Shopper Experience Optimisation
Our focus of late has been about redefining SEO. Ecommerce sites should be all about the shopper, not the search engine. Google labelled “trust” as an element of brands back in 2009, and we took that to mean brands are rewarded, especially if they deliver a quality customer experience. That’s why I’ll be doing a webinar on June 24 about Shopping Experience Optimisation and how it helps eCommerce businesses. Don’t miss it!
- SEO was about manipulating results.
- Always deliver a great user experience.
- Why Google values trust.
- Optimise your shopping experience.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. We’ve got another webinar coming up. That was unexpected. No, it wasn’t. Hopefully the camera isn’t too high. And I don’t look too wanna be Insta today with the camera angling down. We’re coming to you from my office pod in glorious Melbourne winter. Been freezing today, but I’m in a nice warm office pod so I’m happy. I can’t go into the studio because it’s too bloody cold. That’s it. Over the back there. That’s where I’d normally be coming to you from. I want to talk to you a little bit about redefining SEO. Because we’ve been doing it for quite some time now. So we started doing SEO in what, ’90s? Late ’90s? Something like that. Anyway, everything that we do now for eCommerce sites is about the shopper. So search engine optimisation is a terrible phrase. Because it implies that you can optimise the search engine, which I can’t. I can only manipulate the results in the search engine.
SEO redefined
So search engine optimisation isn’t a great term anyway. So it needs to be redefined. And what I’ve shown, what we’ve shown and what we’ve seen with our clients. And what we’ve been talking about over all of these years is that yeah, Google is a search engine. Whether with paid traffic or organic traffic. It’s about giving great results to the user, about delivering a great user experience. Because if the users get that, then they’ll come back and they’ll use Google more because they can find what they want. Now, we learned some time ago, back in 2009, when Google had the Vince update, which promoted all the brands overnight above all the other clients. That’s the only update I can think of where our clients didn’t benefit from, but the brands did. And they said at the time, Google said at the time, “This update was about trust,” in 2009. So from that we could take, well, trust must be an element of brands.
And Google has these human writers that it uses. And one of the things they have to look at is, “Is this piece of content trustworthy? Does it have expertise? Is it authoritative?” They’re the three pillars. So I would say brand is also an authority. So we learned that. And we also heard that in 2017, Gary Illyes at the State of Search. I want to say Phoenix. I’m not sure. But the State of Search, he said brand mentions and citations count, not just backlinks. Someone should say, “Well, brand mentions and citations. Can’t we better spend on Facebook? Get a lot of mentions on there.” No. Where are the most mentions that have a brand that Google has access to? How do you get to Google? You type in Google into Google. So Google has the largest repository of brand search. It knows who the most popular brands are. So it’s going to reward those popular brands because people want to see them.
Brand power
And those brands have done usually a pretty good job of having a reasonable experience. And some of these things are weighted, like user experience isn’t that great. As we’ve said, as I’ve just told the story before. A well-known iconic shoe brand in Australia, we got them to number one for shoes and the site was terrible. It should never have happened. We changed one page title. It shouldn’t have happened. It was just that they were the most popular brand in the category so it was really easy. And that’s what happens when you get a really popular brand, it’s usually really easy to rank them. But some people say, “That’s all the backlinks.” But no it’s not because you can measure that. So as we’ve said, Google is trying to reward content that is great experience for the users. So over the years, that’s what we’ve been trying to do with our clients.
It’s just, let’s give the users a great experience. Make sure all the technical stuff is running right. Make sure our structured data and all those other things that the search engines need and the machines need to display our content properly. We have to do those things, but we’ve got to make it light, fast and quick. Why? Because that’s what it’s like in a shop. That’s what it’s been like in retail for the last 100 years. That shopper experience in store has been optimised, but it hasn’t been done online. So that’s why for us, SEO redefined means shopper experience optimisation, because that’s what we can do. So if you want to find out more about that, then please come to our webinar at the end of this month. I’ll have the date for you next week. It’s probably going to be around the 24th of June. We’re just finalising that now.
But make sure you subscribe, stay tuned and thank you to all the new subscribers. And please like, tell your friends. If you’ve got some questions about the sorts of things we’ll be covering, let us know. It’ll be a small group, so if you are interested, then just email me now, [email protected] and more next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
