Thank you to everyone who attended our the Ecommerce Executive Forum Boston on March 20th!
Your thoughtful questions and experience sharing around what’s working for your organizations elevated the level of conversation. It felt like a firehose of learning.
For those of you who weren’t able to make it, Dale Bertrand, founder of Fire&Spark, gave a 15-minute presentation about SEO trends in 2019 (using case studies from recent client work).
Then, for the next 45 minutes, Dale facilitated a discussion on SEO challenges and strategies that are working for the organizations in attendance. With so much experience in the room, the discussion was the most valuable part of the evening.
SEO in 2019
Here are the four primary points we discussed regarding to SEO in 2019:
- Create useful content: Your strategy needs to be based on creating content that is actually useful to your customers (the days of “SEO content” are long gone). Google is closely watching the CTR and bounce rate of your pages.
- Technical SEO is necessary, but is not a differentiator: It’s okay to focus some time on technical SEO, but don’t let your agency talk you into thinking all these issues need fixed. They can often be ignored because the ROI on fixing them is zero.
- Grow authority by managing your online reputation: Backlinks are still important, but reputation is the best way to build trust with Google. Use the E-A-T strategy: Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
- Use only white-hat link building strategies: Google is really good at silently demoting spammy links. Unnatural links can result in a manual penalty and an immediate drop-off in traffic.
Current SEO Trends
Here are six SEO trends for 2019 from Dale’s presentation:
- Trend #1 – Customer service affects SEO: Google wants to send users to trustworthy ecommerce sites. Google does this by looking at how you treat your customers, so it’s important to secure positive online reviews while also providing value on social media and industry forums.
- Trend #2 – Structured data is becoming more important: Google is always on the lookout for more data to feed its AI, so structured data markup on ecommerce sites is a must.
- Trend #3 – Google is getting better at evaluating content quality: Create content that attracts and retains visitors, to reduce bounce rates. You can do this by creating content that is actually useful to your customers. Also, focus on many types of content, not just writing articles.
- Trend #4 – The role of technical SEO is changing: Getting the basics right is critical to driving organic traffic, but good technical SEO alone isn’t a differentiator. You only have so much time and money, so don’t over invest in technical SEO.
- Trend #5 – More web users are starting product searches on Amazon: The rise of Amazon is nothing new, but the way the platform evolving rapidly. Amazon search is staring to send more traffic to their ad units and squeezing their organic results.
- Trend #6 – Using edge caching tools for SEO: For example, Cloudflare is becoming more capable. It can help with reducing page load speed, blocking price scrapers, SEO A/B testing, and more.
Final Thoughts
Thanks again to everyone who attended our March 20, 2019 Ecommerce Executive Forum.
We received tons of positive feedback on the form we distributed to attendees, which resulted in a Net Promoter Score of 80 percent. This made our week!
If you were unable to attend this event, keep an eye out for our next one in June. Also, we’re planning an event in New York City for the summer, so stay tuned!
