The fastest way to improve your user experience & SEO One Hydra

OneHydra

Warren CowanCEO & Founder, OneHydra

[email protected]

@onehydra

The fastest way to improve your

user experience & SEO

OneHydra

Warren CowanCEO & founder

• Doing enterprise SEO for 15 years.

• Founder of Greenlight, UK’s no1 Digital agency and Search firm.

• Expertise in search, ecommerce and web technology.

• Orchestrated over 100 global search projects.

We believe websites and campaigns can

and should optimize themselves to reach

every searching customer.

We want marketers to be able respond to

reach every searching prospect, in the most

optimal, timely, relevant and cost effective

way,

…and without being limited or burdened by

the scale of the task, or the complexity of

their business and technology, or limited

resources.

A platform that can strategise & automate the onsite

SEO process.

From delivering insights,

through to actionable recommendations,

All the way through to real time delivery of those

changes and actions on site,

via an integrations with major ecommerce platforms

The OneHydra platform

Today we serve our sister agency but also leading retailers and brands like

these who use our technology to improve their ability to deliver great SEO.

We use big data and the power of

the cloud… to automate the SEO

process and create SEO revenue!

Not SEO recommendations!

Why?

SEO isn’t getting done!

If you want to grow revenue from

Paid Search, there’s no shortage of

places to go!

Need to measure, manage or push your affiliates harder?

You don’t need to look far.

Even social ads…

…you can make changes,

and see revenue come out of

the other end!

And for SEO…

It’s complicated!

You need a team of these

Who’ll work with tons of these…

To produce loads of these…

And then you need to

give them to IT…

…and of course they’ll just

drop everything to work on

your problem.

So you CHOPthe recommendations back a bit.

Try to prioritise the

“Quick wins”!

And then you wait…

…and you wait

…while changes are

debated and drip fed in

over 12 – 24 months.

Suddenly…SEO doesn’t feel like

a growth strategy anymore!

By the way…

you can track the ROI on all of this right?

…it’s complicated?Did we say it was

complicated?!

100k

70%

80%

State of SEO in retail,

survey.

Polling 200 ecommerce executives

and digital marketers.

Download at www.onehydra.com

Don’t have the technical resources or bandwidth to implement changes.

of spec’d SEO changes weren’t met in the last 12 months.

The majority of retailers spending on average, against SEO services.

http://www.onehydra.com/

I’m going to go through 3 common SEO

and UX opportunities that ecommerce

sites can leverage.

User defined categories

Most ecommerce websites miss out on

almost half of the searching audience!

This happens because they either misname their categories, or miss them out

completely

• Businesses in general tend to approach the web with a preconceived paradigm based on their

existing business operation

• Door to Aisle

• Lots of products limited space

• Visually merchandised

• Department/category led

This approach leads to hard

ever green taxonomies.

Which break down

into faceted

structures based on

more hard data.

Your taxonomy is key.

Your structure & its naming convention and will

dictate what your site ranks for!

What if you organise your product into key categories...

But your users are searching for many more.

The sites that are the most visible in search,

have taxonomies that are not just broad, or

even spiderable….but are aligned with the

users language.

To capture these opportunities we need to

move beyond hard data & arbitrary

structures that don’t change,

and pre-empt what user will search for, week

to week, and month to month.

The good news is…there’s no

shortage of data.

Onsite search

engine logs

Referring

keywords report

in analytics

Adwords

search query

report

If you find less than

50,000 keywords,

you’re not digging

deep enough!

#SKU’s x 10-20

Once you understand the complete

picture of the language your users

search with…you can start to organise it!

High Heels, 2000

Heel strap, 1200

Heeled sandals, 450

Sandals, 7000Gladiator sandals, 2000

Strappy sandal, 400

Black sandals, 1500

High heeled sandals, 100

Sandal heel, 900

Sandals with heels, 400

High heel sandal, 200

High Heels, 2000

Heel strap, 1200

Heeled sandals, 450


Strappy sandal, 400

Black sandals, 1500


Sandal heel, 900



High Heels, 2000

Heel strap, 1200

Heeled sandals, 450


Strappy sandal, 400

Black sandals, 1500


Sandal heel, 900



Heeled sandals, 450


Sandal heel, 900



[high heeled sandals] 2,050

…and in demand sub

categories begin to

appear.

What’s our response?

Heeled sandals, 450


Sandal heel, 900



2,050

“Do we have product in these groups?”

“Do we actually group these products as part of the ‘navigable’ experience that we deliver to users and

thus search engines?”

Heeled sandals, 450


Sandal heel, 900



2,050

“So lets create one!”

Strapless dresses

Dresses

On average…for every

category and sub category you

can define, user generated

data reveals 5-10 more.

“So lets create one!”

Because high heeled sandals are only popular for so long.

• On top of the data• Making the pages • Changing the site• Opportunism requires agility

Prioritising your

navigational hierarchy

General SEO rule

The higher up in the site that a page sits…the better its ability to rank for its desired keywords.

But you can’t put every page up to the main navigation.

Demand driven hierarchy

• Pages that can attract more traffic,

• and convert better

• at higher price points,

• at the current point in time,

…and promote them up the hierarchy, so they can rank better.

Knee high boots

Gladiator Sandals

Demand varies at every level of the product and category mix throughout the year, and so there is greater or lesser value in ranking at

certain points

Womens Shoes

Boots

Sandals Gladiator

Knee high

But retail sites tend to be fairly rigid, linear and static in their

hierarchies, and typically so throughout any period.

Knee high boots

Gladiator Sandals

Demand varies at every level of the product and category mix throughout the year.

Womens Shoes

Boots

Sandals Gladiator

Knee high

Sept - Jan

+3

Womens Shoes

Boots

Sandals Gladiator

Knee high

Feb - August+3

Align your ‘On-page’ experience

with user expectation

Customers say they can’t find what they want !

Using customer external search language (ie what they type into

Google) we can understand what they want…



…and use that data to inform a pre-emptive approach to the

categories we create, and the way we design and layout our

online store.



…and use that data to inform a pre-emptive approach to the

categories we create, and the way we design and layout our

online store.

When customers arrive in store, it’s easy for them to see how

they get to the products they want.

What do we think customers want in hard drives.

108k

4k

<1k

6k

<1k

1k

25k

7k

This is how we lay out our experience This is how many consumers this appeals to

But does

this

represent

what

consumers

actually

want?

153k

Using OneHydra we can actually find out.

Using OneHydra to look at consumer intent around the

‘drives’ category, we can see there are some clear leading

lights that deserve to lead the organization in this category,

based on in market demand.

External drives make

up the bulk of

keyword searches

used in market, with

797 keywords

commonly used,

some 107k times a

month.

This mirrors maplin

internal search data

to similar proportion.

Based on this data,

the external drives

category is justifiable

headline category.

From here we can see its predominantly dictated by:

Size requirements:• As in capacity, and largely from 500gb - 2tb

• Certain brands, ie WD, Seagate and Samsung

• Discrete sub categories based around features like wireless, Mac

compatibility, ipad, USB, etc.

Is this the experience we give the

customer?

According to default layout

According to default layout According to user expectation

Often the same lack of alignment in browse,

is carried across into internal commerce search

Onsite search results often show a lack of alignment with the category attributes, and user priorities.

A search for TV wall brackets, also shoes a lack of prioritised faceting.

Once the search experience is actually browse-able,

user engagement with onsite search increases.

4 strategies for SEO & UX success, that will grow organic search traffic, and grow your conversion rate across your channels.

1. Align your category structure with what users search for.2. Prioritise the products & categories that can make you the most

revenue.3. Align the in page navigational experience with what users expect to see.

If you can generate enough

SEO recommendations

Work out the

“Quick wins”!

Avoid the

chop back.

…and get them

past this guy!

In time for it

make a return.

Until then…

OneHydra

Warren CowanCEO & Founder, OneHydra

[email protected]

@onehydra

The fastest way to improve your

user experience & SEO