# SEO and Growth Marketing for Startups A revenue-driven Acquisition & Conversion Consultancy for Founder-led Digital Companies. I am 43 years old father of 3 kids, owner of 2 cats, 1 dog and a happy husband too.

Bohdan Lytvyn, Growth Marketing and SEO Strategy

One of 60 consultancy customer testimonials

I've been involved in Growth Marketing and SEO for more than 17 years already and hold several degrees (including MBA). I work as a transformation partner for the founder-led Digital Companies using the brand of [Nertis](https://www.nertis.agency/en/). *** > My "Problem": I am consumed with desire to solve problems and puzzles. > > My Outcomes: I make useful interventions that earn traffic, gain money and defend money too. **My Point of View**: 1. I make things Simpler vs. Complex, 2. I don’t simply answer the question you ask. I address the problem your business actually faces. 3. Structural Honesty: No Vanity metrics. *** {% content-ref url="/pages/7bdEPrA8vHuqmTTAvsr8" %} [CV](/as-a-person/cv) {% endcontent-ref %} ***I take new projects***** as consultant** and focus on the following issues: * Growth strategy consulting & market sizing. * eCommerce SEO strategy development or refinement. * eCommerce SEO strategy training for teams. * Content Marketing, Blog SEO. * Tech SEO consulting, [SEO audits](/services/seo-audit). * Fault finding & issue analysis. * Programmatic SEO consulting. * Traffic recovery. * Best practices, Google Compliance assurance. {% hint style="info" %} ***Main scenarios*** how you'd know you may need my services: {% endhint %}
New (or far weaker) site in a very competitive search market, with the main challenge being resources prioritisation for cost effective and fast enough impact.
Large bureaucratic organisation requiring strong skills to secure resources (vs other areas) to get execution support from other teams fast enough to compete with other players.
Large dynamic sites with multi-millions URLs (marketplaces, e-commerce) where you need to execute at scale, for which a programmatic approach becomes a need for cost effectiveness, etc.
A site with a business model that is not (directly) aligned with the organic search findability requirements, hence having to establish product presence alternatives ( workarounds to develop)
Dealing with a Web product that a Google feature (or filter) is commoditising, hence giving by default less visibility/traffic to. You’ll need to compete directly with them, etc.

Dealing with "Frankensites",

Multi-platform and/or multi-site infrastructures - often with different teams etc where getting "fixes" in can be a nightmare.


“Bot Blindness” or when someone thinks of building an entire system in JS only, using Buttons instead of link text anchors, all "text" is in SVG or images ... or Flash etc.



Site Audit (rather than "SEO Audit"). Covering things like Content Performance, ROI etc and potentially restructuring a site ... often requires data-skills as well as political acumen.

Fault finding on complex sites. Between Platform, Server, CDN and JS ... finding where a problem is being caused can be a problem itself. Knowing how to trace and deduce the source is hard.



This site will hopefully allow to find answers about my Services, [Cases Studies](/portfolio/case-studies) and Problems I've solved.
How to use this site? This one is designed to be read linearly, so start with my Vision & Focus and work down from there!
### Stories from my past clients
Cover image

Social list app: customer acquisition plan

/files/ueFdls6p23wU9gILNPsk/pages/0HaQc3V4uAr1ieumSdmj
Cincopa: SEO, Content Strategy and UX research, etc/files/G9CQATzlyHQkaTr0A2Io/pages/rtYWpeaboFcMdNJu6Y9b
More case studies can be found on my Nertis site (click here)/files/eAUYivmDe6EgnkG9Fh6uhttps://www.nertis.agency/en/case-studies
# The Crawling Lab # Large site owner's guide to managing the crawl budget: Sinopsis with Comments Sinopsis with comments: Google’s Large site owner's guide to managing your crawl budget Original document’s web address: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget\&sa=D\&source=editors\&ust=1730638503452709\&usg=AOvVaw0YUB10xyz6wQ2MaOjabCrA) ### Sinopsis Crawl budget management is mostly relevant for the large sites (+1m pages). Decision on indexing is taken along the following pipeline: each page must be evaluated, [consolidated](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls\&sa=D\&source=editors\&ust=1730638503453878\&usg=AOvVaw3UhUIQqZcRCfq94vCZPAv7), and assessed to determine whether it will be indexed after it has been crawled. Crawl budget is determined by two main elements: 1. crawl capacity limit and 2. crawl demand. The crawl capacity limit is based on two factors: * Crawl health: a function of site’s server response time and server errors. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less. * Google's crawling limits: a function of available crawl capacities with Google. Crawl demand has the following factors: * Perceived inventory: the factor that site owners can positively control the most, including absence of duplicates, pages unwanted for crawling for some other reason (removed, unimportant, and so on). * Popularity: URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our index. * Staleness: Google wants to recrawl documents frequently enough to pick up any changes. Additionally, site-wide events like site moves may trigger an increase in crawl demand in order to reindex the content under the new URLs. Taking crawl capacity and crawl demand together, Google defines a site's crawl budget as the set of URLs that Googlebot can and wants to crawl. Crawl budget allocation is predicted by the popularity, user value, uniqueness, and serving capacity. Management of the URL inventory is seen as the one of the most efficient ways to maximise the crawling capacities. Best practices of management of URL inventory include steps to: * Consolidate duplicate content through specifying canonical versions of the similar or duplicate pages. Eliminate duplicate content to focus crawling on unique content rather than unique URLs. * Block crawling of URLs using robots.txt. * Include \ tag if your site includes updated content. * Make your pages efficient to load. If Google can load and render your pages faster, they might be able to read more content from your site. * Monitor your site crawling. Monitor whether your site had any availability issues during crawling, and look for ways to make your crawling more efficient. * Avoid Including URLs in your sitemaps that you don't want to appear in Search. This can waste your crawl budget on pages that you don't want indexed. *** {% hint style="info" %} Don't use noindex, as Google will still request, but then drop the page when it sees a noindex meta tag or header in the HTTP response, wasting crawling time. Use robots.txt to block pages or resources that you don't want Google to crawl at all (vs temporarily re-allocate crawl budget for other pages). Google won't shift this newly available crawl budget to other pages unless Google is already hitting your site's serving limit. {% endhint %} *** As a way to improve your site’s crawling efficiency: **Specify content changes with HTTP status codes** You can send a 304 (Not Modified) HTTP status code and no response body for any Googlebot request if the content hasn't changed since Googlebot last visited the URL. This will save your server processing time and resources, which may indirectly improve crawl efficiency. **Hide URLs that you don't want in search results** Faceted navigation and session identifiers: Faceted navigation is typically duplicate content from the site; session identifiers and other URL parameters that simply sort or filter the page don't provide new content. Use robots.txt to block faceted navigation pages. *** ### Questions and Answers Question: The closer your content is to the home page the more important it is to Google. Answer: Your site's home page is often the most important page on your site, and so pages linked directly to the home page may be seen as more important, and therefore crawled more often. However, this doesn't mean that these pages will be ranked more highly than other pages on your site. Question: Alternate URLs and embedded content count in the crawl budget. Answer: Generally, any URL that Googlebot crawls will count towards a site's crawl budget. Alternate URLs, like AMP or hreflang, as well as embedded content, such as CSS and JavaScript, including XHR fetches, may have to be crawled and will consume a site's crawl budget. Question: The nofollow rule affects crawl budget. Answer: Any URL that is crawled affects crawl budget, so even if your page marks a URL as nofollow, it can still be crawled if another page on your site, or any page on the web, doesn't label the link as nofollow. Question: I can use noindex to control crawl budget. Answer: Any URL that is crawled affects crawl budget, and Google has to crawl the page in order to find the noindex rule. However, noindex is there to help you keep things out of the index. If you want to ensure that those pages don't end up in Google's index, continue using noindex and don't worry about the crawl budget. It's also important to note that if you remove URLs from Google's index with noindex or otherwise, Googlebot can focus on other URLs on your site, which means noindex can indirectly free up some crawl budget for your site in the long run. Question: URL versioning is a good way to encourage Google to recrawl my pages. Answer: Using a versioned URL for your page in order to entice Google to crawl it again sooner will probably work, but often this is not necessary, and will waste crawl resources if the page is not actually changed. If you do use versioned URLs to indicate new content, we recommend that you only change the URL when the page content has changed meaningfully. ### Comments **Google determines the best crawl rate based on the crawl demand** (more than on crawl capacity). So, improving your site availability won't necessarily increase your crawl budget. Google uses the term **Popularity** to define URLs that they want to crawl more than others. This is to say, Clicks and Impressions must predict the frequency of crawls. Another predicting factor is URL depth, i.e. pages linked directly to the home page may be seen as more important, and therefore crawled more often. Google emphasises that **crawling does not equal indexing**, yet, one of the biggest factors of crawl efficiency - Popularity - is directly predicted on indexing, etc. Google only wants to crawl high quality content, so it may be inferred that pages with the highest crawl frequency can be seen as the most high quality (valuable). Indirect ways to improve crawl efficiency include: * Using *last mod* tag * Using noindex in HTML tag (though it’s recommended to use robots.txt thereto), etc. # SEO Questions from Business Owners # What is the ROI of SEO: A financial statement example Bonjour, les amis! It's Bogdan here, welcoming you to our new series aimed at addressing SEO questions from business owners. {% embed url="" %} Today, we're diving into a topic that's been on the minds of many—what is the ROI (Return on Investment) of SEO? If you've searched online for answers, you know they're hard to come by. I believe I have a clear perspective on this that I'd like to share with you. ### SEO vs. PPC: The Cost Efficiency Factor For small businesses, customer acquisition cost through SEO is typically 20% less compared to pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns like Google AdWords. To illustrate, if you spend 100 euros or dollars to acquire a customer via PPC, opting for SEO can save you at least 20% on these costs. This translates into substantial savings for small businesses. ### A Financial Breakdown: The Solar Panel Distributor Example Consider a solar panel distributor earning 500 euros per sale. With fixed annual operations costs of 275,000 euros, you'd sell or install around 1,000 panels yearly to reach a revenue of 500,000 euros. The acquisition cost under PPC would be 100 euros per customer, resulting in a gross profit margin of 25% or 125 euros per unit. When SEO traffic is introduced to this business model: 1\. Reduction in Customer Acquisition Cost: By integrating SEO, acquisition costs drop to 80 euros per customer. 2\. Impact on Fixed and Variable Costs: With stable fixed costs, acquiring more customers spreads these costs out over a larger base, effectively reducing the per-customer fixed cost burden. 3\. Increase in Gross Profit Margin: For every 10% shift to SEO traffic, there's an estimated 3% rise in gross profit margin; translating to an additional 1% or closer financial gain. For example, moving from 100% PPC to incorporating 10% SEO traffic shifts your gross profit margin from 25% to approximately 26%. While a full transition to SEO alone is improbable, it exemplifies how SEO contributes to profitability. Adding up 10 percent of SEO traffic to your current traffic portfolio that is made of PPC or paid advertising would increase your gross profit margin by nearly 1 percent in absolute numbers and almost 4 percent in effectiveness to your business. ### Conclusion: The SEO Advantage To conclude, incorporating 10% SEO traffic into a predominantly PPC strategy can increase your gross profit margin by almost 1% in absolute terms, and approximately 4% in relative effectiveness. This makes SEO a viable complement to PPC in enhancing your business's financial performance. Feel encouraged to reach out with any questions or comments. You can find my contact details below. Thank you for tuning in—until next time! Feel free to let me know if you need any more changes or further assistance! # How to gain quick wins in SEO? Bonjour, les amis. Bohdan here. Today's question: How to gain quick wins in SEO? {% embed url="" %} If you're a business owner on a journey to enhance your SEO strategy, understanding the importance of quick wins is crucial. Quick wins not only instil confidence but also provide a tangible starting point to propel your efforts. This blog post delves into effective strategies for achieving these quick wins through an understanding of the SEO funnel. ### Understanding the SEO Funnel The concept of the SEO funnel is integral to gaining quick wins. The funnel comprises five essential elements: 1\. Discoverability: The number of pages or units of content discovered. 2\. Crawling: The amount of content that search engines can crawl. 3\. Indexing: The volume of content indexed by search engines. 4\. Content Serving: The number of times content is served in Google search results. 5\. Conversions: The impressions, clicks, and conversions that align with your business goals. Optimising each component with a holistic approach to the funnel is crucial for sustainable success. ### SEO Quick wins for Category Leaders Category leaders, who dominate up to 70% of traffic and revenue in specific categories, must refine their approach within the SEO funnel. Often, the focus should be on eliminating pages that waste the crawling budget and deliver low conversions. By analysing logs, you can identify frequently crawled documents and conversions, allowing you to prioritise appropriately. For instance, Product Detail Pages (PDPs) typically exert a heavy load on crawl budgets without significant traffic returns. De-indexing non-performing pages or reducing page rank can improve the efficiency of your SEO efforts. As seen in many leading e-commerce websites, reallocating resources from PDPs can result in notable improvements. ### Quick wins Strategies for 'Wannabe' Category Leaders Websites aspiring to become category leaders, or those who perceive themselves as better alternatives, need to differentiate themselves through a greater variety of keywords. By diversifying keywords across search intents—informational, transactional, brand-related, and more—sites can carve out a distinct niche. Focusing on the unique needs and search behaviours of potential customers can reveal keyword opportunities that category leaders might overlook. These variations are where your quick wins will emerge, setting the stage for sustained growth and eventual market leadership. ### Quick wins Niche Websites: Standing Out Niche websites must leverage their brand identity to edge out competition from other potential category leaders. Quick wins can be secured by reducing content duplication across site pages. Pay close attention to titles and headings (like H1 tags) to prevent redundancy. Additionally, scrutinise your webpage templates to identify and minimise repetitive elements that might inflate similarity scores, thereby enhancing distinctness across your site. ### Quick wins Micro Websites: Laying the Foundations For micro or emerging websites, fostering external links to authoritative sites is a strategic quick win. By linking out to high-profile, authoritative websites within your field, you can enhance your SEO credibility. This tactic significantly boosts your online presence with relatively minimal effort. Implementing these quick-win strategies according to your business’s unique size and objectives can significantly enhance your SEO strategy. Whether you’re consolidating a leading position or breaking into a competitive market, these tailored approaches can streamline your path to increased visibility and conversions. # Can I do SEO on 500$ per month? Bonjour, les amis. Bohdan here. Today's question: Can I do SEO on 500$ per month? {% embed url="" %} Today, I'm addressing a practical yet frequently asked question: "Can I effectively perform SEO with just $500 per month?" The short answer is yes. However, the real issue lies not in the amount of money but in the traditional approach adopted by many SEO agencies. ### Understanding the Challenge with SEO Agencies budgeting Typically, SEO agencies invest heavily in the initial months of working with a new client. They start with a comprehensive [SEO audit](/services/seo-audit) of your site, conduct competitive and keyword research, and prepare detailed recommendations and tasks. This intensive work naturally costs more than $500 per month, especially when spread over two or three initial months. So, how can you adjust these practices to fit a $500 budget? ### A Strategic Approach to Budgeting in SEO The solution for this challenge is twofold: identifying your client's position within a larger SEO strategy matrix and focusing on the most effective metrics pertinent to your client's business. This approach can be likened to comparing "fast food" to a high-end gourmet restaurant. An effective [SEO strategy](/discussions/business-strategy-vs-seo-strategy-in-ecommerce) involves considering five key factors, each varying in prominence: 1\. Dependency on search engines for traffic 2\. Level of competition within the industry 3\. Alignment of SEO strategy when applied 4\. Influential power of the industry 5\. Availability of resources to the client company By eliminating redundant costs and applying necessary tasks strategically, it is indeed possible to achieve effective SEO on a $500 budget. ### Eliminating Redundancy and Optimising Timing Eliminating redundant costs involves avoiding unnecessary tasks. Optimising timing means focusing only on what's essential at any given moment. Here's an example: imagine you own a small business in the dried flowers niche. This micro-niche often has lower competition and fewer information resources, resulting in a low dependency on search engines like Google for traffic. In such cases, avoid expensive SEO audits. Instead, concentrate on establishing your authority in this niche. Start by creating 100 high-quality posts relevant to the industry, with outbound links to authoritative sources. This is more impactful and cost-effective. Focus your SEO efforts on building topical authority, choosing a list of sites and anchors for internal linking, and developing a solid list of topics. ### Measure Success with Meaningful Metric(s) In this scenario, prioritise simple metrics like the number of keywords per published page. This allows you to gauge efforts effectively without incurring additional costs. With a budget of $500 per month, which totals $6,000 annually, it's entirely feasible to accomplish this work. ### Conclusion Budget-friendly SEO is achievable through strategic thinking and targeted actions. If you found this guide helpful, feel free to reach out with more questions, and don't forget to like this post! Thank you for your attention. \--- # How to Evaluate If an SEO Strategy Will Deliver Results? Bonjour, les amis! I’m Bohdan. Today, we’re diving into a frequently asked question: How can you tell if the SEO strategy proposed by an agency is truly effective and will yield results? {% embed url="" %} Welcome to another session of SEO questions from business owners. Today, we’re diving into a frequently asked question: How can you tell if the SEO strategy proposed by an agency is truly effective and will yield results? Let’s explore what constitutes a robust SEO strategy and the indicators you should look for. ### Understanding SEO Strategy In the business world, the term “SEO strategy” often gets tossed around, usually referring to comprehensive documents laden with information. However, in my context, an [SEO strategy](/discussions/business-strategy-vs-seo-strategy-in-ecommerce) should be a precise, core set of choices designed to optimally guide other decisions. A good strategy is characterised by succinctness—where the smaller the set of choices, the better. ### The Importance of Interaction Interaction plays a crucial role in defining SEO strategy—it is both essential and imminent. Coordination (or alignment) of choices is a crucial part of being strategic. Interaction is a necessary condition for being strategic. Decisions with many interactions can guide many decisions at once and, hence, should be "more" strategic. Therefore, when reviewing a document labelled as an SEO strategy from your consultant, focus on two main aspects. ### What to Look for in an SEO Strategy Firstly, determine the brevity of the document. The most effective SEO strategies can often be condensed to a single page or even a sentence. Secondly, ensure that it provides just one or two initial choices. By its very definition, a strategy is a minimal core set of decisions. A list comprising ten steps is more akin to an action plan, not a strategy. When executing something strategically, zero in on one or two key initiatives that will align and usher subsequent decisions. ### Example of Strategic vs Not Choice To illustrate, a suggestion regarding the choice of platform, such as WordPress, while significant, does not inherently possess strategic value. This is because it lacks the scope to command or direct other business directions within your enterprise. True strategic decisions in SEO should influence a multitude of business choices, particularly visible in e-commerce where SEO becomes an integral aspect of business processes like product management, technology, operations, and marketing. ### Definition and Metric(s) To summarise, a strategy often isn’t what it’s labelled as. A strategic approach is succinct and directive, serving as a compass for other decisions. Employ metrics to quantify the effectiveness of these choices—metrics embody the pinnacle of strategic thought. When assessing a proposed strategy, ask yourself “why?” If the answer helps you visualise how it aligns other business decisions towards achieving your business metrics, then you likely have a promising strategy on your hands. Thank you for joining today’s exploration of evaluating SEO strategies. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask—I’m here to help. Until next time, thank you for watching and reading. Bye! # Why is My SEO Traffic Rising but Conversions Aren’t? Bonjour, les amis! Today’s topic delves into a common concern for many business owners: why your SEO traffic might be on the rise while conversions remain stagnant. {% embed url="" %} This is a real issue faced by many, and it’s important to understand why it happens and how you can address it. Let's discuss this in detail with practical examples and strategic solutions. ### Understanding SEO Vanity Metrics Imagine you have an e-commerce website, and the pages driving your traffic are primarily category and product detail pages. However, you notice a significant rise in traffic from merchant pages or profiles. While increased traffic generally seems positive, it’s not benefiting your revenue as expected. This is often due to vanity metrics—metrics that look impressive on paper but don’t contribute to tangible results, like revenue. They can create an illusion of success but lack meaningful impact. Recognizing this is the first step to addressing the issue. ### Quick Fix: Redistribute Page Rank To tackle this, you can begin with a quick fix: redistributing your page rank. Focus less on internal links pointing to non-revenue pages, particularly those generated from templates. By directing page rank towards more crucial pages, you boost the chances of increasing conversions rather than just traffic. ### Strategic Solution: Define Your Metrics On a strategic level, your metrics shape your strategy. Metrics are not standalone figures; they guide your entire approach to SEO. An effective metric to consider is the number of search queries per unit of content per 1000 impressions. This metric focuses on maximising keyword visibility in indexed content. The more keywords you manage to include in your content, the better the exposure you gain in search results. ### Competitive Advantage: Keywords as a Strategy This approach is especially beneficial against competitors in your niche. For instance, if you own a small site specialising in low-alcohol beverages, like beer, you face pressure from category giants like Amazon. However, your goal isn’t necessarily to topple them entirely but to outperform them in specific areas, such as keywords per page. Typically, extensive platforms might have 1-1.5 search queries per page. If you can achieve a higher keyword density, you’re more likely to be favoured in search rankings, leading to better visibility and potentially higher conversions. To conclude, dealing with vanity metrics effectively requires both a tactical and strategic approach. Redistributing your page rank to emphasise revenue-focused pages, combined with focusing on valuable SEO metrics, grants you a competitive edge. This strategy not only boosts your traffic but aligns it with revenue goals. Keep optimising your approach, and you’ll likely see improvements not just in traffic numbers but in conversion rates as well. Thank you for reading! Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. I’m always here to help. Goodbye for now! # Why is my content not indexed by Google? Why Isn't Google Indexing Your Content? Understanding the Challenges and Solutions {% embed url="" %} Bonjour, les amis! Today, we’re delving into a pressing issue many website owners encounter: “Why is Google not indexing my website properly?” Earlier this year, Google officials indicated that due to carbon footprint requirements, Google has been limiting crawl capacities per site, which can impact how quickly or effectively your website gets indexed. Let's break down the issue into specific cases and explore potential solutions. ### Understanding the Indexing Challenge One common question among webmasters, especially in e-Commerce, is why Google is slow to index their content. The first case to consider is when Google is sluggish in indexing your category pages. This is often a technical issue related to the discoverability or crawlability of your URLs. In such cases, seeking assistance from a technical SEO specialist can be beneficial. It typically doesn’t relate to Google's server resources but is purely a technical challenge. ### Evaluating Your Product Description Pages (PDPs) If your product description pages are indexed slowly or not at all, this may be due to the quality of your titles, which are crucial for searchability. Generic titles often result in direct competition within their category, reducing their chances of appearing in Google searches. Ensure your titles are specific, attractive, and meet searchability requirements for each SKU. A common issue for many PDPs is "thin" content, meaning the content is either low in quantity, quality, or lacks uniqueness across similar segments of pages. Ensuring your PDPs meet Google's searchability criteria is vital. This means making sure your titles, images, and descriptions are compelling and specific enough to cater to search demands. ### Blog Considerations When it comes to blogs, consider whether your posts match user search experience. Often, blog articles reflect a first-person perspective on topics that don’t align with common search queries. Additionally, many blogs are similar in content across websites. To stand out, make your blog distinct and ensure it genuinely matches what users want. ### The Systems Involved in Google Indexing It’s crucial to understand the systems at play around indexing, which include: * crawling * indexing, * rendering, * processing, * ranking, and * serving. These systems are interconnected, and tasks such as crawling and indexing are related to a page’s ranking potential. Simply put, if a document holds a low ranking potential, it might not be indexed. ### Concrete Factors Affecting Indexing Probability Two significant factors are: 1. the recency of crawls and 2. Pagerank. If you find certain pages are crawled more often, it indicates that Google views them as valuable. To succeed in indexing, create more of this valuable content or link such pages to those you want better indexed. Page rank can be improved by establishing links from well-ranking internal pages to those you wish to boost in search results. ### Understanding Indexing Metrics An essential metric predicting indexing probability is the ***conversion of crawls to visits from Google***. For example, if a page type is crawled 1,000 times but only results in 500 visits from Google, it indicates low efficiency. Such pages are less likely to be indexed as they offer little value in terms of user engagement. Google prioritises pages that convert crawls into visits effectively. We hope this post clarifies some of the complexities around Google indexing challenges. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you for reading, and good luck with enhancing your site’s indexability! # SEO agency recommendations: what to do when they Don't work for you? What to do if SEO agency recommendations don't work for me? {% embed url="" %} Bonjour, les amis! Today, we're diving into a frequently asked question in the realm of search engine optimization: What should you do if your SEO agency's recommendations don't quite hit the mark for you? ### Understanding How SEO Agencies Operate To start, let's explore how SEO agencies typically function. Generally, they kick off the process by conducting comprehensive SEO audits. This step involves identifying your target keywords, performing competitor research, and carrying out a technical analysis of your website. With these insights, the agency then creates a list of recommendations for your internal SEO team to implement. Over time, they conduct fresh audits to track improvements and adjust their strategies accordingly. Typically, SEO agencies also develop a Google Analytics research framework for you to monitor progress monthly, updating their recommendations as needed. ### The Standard SEO Audit Components The [starting point is almost always an SEO audit](/services/seo-audit), which commonly includes three or four types, either in one package or as separate services. These audits cover: 1\. Technical SEO Audit: Examines the technical aspects of your site that impact SEO. 2\. Semantical Content SEO Audit: Focuses on the quality and relevance of your content. 3\. Strategic or Competitive SEO Audit: Analyses your position relative to competitors. However, this typical approach can be overly templated, restricting flexibility and often catering to larger organisations that can execute vast changes. ### What Are SEO Agencies Actually Selling? SEO agencies often promote industry best practices, insights, and playbooks compiled from working with leading companies, especially in sectors like e-commerce. When encountering a new client, they frequently offer repurposed insights and strategies. ### When Agency Recommendations Might Miss the Mark There are three main scenarios where an agency’s recommendations might fall flat: 1\. You Are New to the Scene: If you're freshly entering the market, agencies may struggle to provide novel recommendations due to limited existing data. You might find their advice generic and less valuable than your existing insights. 2\. Limited Internal Capacity: Without a robust team or the resources to implement suggestions, agencies’ recommendations may become impractical. Agencies often need to collaborate effectively with your internal team or serve as an extension of it until your team is ready to take over. 3\. You Are at a Plateau: Even when your SEO is technically sound, you might not be witnessing growth. In such cases, agencies can only provide limited support, as breakthrough ideas and a shift in strategy are necessary. ### Potential Solutions *For Newcomers*: Consider hiring an SEO consultant who can provide personalized insights into your specific niche. A consultant will tailor strategies that move beyond standard playbooks. *For Limited Internal Capacity*: Search for a smaller SEO agency or consultant who can integrate into your team as a temporary member, offering a more unified and workable dynamic until you’re self-sufficient. *For Those at a Plateau*: It may be time for what I call "[SEO Therapy](/services/ecommerce-seo-strategy-therapy)." This involves rethinking your entire SEO strategy to drive innovation and adaptability within your organisation. ### Final Thoughts If your SEO efforts aren't yielding the desired results, it's essential to reassess and adapt. Whether it's hiring an expert to tailor strategies to your unique needs or adjusting internal processes to foster effective collaboration, the solution often lies in customising standard practices to fit your specific situation. Thank you for reading! If you have further questions or wish to consult with me on a particular issue, feel free to reach out. Until next time, au revoir! # What are the daily responsibilities of SEO manager? Understanding the nuances of SEO is important for many businesses. If you're a business owner considering hiring an SEO manager, you might be wondering: What exactly does an SEO manager do daily? Let's see the roles and responsibilities that shape their workday. ### The Core Activities of an SEO Manager SEO managers typically operate within three major streams: SEO Operations, SEO Product Management, and SEO Quality Assurance. Each of these areas corresponds to distinct roles that an SEO manager might assume within a company. Let's explore these streams and roles further. ### SEO Operations SEO Operations is a heart of the SEO manager's daily activities, primarily involving SEO audits, research, and reporting. **1. SEO Audits**: These are conducted on a regular basis, often monthly, to assess the website's performance. Additionally, ad hoc audits address specific issues or tasks arising unexpectedly. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of pages, understand the impact of changes, and identify areas for improvement. For example, which is the performance of a group of most frequently crawled pages? What is the performance per segment or per page type? What is the effect of changes that were implemented on the website? **2. Research**: SEO research is critical and may include: * competitive research to analyse activities of competing businesses, * understanding Google updates & news, and * identifying best practices, which is essential for establishing procedures based on industry insights. **3. Reporting**: Making detailed reports, such as SEO temperature, monthly performance, and keyword performance reports, helps instil an SEO culture within the organisation. These reports facilitate internal communication and strategic alignment around SEO objectives across different company units. #### The Role of an Analyst Here, predominantly, an SEO manager acts as an analyst. They undertake extensive analyses to understand websites' dynamics, ensuring SEO strategy is followed through and informs internal alignment. ### SEO Product Management The next significant component of an SEO manager's work revolves around product management, which is rooted in developing product research documents (PRDs) and offering recommendations. **PRDs:** These documents spring from SEO audits and research, highlighting weaknesses and opportunities for growth. They guide developers, marketers, and content creators in improving the website's performance. **Recommendations:** SEO managers provide policy guidelines and best practices for other departments to incorporate, ensuring consistency and effectiveness. #### The Role of a Product Manager As a product manager, the SEO manager liaises between different teams, facilitating the common language and creating documents that help the company achieve its SEO objectives. ### SEO Quality Assurance The third pillar of an SEO manager's duties is quality assurance, which includes education, validation, and monitoring. **1. Education:** SEO managers spread awareness about significant SEO practices within the company, ensuring everyone understands the importance of SEO elements. Education is when you try to educate around bigger things in SEO, for example, say structured data or Google tracking or Merchant centre or how indexing works and so on. **2. Validation:** This involves manual or automated processes to validate SEO-related tasks, ensuring accuracy and adherence to standards. For example, each particular task that may concern a SEO would go to you - as a SEO manager - and would need your work and a sign off for validation. **3. Monitoring:** Through programmatic tools like SemRush or Botify, SEO managers set alerts for significant fluctuations in various elements, ensuring timely responsive actions. For example, this could be significant changes on PageRank different types of pages or changes in html tag, etc. #### The Role of an Educator In their role as an educator, the SEO manager fosters a culture of continuous learning and compliance with the best SEO practices across the organisation. ### Conclusion The role of an SEO manager is multifaceted, combining operations, management, and quality assurance. Thank you for reading, and feel free to share your thoughts or any questions you have on the topic. # What is Farm style SEO? This article explains 'farm-style SEO,' a term inspired by a content strategy from ClearScope. Farm-style SEO emphasises revenue generation & zero waste, drawing comparisons to efficient farm practice ### Farm-style SEO *Summary: This article explains 'farm-style SEO'. Unlike traditional SEO, which follows a linear pipeline from keyword mining to conversion optimization, farm-style SEO starts with existing revenue sources and competitive advantages, integrating SEO into every process for maximum effectiveness.* *** Bonjour les amis! Today, we're diving into the world of farm-style SEO, a concept I've developed drawing inspiration from the ClearScope content strategy, which was introduced earlier this year. Farm-style SEO is built on the principles of sustainability and effectiveness, much like the operations on a well-run farm where everything is recycled and used for revenue. Let's explore how this approach can transform your SEO strategy. {% hint style="info" %} Farm-style SEO challenges traditional methods by putting revenue and sustainability first. By integrating SEO deeply into all aspects of your business operations and focusing on your inherent advantages, this approach ensures that you are acting “more strategically”. {% endhint %} ### Understanding Farm-Style SEO The core idea behind farm-style SEO is simple: No revenue means no SEO. SEO is contemplated through revenue. There cannot be any other type of SEO except for those that bring or that lead to revenue. Every aspect of SEO should be focused on generating revenue, just as every process on a farm is geared towards maximising output and minimising waste. The philosophy of zero waste applies here, emphasising that nothing in your SEO efforts should result in inefficiency or lost potential. SEO should not be an isolated assignment; rather, it needs to be integrated into all business processes, much like an integral component of a well-functioning farm. It's not a part of tech, products or marketing, SEO should permeate everything, ensuring it's as ubiquitous and essential as any necessary farm operation. ### Farm-Style SEO vs. Traditional SEO Traditional SEO follows a linear pipeline: * it starts with collecting and mining keywords, * creating targeted landing pages, and then * focuses on crawling, indexing, and * optimising for impressions and click-through rates, * eventually aiming for conversion. This method, while systematic, often delays the realisation of revenue. In contrast, farm-style SEO flips this model. It begins with identifying what brings revenue and works backward from there. Take, for example, a real farm scenario: you start by considering the resources you have, like acorns in your land if you're planning for a pig farming. You wouldn't randomly choose a breed of pigs and later hope they favour the acorns; instead, you select pig varieties that naturally thrive on your available resources. Similarly, in farm-style SEO, you leverage your strategic advantages and competitive positioning from the start. ### Implementing farm-style SEO: starting from the Strategy Bingo To make farm-style SEO operational, we begin with what I call the "strategy bingo." This involves assessing your company's standing within competitive settings, considering your unique advantages and strategic objectives. This way, you're aligning your SEO efforts with the strongest elements of your business from the outset, setting the stage for sustainable growth and profitability. # SEO Audit SEO Audit establishes a Funnel view of site's performance with search engines and answers the question: "When along the funnel opportunities are missed"? ### **SEO Audit addressed the following issues** 1. How is the site seen by a search engine's robots? 2. What do they actually know and "take home" (being selective)? 3. Where users land on the site? 4. Which queries (and rankings) bring users? **But why it's even important (if at all)**? Because I treat SEO audit, especially in eCommerce, as a way to establish a ***Funnel view to SEO performance of the site's pages***. *** Funnel view to SEO performance of pages (all pages vs. proportion of pages that make it to each step): 1. Known pages (scope of the report) 2. Crawled pages 3. Indexed pages 4. Ranked pages 5. Convert pages

A Funnel view of a large e-Commerce site (visualized using Botify)

The **funnel answers the question "When (along the funnel) the opportunities are missed?"** and is premised on the following approach that a page needs to be: 1. Technically accessible to robots. 2. Found (on site) and examined by search engines. 3. Once evaluated, accepted as worth indexing. 4. Selected for showcasing in search results as a potential appropriate answer. 5. Clicked, depending on the position in SERP, on how it's presented and how its matches the user search intent. 6. Generate revenue as users visit it. The **funnel approach is beneficial since it emphasises**: * The right sequence - Do right things in the right order?, e.g. why work on page quality if Google never finds a page? * The fact that Extra-funnel life may exist - known pages ≠ existing pages, some existing pages may not be exposed to robots * Helps unify the understanding why pages drop out of the funnel. ### **SEO Audit Structure** The **SEO audit report contains two main parts:** 1. Summary and 2. SEO metrics #### **Summary** * High level SEO performance overview (extracted from research data) * Action board: recommendations (with priorities and implementation roadmap). * Opportunities and alerts #### **SEO metrics** The most important of which are ***Website Analysis Metrics*** These come from crawlers and we look at them to understand and explain the Performance metrics we see later in the Funnel view. If we want to improve our results, we need to make changes within the site itself.

SEO performance metrics vs Website analysis metrics

**1. Accessibility metrics** These answer the question “can search engines can access the pages on your site easily and successfully”? Usually contains the following metrics: * Distribution of PageRank * Performance (Core Web Vitals) * HTTP codes (errors, answers from search engines) * Incoming links * Outcoming links * Sitemaps **2. Content metrics** Answers the question: "what exactly will search engine robots see on the page"? * Quality * Similarities / Duplicates * Canonicals * HTML tags * Structured data **SEO Audits comes as a part of Basic or Regular packages.** {% tabs %} {% tab title="Basic" %} **For small eCommerce sites**. SEO audit. Market and competition analysis. SEO Strategy refinement (vs Marketing, Lead generation, etc). Action plan for stakeholders (developers, adjacent teams, etc). Monthly SEO audit(s) and SEO recommendations. SEO performance monthly analysis Q\&A, ad hoc research {% endtab %} {% tab title="Regular" %} **For medium and large eCommerce sites**. SEO audit Market and competition analysis Identification of large upside opportunities SEO Strategy refinement (vs Marketing, Lead generation, etc) SEO recommendations and Action plan for stakeholders (developers, adjacent teams, etc) Programmatic SEO PRDs SEO Quality Assurance Framework development SEO performance monthly analysis Ad hoc SEO analysis, Q\&A {% endtab %} {% endtabs %} ### Check the following articles
SEO Audit: Template, Interpretation of Accessibility and Content Metrics
SEO Audit: Annotated Example
How Google crawls the web? What elements impact Google crawl?
# Fault funding If you have a weird problem in SEO, User acquisition or (a part of) Marketing, it is very probable that I can solve it. * Complex problems that so far eluded all fix-it consultants. * Decaying traffic analysis: “why are we going down”? * Google is slow to index your site. * De-indexing (bot blindness). * Growth plateau: “we are stuck”. * Content Helpfulness and Relevance. * Competitor research: “what do they do better”? * E-E-A-T analysis. * Topical relevance, Topical Authority. **Fault finding on complex sites** *... finding where a problem is being caused can be a problem itself. Knowing how to track/trace and find the source is often beyond many.* {% hint style="info" %} I love solving problems and puzzles. And I thought it was a problem. Later on I realised that my broad experience (lack of focus) and ability to solve tough problems was not a problem—it was my category superpower. {% endhint %} **But finding a problem and even solving it is not enough**. Solution has to be long-standing and self-sustainable. It often requires brutal honesty to admit WHY a fault has happened and a SEO Training or SEO Strategy Therapy to really fix it on a company level.
# eCommerce SEO strategy therapy Refinement of the (current) eCommerce SEO strategy through help of external SEO consultant (me). It all starts with “weird” data. Small bits of data that are hard to explain give a clue to understanding the customer’s problem (that he/she is trying to solve with your product). * User data analysis. * Market sizing. * (SEO) Category design. So, it's crucial to **spot where odd dynamics happen**.
# SEO Training I provide the following training or seminars: * SEO Strategy Therapy * Google Updates Training * Helpful Content Update (HCU) Training * Google leaks Training * Best Practice Training: * E-E-A-T Training * YMYL training * eCommerce * Marketplaces * Affiliate business (in some cases) # Business strategy vs SEO Strategy in eCommerce ### What is a business strategy? And how can it be seen through the lens of SEO? A business strategy is a way for a company to optimally use its capabilities to gain payoffs in the context of uncertainty and, most often, in the competitive environment. The functional definition of strategy is a ‘smallest set of (core) choices to *optimally* guide the other choices’, i.e. make other decisions adapt to them (Van den Steen). A "strategic" decision may drive inbound or outbound (external) alignment. Coordination (or alignment) of choices is a crucial part of being strategic. Interaction is a necessary condition for being strategic. Decisions with many interactions can guide many decisions at once and, hence, should be "more" strategic. Likewise, for example, a tech choice decision buried deeply in a product design may critically affect a company’s success or failure, i.e. be *important*, but that does not – by itself – make that decision strategic, so soon that this choice does not command sufficient number of interactions within (and without) the business. A critical **role of strategy is to reduce uncertainty about what others will do**, to make it possible to align. *** SEO is about how to produce and organise the content and make it available to robots and users alike in such a way that will benefit them most. eCommerce is a commerce conducted via the Internet, a business model (Investopedia, [Merriam Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/e-commerce)). The SEO strategy in eCommerce is a set of choices made with regard to the state of “strategic dependance" (or sometimes "rivalry”) with search engines being eCommerce firms' principal purchasers, i.e. account for the majority of their sales. Dependence is one sided relations while rivalry is a subset of competive relations that has two-directional form: the focal firm’s choices must influence the competitor’s actions – by affecting its payoff – and these competitor’s actions must affect the focal firm’s payoffs (Van den Steen). In eCommerce SEO strategy search engines have much stronger bargaining power when they act in the position of Purchaser. In particular, their choice tends to be "supplier switching". Also, their requirements to sellers is not clear enough to the end. I may put it like this: there's no such moment when this competitor has made all its choices, so **with a firm G eCommerce firm F can never build an optimal strategy**. So, there can be two states: one-sided relations of dependancy on purchaser and (quasi) strategic rivalry or co-dependency. ### 10 eCommerce SEO strategy propositions I will put **important propositions to to eCommerce SEO strategy below**. 1\) no decisions by a firm F will be more strategic than decisions from a firm G (search engine), which means that search engines in the role of purchasers will have far more influence on eCommerce firms in the role of suppliers than otherwise, so no optimal strategy is possible; 2\) firms' choices can dynamically reduce the uncertainty about what a purchaser firm G will do; 3\) purchaser responses to supplier's choices have *a very limited* set of decisions: higher price (more traffic, clients, etc) or lower price - it's always the *supplier switching* mode; 4\) the way a competitor chooses between decisions is never clear, i.e. it is costly to investigate what is the relations between factors to decision; 4\) SEO - as an investment activity - deals with a cost of investigation into competitive response, with a main competitive being a firm G (search engine); 5\) SEO in eCommerce operates operates through making investment in the following resources: pages and their content (category, pdp, etc), pagerank, crawl budget (and it's conversion to visits and clicks), a volume of branded (vs not-branded) search queries. 6\) aim of SEO is to obtain a higher price from a supplier while keping the cost of of investigation below the level where acting strategic does not pay off (when SEO makes no sense); 7\) where a number of supplier firms is large enough,there's no use to built an external strategy when each specific competitor = supplier can be supplemented by purchaser; 8\) where a number of supplier firms is small, external strategy pays off, moreover, a quasi-strategic relations (co-dependancy) with a purchaser may occur; 9\) search engines as purchasers tend to attain position 7 when firms don't get any incentives to act strategically in external domain; 9\) search engines as purchasers force supplier firms to act strategically internally in order to improve organisational alignment and make specific investments to increase their output capacities; 10\) capacities (strategic substitutes) are more strategic than prices (strategic complements); ### 8 strategy states: an eCommerce SEO strategy Bingo This creates the following strategic states: 1. no strategic rivalry, one-sided dependancy on purchaser; 2. (quasi) strategic rivalry, two way dependency; 3. high competition, low cost of switching for purchaser (low prices); 4. low competition, high cost of switching for purchaser (high prices). 5. strategy informs internal alignment; 6. strategy informs low or no internal alignment (unannounced strategy, high cost of annoucement); 7. low sensitivity to prices; 8. high sensitivity (dependence) on capacities / prices. *** ### *Uncertainty* Under proposition 3 when organization can't see the relation between a 'price' and its 'investment', all SEO strategies become uninformed, so firm is better off without any (external) strategy. For example, this happens due to Google Algorithm Updates, effects of which are business contingency. #### Purchaser keeps the cost of investigation high In all, a purchaser is interested to keep a cost of investigation of strategy high in order to force sellers quit acting strategically towards him, which is called 'manipulation' (by a purchaser). It is done in two ways: * periodical algorithm updates that changes assortment of 'price' signals as well as their relative power; * a deferred effect of seller choices on 'price' (smoke). A set of working price signals is given by a purchaser (like the rules of exchange), which are necessary to enable the output and inform investments. *Conclusion 1* *Purchaser forces parsimonious inward strategy that rewards hierarchy and performs only randomly on external alignment.* Cost of investigation (in relation to purchaser) tends to stay high as it's in the strategic interest of purchaser. This 'same for all' condition in SEO eCommerce. This proposes a 'strategy bet' term instead of strategy choice. Under conditions of high uncertainty when the strategy is uninformed, commiting to any choice *can add value* as it may inform internal alignment especially in highly hierarchy organization, but that comes at cost of external alignment that's is no better than random. So, I conclude that purchaser rewards more hierarchical structure will tend to make strategy more effective within the framework of signals communicated by purchaser as well as resignation on strategic competition. Presumably, cost of investigation can be outsourced where \_\_\_ *Conclusion 2* *Parsimonious strategy works around helpfulness.* For internal alignment (to be effective), the term of user satisfaction is used. Presumed user satisfaction or helpfulness is then forced to be endogenized (as an epitome of value and a strategy aim). Helpfulness and content quality is communicted by firm G (purchaser) as 'terms of purchase' but the way it is extimated and how it influences the 'price' is never clear due to high cost of investigation. So, helpfulness is a "catch-it-all" term that works well to optimize internal alignment. *** ### Thinking in Strategy bets. Who are players in the strategy game? A ‘strategy bet’ is where a company commits to a strategy despite facing very high uncertainty. This may be valuable, especially when internal alignment is important. For example, start-ups in eCommerce (and not only) often talk in terms of strategy bets. In the situation of a lack of information to make choice participants may be lawfully called "players" as they are forced to make important and far-reaching choices without knowing what card comes next. This poses the question: what is the gain from *some* strategy (vs a good one) even when it may be uninformed and thus potentially suboptimal. The question is what is the gain from *some* strategy, even when it may be uninformed and thus potentially suboptimal. Or, what is better to have some strategy vs optimal strategy? *** ### Strategy as an organisational tool vs decision-making tool The role of strategy as an *organisational tool* is to give clear direction to an organization in order to improve alignment and specific investments. But strategy is also a useful *decision-making tool* to determine that direction. (Van den Steen) #### Strategy process 1. The strategist needs to investigate and announce only the strategic decisions. 2. The optimal number of strategic decisions is small so that the strategist needs to investigate and announce few decisions. Let's consider how the strategy process is possible in eCommerce SEO activity. **Characteristics of the optimal strategy**: * shall be concise, contain a small number of choices (one), * would give perfect guidance, * achieve the first best, Yet, in most cases a strategist must consider a cost of investigation or announcement. In such case, the strategies will be even more concise, but then, obviously, won’t achieve the first-best any more. Likewise, a search engine, a competitor purchaser, is interested in keeping the cost of investigation highest, so a focus **firm can't achieve the first best**. *** The SEO-specific organizational activity is focused to the content, i.e. the way it's created, built, organized and promoted, etc including: * Discoverability of content by search robots and * Search-ability of content by users, i.e. usage of proper keywords. *** ### What is More strategic vs Less strategic decision? Decisions are more strategic when they interact more – and more strongly – with other decisions, in particular for inbound interactions, and that strategy is *more valuable* when there are more and stronger interactions. So, the value of strategy is a number and strength of interactions, i.e. implications for other decisions. For example, a decision to be ‘low-cost’ is more strategic than a decision to ‘use CFL lamps in the store’ because ‘being low cost’ has more implications for other decisions. {% hint style="info" %} No matter how standalone important, a decision is not strategic unless it has sufficient interactions. {% endhint %} Yet, strategic decisions that produce many interaction shall better not conflict with other (strategic) decisions, in which case it's implications for the company and the power to induce alignment falls. Likwise, a strategic choice made by the CEO shall not conglict with strategic choice(s) made by marketing and the product because in this case its ability to guide othe choices decreases. For example, decisions that constrain other decisions should be considered less strategic and choosen with a great care (in that sense that "contrain" ≠ "guide"). ### What is the role of uncertainty in strategy? "Uncertainty seems essential to strategy: without (prior) uncertainty, everyone knows what to do and where to go and there is no role for strategy" (Van den Steen). So, we can can thay uncertainty makes a decision more strategic and, hence, increases the value of strategy. *** ### Search engine as a "strategic rival". A competitive strategy setting The same logic of a firm's strategy guiding (or influencing / forcing) others decision applies in external decisions, where the firm tries to influence competitors, complementers, suppliers and other external organizations. For example, a firm may expand capacity to force others to delay expansion. In the simplest form of external interaction, two firms’ choices interacting and each firm having its own objective. The second firm can be any firm that interacts with the focal firm, such as a competitor, a complementer, or a supplier (may collectively call a 'competitor'.). #### Competitive relations between eCommerce and a search engine For example, in the eCommerce SEO a search engine's firm (Google, etc) can be called a "Purchaser" while an eCommerce firm - a "Supplier" - so soon as we acknowledge that the a search engine accounts for the vast majority of sales. If a purchaser uses *supplier switching* to meet its procurement needs than we can call it [competitive relations](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0969701299000325). To fix ideas, I will interpret, and refer to, firm Google as the ‘competitor’. I want to consider two important questions within the context of this very simple model: 1. what makes a decision strategic in such a competitive setting and 2. what makes a competitor a ‘strategic rival’ in the sense that it has to be endogenized as part of the strategic analysis, i.e., in the sense that firm F has to consider G’s reaction when designing its strategy. Strategic rivals need to be endogenized when analyzing a competitive situation or developing a strategy, while other competitors can be taken as exogenous. With respect to *decisions being strategic*, the decisions can be both more and less strategic when they **can influence the competitor, depending on whether they influence in the right direction or not**. I will formally define a firm G to be ‘a strategic rival of a focal firm F’ if F’s optimal strategy depends on whether G has already made all its choices. > The following proposition establishes that a necessary and sufficient condition for being a strate- gic rival is the following two directional effect: the focal firm’s choices must influence the competitor’s actions – by affecting its payoff – and these competitor’s actions must affect the focal firm’s payoffs. (Van den Steen) *** ### Capabilities vs Prices Interestingly, if the strategy is built strictly on resources that are currently available, then a competition won’t not even take into consideration what you do: they simply count your resources. > If you have a limited number of resources, a competition minds your resources spending. Suppose you make a certain move that only lasts for a month or two, then a competition finds a remedy. So, this is only within this timeframe that you can potentially have a strategic advantage. The theory of strategy says that you must have two uncompensated strategic advantages (or strength) to be able to enact them within the same timeframe; if you have only one, you don’t have an advantage (at all). Since it is the customer’s problems that we want to, first, *market* and, second, *solve* through the SEO etc, it’s fundamental to be able to answer **the ontology questions**: **what difference we as a business make to customers and why this difference matters?** ### A clear strategy drives investment and resources allocation A persistent and clear strategy of cost minimization along specific dimensions. A clear strategy not only facilitates alignment (or coordination) but also encourages investment in resources, skills, and capabilities, in particular when these resources and capabilities are specific to the firm’s course of action. *** Collis and Rukstad (2008), for example, describe strategy – based on their experience – as specifying 1. a choice of objective, 2. a choice of scope, and 3. a choice of advantage. This list of choices or decisions can be interpreted as an average experience-based ‘smallest set of choices to optimally guide the other choices’ for the most common situations. *** ### eCommerce SEO list of choices ###
### How SEO may help Market customers problem? In eCommerce, search engine optimisation can help *market and highlight the customer problems* in a number of ways, including: * Navigational content (Filters, Related searches, Trending products, etc) and so on. * Informational content (Buyer guides, Best practices, Articles, Comparisons, etc) as well as ### How SEO may help in trying to solve customer problems (by enabling communication) Also, SEO can significantly contribute to the ways a business can *solve the problem*s, including through: * relevant and full presentation of Case-specific portfolios of products (CPV Categories, lists, selections, etc), * bundling products and creating Scenario-specific assortments that relevant to user search experience (will show up in search engines), * creating adequate product description pages (PDPs), including Images, Description, YMYL information, etc, * fostering a community exchange (user-generated content flywheel) to name a few. ### How to establish the madate of SEO over content content-related activities in eCommerce? Obviously, almost all of the areas above are not specific to SEO only. Yet, when(ever) it comes to two things: 1. Discoverability of that content to robots for indexing and to user in search results pages and 2. User search experience, i.e. searchability of content through keywords, etc, the **mandate of SEO over these areas can be easily claimed and established**. ### A feedback loop from customers to SEO in eCommerse If there is no intrinsic value that a business brings to users, even the best SEO can’t help. It’s easy to see through brand-related searches: if a business does not solve any problem of the customers (such as to bring transformative outcomes), then it won’t probably be on the top of the mind of people who google something, so the brand won’t appear in search. A low amount of brand-related search queries, etc is a clear signal to search engines: **a sign or promise of actual value given through SEO to a customer has not been justified**, no positive feedback happens. This idea helps to highlight the link between: 1. the *content as a promise of value* to the customer and 2. the actual user experience, a link that’s sometimes missing in SEO. ### Limitations to the eCommerce SEO Strategy This creates the following limitations to eCommerce SEO strategy: 1. A promise of value has to be true. The content has to be adequate to both the customer’s problem and the solution proposed by eCommerce as well as clear and complete. 2. The way a promise is read by search engines is crucial. Engines are gatekeepers of customers. 3. A promise of value does not equal fulfilment. Or Content ≠ Product. It adds yet another level of complexity to describe and organise content when there are many products (as normally it’s the case in eCommerce). Yet, a good and simple business strategy is a great help to eCommerce SEO Strategy. ### Metric = Strategy The SEO strategy goes through a number of stations, which are easy to grasp by metrics: 1. Number and Cost of Production of a Unit of Content. 2. Number of keywords per unit of content. 3. Number of UV per unit of content. 4. Revenue per unit of content per year. 5. Branded searches (vs not-branded) per unit of content (by segment of pages). #### What is the all inclusive metric for SEO in eCommerce? Yet, it’s (only) one metric that matters in the end of the day. It’s the one metric that drives so much decision making. In eCommerce SEO strategy **Revenue per unit of content per year (RUCPY) / Profit per unit of content per year (PUCPY) is the all inclusive metric**. It’s a synthetic metric that combines both: * users (as they bring revenue) and * content that (together with its discoverability and searchability) lies within the mandate of SEO and attracts users. ### Cost of Production of a Unit of Content Let’s start with the first station of the eCommerce SEO strategy *Number and Cost of Production of Content*, as it’s the first ‘real’ problem that eCommerce SEO strategy faces. It’s the question of "How to increase the number (and decrease the cost of production) of content in order to market the customer’s problem and create numerous touchpoints with her"? In itself, this problem belongs with search engine robots, not to users, but it’s real nonetheless. This marks a product-centred SEO strategy, and the metric it uses is a Unit of Content. We say the cost of production of a unit of content (PDP, CPV Category, Blog articles, etc) but this construction hangs in the air without a pivot, i.e. a relation to a subject who essentially produces the content. For example, it can be merchants (online marketplaces), sites content team (classic eCommerce), external providers, users, etc, but most of the time it’s a bit of all. #### Illustration how to calculate the Cost of Production of a Unit of Content Suppose there is a a B2B marketplace that has 1 million pages and 10k (paying) clients. A totality OpEx and CapEx make the Cost of content, i.e. we don’t need any other metric here. Each client is paying 1k yearly, so the Total revenue is 10 mil and the Profitability is 15%, so we’ve got the following core metrics: ***Cost of Production of a Unit of Content: 8.5€.*** \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \
# Tech SEO Obviously, tech seo is something that helps you control how a search engine (Google) crawls and indexes your site. This includes the following issues: 1. Crawl/index/serving pipeline 2. Duplicate content & Canonicals 3. Blocked resources 4. Robots 5. Sitemaps 6. Multi-language websites: hreflang, etc 7. Migrating a site: redirects 8. Structured data 9. User Experience: Core Web Vitals report / PageSpeed Insights 10. Search appearance: article date / title links / search result snippets Crawling process involves effective allocation of resources by Google as well as the ability to reach all pages on the site. Both issues are addressed if the SEO strategy starts from creating the efficient website architecture. ### Website architecture Historically, the best **website architecture** implied clear categories and pages structure or a Siloing as well as ability for the search engine to reach every page from by one or two links from the parent \[page]. Obviously, it is not a trivial task to do. It includes creating such a way to distribute the “link juice” that all the important pages receive an adequate number of internal links. Since, the number of internal links is a sign of page importance as per website. By contrast, the presence of so-called “orphaned” pages requires more resources to crawl a website and steals a PageRank (InRank) from other pages. > What we check on the site: > > 1\. Using Screaming Frog SEO Spider or similar programmes, **check the level of nesting of important pages**. The most important pages should be located as close to the root of the site as possible. > > 2\. **Check the number of significant internal links** to important pages and the variety of anchor text (using Screaming Frog SEO Spider or similar programmes). {% hint style="info" %} Key notions: UX, significant inbound links, saving the crawling budget. {% endhint %} Related cases studies: ### Crawling Crawling problems are also cured by creating effective sitemap(s), HTML sitemap (where relevant) as well as removing directives that block resources or pages from being crawled. It is not uncommon that pages are being "Crawled but not indexed by Google". Apart from usual procedure reasons it might be caused by the pages’ low quality (as perceived by Google) or overall site’s trust. {% hint style="info" %} There has been experimentally established connection 1) between the number (and quality) of incoming links & the indexing pace as well as 2) between the number of internal links and the speed of indexing. {% endhint %} It's possible to think of low quality content as the main reason of a problem of Crawling without Indexing. > Low quality content consists of 2 groups. The **first is pages that should never be indexed**. These include a variety of service pages, pages of search, filters in various sections, not optimised for indexing, etc. These pages are standard for each CMS and / or site and are found by analysing the site structure, robots.txt and robots meta tags on these pages. Getting rid of this poor quality content is easy enough. To begin with, we write on such pages meta tag robots (noindex,nofollow) or (noindex,follow) depending on the situation. > > After the pages fall out of the index (about a month), write a prohibition in robots.txt. > > The **second type of low-quality content is that which is rejected by Google itself**. It’s especially important for YMYL-sites. It is about this content John Mueller, the official > > Google spokesman responded to the question: "Does the presence of a low-quality section on a site affect the quality of the entire site?" To this, the Google spokesperson replied that it does. ### Indexing Overall, the following reasons can be shown for non-indexing, or for problematic indexing as per [Google Help Center](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203#duplicate_page_with_proper_canonical_tag): 1. Not indexed 2. Server error (5xx) 3. Redirect error 4. URL blocked by robots.txt 5. URL marked ‘noindex’ 6. Soft 404 7. Blocked due to unauthorised request (401) 8. Not found (404) 9. Blocked due to access forbidden (403) 10. Blocked by page removal tool 11. Crawled - currently not indexed 12. Discovered - currently not indexed 13. Alternate page with proper canonical tag 14. Duplicate without user-selected canonical 15. Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user 16. Page with redirect ### Duplicate content Duplicate content is when the same page is given by another URL path. So, it means that it has been written to the database several times by different parameters or as a result of mistakes in implementation of canonicals. #### Parameters in URL {% hint style="warning" %} Example: Often, use or parameters (such as [?page=](#user-content-fn-1)[^1]) in URL is a reason of duplicate content. **Compare** *[www.mydomain.com/news/all](http://www.mydomain.com/news/all)* and *[www.mydomain.com/news/all?page=1](http://www.mydomain.com/news/all?page=1)* {% endhint %} #### Personal Anecdote: > I believe this type of duplicate content makes a little problem to SEO. It's easily dealt with using robots.txt file and Google can normally deal with it herself, unless it came to numbers. #### Internal Duplicate Content due to website templates Also, duplicate content term relates to cases where the pages are different, but the content served on the page is \[almost] identical to the content of another page. Once reason for this is heavily templated website structure with a low number of unique content, sometimes called **‘thin’ content** pages. {% hint style="info" %} To check the percentage of duplicate content you may, for example, use which gives 250 URLs check for free. {% endhint %} #### Wrong implementation of canonicals Canonical tags are often used incorrectly on websites. By adding a rel="canonical" element to a page, you tell search engines which version of the page should appear in search results. When using 'canonical' tags, it is important to make sure that the URL that you specify in the rel="canonical" element leads to an existing page. canonical links to non-existent pages make it harder to crawl the site and index content, which leads to lower crawling efficiency and waste of a crawling budget. **Most common problem**: programmatical instruction to mirror the URL in rel="canonical" tag. ### Semantic markup According to [Quality Rater Guidelines](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/google-raters-guidelines-e-e-a-t) (QRG), when researching the quality of a website, all content should be divided into 3 components: Main Content (MC), Supplemental Content (SC) and adverts. Google algorithmically determines MC and SC when indexing a site. Yet, doing so requires a lot of resources, which is something Google dislikes. It is in order to guide Google as to the content type on a page, we apply semantic page design. The HTML5 standard has provided new elements for structuring, grouping content and markup of textual content. The new semantic elements have improved the web page structure by adding meaning to the content they enclose. The use of semantic elements is quite straightforward and simple. For example: ```
tag - to display the main content and function of the page,