Plesk Official Podcast
Improving SEO and User Experience with Maddy Osman
Episode Summary
For eCommerce owners, understanding SEO and the process of earning and retaining customers is of the utmost importance. Maddy Osman, SEO Consultant, is our guest speaker in this episode, tackling the technical and practical topics around user experience and site optimization from a marketing perspective. How can you make your site more ‘findable’ and interesting? Let’s take a look.
Episode Notes
Key Takeaways
- There are three pillars to SEO: Content, off-page SEO, and website technical structure
- Content should include solid product descriptions, lots of photos, and clear terms. Remember; buying online doesn’t provide the same experience as buying in-store, so you need to fill the gaps. Content will helps us do that.
- By the same token, don’t unintentionally create duplicate content! If you have similar versions of the same product (different colors, sizes, shapes, etc), create variations. Some search engines can lower your ranking if you have a lot of duplicate content, and variations prevent that.
- When it comes to blogging, consistency is more important than quantity. Blogging once a month is the minimum to show people (and search engines) that you’re consistent.
- Ideally, releasing one piece of content per week would be ideal. But it doesn’t just have to be on your own site! Consider being a guest blogger and spreading the word about your brand and surrounding topics through other sites.
- When it comes to off-page SEO, on top of guest posts, you can have affiliate programs and link exchanges. Since Google and other search engines consider backlinks (links back to your website or content) when ranking, getting your website linked on other websites, where relevant, can really help.
- Tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog can help you figure out whom to ask for a backlink.
- Reciprocity can sweeten the pot, but link-trading is also frowned upon by Google, so get creative!
- Influencers can also play a big part of getting people to your site. Social proof is the lynchpin of selling online, so testimonials are great. But showing other people actually using and promoting your products is even better.
- When people look for social proof, we can apply the acronym EAT: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Find influencers with relevant audiences who understand and can honestly recommend your product.
- Finally, when it comes to technical structure, again tools like Ahrefs can help figure out where the holes in your website are. Remember to get rid of or redirect 404 errors, obtain an SSL certificate, and make improvements over time to your content and website speed. Our Alberto Medina episode on Core Web Vitals should be a huge help on this!
Show Notes