Holiday SEO Tips for 2024: Maximize Organic Traffic and Revenue

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today for another iteration of our holiday strategy series that we've been doing over the last few weeks here on the podcast.

And today we're going to be talking about our newest service offering, which is SEO and how to approach SEO over the holiday. So that being said, I'm joined today by Travis Biechele, who's our Director of SEO here at Common Thread. Travis, what's going on, man?

[00:01:08] Travis Biechele: Hey, how's it going? Glad to be here.

[00:01:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Glad to have you. So I think like, basically what we want to do is, is kick it off with a little bit of context around what this particular holiday season looks like, what 2024 looks like. And then we'll dive into some specific tactics that we're employing with our clients around approaching SEO and particularly from the lens of approaching organic search capture which obviously is what SEO is, but thinking about it in those terms in the upcoming We are technically in Q4 right now.

So, Travis, let's, let's start with a little bit of context around 2024 what this year looks like. So there's a graph that, or that we've, or a chart rather that we've included in our decks that we've been showing clients around a 36 percent year of year decline in organic search revenue. Break that down a little bit and then SEO strategy kind of addresses that.

[00:01:55] Travis Biechele: Sure. A lot of brands are experiencing. If you were to look at a year over year comparison over any date range, it's either flat aligning or it's on a state of decline. And the way we think about that is if you're flat or down year over year, you are in a state of decline. Okay. Organic revenue should be a stabilizing layer of revenue for the business. So if you're not either increasing in increments year over year or quarter over quarter, then you consider you can, you can consider the business in a state of organic atrophy and that's cause for concern and that's what we're looking to kind of fix for businesses.

[00:02:38] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And so would you say like, I mean, I guess if there's overall 36 percent year over year decline, this is something that we're generally seeing with a lot of brands and overall. This, or maybe what I'm trying to say is like a lot of brands are struggling with this, or if they don't think they're struggling with it, they should maybe look into it.

And discover that they are something along those lines.

[00:02:57] Travis Biechele: Correct. And it, and you can look at two things. There's sessions and there's revenue, there's traffic. And there's money. So your traffic, your sessions may be in a state of. Increase, but if your revenue is in a state of decrease, then you're not converting at the rate that you need to be or that you have historically. So that speaks to the quality of organic traffic that you are indeed bringing to your site, which can be and should be improved. So there's 2 kind of core metrics, those being sessions from a volume basis. And revenue from a volume basis that should be considered when you're looking at both of those metrics.

[00:03:37] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So let's talk about their, let's kind of segue then into what we're doing to address some of these concerns. And then generally speaking, how the best practices for approaching holiday with your SEO with your SEO strategy. So yeah, let's let's kind of get into, to what we're doing for clients this year.

[00:03:54] Travis Biechele: Yeah. So there's kind of a sprint that we would want to go through in this core timeframe this month and next month are kind of, you know, if we really were to truncate it, the next 45 days are the most critical because we want to get a given website in the optimal condition possible to be attracting the right revenue and the most revenue possible for that business.

And it starts with traffic. So two of the critical things that we're looking at are the metadata, how your site is structured to appear in search results and the schema markup, which is also a complimentary factor that allows your site to appear in more rich results. on organic listings that both together will allow you to appear just more robustly for a given search results phrase.

So those are two things that we're trying to tackle with most clients to ensure that we're increasing their organic traffic and their organic revenue. More importantly, over the course of the next quarter

[00:05:01] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. What, what was the second thing? Schema Marka.

[00:05:04] Travis Biechele: schema markup. Yeah. So it's, it's funny. It's Yeah, markup. Yeah, it's, it's a funny term and it's, it's basically there's a vocabulary of the coding that the internet ingests when it looks at your website. So we see a picture, a paragraph, a title. And in the background, search engines are seeing a hierarchical markup of the data that you want to present. And the reason that this is important to think about is we can control how this data displays what appears on our website. If we don't, we leave it to search engines to kind of infer, and they may get it wrong. So we have the ability, the unique ability, to control how this data appears in search results.

Thank you. And therefore how strong our search listings appear. And that's kind of the focus of what we're trying to accomplish in terms of creating more robust organic listing.

[00:06:07] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And so when you say that we're, we're uniquely capable of this, who, who is we?

[00:06:12] Travis Biechele: Well, you know, any, any practitioner that is that is familiar with schema markup can make these changes. But the important thing is that when we're looking at the default theme markup, when you have a website, you have probably you're operating out of a theme. It's out of the box incomplete, or it's not good enough.

So we need to make that more robust by adding things like reviews and FAQs. And whether this is an article or a video. Or a snippet of information that is pertinent to a specific search query. These are things that are inherent in schema markup that are not necessarily default in the theme that you have in your Shopify site. So there's a, a plus up in an increase in the robust. Nature of that coding that's required for the information in your website to appear across more and more search results pages over the course of time. And if it's not done, then you're just missing out on the ability to even show up against people that search for your product or your brand,

[00:07:26] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So let's let's keep rolling through some of the tactics here. So we, you'd mentioned the sort of sprint checklist and just real quick on a side note. What, what was the first one you said? Structure data and then

[00:07:38] Travis Biechele: um, structured data.

Was that what you? 

[00:07:42] Richard Gaffin: markup. Those are the two.

[00:07:43] Travis Biechele: Correct. Yeah. Structured

[00:07:46] Richard Gaffin: Okay. Gotcha. So, Okay. We can just kind of cut here. So what, so you, the first thing you had mentioned was damn it. Sorry. Data. What?

[00:07:55] Travis Biechele: data. That's going to be structured. Yeah. Structured like a scaffolding. Yep. And structured

data is going, 

[00:08:03] Richard Gaffin: let's look, break that down.

[00:08:05] Travis Biechele: So structured data is going to be the core bits of information that you feed a search engine to tell a given, tell about what a given page is all about. So the three typical things are going to be your page title. That's the blue link that appears in search results. Then you have Your meta description, that's going to be the two to three lines of information that appears below the blue link. And your URL that typically appears above that blue link, but those three together should be in relative unity in terms of the signal that you're sending to search engines about what this page is all about. So it's not enough to say this is a socks collection. It's more important to say. This is a crew cut striped blue sock collection page that should come through in your URL, in your page title, and in the description of that page so that Google doesn't have to infer and rewrite those core elements of your organic search listing.

According to what that page is all about, you can predefine what that is. For search engines, so that doesn't have to be rewritten.

[00:09:19] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And, and so when, just, just for my own clarity here, it's like, so when let's say Google rewrites them itself, what, like what mistakes or pitfalls are sort of inherent in having the search engine do it for you? 

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[00:10:08] Travis Biechele: Typically, what happens is you create a product or a collection and you're calling it socks, or you're calling it crew socks, or your individual sock PDP is called Travis's socks. Well, none of those things are inherently very descriptive. They're just either what the brand wants to call PDP or that product, or what the brand kind of just for lack of a better phrase, lazily calls that collection. So we have the ability to define with more detail. specificity. This is a crew sock collection. This is a striped crew sock collection. And this is a PDP that is a blue striped crew neck sock called the Travis sock collection or the Travis sock PDP. And those are elements that are critically important for search engines to understand and therefore surface your product against appropriate queries.

Otherwise you end up showing up for Any socks or any crew socks or some other, you know, irrelevant query that is going to inflate your organic traffic and it's not going to deliver ultimately. Revenue to the business. So it doesn't matter to show up in the number three spot for crew socks if you're just not attracting the right traffic to your brand.

[00:11:32] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. That makes sense. So as part of part of what this does for you, then like, maybe I'm getting confused here, but it was like, the idea is like the actual PDP, let's say that somebody sees might be named, whatever it happens to be named. But what you're, what you're doing essentially is coding in such a way so that Google reads it as Cruz socks, blue.

Whatever this size, the Travis, whatever, something along those lines.

[00:11:56] Travis Biechele: Correct. Yeah. So you can, this doesn't the SEO efforts do not typically interfere with what you want to name the product. So we can call it X, Y, Z product. And that is not interfered with when we call this product from an SEO perspective, a. blue striped crewneck sock, and that appears in search results. That's not going to interfere with the fact that we want to call it something unique and on brand for the name of that product. So there's no interference there. And, and really the ultimate goal is to cast that wider net against search queries that are relevant for that specific product or category that we're trying to kind of surface. And it's great that we're able to kind of preserve brand integrity and also just appear against highly relevant search queries.

[00:12:55] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So those are a couple, let's say general data points. Let's talk a little bit about. Or not data points, sorry, general tactical approaches or strategic approaches, but let's talk about some specifics around SEO as it relates to Q4 and as it relates to the sort of holiday calendar that we've been talking about for the last few weeks.

So, for instance, we have here like a checklist that you've put together here for SEO for holiday promos and early birds. So let's walk through maybe some of the specifics around what, what a Q4 is itself is going to look like from an SEO perspective. So And

[00:13:27] Travis Biechele: think the, if there's, if there are efforts that people can do to kind of redress, The data that they are communicating to search engines by way of page titles and meta descriptions. The single biggest thing that they can do is take a look at the queries. This is through Search Console, Google Search Console, which many brands have associated with their sites. Take a look at the queries that have attracted traffic to the brand over the course of the last 6, 9, 12 months time. And especially if we can look at Q4 of last year. We can start to look at what are, how are people searching? What are the queries that they're searching with? That might be hyper relevant to what we're selling this year and starting to insert those into the page titles and the meta descriptions of the core products and the core collections that we're trying to promote for the coming, you know, queue for a season. That's incredibly helpful. We can also augment that with. Google ads data where we're paying for the data and the queries that people are searching for, and therefore converting. We can also use that data to augment or, you know, kind of complement the data that we see from an organic perspective. So together, the paid and the unpaid can come together to make an even stronger search listing. If we're paying attention to the queries that are searched at the highest frequency. And I think those are, like, critical elements that can be folded into not only the metadata, but also what we title pages, the copy that might be redressed over the course of time in those core collection or PDP pages. And that's the thing that can really augment the search potential, the organic potential of collections and PDP specifically if we're talking through an e commerce lens.

[00:15:23] Richard Gaffin: so as part of like, I kind of want to dial in on what that augmentation looks like. So you have a list here, product synonyms, richer explanations, complete features and benefits. But the idea here generally seems to be adding more information to your pages. So that Google has maybe more to kind of latch onto or however you would phrase it.

So maybe talk through like, what does it look like to find product synonyms or do a richer explanation or whatever?

[00:15:49] Travis Biechele: Yeah, I think the, the biggest thing is thinking through specifically how people might find your page. So to stick with the socks synonym, we can talk about crew socks or ankle socks or calf socks. There are all different synonyms that people might be searching for. And they may not be synonyms to your brand, but they're synonyms in the minds of customers. So 

delineating between the two is important. And then arriving at a unified understanding of to my customer, this means sort of the same thing. So let's talk about the differences between crew socks and ankle socks and calf socks and how they relate to the product that we're actively selling. And that can be particularly important. In terms of appearing more frequently and for folks that are searching for your brand. And it's just a worthy exercise to go through to make your product descriptions more relevant over the course of the time.

[00:16:52] Richard Gaffin: So is maybe to, to dig in on the example a little bit. So it is what we're talking about. Something like people are searching crew socks, but they don't realize that what they actually mean is something else. Or like how, how would, how would, how would that play out? I guess.

[00:17:09] Travis Biechele: It could. It could be that there's like a misnomer and some of that is You need to dig into the query level data to understand people are searching for crew socks, but they actually mean ankle socks, and we're actually delivering ankle socks. So we need to course correct accordingly. Other times it's a pivot away from. So people are searching for calf socks. We really only produce ankle socks or below. So we need to avoid the term calf or high or something of that nature because it's just purely. irrelevant to what we're actually producing as a brand. So it can be a little bit of going with the flow or kind of pivoting away from it.

That's important. And it's just it's a it's a critical study of how people are searching. And that's only going to be born out of analysis over paid and unpaid data from a query level basis that we assess over the course of time and can help people. Distill and then therefore make product pages collection pages richer and more appropriately stacked with the right information that search engines are going to ingest and therefore surface the brand and its products.

I

[00:18:31] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So, so it sounds like in, in large part, the sort of checklist for the pre holiday pre holiday period going into black Friday is essentially, it's just, again, making sure everything's prepped. And ready to go for that period. So then let's, let's go for the next thing that we're talking about here is Q5, which is of course like the post holiday hangover and how to kind of, how to counteract that.

Right. So, so Q5 clearance and housekeeping checklist for SEO. So what are, what are some of the things specific to that period of time that you need to think about when you're thinking about your SEO? Gotcha.

[00:19:07] Travis Biechele: most important thing is going to be our product. Do we have enough product inventory to continue sell through or do we have not enough where it's this truly remnant inventory? And those are two critical things. If it's truly remnant inventory, my advice would be to collect all of those products and place them into a collection that is Appropriately labeled as clearance or 2024 styles or whatever it might be that is truly evident that you're trying to clear this out of stock contrast that with brands or brands or products or types of products that might continue onward. And the important thing is to just. revamp the metadata and supporting content around those collection pages that can support that. So if this is going to be your brand specific clearance data, then maybe you title that collection brand name, clearance, Collection, and you allow that to house an enormous assortment of products that might be appropriate to be clearing out of your inventory.

Whereas future forward products might be appropriate to introduce. just a novel way of positioning those. It might be know, old styles. It might be some other creative way to kind of clear those out, but keep them part of the core remnant inventory that you're, you're not going to do away with those products, those collections those styles, but you're going to you, you want to obviously push them out of the current inventory, but you don't want to ultimately clear them out of. Your your repertoire of product sales. And the other 2 kind of notes that I'd add to that are if you are clearing out inventory and you have a specific skew or a collection that is going to be never again. Utilized, you're going to be clearing that out. You're going to be never coming back to that collection. It's either out of stock permanently, or just you have a vendor relationship. This is, is terminators no longer valid. It's pertinent to then. Introduce a 301 redirect so that that collection or that PDP does not lead to a dead end for consumers. That doesn't serve anybody any good. And the idea is that you can then turn people that might have that URL from an email, an old email a text shared email. An old ad, whatever it might be, that might have a direct link to that page that they're redirected to an appropriate page that might be either a PDP or a collection that is valid so that they're not presented with a 404 dead end. That's critical for kind of products that are going to be sunset permanently.

over the course of time. Same thing applies to collections. If it's an old one, then you want to redirect that.

[00:22:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So basically in summary, like. The idea would be like prior to this Q5, as we're calling it, period, make sure to have some like clear understanding of what's going away forever and what's not, what's being sunset and what is actually going to be sold through the, through the rest of the next year or whatever.

[00:22:34] Travis Biechele: Correct.

[00:22:35] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So let's quickly then. Cause we talked before we had recorded, we talked briefly about, and it's possibly you already hit this, so we can cut it if we do, but you talked about like the one tip that you would leave people with when it comes to talking about SEO or approaching SEO, which has something to do with the Google Merchant Center.

So let's kind of unpack that for us.

[00:22:56] Travis Biechele: Yeah. So it's, it's a very curious thing. The search results page has been evolving very dramatically over the last year plus. And arguably the single most impactful thing is that we're seeing it grow more visual. So we're all accustomed to that top of page carousel of paid shopping listings. Well, the same engine that that creates those shopping listings is also appearing lower on the search results page, and we see these cards, these organic product cards that appear lower on the search results page below text listings that are visual in nature, and they're, you know, maybe a 5 by 2 or a 4 by 3 or something like that kind of product grid. So the critical thing to do is. To start to pair the organic efforts that you're doing, the page titles, the meta descriptions, the, the efforts that you're putting on the organic side and start to try to merge them with what we're doing with either Google Merchant Center or any product feed. Software that we're using, like some process or data feed, watch or whatever kind of mechanism is in the background from a Google perspective, because those mechanisms are driving what we see from an organic product card listing perspective. So we need to. We need to not only redress what's on our website, but also what's either within our feed or what's within Google Merchant Center in terms of its read of how products are represented from a page title, product title, or a description perspective and the imagery that's associated. So in order to feed into those, we need to be redressing Both the website side and the merchant center side.

[00:24:50] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So, so, and you'd mentioned that part of the reason to do this is to create a scenario I'm imagining, right? Where you, like, let's, you search a K keyword. Let's go back to our crew socks. Analogy here or example, rather. So you search, you search crew socks and you see a series of socks at the top which is your Google shopping sort of like listing or whatever.

And then throughout, and what you're saying is like throughout the search results, you're also seeing organic pulls. That action that sort of respond to that same keyword, so there's something that needs to happen in and sorry. So, so the shopping fee. And again, this is I'm showing my ignorance here, but the shopping feed pulls from merchant center is what you're saying.

And then the, the, the images that are pulled into organic are from your website. Right?

[00:25:39] Travis Biechele: Yes and no. And, and and, and, or, so it can

be from your merchant listings. It can also be from your website. It depends on which structured data is more robust. So typically Shopify, which is many merchants, many websites are operating off Shopify. That's going to do a pretty darn good job. But it doesn't out of the box, make your website bulletproof or perfect. So it's prudent, especially if you're using a data feed kind of, pull of your website for the purposes of merchant center to represent how your PDPs would appear in the top shopping carousel. Understand that that's going to impact not only that top layer, but also the subsequent layers that appear organically. Those are governed by the same process, the same house of Google Merchant Center, which is new and never before seen. So it's important to apply the same scrutiny and the same prudence that you would apply to, Your shopping ads as your organic listings. And it kind of brings SEO and SEM together in that sense where we have this unifying mechanism of Google Merchant Center. So how are products being listed there? What are our product titles? What are our imagery? What is the the average. Description pulling from and do we have all of the product data synced up appropriately so that we can appear across paid and organic listings in the strongest way possible,

[00:27:20] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah, no. And, and also like one thing that we've mentioned on the pod before, and it has been part of our Google search, like our paid search strategy for a long time, is this idea that the Google shopping feed is the most valuable real estate on the page. If you can be number one there, you can be number one, generally speaking.

So, and, and I would imagine that it's a little too early to make the call, but are we seeing initially that the, the image ads that are appearing, let's say in the actual organic feed, are outperforming or are showing signs of being more valuable, let's say, than just the actual, like, regular search listing.

[00:27:53] Travis Biechele: I'm starting to see that image centric searches are increasing over the course of time. The sheer volume of image based searches is increasing over

time, which leads me to believe that there is a possible future state where Google search becomes image only or image first. And in that case, it behooves us to pay much stronger attention to these product listings in combination of the titles and the descriptions that we're applying to them to the images and to their alt tags in the background, whether that's organic or paid in nature.

And it just becomes critically important to pay attention to that visual first search results page. I think that's kind of like the clear future for me.

[00:28:40] Richard Gaffin: that makes a ton of sense. I just put crew socks into Google and it's almost wall to wall images. 

[00:28:45] Travis Biechele: Yeah, 

[00:28:46] Richard Gaffin: that's, that just kind of like backs up what you're saying here. Cool. All right. Well, I think that in terms of like, well, I think what we want to talk about in SEO, I think that wraps it up. Travis, is there anything else that you want to hit on this point?

[00:28:57] Travis Biechele: I don't think so. Other than, if any of this is unfamiliar and if, if especially if you don't know enough about your schema markup, that is the language that search engines continue to use to digest what your page is all about. So if that's unfamiliar to you, we'd love to talk more about it. That is kind of the backbone of what makes a good search listing appear.

So we'd love to help you out there. If that's something that is unfamiliar to you, we can, we can lend a hand.

[00:29:29] Richard Gaffin: Yep. And you can check us out of course, at common thread code. com hit that high rest button. Let us know if you're interested. In our services, particularly in SEO, and we would love to help you out. All right, folks, we appreciate you joining us here. Travis, thank you again for being with us, and we will see you all next week.

Goodbye.