Clean indexing and preventing internal competition constitutes the path to the top

Sina Grabner-Von Rosenberg, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Zooplus.se

The winner of the Swedish SEO-price in the category “Animals” is zooplus.se. We talked to Sina Grabner-Von Rosenberg in order to get her opinion on the latest within e-com and what have caused zooplus.se huge organic success during the last year.

Mention three major trends that every e-commerce-junkie needs to be aware of in 2020?

1. Voice search & omnichannel shopping: with the emergence of more and more virtual assistants or smart AI devices that allow people to use voice searches, this will have an increasing impact on the way searches are made in the future. Online retailers must consider this when creating and optimizing their content, and also combine this with the growing trend towards omnichannel shopping. Customers are no longer using a single device or channel to shop, but rather tend to combine them by e.g. doing a first voice search and on a mobile device with the final decision stage and checkout on a laptop.
2. Efficiency in time and effort: people nowadays want to save time and get things done as simple and smooth as possible, especially when it comes to finding the right products, the check-out process and available payment methods. Online retailers have to facilitate a smooth and efficient shopping experience in order to make a customer convert on their site. After all: a customers’ loyalty is much more affected by the overall shopping experience, than by a brand itself.
3. Increasing awareness for social responsibility: The increased awareness around this topic will also impact e-commerce to a larger degree. Customers will more often question an online shops’ routines and responsibility when it comes to sustainability, social obligations and related topics. This can reach from transportation routes and packaging to ethical standards, charity and product sourcing. Being transparent and honest with the customers is a key factor here.

Please share three SEO-advice which you are practising for boosting organic rankings!

1. Create valuable content and provide context: Instead of only providing a simple listing, showing the product and its price, we are putting a lot of work into valuable content that helps both the customers and the search engines to get what the site is all about. This starts on the homepage with content containers including information about e.g. the assortment and services, and goes all the way down to the product level, with detailed product descriptions, open customer reviews – including star ratings, visuals and so on. In addition to this, we extend our content even further with our pet magazine, which contains relevant and educational articles for pet lovers.
2. Broaden the scope: Do not put all the focus on transactional search queries only, but aim to meet the users way earlier in the purchase cycle by also addressing informational search intentions. By doing so, we manage to be much more prevalent in a customers’ decision making process and have already established a first point of contact before maybe even a purchase intention was in place. Mobile first and page speed: considering the extensive usage of mobile devices in the daily life of internet users, especially when it comes to their search behaviour, it’s a must to have a mobile friendly site that is easy to navigate and short in loading time. Countless examples show that especially mobile users for example have a much higher bounce rate when the page load speed is too slow or content layers are delayed – popping up and repeatedly interrupting the user in the process. All in all these two factors sum up to major ranking factors in SEO.
3. Clean indexing and avoiding internal competition: To make it easy for the bots to do their job, a proper and logical indexing strategy has to be in place. This includes taking care of potential cannibalization between their own pages. When several pages are covering the same topic, you’ll run into an issue of competing with yourself for the best rankings – which eventually will have an adverse impact on the rankings. By structuring the website properly and e.g. deindexing pages that are relevant for UX, but not for peoples’ primary search behaviour, one can achieve a higher relevance for the pages that actually are supposed to rank, while at the same time improving the onsite experience.