Specific Ways to Build Your Enterprise SEO Traffic and Sales

55Jonathon Colman

Twitter @jcolman

In-House SEO for REIwww.REI.com

CREATE ORIGINAL CONTENT1.1.

Photo © Sukisuki on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/sukisuki/3293817448/

CREATE ORIGINAL CONTENT

FOCUS: Increase rankings and portfolio diversity for traffic-driving keywords

• Original, relevant product information that adds value and solidifies your brand

• <title>s, <meta> descriptions, on-page copy

• Landing pages for categories, brands, and search results

• New value-added content your customers can use to enjoy the products you sell

Source: Vibram FiveFingers Bikila Running Shoes at http://www.rei.com/product/798241/vibram-fivefingers-bikila-running-shoes-mens on www.REI.com

Let’s look at a standard REI product page…

Source: Vibram FiveFingers Bikila Running Shoes at http://www.rei.com/product/798241/vibram-fivefingers-bikila-running-shoes-mens on www.REI.com

That’s nearly 250 words of branded, original, unique, relevant content – what search engines need!

Source: How to Choose Barefoot / Minimalist Running Shoes at http://www.rei.com/expertadvice/articles/running+shoes.html on www.REI.com

This article on our site draws qualified traffic from over 1,800 individual keyphrases every week.

MINIMIZE DUPLICATION2.2.

Photo © leg0fenris on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/legofenris/4641828205/

MINIMIZE DUPLICATION

FOCUS: Rank higher and increase traffic

• Duplicate content = the same content at two different URLs

• A likely warning signal for Panda algorithm

• You have enough competition without competing with yourself!

• Solutions: rel=canonical, rel=prev/next, 301 redirects, setting default domain, selective blocking of crawlers, and more…

Duplicate content waters down your rankings for competitive keywords, reducing your traffic and conversion.Source: Google Webmaster Tools reporting

4 TOOLS FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT

• Use rel=canonical to point from a duplicate back to the authoritative version of the content – used for exact duplicates

• Use rel=prev/next to handle paginated content, such as a large search result set

• 301 redirect from deprecated content or near duplicates to authoritative versions

• Set your preferred domain to avoid duplication at the domain level

Using these tactics, we reduced duplicate content on REI.com by 96% Y/Y, driving increased traffic to authoritative content.Source: Google Webmaster Tools reporting

GO FAST OR GO HOME3.3.

Photo © ShootNFish on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/geyring/5290188093/

GO FAST OR GO HOME

FOCUS: Increase your conversion

• Google uses speed as a search ranking factor for the most competitive queries

• This can drive more traffic and associated sales, but site speed has a much larger impact than just SEO…

Source: Google, Matt Cutts [via Search Engine Land]

Customers expect your web site to load in 2 seconds or less.

2Source: Forrester/Akamai [via GetElastic]

40% of customers will abandonany site that takes longer than

3 seconds to load.

3Source: Forrester/Akamai [via GetElastic]

The average Fortune 500 company web site takes 7 seconds to load.

7Source: Andrew Davies, Web Performance: A Whistlestop Tour…

For every 1 second of load time, conversion drops by 7%.

7% Source: Strangeloop

For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%.

16% Source: Strangeloop

A faster site reduces the costs of infrastructure and releases

by 50% or more.Source: Shopzilla [via O’Reilly]

50%

REI’S RESULTS:

A 50% decrease in the time it took for Google to crawl an average pageSource: Google Webmaster Tools reporting

REI’S RESULTS:

A 100% increase in the amount of total pages Google crawled per daySource: Google Webmaster Tools reporting

REI’S RESULTS:

In 2011, we saved customers 22 years of time by speeding up REI.comSource: Google Webmaster Tools reporting

TOOLS TO SPEED UP YOUR SITE

• Yahoo and Google best practices

• Google Webmaster Tools speed report

• Site speed data in Google Analytics

• Google’s Page Speed Online tool

• Yahoo’s YSlow browser tool

• WebPageTest, Pingdom test suites

BE META, NOT JUST <META>4.4.

Photo © sarah0s on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/sarahseverson/6245395188/

BE META, NOT JUST <META>

FOCUS: Increase traffic and conversion

• Structure product search results into faceted navigation to allow for filtering

• Structure product, store, event, author, video, recipe, and other data for Rich Snippets in search engine results

• Increase findability and interoperability at the same time

Source: Sleeping Bags at http://www.rei.com/category/4500001_Sleeping+Bags on www.REI.com

Use product metadata to structure search results for your categories into faceted navigation.

Source: Sleeping Bags at http://www.rei.com/category/4500001_Sleeping+Bags on www.REI.com

Facets help users narrow down their searches and provide niche results for search engine crawlers.

WHICH WOULD YOU CLICK ON?

RESULTS:

Rich Snippets can drive up to +30% more clicks over standard search results

Structured data makes you more findable in verticals, such as local search.

TOOLS FOR RICH SNIPPETS

• Google’s guide to Rich Snippets

• Microdata: Schema.org standard used by Google, Bing, and Yahoo

• Microformats: hProduct for products, hCard for people and locations, and hCalendar for events

• RDFa: GoodRelations vocabulary

• Google Merchant Center feeds

LINK IT ALL TOGETHER5.5.

Photo © Ravages on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/ravages/2831688538/

LINK IT ALL TOGETHER

FOCUS: Increase rankings and traffic

• Don’t buy links – any purchasing scheme goes against Webmaster Guidelines and is “Black Hat” SEO

• Earn links to your site by providing great content, products, services, and features

• Be social to listen to and engage with your customer base and attract new followers

Source: Paid Links (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Don’t let this happen to you.Do not buy links. Ever.

Search engine index

Search engines index the Web by following links to page after page of content. But most of the time, they can’t find content without following a link to it.

Strongly interlinked sitewith numerous inbound links

New pages without links areisolated from search engines

EARN LINKS FOR DISCOVERY

For a search engine, links from one site to another are like a vote of confidence and trust, similar to a citation in a scientific paper. This is the original basis behind Google’s PageRank.

Page onSite A

Page onSite B

Link“I trust you!”

EARN LINKS FOR TRUST

If all else is equal, pages with more links can be said to be more authoritative because more individual sites trust and cite their content. This often translates into higher rankings.

EARN LINKS FOR AUTHORITY

Page on Site A

Five inbound linksfrom external sites

Page onSite B

Ten inbound links= more authority

HOW CAN YOU EARN LINKS?

• Create useful content that fulfills a customer need – especially tacit needs

• Be original, funny, engaging, or amazing

• Hold a contest or giveaway

• Be timely or relevant to a current event that your customers care about

• Feature your customers and their efforts – make them feel special.

Source: S’mores at http://findout.rei.com/blog_detail/?contentid=5496892009878913438 on www.REI.com

Source: Backpacks infographic at http://www.rei.com/infographics/backpacks.html on www.REI.com

A customer-created video for one of our products went viral, driving awareness, links, traffic, and ranking increases.Source: REI Match Test video by dalemclmm at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8BY6AbHL9w

We rank #3 for a broad search term that doesn’t use our brand or even the category. What if this was a high-margin product?

KEY, ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS

Photo © mrjoro on Flickr. Source: flickr.com/photos/mrjoro/89187454/

55

5 KEY, ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS1. Create original content that meets your

audience’s explicit and tacit needs

2. Reduce duplicate content to stop competing with yourself

3. Speed up your site to drive conversion

4. Structure your content with metadata to make it more findable and easier to use

5. Earn links by building great content or have customers build it for you

MANY THANKS!

Jonathon Colman

In-House SEO for REIHome: about.me/jcolman

Twitter: @jcolman

E-mail: jcolman@rei.com