it is an outdated and dangerous SEO strategy that is doomed to fail. These three are however still very common.
How do you think voice searches will affect SEM SEO?
For a foreseeable time, it won’t significantly. Voice search once readily available to replace typed queries, which is far from being a reality in English much less in other languages, will still rely on search engine bots understanding the context and the unique selling proposition of a site or a landing page. Which means that content and technical SEO will remain the cornerstones for success with search, voice or otherwise.
In e-commerce, what relevant KPIs do you think are often neglected?
Remarkably the only KPI that really counts in e-commerce, which is conversion, is frequently given little attention when it comes to SEO. Instead, there are still organizations applying keyword counts, numbers of backlinks, PageRank or completely illusionary values such as TrustRank. All of which are irrelevant to SEO or e-commerce.
There are many people who do affiliate marketing. What do you think about using SEM SEO to promote affiliate products?
SEO is a superb way of driving affiliate sites, including promoting affiliate products. However, you need to have a unique sales proposition, something that sets you apart from your competitors and also adds value.
