In part 2 of our SEO workshop series, you’ll learn everything you need to know about your shoppers’ intent — how to identify intent, and how to analyze intent to find new opportunities for your store. Our Wix SEO experts will help you understand the importance of your sites identity in making your products rank higher on search result pages.
Transcript: Advanced eCommerce SEO
Speakers
Liat Karpel Gurwicz, Head of eCommerce Marketing, Wix
Mordy Oberstein, SEO Community Liaison, Wix
00:04
Liat: Welcome to our Wix eCommerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking about advanced eCommerce SEO. My name is Liat. I lead eCommerce Marketing at Wix. And joining me today we have Mordy. Mordy, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?
00:22
Mordy: Sure. I'm the SEO Liaison here at Wix, which basically means that it's my responsibility to keep the SEO community abreast of what we're doing here at Wix, to evolve the platform for SEO—and in reverse, to keep Wix updated on the latest and best practices in terms of what's going on within the SEO industry.
00:41
Liat: Very cool. So you guys don't know this, but Mordy is a real SEO expert. It's a real privilege for us to have him here today. And you can ask him all the hard questions, please do. I will enjoy hearing him answer you guys.
Mordy: Thank you.
Liat: So on the agenda for today, we really want to talk about how you take your eCommerce content to the next level. Understanding the role of intent in SEO. Learning how to identify intent on the SERP. Using intent analysis as a means to find new opportunities. And finally, understanding what site identity is and why it even matters so much. And as I said, we'll be taking questions throughout the session today. And we will try and answer as many as we can. So without any further ado, Mordy, I'm going to hand over to you.
01:34
Mordy: So we're going to be talking about understanding the role of intent in SEO. And what I mean by intent is the reason why a searcher searches for something. And there's many reasons why the same query or the same keyword might mean different things. So it's a really hot and broad topic in SEO, it's a really important topic. So let's get started.
At this point in the SEO journey, or in the SEO process, I'm assuming that you've already optimized your title tag, which [are] the titles that appear on the Google results page, product descriptions or service descriptions, product names and titles, page headers, link structure, meaning internal linking. And that means that you should be linking to the really important pages throughout your site—so if you've a blog post, let's say that talks about whatever it is that your product does, or your service does, you should be throwing links to your products into those blog posts, as they are in a natural way, so that Google can understand which of your pages are really, really important. And I'm assuming you've done things like alt text for images, and so forth. Even if you haven't done them yet, and it's a continuing process, this presentation assumes those things have been done.
The question is, now what? I've done all the basic things. What do I do next? I've gotten into the ballpark. So, you know, how do I get onto the field? That kind of thing. And to do that, one of the ways to do that, and there's many ways to skin a cat in SEO. But one of the ways to do that is to reverse engineer the SERP. And that means to uncover user intent and to find new opportunities by doing that. I'll explain exactly what I mean by “reverse engineer the SERP”. So I think at this point, we have some questions to go over.
03:09
Liat: We do already have a few questions that we'd like to ask you before you dive into the details. So the first question that we have for you today Mordy is from Crystal. And she says, “I've been told that Wix websites rate low in Google. How true is this? And can it be bypassed?” Yeah, we're not going to take it easy on you today, Mordy.
03:32
Mordy: Oh, I like that question, by the way. I recently did a whole presentation about this on Semrush on the SEO tools. So let's go back to 2017. Google's John Mueller, who's Google's main advocate in the SEO community, was quoted as saying there is nothing preventing a Wix site from performing really well in search. And just maybe last week, the week before, I was having a whole conversation with John, who again, is Google Search advocate, about CMSs and about Wix in particular. And John said, you know, one of the things he sees is that the CMSs like Wix, in particular, do a really good job of handling the technical SEO aspects. And he likes that because it allows you as a business owner to focus on where he sees the lack, which is content.
The main thing, the main, the most important thing you can do in terms of SEO is write really, really good and really targeted content. And Google was telling me look, we really see business owners, there's a gap there. And that's where the issue is. And you can use a platform like Wix, to not have to worry about those other technical things, so you can focus on creating great content. Now with that, we have an absolute plethora of advanced SEO tools, if you want to do more advanced things. Those things are totally open to you, but there's absolutely nothing preventing you [from] ranking when you use the Wix platform.
04:47
Liat: Amazing. So you guys all heard it from the experts. Now you just need to do the work to make sure that your store is ranking. So Mordy, someone else asks, “How long does SEO actually take to work?”
05:02
Mordy: Oh, that's a great question. There was a study, I think Ahrefs did a study on this, I can't remember exactly the timeframe they gave. But I think it takes six months to really start ranking. I don't want to put a timeframe or a number on it, but it's a long process. And think about it like dating. You wouldn’t get married after the first date, you wouldn’t ask Google to marry your website after the first day that it's up. Google needs to understand, and it takes time for Google to understand, what your what your site is, what it's doing, what these pages are, what the pages are trying to do. And as you're more active, as you're updating more content, as you're creating more content, and you're showing Google, hey, I'm alive, we're a live active site, those things will be helpful to you in terms of getting Google to crawl your site more often, in terms of getting Google to better understand your site. So it does take time. Just keep creating that content, keep doing the work, and slowly, but surely it will get there.
05:55
Liat: Right, yeah, it's definitely a long term effort. And I can say we ourselves are always investing in that long term goal. So you definitely want to take your time and put in the effort. So Justin wants to know, he says, “Google's description of my site has words that I did not add in my SEO Settings on Wix. Why?”
06:17
Mordy: That's a very good question. In fact, most of the time, Google won't use your own words. This is referring to the meta descriptions or the description that you see underneath the title in the results page. And studies have shown that most of the time, Google will create their own.
Now, it's still a best practice for a few reasons, it's still a best practice to write those meta descriptions yourself. One, on the off chance that you do appear, you control the narrative. However, Google did say while meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they do not determine how well you do or don't rank. One of Google's advocates, Martin Splitt said at one point that they do kind of look at it to get a general sense of what the page might be about. So back handedly, you're kind of helping Google better understand your page. Now, what's really important to also understand is where Google takes that content, when it rewrites the description, and is rewriting it based on the search queries trying to match the description to the search query itself. Google usually pulls it from the very, very top of your page. So when you're thinking about content, when you're writing content, and you want to consider what's going to happen as you appear on Google, consider that Google is going to pull those meta descriptions or rewrite those meta descriptions, usually from the top part of your page.
07:29
Liat: Gotcha. So I think you partially answered this. But Sweta is asking, “How does metadata help SEO?”
07:37
Mordy: Right, so there's metadata that has nothing to do with SEO that some people think has to do with SEO like meta keywords, those don't apply anymore. That's way back when Google was first getting started. The major factor in terms of metadata that you need to think about are your meta titles, or your title tags. And those are the titles that show up on the results page. Google does use that to get an understanding like any reader would looking at a title to understand what your page might be about. It's not going to necessarily move the needle one way or the other if Google gets a general understanding of your page. But it can and it does help Google better understand what your page is about.
08:17
Liat: Great. So Richard says that,“My product names don't tell you exactly what the product is, how do I not confuse Google?”
08:27
Mordy: So the product should at some point mention what the product is, the product name. For example, so I was looking at throw pillows the other day, and you have the name of the throw pillow, you know, Stars and Stripes throw. It'll say Stars and Stripes, and there'll be like maybe a space, or colon, say, throw pillow. So you can have the particular name of your product there, you can, you know, jazz it up a little bit. And then after that, maybe throw in a throw pillow, the name of the product. So Google does and that should be in an H1, usually, if it's on a product page. So that's really important for Google to understand what exactly it is because if we just put the fun name that you give your product, Google won't be able to really understand what it is.
09:07
Liat: Gotcha. So we're saying, you do want to be straightforward and specific, like alongside the branding and the fun, but make sure that you're actually including that product info in there.
09:15
Mordy: 100%. Yes.
09:18
Liat: Cool. So while we're talking about H1s, Assaf asks, “What is the difference between H1 and H2? And should we just put all the product information in H1?”
09:31
Mordy: That's the very essence. So SEOs will like that question. Okay, so there's different structures to your page. Think of it like a college essay. Maybe you have, you know, you have a title for the essay. You have the various headers, you have your H2s, maybe your H3s, it gives structure to your page, it helps Google, it helps your reader really understand what's on this page. So maybe the product name or the service name would be in the H1. You might have some content there. And then you have some H2s like, you know, shipping details or product specs or a product description. And then you might even have an H3. But you know, the H3 is meant more for your blog posts, even go to H4 and H5 and H6, you don't need to go crazy like that. But it does, it's really important to Google like it is for a reader, it gives your page structure. It tells Google okay, this page is about this, this section is about this, the next section is about this. And Google can look at those headers and say, okay, we understand what this page is more or less about without really having to understand every word.
10:31
Liat: Gotcha. Okay, great. So I think that for now, those are the questions. Let’s continue.
10:35
Mordy: Awesome. Those are really good questions. We're talking about intent—understanding intent, identifying intent. The question is, how do we actually understand what Google is showing us in terms of intent? How do we pick up the various intents that Google is showing us? And my clicker is not working. Now it is. So I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole with this. But in 2015, Google released its first machine learning property, called RankBrain. It's not exactly AI, it's technically machine learning. And there's a slight difference to it. You don't need to know all of the nitty gritty details about it because it's really interesting. But what you need to know are these things, RankBrain and the further developments Google has made along the way since then, have shown Google the ability to understand what exactly people are searching for. And Google kind of realized, you know what, for this very same keyword, one user might mean this, and another user might mean something totally different. And Google said, you know what we should do? We should show results that speak to both of those user intents, to both of those users. On the same results page. By the way, the SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.
11:41
Liat: Hang on Mordy, I'm getting some requests here from the audience. They're saying, “please, please, Mordy, this is complicated. Go slow”.
11:50
Mordy: Sorry, sorry. Okay. The Search Engine Results Page, which is basically the Google page, has many, many purposes, or is trying to cater to many different users. And users are searching using the same search term, but they might mean very different things. And since 2015, Google has been really good at figuring out the various meanings to a search. And I'll show you in a second exactly what I mean. But that means overall, that there's some very unexpected things that show up in the results, some very unexpected pages that you wouldn't think should really show up. And that also means there's some really unexpected opportunity.
12:29
Mordy: Here's a concrete example of this. So “buy life insurance” was the query I ran here. Now, five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, whatever it is, all you would get here are pages where you can buy life insurance. And it seems pretty straightforward. If I type in “buy life insurance”, don't you think I mean to buy life insurance? Well, the answer is no. Because the very first result, if you scroll past all of those ads, and you'll see why in a second, all those ads are there. If you scroll past all of those ads, the first result is how to buy life insurance, you can't actually buy life insurance on the very first result for this query. Now you know why people who sell life insurance want to advertise and get above that result.
Liat: Right.
Mordy: So the moral of the story is, commerce sites really need to create informational content, because it opens up a whole new set of doors for you. And that can increase your chances of ranking. Let me show you exactly what I mean by this. So let's take a look at the entire page one results page for “buy life insurance”. And what I’ve done here was I color-coded the results page for you. In red are all of the pages to talk about information, how to buy life insurance, where to buy life insurance, the best life insurance. And all the results in yellow are places where you can actually buy life insurance from—Geico and Allstate and all the other insurance companies.
What you'll notice is, there are six slots for informational pages. And there are only four slots for commerce pages. In other words, if you're a commerce site, if you sell life insurance, for example, and you want to rank on the SERP here, on the results here, you only have four opportunities to do that. And no matter how amazing your content is, how great your page is, how amazing your website is, you are limited to just four slots, where if you have an informational page, you have six opportunities to rank. Now if you have both pages, now you have ten opportunities to rank. So the math kind of works to make sure that if you’re a commerce site, you do also have informational pages on your website, like a blog to make sure you capture the most opportunity possible.
Also consider, and I know we've talked about ranking a lot in SEO, but consider who ranks first on this results page. Let's jump back for a second. If I want to buy life insurance, I have already done all the research. I know everything about life insurance. I know the whole spiel, and I go and type in “buy life insurance”, which is the first result? It's not Policygenius. I don't need that result. I'm going to skip over and to me, Geico was the first result.
So when you look at your rankings, you look at your data, and you're trying to figure out what's going on, you have to really qualify things a little bit. And I'm saying this as somebody who used to work for a rank tracking software company. I know a lot about rank tracking. You have to really go to the results page once in a while and see what's happening there. Because you might rank number three or four, but you might be the first result for the users that you're targeting. So be careful about ranking, you should be thinking about it as ranking for the intent that you are targeting.
Now, you sort of can have your cake and eat it too. You can have an informational, I'm sorry, you can have a transactional page, a commerce page, a product page, a service page, whatever it is, and add a little bit of an informational touch. What you see here is basically an FAQ, it is an FAQ. What did Allstate do here? They have a page where you can buy life insurance. And they added an FAQ to it. And then they told Google, hey, Google, you know what we have here, we have an FAQ here. It's called structured data markup. And it's basically code that you can add to your site. And I'll get to it, don't freak out because I said the word code. It's code that you can add to your site to tell Google really quickly so Google doesn't have to scour your page and figure it out themselves, what's on the page. Like, if you have reviews on the page, you can tell Google, hey, Google, there's a review on the page, there’s a product on this page. Here's all the information, we could also tell Google there's an FAQ on this page. And Google might, it's not a guarantee, but they might pull it into the result itself.
If you jump back again, look at that result from Geico on the left. That's a really big, hefty piece of real estate that you're occupying. Because Google is pulling in the FAQ questions into these tabs. And when you expand the tabs, you see the answer. Now, how do you actually add this to your Wix site? It's pretty easy. There's a lot of free tools. Rank Ranger has one, Seoclarity has one, Merkel has one, you just need to Google “schema markup generator”, “schema markup creator”. And you'll find these free tools. All you do here—in this case, you hover over to the type of schema you want to create, I clicked FAQ Page, and you just fill in the fields, you put in your question, you put in the answer, and you're literally copying and pasting the content from your page. The tool will create the code you need. You just click copy, you go to the Wix Editor, you go to Advanced SEO, where it says structure data and it says paste your JSON LD code here. You paste your JSON LD code here. And that's it. And you've added FAQ markup to your pages.
17:31
Mordy: Now, all of this sounds really simple. I have to go to the SERP. I have to check the results, I have to see if there's information or results showing. And if I see that, I should probably create a blog post to try to target that. Really simple. But it's not that simple. Because there's multiple kinds of informational content. There's informational content where you can buy something. There's informational content where you can learn how to buy something. There's general FAQs, there's also comparison and reviews. And if you notice, I switch queries here, this is no longer “buy life insurance”, it’s “buy a laptop”, and you have a comparison of the other 15 best laptops and reviews.
Why did I switch queries? Because this kind of informational content did not exist for “buy life insurance”, meaning for whatever reason, Google didn't think that this type of informational content is relevant. So what you really have to do is not to just see if there is informational content. Should I write a blog post? Should I write whatever I need to write in order to target that opportunity? But you have to break it down and see what exactly is Google showing, what type of informational content is there.
By the way, I know I'm using more complex products like “buy life insurance” and “buy a laptop”. But I did a study back in 2018 about this. And I ran a whole bunch of queries. I did anything from “buy toilet paper”, literally “buy toilet paper”, which by the way, does show an informational result when I ran it last week, believe it or not, I promise you I'm not being facetious about this. For simple products, the first page of the Google results, 25% of the results are informational pages. When you go more complex, something like “buy life insurance” or “buy a laptop”, that number jumps up to 40%, meaning four out of the ten results that generally appear on page one of the results are not pages where you can buy something, even though the word “buy” was in the search term. Like “buy a laptop”—40% are informational pages. That number, and this is anecdotal, I haven't really done the study. If that number is gone up, and you saw it here with “buy life insurance”, right? The number now was 60%, or six out of ten results were informational, and only four were commerce pages. So there really is a real need to focus on informational content even if you're a commerce website.
It also means you need to know your results and you need to check the queries, the search terms that are really important to you. Because you might think okay, I sell forks, I'll search for “buy forks”. What possible informational content can there be for buying a fork? Well, believe it or not, there were three results about buying forks, “the best flatware for 2021”, “buying guide to flatware”, “the eight best flatware silverware sets for 2021.” So believe it or not, there could actually be a nice amount of informational content that you might want to be able to target. But you need to know what your specific results page looks like. You can have a lot of opportunity, you can have a little bit of opportunity, you can have one type of opportunity, it all depends on your keywords that are important to you. So run these through Google, check it out and see what's there for yourself.
By the way, doing this also points out the limitations to you. And limitations are really, really important because it can make your life much easier. For example, I searched for “buy dress shirt”. And what I got at the top are a bunch of ads, to the right of the main results are called PLAs—they’re Product Listing Ads. They're just more ads, there's a lot of ads here. Then there's this whole weird map thing Google is showing me and then if you go all the way down, there's a one little itsy bitsy organic result from Amazon. What happened here, that box I have highlighted in red for you. That's called a local pack. And Google thought, you know what, when you typed in “buy dress shirt”, we really think you want to actually go out even though it's a pandemic, and actually buy the shirt in a store. Now, Google could show this all the way at the bottom of the page, which it does sometimes, but showing it at the top means Google thinks that's the primary reason people have come here. They've come to the results page, they typed in this query to find a physical place to go and search for their shirts. Is that keyword really worth your time, if you don't have a physical listing? If you don't have a physical store? I'm not saying you can't win that keyword. I'm not saying you're not going to get traffic or you're not going to get conversions from that keyword. All I'm saying is if you have a whole bunch of things to do, in theory, that might not be the best place to start. Because Google's telling you, the main intent that people are coming here for is local, is to actually go to a store.
22:05
Mordy: Which by the way, it brings up the SERP features. SERP features are all these box things that you'll see anything but the actual organic results. I'm a big baseball fan. And I love the Yankees. And when you type in “Yankees”, you get above the fold, zero traditional organic results. You get a sports box, you get a knowledge panel to the right, you get a whole slew of actual articles from big name publishers. So understanding SERP features is a major part of doing SEO. And that's a whole lecture unto itself. But for our purposes, what you can do is reverse engineer those as well.
So if I search for a new garage door, and I get this little slew of carousel images, it's called an image box, that kind of tells me something is oh, you know what? Google thinks that users—and Google's using machine learning to figure this out, so Google's pretty good at this—they want to see a whole array of visual images related to garage doors, they want to survey what are the various styles or sizes or options for garage doors. And that means on your page, if you want to rank, you should also try to rank a page here where you can show a lot of images about all the various garage doors that you sell. Maybe a collection page where you have a good page to target with this kind of keyword. And I've seen this a million times over. For example, if you search for like, “New York Yankees jersey”, and even though it's not a place where you can buy a New York Yankees jersey, it’s just, you know, about the Yankees and the history of their jerseys. Every single one of those pages has prominently featured very large images showing off those uniforms. Google put a big old image box on that results page. Whenever you see that image box shows up, that tells you there's an intent to view images. So try to cater to that somehow, if you can.
Also, it means exploring other media formats. If you see a video box show up, a list of videos. First off, that tells you one thing right there, Google's telling you, users might not want to read anything you write, they might want to watch a video instead. By the way, seeing this, even if your page is ranking, you should go after the video because Google's telling you the user might not want to read a page. But even if you're not ranking for this particular keyword, and it's impossible to rank for every keyword you want to. There's so much content out there and Google talks about this, and there's only limited space on the results page. If you see that you're not ranking, maybe create a video and try to get onto the results page with your video instead. That's a great way to try to manipulate your way onto the SERP. Manipulate is a terrible word. At this point. I'm going to turn it back to some questions that we have.
24:36
Liat: Right. So Bradley is asking, “Is it realistic for a small business to organically rank on the first search page without a large budget?
24:47
Mordy: That's a really good question. It all depends. Everything in SEO depends. If you're creating a site and it's your first day out there, no, you're not going to compete with the big brands. And when Google wants something a little bit more authoritative, let's say for a health query, it's very, very hard to compete. It can be hard to compete in general. Again, think of it like a marriage. Google knows these sites, they have many, many pages. It's not about the budget per se, if they have a lot of links pointing to them, Google is very familiar with them. If you see you're having a hard time, that's entirely possible. It means you might want to try going after some long-tail keywords, or some long-tail terms, meaning those kinds of things happen for very broad terms you want to try to rank for “buy a laptop”, you know, there's Amazon and Best Buy and Overstock and eBay, it's very, very difficult. It's very true. That means you might want to go more specific, what's something unique about the laptops that you sell? Or whatever it is that you sell, find something unique that you do differently, that sets you apart, and go after that target audience. Because it's not about getting a lot of traffic, it's about getting the right traffic.
25:54
Liat: Right. Okay, that's really good advice. So Ashley is asking, “How do you do free keyword research? And you know, what would be the best way to start doing that?”
26:08
Mordy: That’s a really good question. So keyword research, I just want to say something about keyword research to start off with. Be careful with keyword research. Keywords have sort of lost their significance in a way. Google's not focused on keywords. Google understands synonyms. Google understands your page is semantically-meaning, Google understands what's on your page, whether you use the target keyword or not.
What you should think about more is topics, right? What topics do I want to address? There's a topic that's really important for my business to address. I should create content for that. Now, there's a lot of ways you can do this, you can go to the Google results page. At the bottom of the page are related searches. And that'll help you see some other things people are searching for. There's sometimes a box called People Also Ask which shows other questions that are related to people looking at your query. There's a bunch of free tools out there, I think, I don't know if they still do or not, but Moz, their Keyword Explorer, offered some free access. Rank Ranger, their Keyword Explorer, just you know, Google Moz, Keyword Explorer, they might give you a couple of free searches every day. There's a tool and I like this tool a lot, it's called [Answer the Public], and it doesn't give you the traditional kind of keyword results that you're looking for, so the search volume and keyword difficulty and all that kind of stuff. But it breaks down the topics. It'll take a topic and show you all the questions people ask around that topic. And that'll give you some really great keyword ideas. And there's another tool, it's also very similar to that it's called, AlsoAsked, you can Google that one as well.
27:34
Liat: That's really great. So I love this event, Mordy. I'm kind of focusing on the topics and also focusing on the intents, right? Like, what are your customers really looking for, and then kind of trying to match those two to each other?
27:46
Mordy: Look, it's really hard if you're writing really well not to use the terms that Google naturally understands as what your content is about.
27:55
Liat: So in that way, actually, Google is making our lives easier, because you don't have to be so mathematical about the keywords, you just need to meet the content that people are looking for.
28:05
Mordy: Correct. And it's a best practice not to get too hung up on the keywords.
28:10
Awesome. So Adam asks, still on the keyword topics, “But then what makes a good keyword? And why are some more powerful than others? And how long should a keyword be?”
28:24
Mordy: Okay. So try to take all of them in order. What makes a good keyword? A good keyword is something—think about it like this, think about it as a match. People are searching for something and you offer something you want to be, you want to have the content available for what you offer, you offer something really unique. People are searching for things that are related to the unique thing that you offer, you want to make sure that you have the content to match that. A good keyword is a keyword that reflects what you offer, and that people who are interested in that will understand. You're going to want to target your audience with the content that you're writing, don't think in terms of the keyword per se, but think about, “What topics do I want people to come to my site for?” and create content for that. I think I'm skipping over one of them.
But how long should a keyword be? So I think there's a little bit of confusion there. There's two ways to think about a keyword. One is a keyword that you enter into Google, that’s the search term, that's a keyword. And then there's the keywords on our page. Really don't think about it like the keyword people are entering, you want to have content on your page that matches up to that. So there's no length of a keyword because you're just writing content to match your user's intent. And there was one in the middle. There's a question in the middle. I totally forgot.
29:40
Liat: Yeah, so the other one was, “Why are some keywords more powerful than others?”
29:45
Mordy: So that depends what you mean. If you mean certain keywords get more more searches every month. Like for example, if you search for “buy a laptop”, that's a very high search volume keyword, getting probably thousands upon thousands of people searching for that every single day. However, there are keywords that are maybe, you know, less powerful in the sense of the number of people searching for them. But they may speak to what your business offers. For example, if you offer, you know, really slick, awesome, you know, cool artistic laptops. So when people search for cool artistic laptops, so that's not a keyword that'll get thousands upon thousands of searches every single day. But it's a keyword that can generate a lot of traffic to your site, where people will buy the product. And it's not about traffic, it's about making money. So a powerful keyword to me, is a keyword that helps you make money.
30:38
Liat. Right. So basically, sometimes going more niche or more specific, even though you might have less volume, you might end up ranking higher and finding the most relevant audience for your product.
30:51
Mordy: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And Google, by the way, is encouraging you to go specific and go niche in a lot of different ways. I'm not going to get into it here. But that's the trend that Google wants to create. Align with Google, that's the best thing you can do.
31:05
Liat: Alright, cool. So I think those are the questions at the moment Mordy.
31:08
Mordy: Awesome. So let's get back. So where do we get started with content? Now we understand user intent, we understand how to, you know, get a better understanding of the various subcategories of user intent or of informational content. But there's, you know, there could be a couple of snags. How do you actually get started with content?
It's really more than user intent, I don't want you to think of—okay, let me go and analyze user intent on the results page and that's how I'll start my journey of creating content. User intent, or analyzing user intent, the way we're talking about it, really fits into another, more broader and really more powerful thing, which I'll get to in a second.
It's also not keyword research, which we just spoke about in those questions. Keyword research is not, it's really not a good place to start in terms of creating content. It's good at helping you maybe refine that process, or maybe refocus you, or maybe helping you find some new opportunities. But the one thing, the best place—the only place in my mind—to start with creating content, is understanding your user. And it's being empathetic. It's understanding what your users are going through, understanding what's bothering them, understanding what's helpful to them, understanding the situations that they find themselves in, and creating content to meet that need. That is the one place, you want to understand the user, and you want to create content for that.
And if you want to refine that process and get ideas, understand that in more concrete terms, so then yes, you can go and you can look at [that] results page, and you can break down user intent, and so forth, and so forth. But it all starts with understanding the user. I don't want you to think this is where… It starts with user intent, it starts with targeting your audience by understanding yourself and understanding your audience and understanding the product that you offer, and how that fits in, or the service that you offer, how that fits in. And using things like breaking down user intent to help guide you a little bit along the way. And with that, we're going to turn it over once again, for some more questions.
33:04
Liat: So Shanika wants to know, “How do you go about targeting a specific audience?”
33:11
Mordy: That is like the million dollar question, right? To me, it starts with understanding yourself, like understanding your product. Every product has an identity, every business has an identity, every service has an identity that makes you stand out and makes you different [from] all the other people doing this. And understanding yourself and who, what is my product? What's its identity? What's my service? What's its identity? And saying, who does this speak to? What kind of person does it speak to? What problems might the person who's interested in this have? What problems does this solve? So you're understanding yourself, and you're understanding yourself in the context of understanding your audience, again, being empathetic and understanding where they're coming from, what their situation is, so that you can create the content to meet that. And so you can showcase your product and service in the context of helping people solve their problems.
34:03
Liat: Right. And I think here, like some of those other tips you gave before, in like, looking at other brands or products that are appearing in those search results and looking at the kind of content they're creating. You can also go and look at their social channels, see what their customers are talking to them about. Look at common questions your customers ask you. There are a lot of ways for you to get deeper into your customer mindset and really understand what you know, what's bothering them, or what do they need?
34:33
Mordy: 100%.
34:37
Liat: Cool, so Kwan is asking, “How can I optimize SEO for blogs? And does putting YouTube videos on my page help or hurt SEO?”
34:48
Mordy: In all likelihood, it probably helps and that's what your users were looking for. I mean, if you're speaking to your audiences, you know, who are visually impaired that maybe a YouTube video is not the best thing to show. But all things being equal, if you understand your audience, and it's helpful to them, then yeah, YouTube videos are great.
In terms of optimizing your blog, so there are some basic things you can do like the page structure that I mentioned before—having a title [on] your page, using H2s, using H3s, bullet points, lists, tables, images, all these things to offer structure to your page to make it really easy.
Think about [it] like this, whatever makes it really easy for a user to understand your content, also makes it really easy for a search engine to understand your content. And the best thing you can do is just write, I'll quote Google here, “write really helpful content for your users”. And you know, look, put effort into it. If it's a matter of writing, spending an extra hour writing, an extra couple of paragraphs, do it. Write something that's really authoritative, and really substantial.
35:53
Liat: Right. So Dale says, “My industry, which happens to be a florist, is very competitive online. So how do I actually get myself listed in the top searches?”
36:05
Mordy: So again, I mean, so if you're a local business, and you have a physical listing, or your service area, business, please make sure to set up a Google My Business profile. That's an absolute must, you won't, things like the local pack that I showed you, that map with the three listings, you won't be able to get into that unless you have set up a Google My Business listing. So please definitely do that and fill it out completely. There's a lot of features there, explore, do some research, there's all sorts of features you can take advantage of to really fill out that listing. And definitely do that. If you're competing in a really competitive industry, it's the same advice across the board, I'll say. Find the thing that you do better. Find the thing—10x it, find the thing that you do differently. Find the thing that differentiates you, find the thing that makes you stand out, and push that to the max. Target that, showcase that, be proud of that, put it out on social media, put out content, whatever you can do to promote that aspect of your business, do that.
37:01
Liat: Awesome. So I'm gonna say Dale here for talking about florists, definitely stuff that's super helpful is anything around how you're doing shipping and delivery. Maybe the kinds of bouquets or flowers that you're offering. Again, going back to what Mordy is saying, figure out like, what your specialty is, and focus on that. So Felicia wants to know, “How do you find your targeted audience?”
37:29
Mordy: That's a very good question. Firstly, like I mentioned before, it really starts from your own brand's identity—what do you do? Like what again, what differentiates you? And who does that speak to? Right? If once you understand who that speaks to, now you've sort of have a really good starting point, who is this helpful for? Well, there's your audience. And then you can do things like go to the results page, see what your competitors are doing. Do keyword research, investigate the questions that relate to the topics. Like if you go to, let's say, [Answer the Public], that's a free tool that I mentioned before, and you see all of the questions related to the one question you put in, you can really start getting a sense of: What's the profile of this person? What's the pain points of this person that I'm trying to target? And then take it from there.
38:13
Liat: Great. So we have one more question here. And that's from Alan, and he wants to know, “we're getting a decent amount of traffic. But I feel like nothing is converting or people are not adding products to the cart.”
38:30
Mordy: So that speaks to you know—SEOs love talking about ranking and traffic. And none of those things actually matter. What matters is, you know, dollars in your wallet or whatever currency you're selling in. That tells me off the bat without looking at the site, because I can't say without looking at the site, but most probably, you're getting the wrong traffic. You're ranking well. You're showing in the organic results. For people who are—you're not really speaking to, they get to your page and the product doesn't speak to them for whatever reason.
That's what I mean, like if you have a million people coming to your site, and none of them are interested in buying your product, is it really worth having a million people come to your site? Versus hey, I can have 100 people come to my site and all of them are interested in buying my product. So it might mean refining your content offering and trying to target the people who will actually buy like your target audience, or finding your conception of your target audience.
39:25
Liat: That's great advice. So yeah, I would definitely dig in deeper there. I think try and talk if you can to some of the people coming to the site. Maybe add, like a live chat to your website so you can engage a little bit with the people who are visiting, and then try and understand, like, what's off there, what's not meeting their expectation once they're getting there.
39:44
Mordy: That could be, that could very well be a UX issue. This happens all the time because we make the site we think it's very intuitive. But I've heard examples of time and time again, when the user actually goes to the site and they try to buy something. There's a hitch that you didn't really realize was there because to you it all makes sense.
40:02
Liat: Right. So we do have other courses, go check out the eCommerce School about how to like optimize your product pages and optimize your store for conversion. That is definitely a whole different conversation. But I think Mordy gave you two great directions. So either you're bringing the wrong people to the site, or people get to the site and something on the site is not working. So try and figure out which of those two issues you're suffering from, for sure. Okay, great. So I think Mordy that's it for now.
40:30
Mordy: So actually, the last question is a great segue into this. Because, you know, you can bring traffic to your site, but it might not speak to what you're actually doing. And this speaks to some ways that you might be misusing all the knowledge that I've shared so far around user intent. Because it's a little bit again, more complicated than we've already made it. So I'm sorry to add more complication to it, but I'll explain it in a really easy to understand way. And it's all about understanding what site identity is, and why it matters so much.
So first off, what is site identity? So site identity is pretty much like it sounds. It's when users or Google—in this case, we're talking about search engines—come to your site. It's their ability to understand what your purpose is. What is your site about? Who are you? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish with this site? Think about it like this. Imagine you walk into a doctor's office, and you show up, you go to the reception area, and you ask, can I see the doctor? And the receptionist says, “Absolutely. Would you like to see the doctor about your health problem? Or do you want to buy a new car?” Like, what? You sell new cars? You’re a doctor. You'd be very confused, like, what's going on here? Am I in the right place? Not only that, you might start to question how authoritative or how good of a doctor are you if you have to sell cars on the side.
So when you don't have a strong topical focus, it confuses search engines just like it confuses people. It tells them well, I don't really know what your site is about. I'm not really sure what you're doing here. How am I supposed to rank you? And even if I can understand, you know, you're doing this and you're doing that, those two things don't align. Why are you doing that? Do you not understand? Are you not really understanding what you're supposed to be doing? Maybe your site's not really trustworthy. And if I'm, again, if I'm a search engine, why would I rank you? And if you don't think Google is doing that sort of complex thinking, it most definitely is.
I and other SEOs have been tracking this since around 2018 when Google started doing this, but luckily for you, on February 8 2021, Google announced that yeah, we're doing this. Google said, we can tell you, we can tell rather, if you have a strong focus, if you have a good reputation around one content area or one topic. And SEOs will often complain, “Oh, an update came around, I lost all my keywords”. But when they dig into it, they'll start to realize, yeah, you lost all of the keywords around topic X but topic Y, you're fine. Because Google says, why are you writing about topic X, it has nothing to do with your site. And you don't really want to go that far. Because if Google's doing that, it's already raising red flags as a search engine. You want to stay focus on one topic. And one topic can be very, very broad. You can talk about SEO, and there's a ton of you what you could talk about SEO.
But it's having a strong topical focus. And for content creation, it means you want to create content that Google thinks is really authoritative. And having a singular focus or a singular identity helps you be authoritative. Just like our doctor office example, it also in turn or the flip side of that means that Google says that you're trustworthy. If you're authoritative, that means I can trust you. And in order to do those two things—in order to be authoritative around a given topic, around the topic that you talk about in your website—you have to be disciplined. It means you have to stay focused on the topics that are important to you.
So you might reverse engineer the SERP, you might take a look and say, hey, there's all this great opportunity to read all this informational content. But it might not speak to what you do on your site. If your site is about why reviews are terrible. And comparisons are terrible. And you're doing a comparison review because you see the chance to you know, grab that keyword, that clearly makes no sense. And that will confuse Google. And it'll impede Google's ability to rank you. If Google doesn't trust you, if Google doesn't think you're authoritative, it simply will not rank you. Obviously, you also have to be relevant to the keyword. I'm not saying no. But basically, what if you take anything away from what I'm telling you today—and it speaks to a lot of the questions that I'm hearing from the Q&A—I want you to think of your content and your website as your brand. Imagine a reader because they are not users, they're readers. They're real people, they have real feelings and they understand things. They're people and they come to your site, and they see a blog post that maybe you wrote. And it really doesn't have anything to do with your site. They look at the name of the site. They look at your homepage maybe, or they saw the description on the Google results page, and they understand what your website's about really quickly. You can really understand what a website's about very, very, very quickly.
45:08
Mordy: And they get to the page and they’re like, why did this website write this? What would it say about you as a brand? Does that come off as you have you know, you have it all together? Probably not. Does it come off as very authoritative? Not really. Do people want to trust you? Not really. By staying focused and by thinking of your brand, or your content as your brand and thinking, what perception will people walk away with after they come to my site and see my content, you'll automatically and naturally create the content that Google is looking for. You'll create content that's focused, you'll create content that's authoritative, and you'll create content that's trustworthy. So please think of your content as your brand. And think about the perception that users will walk away with from looking at your content because it's exactly what search engines are doing.
By the way, since we're talking about writing a lot of content, it's really helpful to do audits at this point. And site audits can show you lots of different things, they can tell you, maybe you have a 404 page, those are the warning sections, the error sections, I mean. In the warning sections, they'll tell you a lot about your content. And this is one from Ahrefs, it's free, I don’t know if I will share the link, but you can Google it. It's a free site audit, it's really simple to use, they’ll walk you through it. And you can see, hey, maybe they're missing alt text. So alt text, by the way, is the text that describes your image. So it's for the visually impaired. So they have a reader, reading the page out loud. When they get to an image, it'll read what the image is about. Google uses that to understand images. It'll tell you if you're missing that, it'll tell you maybe you're missing, you're maybe your meta description is just, you know, too thin, there's not enough there or whatever it is. It'll give you a lot of information about the content that you're writing. And as I implore you to do if you're writing a lot of content, picking up on these things can be really helpful.
Now, if you really get into writing content, and you take it to the nth degree, you might want to go with a tool that's really all about this, all about crawling your site and finding all of these problems. Personally, I use Deepcrawl for this. There are other tools that do a really prolific understanding or breakdown of what's on your page. For example, Deepcrawl will pull out and tell you, hey your page is too thin, there's not enough content there. Now, by the way, I want you to be careful because it might be a product page. And for this particular product, there might not be a lot of content that you can put there. Though, generally speaking, have a description, the specs, tables, all sorts of content you can put there. But take it with a grain of salt, make sure that the warning that they're telling you about actually makes sense. But they'll tell you, maybe you have duplicate titles, if you have a product page, or if you have—and then you have a product blog post, it's entirely possible that the title tag, the title, you're telling Google to show in the results page, is too similar. And that might confuse Google. It's too similar content. You might have duplicate content.
Imagine this, you write a product page or service page, and you write a blog post about that product or service. It's highly possible that both of those pages rank on the results. When someone Googles something, they see your blog posts, and they see your product, your product page. If it's a commerce-focused query, do you really want your blog post showing up first? No, you really would much rather have your hey, you're happy with the blog post, but you really much rather have that product page show up first. So a tool like Deepcrawl will tell you when that might be happening. It'll tell you theoretically, when you have duplicate content. And I've totally done this. I wrote a blog post 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post last week, I didn't realize like the post that I wrote a long time ago is really similar to the one I just wrote. You might want to consolidate that, you might want to get rid of that old post, you might want to repurpose that old post. So a tool like Deepcrawl will crawl your site and find a lot of these issues for you.
So to sort of sum it all up, I want you to think beyond purely transactional content if you're a product or an eCommerce website for your products or your services. Google has multiple intents that it's catering to. It's catering to people who are searching for multiple reasons. So take advantage of that. Know what's out there, and take advantage of that. Use the SERP to understand what Google wants. And don't get too hung up on the keyword research in this whole process. Really look at the SERP, look at—target your audience by understanding your users' pain points, and use that as a starting point, not keyword research. Your keyword research should maybe refine that process or find new opportunities. Give your informational content a topical focus that we talked about. Why? Because you need to create site identity with your content. And I think that sums it up for me.
49:57
Liat: Awesome. So we do have a few more questions for you Mordy. Let me pull them up. Okay. So Melissa is asking, “How can I stay on top of the ever-changing algorithm?”
50:13
Mordy: That's like the million dollar question. So yes, Google does release updates all the time. And Google, by the way, will say, there may be nothing you have done wrong with your page. And you may not rank anymore. It's just there's a lot of content out there, there's limited opportunity. And for whatever reasons, the pages that are ranking are perhaps more relevant, and you might not be able to do anything about it, depending on what your site is. Now, that said, if I can offer a best practice, and if I can talk about the overall trends of the major updates that have happened since 2018, it's to create nuance. Really, particularly for blog content, but also for your product pages, create really nuanced, really specific, really targeted content.
Create content that comes off really authoritative, that Google really feels comfortable trusting, and that Google knows that you're an expert. Hey, look, if you're writing about a particular topic over and over and over and over again, and you're writing a lot of really great content, and your product pages are really in depth, there's a lot of information on there, from shipping to spec to whatever it is, Google’s going to look at that and say, that's a really authoritative website, I can really trust that website. They're an expert on their content matter. That's the general trend of where things are going. And that sort of future proof you from the algorithm updates. Of course, any given update at any given time, for any given keyword. Who knows, but in general, that's my answer.
51:34
Liat: Right. And also, I would add here, Mordy, is that all of this advice that Mordy's giving, and all of these best practices are an ongoing effort, right? Content is not a one time thing. Right? So you need to keep working on this all the time. Keep going back to the SERP, keep going back to the keywords and you know, keep doing the work.
51:54
Mordy: Imagine you're you're you're on the hunt, you're trying to figure out how do I best improve? How do I find new opportunities? And by the way, things are always changing in SEO, and the results pages are always changing. So definitely, there's no end, just keep at it.
52:08
Liat: So Richard is asking, “How do you encourage conversion or purchase from a site visitor on the site?”
52:16
Mordy: That's a really good question. Aside from making sure that your target audience is coming to your site, I will go back to what I talked about before with the UX. Look, it's really easy to mess this up. Because again, we are very familiar with the sites. But have somebody, it could be a family member, have somebody who's not familiar with your website at all, try to buy something. And do this multiple times and survey people and take back that feedback, and try to make that user experience really seamless.
52:44
Liat: Right. I agree. And like one of the things that I always point out to people is, you know, we sometimes forget in eCommerce, that, you know, people don't get to interact with you, your business or your store or your product. Right, they're really buying online. So you need to know that your website and your product pages have to do that work for you.
So, imagine if somebody came to your physical store. You'd greet them, your staff would greet them, they get to see all your products, they pick them up, touch them, feel them, smell them, try them on, whatever it is. So when they're coming to your website, they don't get the opportunity to do that. So, make your pages work for you. You want to invest in images, you want to invest in product descriptions. Mordy said it before like, literally list all the relevant information that you need there, whether that's ingredients, sizes, charts, whatever it is that helps people understand what they're buying.
I really love having reviews, especially customer reviews with images, like I know as a shopper, I look at those all the time, like I want to see, okay, great, the shirt looks pretty in the picture. But I want to see somebody who actually tried that shirt on, so now I know what it looks like on a real human being. So think about things like that, that can help your shoppers understand your products and what they're buying. And Mordy, JJ says, “How do you integrate SEO search with social media? Like Facebook or Instagram.”
54:17
Mordy: So as somebody who loves social media, it really works hand-in-hand, it really does. Look, you want people—you want Google to know that your site exists, Google to understand that you're, you know a player in the niche that you're in. And one way to do that is to get people talking about you. Google, by the way, not only tracks links, but it also tracks mentions—so mention your brand. So if you're out on social media, and you're sharing content, and you're showing yourself to be an authority and expert in whatever wonderful thing that you are within your industry, that will get people talking and people will create content and mention you—perhaps link to you. That’ll create buzz on social that can translate and spill over onto the web and that spillover, Google picks up on that
54:57
Liat: Amazing so Samantha says, “How do you make your website appear on the first page of Google search results, Mordy?”
55:07
Mordy: It's about targeting that content, going very specific. Again, if you're going to be very broad and try to bring in that huge audience, that doesn't necessarily work. To get to the top of the results page, you want to have targeted content, nuanced content, content that's very
highly-detailed, highly-specific towards a very highly-specific audience. And I'll tell you, like, I'm trying to think when it was, maybe even a year ago, maybe less, Google started releasing this filter at the top of the results page. Let's use Google to show where to go on vacation. So Google will show a filter, fall, winter, spring, summer, and even though you will rank, you know number one for where to go on vacation, if a user has a particular season in mind, they're going to click on that filter. And they're going to go to a whole new results page about going away in the summer. So Google is pushing users to be more specific, and to go to more specific kinds of pages. So you should try to target the trend and try to write really specific, highly-targeted content.
56:07
Liat: Awesome. So actually, already, we're getting a repeating question from the audience that they would like you to please repeat the name of the auditing site that you recommended.
56:18
Mordy: Sure. So there's two—Ahrefs, they have a free site audit tool, and Deepcrawl, they don't have a free tool, but their tool is only about site audits. So Ahrefs has multiple things for SEO, they track your rank, they track your backlinks, and they do offer a site audit option. But in general, when the SEO tools do everything, that's great. And it's good up to a point. And it could be very good for your site. I'm not saying no at all. But if you want to go and take it to the professional level, that's what you're doing. That's what you're interested in. So then a tool like Deepcrawl is only about site auditing, and they offer a much more full and complete site audit.
56:59
Liat: Thank you. Sure. So Chris asks, “How effective is on-page SEO versus off-page SEO?”
57:08
Mordy: That's a good question. So just to explain, because people don't understand—on-page SEO means changing things to your content itself, like your title tags, or your titles themselves, your headers on the page, the content on your page. Internally linking, remember, I mentioned it before, you want to link to the pages that are most important to your website because that's a very strong signal to Google that, hey, this page is really important to this website. We're going to crawl it more often. And it helps us better understand the website.
Off-page SEO generally means links. And I'll say this in general, the push—and it all depends on the market, in English links are less important. When you're talking about other markets where Google has a little bit less content. So those links become in general, more of a factor. But generally speaking, links are an indirect signal. That's Google saying, we don't really know what's on this page. We can't fully understand it. But so many people are recommending it by linking to it, so it must be good. But as Google gets better at actually understanding the content itself, it needs to rely less on indirect signals, like links. I'm not saying links are not important. They are very important. But content is always the most important thing. On-page is always the most important thing. Think about it like this: Is anybody coming to your website because you have a great backlink profile? No, they're coming to your site, because they want to consume your content. So your content is the product, always make sure that the content is in focus, and then worry about things like links.
58:38
Liat: Great. So we have one more question here also relating to links. So if you are doing links, what's the best way to develop backlinks for your site?
58:49
Mordy: So never ever, ever buy it. People will offer you to buy links. Never buy links, it's against Google's guidelines, it can get your site in a little bit of trouble or a lot of trouble. The best way to think about links is naturally. First off, the best way to create links is to write 10x content by running content that it's really helpful to people, really interesting to people, sharing them on social media, and getting links naturally that way. But you can also be strategic about it. Imagine you're a florist. And as I mentioned before, there are florists. And you do a lot of wedding work. Maybe there's some wedding venues or wedding halls that you often work with and say, hey, can I write a blog post about how to do the best flower colors for your wedding? I don't know. And write that post. And that will link back to your website. That's a natural way of offering some great content or just hey, wedding venue, I know we always work together. Would you mind listing me as one of your recommended florists? And you're building a natural backlink that way.
But you know, the other thing is—don't worry about the number of backlinks. Google actually came out last week and said this even though it's been true for a long time, and everybody really knew it, but no one wanted to admit it. It's not the number of links, it's the relevancy of the links. In other words, if you're a florist and you have a car dealership linking to you over and over and over again, that's kind of like why, even though they may be the best, most authoritative website ever, you want other related venues like a wedding venue, a photographer, other florists, flower sites, you want them linking to you. So try to get links that are related to what you do.
1:00:19
Liat: Amazing. Thank you so, so much, Mordy. We really, really appreciate your time. Great advice. I know that people have really enjoyed the session, and we will invite Mordy to come back, don't worry. But we do have some other great news for you. Wix and Deepcrawl recently partnered to create this great eCommerce SEO guide. That's another resource that you can download and use to work on the SEO for your eCommerce sites. So please go ahead and do that. Please join our Facebook group, join our community, you can connect with each other as well as our team there. We both thank you very much for joining us today. And hope to see you again at our next workshop.