amazon and google: seo priorities

AMAZON & GOOGLE SEO PRIORITIES

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ME

NEW JERSEY ORGANICALLY-GROWN NERD

HISTORY MAJOR LAW SCHOOL

hi. i do seo.

Buy our running shoes. They’re the best running shoes you’ll find. We have pink running shoes, brown running shoes and running shoes that help you run. They’re shoes. For running.

WE’RE MORE LIKE THIS

LET’S TAKE THIS A STEP AT A TIME,

SHALL WE?

SURPRISE!!!!! BOO! MWAHAHAHAHAHA

ALTHOUGH SOME…

BUT WE’RE LIKE THIS

LET’S TAKE THIS A STEP AT A TIME,

SHALL WE?

I’M GOING TO HIT THE HIGHLIGHTS

I’LL STICK TO THE HIGHLIGHTS

GETTING INSIDE A SEARCH ENGINE’S HEAD

I READ PATENTS

WE READ PATENTS

I LOOKED AT 1,500 PAGES

WE EXAMINE RESULTS USING CUSTOMIZED CRAWLERS CALLED “BOTS”

THAT ARE VERY WELL-BEHAVED AND CAUSE NO HARM

THEY ARE NOT ALIKE

Caution: Some gray-hattedness

AMAZON INDEXES ITS OWN DATA

I’m ignoring what Amazon says they want us to do

I’m skipping pricing, images and reviews

Wants to sell more stuff (So help them do just that)

Delivers results based on relevance and behavior

Scarcity Single-factor search

Consolidated content

Critical Strategy Optimize products with fewest sellers

Relevance Does this make sense?

Amazon provides no query data

So dig for it

EBAY: Terapeak Keywords

Search suggest

On Amazon, keywords don’t drive rankings They’re a hint

Keyword Prioritization Title Keywords Product description Bullets

Many sellers = Weak correlation

Fewer sellers = Strong correlation

Ideal Product Title Brand + Line + Material + Attributes

Ideal Product Title Keyword close to start

Ideal Product Title Sockmakers Zombie Socks Blue SM 4 Pack

Ideal Product Title Iwata Eclipse Airbrush Gravity Fed

How about in content and bullets?

How about in the content and bullets?

VERY WEAK CORRELATION

Aim for persuasive, not keyword-rich

In the keywords?...

Unknown: No data (but common sense)

Incomplete match hurts rankings

“Remote Controlled Moose Call”

Rely on Amazon’s query segmentation

RC Cars

RC Cars Radio Controlled Toys

RC Cars Radio Controlled Toys

Remote Controlled Vehicles

Don’t repeat product name or other keywords (Doesn’t help them sell more stuff)

Build product “freshness” Poke around with updates

I wrote a book

Less relevant than a camel

One Trick Pony Consulting

One Trick Pony Consulting Camel

20 minutes after title change

20 minutes later

Questions

Update description to answer questions

Be very deliberate around pricing (Yeah, I lied. I’m talking about pricing)

Here’s why

CamelCamelCamel.com

Google Insights for Search

Behavior Did the customer click? Did the customer buy? Did they like it? Did they like who they bought from?

Product performance for key phrases determine rankings

For this, I paid and got up early?

for this, i paid?

Rank well so you can perform well so that you can rank well

Provide evidence that you’ll sell more stuff

Try some phrase targeting

“To buy my book, search ‘one trick consulting’ on Amazon”

One Trick Consulting

That proves you can sell more stuff for “consulting”

A quick note about images

Patent describing interpretation and ranking of images by shape and size

If there’s a clear winner, you might copy the layout

AND YEAH, REVIEWS

Quality + Count + Velocity + Votes

Where Amazon’s Going

Consolidation

Scarcity Single-factor search

HISTORY MAJOR

GOOGLE INDEXES OTHERS’ DATA

Google is indexing massive, ridiculous, mind-numbing amounts of unstructured data

They want to sell more ads Which means they need more page views

For that, they need to give the right answers

Delivers results based on relevance, behavior and authority

Multi-factor search

Google provides some insight into site health

Set up Search Console

All this lovely data…

But herein lies madness

Get a crawler, or a “health check” toolset

Screaming Frog

Your first job: Visibility

Yes, before keywords

I-N-F-R-A-S-T-R-U-C-T-U-R-E

Avoid duplicate content

May be duplication

If this is much higher than actual site pages, probably duplication

/purplepeopleeaters /purplepeopleeaters?p=1

www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/index.html

mysite.com

whoa say what now?

Costs you “crawl budget”

i’m outta here

Don’t remove out-of-stock products that will be back

Product

Your customers

“Sorry, this isn’t in stock right now. Here are some other options.

Or, we can notify you when it’s back.”

Preserves authority Avoids redirects and broken links

More visibility signals: XML Sitemaps

Your second job: Quality (impacts behavior)

Google looks at dwell time, bounce rate and clickthru rate

Compress images (for a faster site)

700kb png 64kb jpg

IMAGEOPTIM/CAESIUM

1.1 megabytes

Want to be in the top 5% of all web sites?

Check your spelling.

Grammarly

Hemingway App

Fix busted links

Screaming Frog

Google search console

More quality signals: Responsive design Writing grade level (sometimes) Server response

Oh, and…

Your third job: Relevance

Use the right words

“I sell athletic footwear! Not running shoes!” “Philistine!”

AUDIENCE

Google Insights for Search

keywordtool.io

Adwords keyword planner

Onsite search data

Moz Keyword Explorer SEMRush

AlchemyAPI

Answer the right questions

Google Suggest

HIGH VALUE = LOW DISTANCE FROM PERFECT

WAIT, DUDE, WTF?!!!!

AnswerThePublic.com

Target these in product descriptions “[Model name] is best for overpronators”

Put words where they should be

Title tags The most influential on-page ranking factor

Titles must pass the blank sheet of paper test

Will this, written on a blank sheet of paper, make sense to a stranger?

Famous failures

Deer kill 10,000

Supreme Court Tries Sodomy

Description tags No direct ranking impact

Update existing content

Find older product descriptions & other content

This is an old answer. Write a new one:

Update product language to answer new questions

Update language to better describe features

More relevance signals: Structured markup On-page links Navigation and structure ALT attributes

And then authority

Links are votes

Fix broken links, first

Opensiteexplorer.org

Easiest link acquisition ever

Opensiteexplorer.org

Google Search Console

Don’t split the votes

Not logged in. Don’t show this.

Then earn them. Don’t get them.

More authority signals: Social signals (?)

Don’t get cute

i will kick your @#!$

Google Panda Measures site quality

i will kick your @#!$

Google Panda Measures site quality

That panda? He’s a

wimp.

Google Penguin Penalizes link spam

Yes, there is lots more Response codes Canonicalization … This is a starting point

Show Google you have the right answers

HISTORY MAJOR

QUICK TIPS FOR HIRING AN SEO

HIRE US.

NEVER hire if they say

“It’s a secret”

“We have connections at Google”

“We guarantee results!!!”

DO hire if

They don’t make you feel dirty

They explain what they’ll do and how

Amazon and Google Nothing in Common

Except we need them

Next steps

First, do no harm

Work through these tips

Remember what they want

[email protected] @portentint Slides & links www.portent.co/amazonseo

Small, unmarked bills, please

amazon and google: seo priorities

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