This document provides tips from three eCommerce SEO experts - Kristina Azarenko, Paul Lovell, and Luci Wood - on driving more traffic to eCommerce sites. Some of the tips include creating valuable category pages, using filters from Google Image search and internal site search data to find new category ideas, applying noindex tags to internal pages with low search volumes, ensuring faceted navigation pages have consistent URLs and updated metadata, and using internal linking to valuable filter pages. The experts discussed best practices for category and filter page optimization to expand keyword visibility and drive more qualified traffic.

2. Driving More Traffic to ECommerce Sites
● Kristina Azarenko
● Paul Lovell
● Luci Wood
AUTHORITAS
● Carrie Shepherd - Marketing Executive
● Laurence O’Toole - CEO

3. Kristina Azarenko
eCommerce & Technical SEO Consultant
● eCommerce & Technical SEO Consultant
● 10+ years in SEO and Digital Marketing
● Worked on an agency side and in-house
● Founder of MarketingSyrup
● Creator of the SEO Challenge Course
● Kristina loves getting hands dirty with website
migrations
● And she absolutely loves eCommerce ♥️
@azarchick

4. Paul Lovell, Always Evolving SEO
• 10 years Plus in the Digital Marketing industry
• Working with Startups and Large Ecommerce
Sites
• Currently obsessed with Schema
• Into All Things Search and Analytics RelatedImage

5. Luci Wood
SEO Director, Blue Array
● SEO Director at Blue Array in Reading
● Oversees strategy for a number of the agency’s
largest clients
● Particularly interested in eCommerce SEO and
emerging search trends
● Currently holds the record for most corgis
included in a BrightonSEO presentation 🐕

6. Top Tips from Kristina Azarenko
Categories are the most popular pages on most eCommerce
websites…
Create more categories valuable categories!
What valuable categories mean:
● A category page is properly optimized (title tags, unique
content)
● It has enough products to display
● It’s added to the existing website infrastructure
Up next: 4 ways to find killer category ideas

7. 1. Think not only about the characteristics of your products
but also about the use case.

8. 2. Use Google Image search suggestions

9. 3. Research your filters
bit.ly/8-step-eCommerce

10. 4. Use internal site search data

11. Top Tips from Paul
Tip 1
Remember SEO is Search Engine optimisation not Google
Optimisation :
● Don't put all your eggs in one basket
● There are many other search engines outside of
Google and Bing
● One of my clients gets more traffic from Pinterest
that they do Google organic

12. Top Tips from Paul
Tip 2
No index internal pages with low search volumes:
● Use Google tag manager to apply the noindex tag to
internal search pages with low number of items
● From that you can also fire an event in analytics and
create an alert so that the business is aware.

13. Top Tips from Luci
Expanding keyword visibility through faceted navigation
Tip 1:
Don’t canonicalise filter pages ‘upwards’ (with no static URL equivalent)*
Instead:
Create a static URL equivalent for your ‘top’ filters. Canonicalise your
parameterised filter URLs to their static equivalents.

14. Top Tips from Luci
Expanding keyword visibility through faceted navigation
Tip 2:
Don’t bloat your site with multiple pages for a single product:
● Colour/material/style = /dresses/?colour=Black&material=Silk&style=Maxi
● Colour/style/material = /dresses/?colour=Black&style=Maxi&material=Silk
● Style/material/colour = /dresses/?style=Maxi&material=Silk&colour=Black
● Style/colour/material = /dresses/?style=Maxi&colour=Black&material=Silk
● Material/style/colour = /dresses/?material=Silk&style=Maxi&colour=Black
● Material/colour/style = /dresses/?material=Silk&colour=Black&style=Maxi

15. Top Tips from Luci
Expanding keyword visibility through faceted navigation
Instead implement either:
1. A rule in place to ensure filters are only ever added to the URL in a consistent
order e.g. colour/material/style. This means you’ll only ever get one URL and
reduces any crawl budget issues.
2. A canonical tag declaring which is the master URL.
3. A NoIndex tag on all of the duplicate pages.
Options 2 & 3 prevent issues with duplicate content, though don’t help with
crawl budget issues, so option one is generally the preferred route.

16. Top Tips from Luci
Expanding keyword visibility through faceted navigation
Tip 3:
Ensure metadata is updated on filtered pages to reflect what’s on the page.
Dynamic updating via the CMS is typically the best way to do this at scale but make
sure you ‘sanity check’ how you’re naming your filters:

17. Top Tips from Luci
Expanding keyword visibility through faceted navigation
Tip 4:
Use internal linking to your advantage
Link to your valuable filter pages from elsewhere on the site, such as blog posts
or new trend pages.
Again, if your filter pages use query parameters, it may be worthwhile creating a
more user-friendly static URL to use when linking from high authority pages on the
site like the homepage or even in the footer.

18. Thank you - over to Q and A
● Great tips from 3 experts
● Kristina Azarenko - @azarchick
● Paul Lovell - @PaulLovell
● Luci Wood -@incorgnitomode

19. “Making Paid and Organic Work Together"
● Pınar Ünsal
● Oliver Hearsum
Friday 1st May 2020 @ 4 p.m. SEO Advice, tea and cake with...