Your e-commerce SEO sucks because you’re not asking the right questions of your partners and yourself.
Today, I will explain a simple process of working out precisely what you need to focus on to move the needle on your e-commerce brand’s SEO by asking the right questions.
Most People fail with SEO because they don’t ask the right questions.
When I’m learning a new skill, I start by watching some training.
I then try to apply the training.
But the most important thing I do during this process is that I ask a lot of questions.
These questions help me “fit all of the pieces together to understand better the whole concept and how everything works.
With SEO, most of you do the following:
- You identify a problem, i.e. you’re getting no sales from organic search.
- You identify the solution, i.e. SEO will fix this.
- Then, you try to find the SEO product or service provider to help you solve the problem.
You engage someone to do your SEO or try to learn to do it yourself without asking good questions.
You end up abdicating responsibility about WHAT and HOW the SEO agency is doing for you, or if you are doing it yourself, you end up trying to implement a million cool tactics that you read about online without asking, “Should I be doing this?”
Both approaches will fail because you didn’t ask the right questions.
Right Questions lead to Right Actions!
Let me give you a list of the essential questions I ask for E-commerce SEO
- Is SEO a viable traffic and sales strategy for my market?
- Can I financially commit to SEO for the long haul?
- Are leading players in my market leveraging SEO effectively?
These questions will ensure you don’t invest in a traffic channel that won’t bring you the long-term results you hope for.
If SEO is a viable strategy, then you have more tactical questions to ask.
- Who are the leading brands in the market succeeding with SEO?
- What non-brand keywords do those brands rank for in Google?
- Are those keywords relevant to my business? Do I sell products that would be natural destinations for those searches?
- How do my competitors structure their websites, product categories, or collections that allow them to get found for all those keywords?
- Do I have enough products to populate product categories or collection pages?
- Can I replicate the content on my collection pages that is as good or better than the competitors?
- Is my website design and layout good enough to compete with the leading websites?
- How many links do those websites have, and how did they acquire them?
- Do my competitors use paid links, link-building content, or PR for links?
- Do I have the budget or creativity to do the same?
- If I don’t have the budget, is there an angle or approach that would allow me to attract links or attention cost-effectively to enable me to compete?
- What content are my competitors publishing?
- Why are they publishing that content? Are they using content to expand their keyword footprint or to attract SEO-boosting links, OR are they stuck writing generic or branded content for other uses?
- Do my competitors have a unique edge, advantage, or assets that I don’t, and will that make it harder for me to compete?
If you ask these questions, you will focus on activities that will improve your SEO performance.
You will not spend your mental energy and money on activities that do not compound and that do not bring you more visibility and sales.
If you need help asking the right questions, you can book a call with me, and we can work on this together.
