The technical approach to ecommerce SEO is no longer effective on its own. You can almost completely ignore the long list of technical issues your SEO consultant presents to you. Chasing SEO best practices by fixing technical issues is unlikely to increase your traffic significantly, unless your website is majorly broken.
Instead, you should focus on becoming Google’s preferred brand in your product category. We do this by starting our SEO efforts with authority building. Once we have defined our authority building strategy, the appropriate technical fixes, page optimizations and content strategy are obvious.
I’ve collected examples of brands that are using authority building strategies effectively.
Think of authority as your invitation to the stadium where the brands in your product category are competing for organic traffic. Authority gets you on the playing field. The remaining on-page SEO and content optimization tactics that we recommend will help you win the game.
Case study: Advocating for the “right to repair” by a publisher in the consumer electronics space
iFixit is a publisher of repair guides for consumer electronics. They have built authority through their advocacy for consumers’ right to repair their own devices–publishing informative articles on the topic and promoting campaigns. Like-minded activists and organizations link to these materials, generating the engagement signals Google likes to see.
Case study: Grants for emerging jewelers by a materials supplier in the jewelry industry
Jewelry materials supplier Halstead, holds an annual grant contest for emerging jewelry artists which generates all kinds of buzz on the web. Jewelry news sites cover the results of the contest and aspiring jewelers follow contest judges’ blogs and podcasts to get an edge. All this content generates brand mentions and backlinks for Halstead, boosting their site authority.
Case study: Publishing immigration stories by a financial services company in partnership with advocacy groups
Sharemoney is an online remittance platform that has achieved link-building success through spreading the word about their immigrant support scholarship and syndicating high quality content relevant to the immigrant community (their main customer base).
These two strategies have allowed them to earn dozens of backlinks from authoritative online publications and non-profit organizations, allowing them to compete on the first page of the search results for high-value keywords in the ultra-competitive finance space.
Final thoughts
To be effective, your authority building efforts must generate backlinks, product reviews, brand mentions, content partnerships and other trust signals that Google is monitoring.
We designed our Authority First SEO process to simplify SEO strategy by ditching technical SEO and focusing on what matters. Authority building is the biggest lever you have to grow your organic visibility. So why not start there?
