Overcoming SEO Challenges For Retailers: Interview With Stephan Spencer

This is a clip of Stephan’s interview about Overcoming SEO Challenges For Retailers on Search Engine Journal.

My name is Brent Csutoras from Search Engine Journal, and I'm here with Stephan Spencer from Science of SEO. And what exactly is the Science of SEO? I know that's a new project that you're working on and whatnot. Can you tell us just a little bit about that before we jump into some of our other topics?

Absolutely. It's a video-based training program on SEO. It's going to cover the gamut, everything from link building to strategy to implementation of technical issues to content optimization keyword research on that, and you have quite a bit of experience in really writing about se. I mean, you have the part of the SEO book that you've done, which is now in its second version right yet in the second edition last year, stuff on panda stuff on new tools and so forth is that you know that a glossary in its.

And that's something that I've actually used as a reference point to a lot of people who are looking to really get in and have a good coverage of it. So earlier we were talking a little bit about some of the changes and some of the different challenges that different companies were facing. Specifically, we started getting into conversations about retailers, product-based retailers, and stuff like that. And some of the challenges they were facing, you had some pretty good points. Can you kind of rehash some of the points that you think maybe small and big size retailers are facing today?

So my clients span both small and large retail, and they tend to have the same sort of problems. For example, it's hard for them to get links because who's going to link to an e-commerce site? Not very many people. It's not rich in content, and it certainly is not viral-type content. So that's one issue. Technically, they tend not to have a lot of the things implemented that they should have, like rel prev and rel next on pagination. Their faceted navigation is not built in a search engine optimal way.

The Art Of War by Sun Tzu

They're not using microdata markups, so they're not taking full advantage of the rich snippets that Google can provide, and so there are a range of different issues. Maybe they don't have images included in their XML site maps, so many different things that I have to kind of troubleshoot for them, but you know, it's not just tactical strategic, and I like to say that you know there's an in The Art of War the book by Sun Tzu he said, "that tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat," right? So, working on all these tactics and avoiding the big-picture strategy is a colossal mistake.

So, what would you say, you know, to accompany, let's say there, let's go for the smaller to mid-size, you know, a company that's looking at their site, they're looking at their retail strategy. They're saying, "Wow, you mentioned like five or six things that I haven't been paying attention to, but then you said, oh, we also have to have a strategy." Would you say there are a couple? What would be the starting point, like the first three steps, that you would say people really need to focus their energy on?

Right. So, the first thing is how are they going to be remarkable? And when I say remarkable, I mean Seth Godin's definition of remarkable, which is worth remarking about. It doesn't have to be the best, the most interesting, the lowest price. It just has to have something worth remarking about, and that can lead to viral marketing you can and content marketing. So for itself, how are they going to be remarkable with their videos, their infographics, their personality tests or quizzes, their how to use their top ten lists, whatever they're doing that, you know they're going to be remodeling product descriptions right so it could be just product videos I've been like that Vat19.com is one my favorite retailers because they are just so remarkable with their product videos. They are viral product videos. They're hilarious, like the music video of this 20-pound gummy bear. It's hilarious.

Awesome. So, if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, obviously, you have a wealth of knowledge in this space, and we're barely scratching the surface, but if anybody wanted to get in touch with you and learn more about retail specifically, how would they get in touch with you?

Yeah, so email me at Stephan@stephanspenser.com, and also follow me on Twitter SSpencer.

SSpencer, right?

Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you very much, Stephan. I appreciate your time.

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