From URL structures to UGC, discover how to drive traffic and boost sales with a clear SEO roadmap for search. Strengthen your foundational strategy with sturdy best practices. Uncover new secrets to ensure maximum impact. Dive into an integrated SEO plan that’s scaling your eCommerce growth.

Jump To:

Ruben Quinones (02:09): 

Hey there. Welcome to another session on eCommerce. We’ve been doing a series around eCommerce. Thanks for joining us. Every three weeks, we’re putting out content here at Amsive with our partners and some in-house folks to just talk about topics on how you can help grow your eCommerce brand. This isn’t necessarily about us, but this is about you and problem solving through and navigating through the eCommerce marketplace. Today specifically, we’re going to talk about SEO secrets to eCommerce growth, which is a lot to unpack. So, I promise if we can’t get through it all today, we will do it in an upcoming session. If you haven’t seen me before, my name is Ruben Quinones, SVP, Client Strategy here at Amsive for 17 years, and here to just have a conversation with our partners. And feel free to, if you have any questions down the road to leave comments on our LinkedIn page or on the Amsive blog. With that, I’m going to actually introduce our first guest to the panel and let me get Jamie back on here. Jamie, I should know how to say this, that I’m Spanish. Jamie D’Alessandro. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (03:37): 

D’Alessandro. Yeah, you were close. It’s really good. Yeah, that is my going on married one year. 

Ruben Quinones (03:44): 

Can you say my last name? Okay. Alright. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (03:49): 

Yeah. Too bad. 

Ruben Quinones (03:51): 

Not bad. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (03:53): 

Thanks. I’m excited. 

Ruben Quinones (03:57): 

So Jamie, what do you do here? 

Jamie D’Alessandro (04:00): 

So I am an Associate Strategist at Amsive. I’ve actually been at Amsive now for three years, which is crazy. But specifically I work on a ton of different clients, but more in the past couple years, I’ve been really honing in on eCommerce specifically. So when I heard about this one I was like, oh my God, let’s talk about eCommerce growth. So really excited to just kind of dive in, talk about SERP landscape for eCommerce and yeah, chatted up with you Ruben. Friday with Ruben is a great time. 

Ruben Quinones (04:34): 

Well, I would like to think Mondays as well, but now I’m a little grumpy on Mondays. I think. Jamie, your fun fact. I haven’t heard it yet. I’d love to. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (04:45): 

Okay, so my fun fact, since we’re in summer, I actually cannot swim. So I own a $70 life vest that I bought. 

Ruben Quinones (04:55): 

Wait, you don’t swim? Okay. That’s a whole other thing.  

Jamie D’Alessandro (04:57): 

No. I can’t swim. Swim. So I have a $70 life vest and it is the most important piece of clothing that I own. So 

Ruben Quinones (05:06): 

Where’d you buy it from? 

Jamie D’Alessandro (05:08): 

Dick’s Sporting Goods. I looked it up online, I saw it in stock and I went in store to try it on. 

Ruben Quinones (05:15): 

So wait, your fun fact is that you bought a $70 life vest. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (05:17): 

Well, it’s kind of like twofold. I can’t swim, but my life vest is really cute. Maybe the life vest being cute is the fun fact. 

Ruben Quinones (05:24): 

And there’s a tie to eCommerce somewhere in there. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (05:27): 

Course it does. 

Ruben Quinones (05:30): 

Alright, our second guest is Josh Squires. Josh who I am going to vote with the best background. That is not an artificial background. That is an actual, he was trying to get one and I’m like, no dude, just that looks very sophisticated. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (05:48): 

I know it’s great. 

Ruben Quinones (05:48): 

Josh, welcome to whatever this is. Welcome to live on LinkedIn. So who are you and what do you do here? 

Joshua Squires (06:01): 

I’m Josh Squires. I’m the Associate Director of SEO at Amsive. I’ve been here just over four years, been doing SEO for a little over 17. Clients have spanned the gap. We’ve just about done it all in-house, out-of-house, freelance, coming at it from every angle. 

Ruben Quinones (06:23): 

All right, cool. What’s your fun fact? I don’t think I’ve heard this before, so I’m excited. 

Joshua Squires (06:27): 

So I’m a big Hi-Fi guy. I’ve got a large and ever-growing record collection and we just moved into a new house in Minneapolis and for the first time ever I’m going to have a big enough office that we can set the whole rig up. So maybe in future videos you’ll see my outstanding Hi-Fi setup. 

Ruben Quinones (06:46): 

I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (06:49): 

Yeah, I’ll be honest.  

Ruben Quinones (06:51): 

Five. I’m like you like high-fiving people. What do you call it? 

Joshua Squires (06:54): 

Hi-fi. High fidelity record players, stereo equipment, sorry. 

Ruben Quinones (06:59): 

Oh, very cool. That’s an interesting fun fact that you know that Jamie, you see, you learn about your colleagues every day. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (07:05): 

I know. 

Ruben Quinones (07:07): 

All right, so enough about our fun facts.

SEO Strategies for eCommerce Growth

Let’s talk about SEO secrets or they’re not necessarily secrets, but maybe some broad-level strategic thinking around how and eCommerce brands can grow online, right? It’s kind of the holy grail. I want to make sure that I’m prefacing that when you say SEO. Is this better, Jamie? I want to make sure my audio, maybe it’s just. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (07:38): 

What you did before, that was a little bit better. 

Ruben Quinones (07:41): 

Okay. We’ll just drop it down here. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (07:42): 

Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s okay. 

Ruben Quinones (07:45): 

So if the mic is further away, it works better. Go figure. So as we’re going into Q4 and really next year, just thinking about how I was talking about prefacing this as this is the natural portion of getting advantage on search, also known as organic search, natural search, a lot of brands are spending a lot of money to come up on sponsored listings, and this is a way to obviously potentially gain some marketshare naturally and not have to rely on having to spend thousands, millions of dollars online. So I think as our first, I guess, subtopic wanted to talk about how do we get our products discoverable, more discoverable? A lot of discussion around user, user-generated content for social, right? But there’s a play for that on search, right? Talk to me a little bit about that, Jamie. How can a brand who’s already using user-generated content or can leverage that? How can they do that from a search perspective? 

User-Generated Content and SERP Landscape

Jamie D’Alessandro (09:00): 

Oh man, it feels like we don’t even have enough time.  

Ruben Quinones (09:04): 

We can spend all day on that.  

Jamie D’Alessandro (09:05): 

Sure. There’s so much there. Yeah, it’s crazy. Just in my experience watching the search results change, even just in the last year, we’re really seeing Google make this push towards transactional-focused results for a large set of transactional queries. And I even have clients where they used to rank for content pages and now they’re ranking for transactional and vice versa. So at a minimum I would start with every site and every brand has a target set of core keywords. And so it’s about what is the pulse of what’s in the SERPs for those keywords. And just for clarity, SERPs, we’re talking about search engine result pages. So whenever you search in Google what comes up, but I have a lot of clients where they assume that their target keywords show one result, but it’s showing something else. And more recently I’m seeing a lot of clients where they’re actually seeing different types of pages being tested. 

So from their product landing pages to their actual products, we’re noticing this shift now towards, depending on the query, Google’s going to go right to products. So I think it’s important for brands and sites to take inventory of the pages that are related to their target keywords, but really from there, lean into your customers. So we saw that the SERP results have also introduced Reddit and Quora discussions and forums. Those are a really big thing. And I often apply my own logic as a customer to that too. If I’m searching for the best red lipstick, so many reds, only one lip. So I might actually search on Reddit to see what other folks are saying because this idea that Reddit is quote “non-biased” and you’re learning from people just like you who are buying products. So brands having a pulse on what their customers are saying about their own products is really important. 

But also when we think about user generated content, you’d be surprised as much as we know reviews and that dataset being on PDPs and product pages, a lot of brands don’t necessarily have the best review model in place. They’re not soliciting reviews as much as they should. So especially as we get into holiday and especially as we know, Google has become this larger database, if you will, and it’s pulling in all of these different attributes from your product pages to Merchant Center, really ensure that you’re getting your reviews up, that you’re sending those emails out and so on. And yeah, making sure, getting more into the specifics. There’s obviously things you can do on your product pages, ensure that the right markups are coming up, really lean into your tools or reach out to an agency who can help you analyze your PDPs and make sure that they’re performing the way that they need to. So that’s kind of like in a nutshell what’s going on. But I would say really lean into where Google is right now and its sphere of shopping and its experience and ensure that you’re coming up and if you aren’t, where are the gaps there? And Josh, I know this is something you and I talk about a lot, did you have anything that you wanted to add to that? 

The Importance of Product Reviews

Joshua Squires (12:30): 

Yeah, I think you got us off to a real strong start. One of the things that I think a lot of brands miss is looking for those review keywords to see what comes up. And for the ones that do, I think there’s even some questions that we get from our own clients about, well, where should I be sending those reviews? Should they be going offsite to a third party like a Trustpilot or a BBB or specialty forums, or should I be getting those on my own site and making sure that they show up there? And I think the best answer is usually both. The more space your brand and your products take up in search results, the less space there is for your competition. And there’s a lot of value in that. But we also know that having reviews on site will give you the ability to have some of that schema markup that will have your results display those star ratings, total number of reviews in search and sort of like you said, hundreds of reds. One lip, if you’re trying to find the best, and customers always are trying to find the best and what the definition of best is, is going to vary by the user. Sometimes the thing I can get now is the best. Sometimes it’s quality, sometimes it’s the thing that everybody likes the most, right? You want some sort of signal that before I even click into your page that you’re going to help me meet my need before I even get there. And showing those results in search and having the necessary markup, the code on the page that helps Google display those star ratings, I see more sites missing that than probably should be the case. I think that’s a tactic we’ve known for a while now, but not everybody’s up to speed and that has a direct impact. But I think what we miss in the eCommerce space is the sort of waterfall effect of that. 

If I am showing those star ratings on a product page, whether that’s the image or a product carousel, if that’s encouraging the click, I’ve already started to shape the expectation of the user before I get there. So for pages that have that and are displaying that and where that aligns to the user’s need, you’re going to generate a higher click through from search. You’re going to generate higher quality visits once they get there. And Google is tracking the life of that click. We know a lot from the deposition and the leaks that Google’s very interested in the user journey beyond the search results. So where we’re generating high value interactions, whereas Google’s getting the right signals that the users need is being met, whether that’s time or actually making purchases, there’s a lot of nuance to it, but where Google thinks that that is a quality click and a quality visit that’s going to help you rank better over the long term. And we can expand that from individual products to entire collections to the entire site. 

Ruben Quinones (15:20): 

Just want to make a mention of that. Again, people haven’t heard about this leak. I know it’s big in your world, but a leak when you ever say you leak you think of a government conspiracy, but it was a leak that someone, I don’t know if someone just got a hold of Google’s algorithm or some of their signals might be dated, but it is the first look at what they actually were maybe looking at as far as signals. And it’s probably the best that we have given that most of our work is out really from an outside purview and a lot of hypothesizing. But there were two things that I’m kind of picking up from what you guys were talking about. We started off with reviews and then we went into what you can do on pages. Is it as simple as I just for my brand, I just Google the brand and maybe brand name reviews and that’ll really give me a good snapshot, at least for my space and at least for my brand where I might try to leverage user-generated content. Because what you can control and there’s what you can’t control. So when you start getting into what you can control maybe what’s more controllable in that sphere, it’s for your brand, right? It’s the Trustpilots of the world. You mentioned Reddit, so if I wanted to more from a reputation standpoint, manage that a little bit more, would we do anything on Reddit? I know you could run sponsored ads, but is that crazy thinking? 

Joshua Squires (16:58): 

The ads are coming out of the gate pretty hot right now. Matter of fact, I’m a Redditor, have been for years and the number of comments about the sudden appearance of ads in places ads didn’t previously exist just in the last few months is definitely climbing. So people are seeing them. Seems like sentiment is sort of on the fence. Reddit is a community that very much likes to be left alone by the corporate world. They sort of take offense to people meddling. It’s supposed to be a true user-to-user interaction. But we have seen great examples where brands exist on Reddit, whether they own their own Subreddit, basically their own forum on the Reddit domain, which isn’t going to be the answer for most people. That’s a big lift. That’s probably going to be exclusive to very large brands or somebody that can really dedicate a person moderate that forum. 

But in general, it’s great to be able to influence what people talk about on there. And the best way to do that without paying somebody to sit in Reddit forums all day long is to just look, right. You can do searches for your brand mentions on Reddit. For anyone that doesn’t know real simple modifier, go to your Google search bar type site, colon, the name of the site, Reddit.com, and then the name of your brand and see what comes up. You’ll see the good, you’ll see the bad. And that will give you a sense of where you should be starting. If it’s mostly good great, what do people like? How can you amplify that? And if it’s mostly bad, fantastic, now we know. How are we going to solve that? 

Ruben Quinones (18:43): 

I want to pounce on that. I didn’t even think about that. I always do it for site, but you can do that for Reddit as well, right? Site, colon, and then the brand name. Is that what you just said, right? And I want to make sure that, again, I didn’t want to make this a Reddit conversation, but the reality is Reddit has exploded in traffic and gets a lot of first page visibility. So we have to be mindful of that, whether it’s your brand or the keyword itself. You can do this for a keyword as well. Maybe site, colon, the keyword or maybe quotations or expensive life vests. 

I dunno that someone’s searching for that, but life vest just to see how people are talking about within that community. So that’s why I mentioned Reddit because it’s kind of exploded in traffic and it’s getting a lot of first page visibility. So I guess we talked about what you can do off profile a little bit and what you can do with user-generated content. But let’s talk about, hey, the global things that you can do on a website as far as structuring your URL. And I would, correct me if I’m wrong guys, but I would think URL structure is a little bit more important for eCommerce because there’s so many facets and variations. Getting that right is probably more important than your non eCommerce clients because they are more service-based and more manageable. Am I right in saying that, Jamie? 

Jamie D’Alessandro (20:18): 

For sure. And I was going to say this is a great segue because something that we see happen a lot, not even just in the SEO industry, but I’m sure in a lot of other marketing vertical industries, whenever there’s the new shiny thing Google rolled out, we see more Reddit now we see the discussions in forums. I think a lot of folks think, oh, I have to pivot my strategy now. I need to go do things on Reddit. And the way I like to talk to my clients is it’s important to know what’s going on, but don’t lose sight of what’s working for the new shiny thing. So I’ve had that discussion with a few clients where they’re like, oh, what do we do about Reddit or what do we do about AI? And I’m like, hey look, it’s important we’re still learning all the intricacies.

It changes so much, but don’t lose sight of what really matters. And to your point, Ruben, the great segue of your onsite performance, your onsite behavior and URLs especially. So for folks that have been in SEO, Josh, I know you’ve been in it a long time, that every different type of site has different types of needs. And a site eCommerce very dynamic, you have new pages, you have parameters being generated, so on and so forth. And especially for our larger enterprise sites that have hundreds of thousands of URLs, those definitely take precedence. And so really when I think about eCommerce sites, we always think about the technical foundation of that. How is Google able to crawl your site efficiently? Are you wasting crawl budget? So we’ll often look to make sure that unnecessary parameters, things that are being automatically generated or whatnot, those aren’t getting in the way of your priority pages. 

And we actually went through this for going on a year now with a client of ours where they had that exact issue and these fluffy URLs, if you will, they were getting in the way of Google actually addressing their priority pages. And as we started to work to remove those URLs from Google looking at it, we’re now seeing them put more focus on the priority URLs and we’re seeing traffic go up as a result, which is really important. So URLs, they’re kind of an ongoing thing. I actually saw a great question in the chat about how to handle variant pages. Josh, we talk about this all the time. So Josh, you have a great way of explaining these concepts very easily. Do you want to take that one on how we kind of tend to approach it? 

Canonicalization of Product Variants

Joshua Squires (22:55): 

Yeah, absolutely. Google’s actually updated their guidance on this. They have a dedicated page to it, and they’ve done a much better job explaining this. They’ve added some visuals. I would highly recommend checking that out. But for folks here on the call, Google’s advice is pick a canonical product. So I also add the extra advice that your canonical should probably be the most searched for variant. If you’re selling Nike Air Force 1s, you probably want your canonical D to be the white ones or the black ones, right? All the other variants, there’s definitely going to be search volume, but it won’t be as high. So we want to lean into the greatest opportunity where we can and then canonical all of our variants back to that one original version. So Google will see and crawl all variants, but it’s going to give all of the equity when somebody takes a red pair and shares that on social or blogs about it, any equity from that backlink is going to contribute to the growth of all of those products instead of just the red ones. And so super important to leverage that, but that also makes crawling easier. It’s also the canonization of variance to a single version also helps Google understand what it should be ranking.  

Ruben Quinones (24:14): 

Josh, I have to just jump in here because you didn’t say what canonize means. It took me a few years to even say the word canonize. Am I saying it right? So what does that mean? Very high level, right? That is important. 

Joshua Squires (24:28): 

Great catch. So if you’re a big comic book nerd like me, think about canon. What is the one true story? What is the one true version? There’s going to be all of these different versions of the same thing. Stories get retold in different versions, but there’s one original, right? You can trace it back to one thing. And that’s what we’re doing. There’s basically an element in the HTML that you’ll hear SEOs refer to it as rail equals canonical or just canonical links. And basically on any given page, we’re going to have a link in the HTML in the head of the document that’s going to say, you’re on this page, but this is really the master version of this page. This is the one we want you to give the most credit to. This is the one that is the quote on quote most correct. And Google will generally know when it should serve the main one versus when it should serve something more specific. So going back to the Air Force 1s version, if the whites canonical and I search Air Force 1s, they’re going to show that white canonical Air Force 1 page. But if I search Red Air Force 1s, even though we told Google this is a variant, but it’s not the one we want you showing it knows that that exists and it will show that page. That’s a little bit of technical nuance, but we see folks get that wrong. And when you get it right, it definitely helps, right? You’ll definitely see better impressions, better rankings. 

Crawling and Crawl Budget

Ruben Quinones (25:58): 

And this ties into, although we went to product variant pages, this does tie into crawling well, crawling well, why is that important? Talk to me about budget crawling and why we have to prioritize pages. It’s like, whoa, okay, prioritize. What does that mean to gain visibility? I think we have to kind of be grounded in, Google doesn’t go and try to crawl all your pages. They can try, but there’s actually a limit that they place. We don’t know what that limit is. But again, my information might be dated, but you guys correct me if I’m wrong. Talk to me about crawling and why that’s important and why we should prioritize pages. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (26:40): 

Yeah, I’ll kind of step in then. Josh. I know we talk about this a lot too, so I’ll get your feedback as well. But I think it’s important to start with why variant pages matter. So for us, we sometimes have clients where they don’t expose any of their variant URLs. And what that means is they don’t make them crawlable or indexable by Google. Google doesn’t know they exist. Oftentimes there’s a lot of value in your long tail searches. So instead of somebody just searching for Nike sneakers, it’s white Nike sneakers or pink Nike sneakers. The more granular you get, the likelihood of a purchase is much higher. And so we’ve actually found that a lot of sites, sometimes they don’t capitalize on their variants. And so again, it starts with why are we exposing these URLs? Well, we want to capture the search traffic from it, and as we grow our presence online, your variant URLs are going to lead to a bigger keyword bucket, which helps get your brand more visible on Google. 

Ruben Quinones (27:41): 

So I just want to make sure we come across brands that are actually not allowing Google to crawl those variant pages. We’ve come across that. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (27:52): 

Yeah. 

Ruben Quinones (27:53): 

And again, I want to tie into canonical thing is the canonical is just telling Google, hey, we’re not trying to create and manipulate search engines, which is why that canonical ties in. It just says, hey, this is the master page. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (28:05): 

For sure. 

Ruben Quinones (28:06): 

You hit on the product variant, which is again, to hear that brands 2024 are not allowing or are not mindful that people are going to type in blue lifevests versus red, and they’re not allowing Google to kind of sift through that. That’s an important piece, I think. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (28:29): 

No, it is, oh, go ahead, Josh. Go ahead. 

Joshua Squires (28:32): 

Yeah, just to jump in, that’s something that you’re likely to find on new eCommerce sites, folks using something like Shopify, it’s super common for a Shopify theme to not have that set up properly out of the box. Even if you paid for custom development, that tends to be a thing that you really need to explicitly state how you want that set up. When Shopify people running Shopify stores come to Amsive, that’s one of the things we audit for pretty standard because it’s so common that that’s left undone. And for larger eCommerce brands, if you’ve been around a long time, the guidance on this, I don’t want to say it’s changed, but it wasn’t well known early on. So if you’ve been doing eCommerce for 20, 30 years might be worth checking. Maybe that got fixed somewhere along the way, maybe it didn’t. We’ve seen some very big brands that, to our surprise, not all of those were being indexed or there were categories that weren’t. It’s worth really deeply auditing the site to make sure everything’s working the way it’s supposed to. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (29:33): 

And Josh, you brought up a really good point. We see that happen too, the new sites, but then sites that have been around, so they were following guidance that doesn’t really apply today. The landscape has changed. And so to Josh’s point, getting in and looking at the site and making sure it really comes back to what is your brand? How are you getting people to your site, what are those target keywords? And then from there, making sure that those pages are available, but not forgetting that variance also play a huge role in this too. 

Ruben Quinones (30:08): 

Right. That makes sense. I think we should try to start off with URL structure. And I guess that part of that is the variance. Is there anything else missing that we should be mindful of when it comes to structuring URLs at a global level? And when I say global, the entire website is what I mean by all your websites. Cool. 

Joshua Squires (30:30): 

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s worth taking a minute to talk about how Google calls your site and how that’s a little different for eCommerce brands. One, eCommerce is the intersection, most often, of high volume of pages on a website and a high volume of turnover of pages on a website. So not only do you have a lot of pages for Google to crawl, but those pages tend to change frequently. And so, the thing that we want to make sure is happening is twofold. We want to make sure that first Google sees changes when they happen. Google’s usually really good, especially sites that get the amount of traffic. Google does a very good job at keeping up, but the bigger you are, the less good they are at keeping up. The other side of the coin is it’s a ranking issue. The reason we talk so much about variance is we’re feeding Google multiple URLs and they tend to look really similar. 

So for most product variants, what you’ll see set up on eCommerce sites is the URL will be domain, category, maybe a second subcategory, and then the name of the PDP, the name of the product. And then if there’s variance, you’ll see the question mark, the parameter, and then some sort of identifier to show that this is one of several versions of a product. So for every product, you could have five, ten, a hundred variants. So we’re multiplying the number of URLs on the site, almost exponentially, in some cases very exponentially. So Google will come to your site and they will crawl, but they have a limit. It is about how much resources it takes for Google to crawl and render every individual page. And when we talk about crawl budget, that’s what that is. Google says, when I have crawled X number of pages, or I have reached X number of kilobytes, megabytes, whatever, of downloading pages, then I have to stop and go do it somewhere else. 

And after a certain period of time, I’ll come back and try again. And Google only crawls a third of your site and then has to go somewhere else, but you’re making changes daily, hourly. There’s a high chance that they’re going to miss stuff. So we want to make sure that the only URLs, Google crawls are the ones that are pertinent to your business and matter for search. And once we’ve done that, that means there’s fewer URLs that Google has to crawl. And when there’s fewer URLs that it has to crawl, that means there’s fewer that’ll get indexed. That’s a good thing. So think about when you go to, if you’ve ever been to one of those diners that has the 17-page menu. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (33:22): 

Oh, you mean like Cheesecake Factory? 

Joshua Squires (33:24): 

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

Ruben Quinones (33:27): 

And we know where Jamie goes on the weekend. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (33:30): 

Hey, I’m big fan. 

Ruben Quinones (33:31): 

Spaghetti meatballs. 

Joshua Squires (33:33): 

Right? The waiter keeps coming back and is ready to take your order, but you’re on page four and you’ve got ten more pages to go. That’s the problem that Google’s going to have. How certain is Google that the page it thinks is matching a user’s query is the best page on your website, and then is the best page on the internet for that query. And when Google has to decide between thousands of URLs on your website and then millions of other pages on other websites, it’s starting to look like paralysis by choice. 

Ruben Quinones (34:12): 

Data paralysis. 

Joshua Squires (34:14): 

So you effectively decrease Google certainty that a page on your website is the best answer, and all ranking is a measure of certainty about who’s the best fit for the query. So this actually long-term can help you rank. We’ve had instances where we reduced the number of crawled-in index pages for a website and seen the rankings lift for the pages that matter. So helping Google make decisions benefits us, and one of the best ways we can do that is give it fewer choices. 

Ruben Quinones (34:47): 

It sounds counterintuitive, right? It’s like take out pages, at least. Again, if you’re not in the SEO community, it sounds counterintuitive. It’s like, no, I want Google to pick up all my pages. So I guess it’s a case-by-case situation of kind of now abandoning all the other questions and sticking on this because this is important. Go ahead, Jamie. 

Tools and Techniques for Managing Crawl Budget

Jamie D’Alessandro (35:14): 

I could even add a tip. So something that I’ve learned through this process, so obviously leveraging your tools, Search Console is a huge data set for us, but you can also see how Google is breaking down your crawl. So in your domain-level profile in Search Console, and you go, I believe it’s in Settings, don’t quote me, click around, you’ll find it. You can look and see the breakdown. So you can see how often Google is allocating to discovery and how often they’re allocating to, I think it’s just refresh. So recrawling existing URLs. And that was part of the issue we saw with the client of ours where Google was spending all of its time on refreshing and crawling existing URLs, but not nearly enough time on new URLs. And so we would expose these URLs, expose these variants, but Google had a backlog of it. So to Josh’s point, making sure we’re kind of doing an order of operations for when Google is crawling your site, that they’re excluding all the noise, getting rid of things they don’t care about, but only focusing on the important pages. 

Ruben Quinones (36:24): 

I want to hit on that because a lot of, again, more executive-level marketers think, put out new content, put on new products, write more descriptions, but none of that will work if you’re clogging up, I guess this crawling area of SEO in that you really have to clean house there first, right? You can’t scale because Google can’t even see beyond the forest in front of it because you’ve given it so much. Remember, this is a Google bot, it’s AI, right? So it’s only going to be as good as what you give it. Is there again, more, would you guys, again, case-by-case I realize, but would you surgically try to, because again, a lot of this might be a hypothesis. Would you try to clean up a category first or are there site-wide things that you would do? Or am I asking a question that is not answerable? 

Jamie D’Alessandro (37:27): 

You’re asking such great questions and we don’t have nearly enough time. But again, I go back to what is the point of this site? What are they trying to do? Okay, if eCommerce, they’re trying to make money, right? They’d want to make money. So we want to look at what pages are performing, what pages aren’t. So get a sense of where Google understands the site and what they’re ranking, but then we want to look and see what is in that backlog, what is in your crawl but not index or discovered, but not crawl yet? Take a look at those. And you want to start to understand, are there things in that list that Google’s getting bogged down with? We’ve seen all kinds of URLs. There’s a lot of CMSs out there for eCommerce sites. Josh mentioned Shopify, there’s Magento, there’s homegrown CMSs. They all have their own problems. And so you want to understand is that CMS affecting Google’s ability to look at the site? And I know Josh, you look at this too. Is there anything that you would say is important to look at? 

Joshua Squires (38:33): 

Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up homegrown solutions and some of the larger enterprise tools. I know Adobe has an eCommerce solution. Magento’s a great old one. I’m having flashbacks right now. I think understanding the technology your site’s built on really matters because that’s going to impact crawlability and indexability as well. I know different flavors of JavaScript are different levels of effective. I remember for a while there sites using AngularJS were really having a problem getting things effectively crawled and indexed. There’s a mountain of material out there about it now to help people get to those solutions. But you’d have problems where Google would see a URL but no content on the page because the whole page was rendered in JS and they didn’t implement it in a way that Google could render it. Google’s gotten better about crawling JavaScript over time, too. So that is worth noting. I think there’s this misconception that Google can’t crawl JS, and that’s not true either. They’ve actually gotten very good at it, but that also is dependent on proper implementation. So you really need to be a full stack marketer to make sure that the SEO of your eCommerce site really is checking all the boxes right from content to front end to back end to architecture, external signals. There’s a lot to go through. 

Ruben Quinones (40:02): 

Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. We’re going to table set the or table the conversation around keywords and user alignment. I don’t know how we felt we were even going to go over that in 45 minutes. I know we’ll have you guys back on and do that, but I think actually this was a good, this is kind of, again, you have to get this piece correct. So my takeaway is, and correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like most SEO marketers would use Search Console as a tool. It’s kind of Google’s tool to analyze how they’re crawling and indexing your site, and that will provide direction as to prioritization of pages and or sections of pages that maybe need to be done away with. Am I hearing that correctly? That tool does inform the strategy of what the roadmap of next few months would look like based on what you’ve seen in their diagnosis. And that’s probably where you would spend your time on first if there is an issue, rather than go and again, try to fill out metadata on PDPs. Am I hearing that right? That’s kind of like one of the first things that we look at for an eCommerce site. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (41:26): 

Yeah, it basically for me comes down to order of operations. And to your point, Ruben, absolutely, there’s so many checklists, there’s so many great ideas, but at the end of the day, it’s what. There’s a finite amount of resources, your time, money, energy, all of that. And so for me, it always comes back to the most simplest thing. ECommerce wants to make money. How do we help them make money? How do we make sure that the revenue generating pages are doing that? And actually, we got some really great questions in the chat that I think play into that. 

Ruben Quinones (41:59): 

Oh gosh. I should be paying attention. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (41:59): 

Yeah, we have some actually really great questions. So Mike asked, how long would you wait to make a decision to turn off a page? What are the major indicators to say, hey, Google’s not liking this page. We should either optimize or remove it. And I think that really ties into the discussion around Search Console. So Search Console, one, it’s a great tool, but it’s not your only tool. You also want to look at GA and Josh, I’m going to tap you too in a minute. I know you have thoughts on this, but really I think it’s going to depend. Every page has a different value, a different purpose. And so I think it really starts with what is the purpose of this page? What do you have it for? And then we also want to look at what has changed in the landscape. What is your site impacted by any of the Google algorithm updates that tend to come out? 

Where does your site fit in terms of some of the issues we talked about? So there’s a lot of variables we need to ask ourselves first. And then really it’s about, okay, you have this page. What is its purpose and what are its KPIs? If this is a revenue generating page, it says a PLP or a PDP. What is that target keyword? Have you lost rank for that? So again, it comes down to, I don’t want to sound redundant, but this is kind of the framework for how we think about these things. What are the order of operations that need to happen and what is that north star guiding it? And it’s always what is the purpose of the page and is it making us money? And what is the target keyword, Josh? And is it converting, right? Yeah. And is it earning money? Yeah, of course. 

Joshua Squires (43:36): 

Yeah, no, I think you absolutely covered it. I think if I believe a page is underperforming, I think it may be Search Console is going to be the place to go. I immediately want to know, well, where does it rank and how many impressions is it getting? And then looking at keyword tools, how many searches per month is it getting? And I’ll give this tip away for free. I love keywordtool.io because it gives me the average search volume across the entire year, but then breaks that down by month. So one thing that I saw there was a question about seasonality in there too. If you sell products that have seasonal patterns, more popular in the summer, more popular in the winter, knowing that search volume is high at certain times and low at others and average across the year is not going to be helpful. 

You need to know what month it is and what you should be expecting for that month if you’re getting 10% of that total impression volume. Google doesn’t think that page is relevant, and you should definitely try to figure out why Google doesn’t think that page is relevant. It could be the on-page content. It could be how you’ve linked to it internally. It could be external links to it. I’ve definitely seen instances where people use old versions of a page and the backlinks to that page tell a different story than what we’re telling people on the new page. So trying to figure out what’s quote on quote wrong with a page that’s sort of the framework. And then let’s say you make that change. How long should you, I see several questions asking how long should, yeah, how long you should wait. Yep, yep. That’s actually going to be directly related to your impression volume, right? 

It’s important that you hit statistical significance. So make the changes, try to be more relevant if that’s the problem. And then if you’re targeting a keyword that is a million searches that particular month, you’re not going to have to wait very long, probably 10 to 15,000 searches in. You’re going to know Google will have reranked you. And if you’re using the keyword that maybe has 500 searches a month, you may need to let that page sit for three or four months. And that’s uncomfortable. But it’s about statistical significance. I see a lot of folks making decisions too early, being uncomfortable waiting, the time it takes to get the data. Remember, Google is machine learning based, right? It’s going to take its output, your input, recalculate, and update. And that’s a very oversimplified explanation of what core updates are. So if you change a product and a core update comes out and it goes down, well, maybe we made the wrong changes or maybe something else has happened. So there’s all of these dimensions to think through, which can be a challenge. I would definitely advise in-house, SEOs, other folks at agencies, be really clear on your list of what could be happening, what should be happening, and what are the metrics that influence each of those things. 

And I’m sorry, I’m trying to speed through some of these. Actually had a really good question too, on how to speed up that process. And that actually goes back to our user-generated content. It goes back to brand. This is actually where it all starts to come back together. If I’m making changes and I want Google to see my changes faster, I need to be omnipresent, I need to be visible, and I need to drive traffic. So social, UGC, third-party websites, blogs, influencers, email, whatever you can do to get traffic to those pages, spin up a small paid campaign and drive some traffic to it, get that feedback out there. Try to get people to share it because one of the things that Google is going to do is it’s going to crawl the web. And if larger pieces of the web point to your page, Google’s likely to find your page faster. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (47:42): 

And I think, I mean there’s so many great questions that we love this dialogue. There was also a really good question, which ties into that, Josh, about thoughts on the role that seasonal content can and should play in driving SEO, especially on retailer sites. And you and I have worked on a couple sites with seasonal content, so definitely big fans of it, but I think it also goes back to what your site is and who it is your audience is. So when we think about retailers, sometimes we assume that everybody follows the Black Friday or Cyber Monday rush, but really, retailers all have their own unique holidays. So I have one friend who works in a particular niche in retail, and she actually told me her seasonal holiday is actually from April to June because that’s when her customer tends to buy this product. And so it’s really about what is it that your customer is looking for? 

And I think it kind of ties back to what we talked about at the start of the conversation of what is your customer talking about on forums tapping away to see what they’re discussing. So if we’re seeing a certain trend in products around a certain time of year, you can absolutely create a page around that. But I think it’s also important to, like we said, understand what Google is showing for these types of queries. Because something we’ve seen folks do in the past, and Josh, I want your feedback on this too. We saw a lot of sites doing these best of articles. They thought, oh, I’m a product provider. I’m going to make a best of all my products. But then slowly we’re seeing Google’s like, no, not quite. So to go back to that point and make it more, to kind of summarize it, yeah, seasonal content is valuable, but I think the seasonal content’s going to depend on your business. 

If you follow a traditional model, you definitely want to have your Black Friday, Cyber Monday pages live. Really important for folks planning for holiday. Do not delete your holiday pages, don’t delete them. A common misconception is, oh, my 2024 Black Friday sale is over. Don’t delete it. You can either just remove it from your navigation. We honestly sometimes just tell clients to keep it live because it’s fine. They want to know deals. Just keep it live. Change the copy to say, Hey, catch us again next year or add an email sign up. So don’t get rid of it. The longer that page is up, the more equity you build. So we’ve had that conversation with a few folks who’re like, oh, I’ll just make it for the next year. And I’m like, please don’t do that. Save the page. Just update it.  

Ruben Quinones (50:26): 

Might be answering another question here, which is discontinued pages. So you may have killed two birds with one stone, but maybe this person meant if you discontinued it already. How would you handle that, Josh? 

Joshua Squires (50:40): 

Yeah, discontinues and out of stocks are so important for eCommerce and especially with the addition of Merchant Center over the last few years, you really have to be on the ball with this, discontinued pages. If the product’s never coming back, it’s okay to leave it up for a little while. I’ve seen, and I want to struggle to recall here, but I know John Mueller, the Search liaison at Google, they’ve both said that there needs to be a waiting period. You leave the product page up, put some sort of notification that this is discontinued and let it serve a 200 response. So that says, yeah, the page is live, but the product’s not here. Give everybody a chance to see it. I think it’s like three or four months, then take it down. If you’re in a seasonal-driven space, I’m thinking like retail clothing, things like that, where stock is going to turn over at large over multiple periods during the year, just put it as discontinued. 

And when we roll over to the next season, let’s just get rid of that page. And by get rid of it, I mean let’s, let’s have that URL return, a 403 status gone, right? The page doesn’t exist anymore where you’re discontinuing an older version of a product in favor of a newer version, there’s an opportunity to redirect the old URL to the new URL because the links to that old URL may still exist. Let’s say you’re selling power tools and the power tool you were selling was just one of the most popular things last Christmas season. Every dad had to have one, and it got written about in a couple of places. If a user clicks on those blog posts and tries to get to that tool and you’re returning a 400-status code and that page is just gone, they’re just going to get a blank page or a 404 or whatever experience you have set up. 

And that’s not ideal, right? That’s a missed sale, that’s a missed opportunity. If you redirect that new version of a product that has value to the user, they’ll probably recognize that the thing that they were just reading about is not the page that they have landed on, but they will note the similarities. And you can even have custom messaging from people being redirected from that so that you can add that context. But discontinued pages generally, you don’t want to keep ’em long term, but you do want to keep ’em live for just a little while to give users and Google a chance to catch up. 

Handling Seasonal and Discontinued Content

Jamie D’Alessandro (53:20): 

And I would also add before that, yeah, Josh, no, that’s great feedback. And would also say, make sure you’re removing it from your internal links too, so make sure you’re removing it from your site maps. Any related pages, usually a quick Screaming Frog crawl or I use Screaming Frog for this, can do it, but you don’t want to continue to send internal linking signals to it. Yeah, Josh, great. And one clarifying, I think you said 403. Do you mean 410? 

Joshua Squires (53:49): 

I absolutely meant 410. Thank you. 

Jamie D’Alessandro (53:52): 

You’re welcome. I was like, wait a minute. 

Joshua Squires (53:55): 

We’re weaning ourselves off coffee this week and it’s not going great. 

Ruben Quinones (54:00): 

Alright, I got to get you guys back to work. So I know if someone just kind of joined in and was not able to join in earlier. So we are going to put this up on the Amsive blog and we’ll probably, this is intended, I think we’re going beyond LinkedIn Lives now. So we’re trying to work on a solution where we do this live on the site as well. So we’ll work on that internally, but we will have it live on the blog and we’ll post it. So if you go to Amsive.com, you go to Insights, you’ll see our latest blog posts. We’ll have it on there as well. But we’re going to have another event in three weeks as well. Before I let you guys go, is there anything kind of parting thoughts? I don’t know that you can summarize what you’ve said. There’s a lot. I will have you guys back on in the next month or two to talk about maybe keyword research, how we apply that. This was obviously more globally technically solving problems, which is important. It’s essentially what you would need before you tackle those other areas of SEO. But is there anything else you want to say as we head off into the weekend here? 

Jamie D’Alessandro (55:08): 

No, I would just say, I mean, Ruben, thank you so much for having us. This was so much fun and thank you everybody for your questions and tuning in. I mean, we do this all day, every day, so to share it with other people, it’s been really fun. And for me, life is complicated, so I try to simplify things the best way I can. When it comes to our business, we tend to want to go after everything and do everything, but we can’t. And whenever you find yourselves in a position where you’re like, oh my God, I got to do this, I got to do that. This new thing, this new thing here, just go back to you’re trying to make money. What are the pages that you’re trying to make money from and how do we make them the best pages they can be? And don’t be afraid to be a brand. Don’t be afraid to inject your personality and your brand. And remember, a brand lives outside of SEO, it’s all encompassing. And so share your brand, get it visible, get it talked about, because Google will also see you talking about it. And Josh, I know you and I love to talk about brand. Do you have any thoughts you want to share on that and your takeaways?  

Ruben Quinones (56:15): 

Absolutely. It’s customary that I let you go first, Jamie, so goodbye. 

Joshua Squires (56:23): 

No warning. 

Ruben Quinones (56:25): 

No, that was great. 

Joshua Squires (56:26): 

Yeah, I would echo Jamie’s sentiment. I think that brand in 2024 is probably the power play for SEO, but it requires all the other channels to help you out with AI, search, and chatbots and all of the new features that are changing in the Search results every day. The one thing that overrides that is just people knowing your brand. I know that we have another talk scheduled coming up about how challenger brands can beat the big guys. I’ll be on that one, and we’ll be talking about that one more in depth about how smaller brands can gain visibility even when you’re competing against giants. It’s a little broader than just eCommerce, but I think if you found this helpful, you might find that one helpful too. 

Ruben Quinones (57:13): 

Yeah, maybe we can throw it on the thread of this on LinkedIn. That’d be great. 

Joshua Squires (57:19): 

Yeah. Yeah. And for you kind folks who joined and also added me on LinkedIn, one, really appreciate that. Two, I will absolutely be posting that talk when we get a little closer to it. So thanks everybody for your time. Really, really glad to have been here. 

Ruben Quinones (57:34): 

Yeah, I’ll bring Jamie back on. I felt bad. Oh my God, you’re back.  

Jamie D’Alessandro (57:40): 

He just kicked me out. 

Ruben Quinones (57:42): 

No, have you not seen my other? I do it one by one. Anyways, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate the work you put into this. Looking forward to doing this again in a few months. And again, appreciate the conversation. So with that, we’re through the books with another session here on how we can help and just have a dialogue about growing your eCommerce portfolio, your brand, and navigating that space. And we’re going to be at it again in three weeks. We’re going to talk about social commerce. Don’t have the topic title yet, but for sure we’re going to have Chalice Jones from our social team talk to us about being able to bring some awareness to your brand on social. So keep an eye out for that. Again, we may extend this beyond just LinkedIn invites, realizing that there’s some other needs there and people just want to join in different ways. So we may do that in the future. So I want to thank you for your time for listening to this and for contributing to the chat. So good morning. Have a good morning. Have a good evening, good afternoon, wherever you’re watching this, whenever you’re watching this. And I will see you next time. 

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