The rules of SEO keep changing, so how do you keep up? Feel like you barely have enough time to pivot your SEO strategy? The evolution of search continues to ramp up and bring a new sense of excitement to the world of SEO. One way to keep up, especially if you’re an SEO professional working in ecommerce, is to uncover and prioritize commercial opportunities.
Wondering which powerful priorities you should complete first? The key is surprisingly simple: keep the fundamentals at the forefront of your SEO strategy. Let’s dig into exactly how to do each of these steps so you can level up your SEO strategy.
In a time when the world of search is experiencing unprecedented change, it’s helpful to include SEO tactics in your strategy that bring about a sense of predictability. One great SEO tactic is to identify and plan for seasonal trends.
Most product demand trends experience seasonal peaks and troughs. But are you timing your content appropriately to maximize traffic and sales from these patterns? Before you create a new content plan, it’s a good idea to take a look at historical search trends first.
Analyzing historical search data for your key products is a great way to predict whether the same trends will occur in the future. You’ll be safe in the knowledge that your strategy isn’t based on assumptions, and you may find that demand timings are not quite as you’d expect.
The best way to successfully adopt seasonal search trend data into your content strategy is to follow this simple process:
- Identify the key search terms for your products.
- Use a tool like Pi Datametrics to analyze historical search data for those terms.
- Identify the seasonal trends for those terms.
- Create content that is optimized for those terms and timed to coincide with the seasonal peaks in demand.
Optimizing for long-tail searches is key to capturing your audience at multiple touchpoints before conversion. One of the best places to start is looking at the questions your audience is asking within the People Also Ask feature of Google search.
Having a good grasp and understanding of your audience’s intent can help inform your content so that it aligns with your customer and their needs. Google’s People Also Ask feature is a really useful tool to get inside the mind of your customer and have a clearer picture of the content they’re searching for.
SERP features allow you to appear multiple times on page 1 and entice customers with useful and engaging content. One new opportunity we’ve seen to gain additional real estate in the SERPs is the rise of the Popular Products feature.
Through our research with Pi Datametrics – SERP Feature Radar, we’ve found that the Google US search results are getting flooded by Popular Products. If your website sells products, you should be considering optimizing for the Popular Product feature.
This will mainly rely on submitting your product feeds to Google Merchant Center and adding product schema to your site’s product details pages (PDPs). Be sure your product feeds include:
- Product title
- Product description
- Product image
- Product price
- Product availability
- Product brand
- Product GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)
- Product MPN (Manufacturer Part Number)
- Product condition
Think about all the attributes within your product feed that help your product offering look competitive and provide customers with as much information possible (for example, multiple color options).
At a macro level, a great way to identify additional commercial opportunities for your brand is to look at your organic share of value (SOV). Share of value in Pi’s Market Intelligence tool calculates the share of Organic Value Score (OVS) a domain owns in a particular category. Every position earns a score, this is summed and then divided into a “share of” calculation.
Evaluating which categories and subcategories you perform well for versus your competitors can help focus your attention on areas that are likely to increase your SOV.
Uncover which terms within those categories are contributing to good performance. This will allow you to have a better focus for optimization from a top-down level. You can be more confident that your efforts are going to deliver increased revenue and brand awareness.
Source: Search Engine Journal
