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How to Migrate Your Store to Shopify: A Complete Shopify Migration Checklist

The eCommerce landscape is ever-evolving, so choosing the best strategies and tools to help you stay ahead of the curve is essential. When you need to move your eCommerce website to a new platform with improved features and performance to maintain your edge, make sure you’re choosing the best team for the job – LION Digital.


Here, we explore the complexities of migrating an existing eCommerce store to Shopify or Shopify Plus and how our LION Digital Shopify specialists can help you maximise the opportunity associated with this migration.

The Complexities of Shopify Migration

While moving to Shopify offers plenty of benefits, the process itself demands meticulous planning and execution. To maintain customer trust and prevent disruptions to your business operations, it is critical that we ensure the accurate transfer of data without loss or corruption.

Data Migration

One of the most crucial aspects of transitioning to Shopify involves migrating product data, customer information, and order history. Achieving a seamless transfer of this data requires careful planning and potentially custom coding to accurately map data fields.

Design and Theme

The visual appeal of your online store is important for attracting and retaining customers. While Shopify provides a range of customisable themes, recreating your existing design or optimising it for the new platform may require design expertise and time.

URL Structure

Changing URLs can have adverse effects on your store’s SEO rankings and traffic. Implementing correct 301 redirects and optimising the new URLs is vital to avoid losing organic search visibility.

Third-Party Integrations

If your current store relies on various third-party integrations for payment processing, shipping, or marketing, we must ensure they are working cohesively with Shopify. Some integrations might not be directly supported, which will then require custom solutions.

SEO & Ranking

Your store’s search engine ranking is the result of various factors. Moving to a new platform could impact your SEO. Properly managing metadata, keywords, and backlinks during migration is central to maintaining and/or improving your search visibility.

Shopify Migration Checklist

Migrating your eCommerce store to Shopify is a complex process, so make sure you have a well-structured checklist for a smoother transition. The team at LION Digital has compiled a comprehensive Shopify migration checklist to help you cover the essential aspects of the migration process.

Shopify
Migration Checklist

Seemlessly migrate your eCommerce store to Shopify.

Download

By following this Shopify migration checklist, the team at LION Digital can help manage a successful transition to your new eCommerce platform while minimising disruptions to your operations.

Potential Challenges of Shopify Migration

A poorly executed migration can unravel your online presence. Therefore, understanding the potential challenges that may arise during the process is vital to ensure a smooth transition.

Downtime and Business Disruption

Migration often involves taking your store offline temporarily, which may result in lost sales and eroded customer trust. Efficient planning and execution are essential for minimising downtime and managing customer interaction.

Data Loss & Corruption

During migration, there’s a possibility of data loss or corruption, leading to inaccuracies in product listings, customer accounts, and order history. This could negatively impact customer satisfaction and loyalty, so protecting your online reputation is key.

SEO Setback

Neglecting SEO considerations could cause a dip in your store’s search engine rankings, resulting in reduced organic traffic and sales. Our team can identify any potential setback and implement a management strategy to help avoid SEO setbacks.

User Experience

Changes in design and navigation might temporarily confuse returning customers, and impact their shopping experience. Therefore, it is important to manage customer expectations surrounding the Shopify migration.

Functionality & Feature Gaps

Despite Shopify’s broad range of features, certain functionalities specific to your previous platform might not be readily available. So consider a tailored plan for custom development work to return to former functionality.

Cost Considerations

Shopify operates on a subscription-based model, and additional expenses might arise due to theme customisation and app integrations, so you need to consider hiring experts for coding or design assistance.

Rather than risking a DIY debacle, collaborating with an experienced agency such as LION Digital during your migration to Shopify can greatly reduce the fallout from any complex technical hurdles and create a smoother transition for your business and customers.

Handing Over Your Migration to Shopify Specialists

Successfully migrating your eCommerce website to Shopify is supported by partnering with the Shopify specialists at LION Digital, who hold the experience, customer and technical know-how to ensure your business breezes through this complex transition. 


Our recognition as a Shopify Plus Partner is a testament to our expertise in conducting thorough and effective Shopify migrations. This partnership cements our position as an industry specialist, allowing us to offer expert Shopify implementation and management strategies.

Expert Proficiency

LION Digital is an eCommerce agency, delivering top-tier eCommerce solutions in a complex and highly competitive marketplace. Our specialists possess in-depth knowledge of the nuances of Shopify Migration to help your business transition seamlessly.

Bespoke Approach

We acknowledge that every business is different. Our team will identify your unique requirements before customising the migration process to resonate with your brand identity and business objectives.

Data Integrity Assurance

Data forms the lifeblood of your eCommerce venture. With LION Digital, we undertake best practice procedures to ensure the integrity of your data and reduce the possibility of loss or corruption.

Minimal Downtime

Our streamlined migration process ensures minimal disruption for your online store, creating ease of flow during the evolution of your business.

Sustained Post-Migration Support

Our indexed procedures don’t just end once Shopify is up and running. At LION Digital, we offer ongoing support to tackle potential challenges and ensure consistent operations.


By choosing LION Digital as your eCommerce partner, you’re tapping into a wealth of experience that’s backed by Shopify-endorsed success for your business.


Partner with us today.

GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH

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Article by

ERIKA MAGPILI – DIGITAL EXECUTIVE & MARKETING MANAGER

Which SEO Tools And Tests Should Every Developer Know?

Positioning SEO As An Opportunity, Not A Challenge

(1:12) MARTIN SPLITT: What is SEO? Oftentimes SEOs barge in to the development team and they’re like, “oh my god, we need to like figure out our canonicals and there’s this other problem here with duplicate content, we’re gonna get a penalty”, and oftentimes they are met with a blank gaze from the people they just spoke to.

“What’s happening there?”, “Why are we are working on the same thing?”, we are all working on the same projects together and yet we seem to be so very very different in terms of the vocabulary we use.  What’s happening there?

CRYSTAL CARTER: I think, I absolutely agree. This is something that I’ve seen a number of times and I think that one of the things that’s tricky is that we’re sort of coming at it from different perspectives.

Sometimes if you think about it, it’s a bit like a band. Like if you have a band, you have your bass player, you have your guitar player, you have your drummer and you’re all trying to make a beautiful song. But the bass player has different things that they need to do, the drummer has different things that they need to do and sometimes they overlap, sometimes they intersect, but really what we all need to focus on is making sure that we’re making beautiful music together.

And so, I think that, yeah, it can be tricky, and I think sometimes it’s because people who’ve built the website, the developers behind the website, they’re very often like they spend a lot of time and effort putting that together. So, it’s quite tricky when someone comes in and says, “oh, it’s broken”, “oh, it’s wrong”, or it doesn’t work.


And I think that it’s really important to think about that when you’re speaking to developers as an SEO. And one thing that I found that’s really useful is to think about it as opportunities.

So rather than saying, “this is broken or this is wrong”, say “we have an opportunity to make the website faster if we do X, Y, or Z”, “we have the opportunity to make the website easier for users to access in a different way if we do this, that, or the other“, and I find that generally speaking, if you go to it from that perspective, then it can sort of make those conversations a bit less brutal.

Sometimes if you think about it, it’s a bit like a band. Like if you have a band, you have your bass player, you have your guitar player, you have your drummer and you’re all trying to make a beautiful song. But the bass player has different things that they need to do, the drummer has different things that they need to do and sometimes they overlap, sometimes they intersect, but really what we all need to focus on is making sure that we’re making beautiful music together.

And so, I think that, yeah, it can be tricky, and I think sometimes it’s because people who’ve built the website, the developers behind the website, they’re very often like they spend a lot of time and effort putting that together. So, it’s quite tricky when someone comes in and says, “oh, it’s broken”, “oh, it’s wrong”, or it doesn’t work.

MARTIN SPLITT: Oh, I love that. I love framing it as opportunities and possibilities to make things better because fundamentally that’s what developers want to do in the first place anyway.

So that’s really, really cool. I like it better than framing it as a problem or like a thing that needs, is broken or needs fixing. Because to be honest, it’s also that developers are not even necessarily aware of these things.  It seems to be like you are preaching from the holy book that is written in a language that isn’t ours and it comes out of nowhere and out of the blue, right?

One day you’re just implementing this feature and you’re making sure it works in all browsers, works on all devices, is fast and then out of the blue someone is like, “it’s broken”. So, I like changing that into here’s an opportunity to make it even better.

The Importance of Testing And User Data For Both Web Dev & SEO

(04:18) MARTIN SPLITT: I do read up constantly on new technologies, on new things that browsers can do, on new trends and design, but I don’t really even know where to get started on SEO. And I think one of the things that us developers need to do more is get out of our little bubble of development and actually look at SEO as at least at the technical side of SEO, as something that is just part of what we deal with. Not necessarily it’s not part of our job to do this, but like we should know about it, I think.

CRYSTAL CARTER: Yeah, I think so and I think Google’s really good at trying to bridge the gap between those spaces and trying to make it more clear for people to understand how that works.


I think one of the things that’s really useful, when you’re thinking about developing an SEO and understanding SEO as a developer, is remembering that with SEO.

We’re essentially taking the technology that a developer has built and we are interacting with it in the real world. Users are using it in lots of different ways and the ways that users are using the site, the ways that users are interacting with the site, are going to be very different from, you know, there’ll be millions, billions of possibilities for ways that people can access the site, ways that people will search for the site, ways for people that people will use the site, from what we are able to test in a sort of test development framework.

And so essentially, as soon as we build a site, they always say, “we built the site can somebody run it through a few tests”, and I always run it through a few calls and there’s always a few things that we pick up because the SEO is essentially thinking about, you know, it’s search engine optimisation.

Which means that you are thinking about how people search for and arrive at the site and how people interact with the information on the site and how people use the site. So, SEOs will have lots of user data based on that site itself.

Let’s say you’re rebuilding a new site. We’ll have lots of historic user data about how people use the site, and then there’ll also be general sort of industry user data. So, it might be that, you know, you’ve built a lovely shopping framework, but we also know that within the shopping, the eCommerce space, that users have an expectation of being able to see this and be able to pay in this way and being able to sort of have a cart that’s really clickable and that sort of thing.

So, I think that, you know, development is a really tricky job because there’s a million different ways that you could build a website. Like there’s a million different ways that you can build an app, that the possibilities are endless.

I think developers can speak to SEOs and ask for more user data to help them build ahead of time. And I think that using some of the, like Google, has a lot of tools that are over cross development tools I use all the time.

It’s tricky to expect one developer or even one developer team to know every single possibility, possible way you could build a website. But when people are using the site, that’s where SEO and development can interact and I think that developers can speak to SEOs and ask them for data about, you know, “what are the sort of customer expectations for this type of website?” or “how fast should it be?”

So, for instance, eCommerce sites tend to be a little bit slower than other websites, and that’s because they’ve got lots of different tracking things on them. It’s all sort of, it’s all relative. We want to make sure that we’re meeting user expectations.

When I’m speaking to developers and, you know, just things like view source can be really, really useful in Chrome and that sort of helps bridge the gap between the two, and I think that where there’s the willing to understand the two different parts of both how users are interacting with it and how businesses need a website to work and how it’s built in the framework and that sort of thing that there’s opportunities for growth and opportunities to make the web better for everyone.


MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. And you said two things that I want to address with you now. Let’s start with, so the one thing that you said is you run a bunch of tests and there’s a bunch of tools that developers can use and then the other thing is like, there’s a bunch of different solutions. And I think those are two very interesting aspects.

Let’s start with the tests. Because you said like, once a website is done, I run a bunch of tests, that’s what we as developers do while we are building it. So, we have a bunch of tools that we are running to figure out bits and pieces, like “how fast is this website?”, “where our problem’s coming from?”, “is it behaving the way that we expect it to behave?” – and we actually write tests. We write test cases such as “if I click on this button and then, I should see this thing”, “If I type something into this thing and then I click this button, something should happen” – So, like we are having a bunch of tests.

Tools To Help SEOs & DEVs Work Together

(9:40) MARTIN SPLITT: I wouldn’t even know what tools or tests to use for SEO. Because for pretty much most of the things, I can run a browser, basically remote controlled by code, so I can click on buttons and fill in form fields and then see what happens. But what would I be looking for for SEO? I actually don’t know, and I don’t know where to find out or what tools are available to me. I know Lighthouse has an SEO audit, but that seems very, very basic.

So, what would you say is something that developers should look into to support their SEO teams?  What are technical aspects that developers should be aware of? Or where would they find out how? Or what would they have to? I don’t even know what to ask an SEO.

CRYSTAL CARTER: I would say that normally what happens when we launch a new site is I’ll crawl it with something like ScreamingFrog, which will give you information about crawl errors and then the other thing is things like Search Console. Search Console gives you lots of information about the way that Google is seeing it. Because different search engines will have different ways that they read websites, different bots will have different ways that they read websites.

Search Console gives you lots of information about the way Google sees it, and it can also give you information about how different users are seeing it. So, a page experience report, for instance, is based on real user information.

So, it might be that within your test framework that everything looks perfectly fine, everything’s lovely. But it’s sometimes like if you’ve ever written something and then you try to proofread it yourself, sometimes you don’t see your own writing. Things because you’ve spent so much time writing. Whereas if somebody else reads it, they’ll go, well, you’ve missed a full stop, or you haven’t said and there, or that sort of thing. Because they’ve got sort of fresh eyes.

The other thing is that as a developer, you’re looking at it from a developer’s perspective and you’re fairly tech savvy. Whereas users are going to be coming at it from lots of different perspectives. So, I think it’s really important to look at it with the way that it’s rendering on different browsers, the way that it’s rendering on different machines, the way that it’s rendering on different mobiles, and devices as well.

Tools like Search Console give you user data, how people are using it. And once a new website is live, I think it’s really important to think about what to expect to make further changes and potentially expect to make further changes even six months down the line. Because you’ll have more data based on it. I think data is really important, particularly for businesses that are seasonal or businesses that have sort of peaks.

So, the way I think about that sometimes is like, if you were to do data on a tree, like on an oak tree, for instance, and you took all your data from between May and June, all your data would tell you that trees are green, oak trees are green, they have green leaves and they’re great. But if you do it for the whole year, then you learn that sometimes they fall, all the leaves fall off, and sometimes there’s none, no, sometimes the leaves aren’t green at all. So, the more data you have, the better you can prepare and if you had the full data on the full year, then you’d know that we’d also need to buy a rake to go with the tree.

MARTIN SPLITT: I love that image, that’s a beautiful picture you’re painting. That is awesome. It’s really nice that you mentioned Google Search Console because I remember as a developer, again, coming from a developer background, the very first time I came into contact with it was when it was still called Webmaster Tools, if I remember correctly, and I was at the same, this is gonna sound really weird, at the same time I was overwhelmed and underwhelmed. And it was bizarre because I didn’t even know where to look. But I think that’s exactly one of these interfacing moments between SEOs and developers, because if you come to this tool and you see like performance, impressions, clicks, what’s happening, then it might be a lot to take in at first.

But I think this is exactly where SEOs can guide the developers or even just provide the data that they need for a specific conversation to underline that specific conversation. And I think this is what needs to happen.

I remember working with one specific SEO a long time back and she guided me through a bunch of the decision-making processes that I didn’t even know existed and that was very, very helpful. And I think data collection, as you say, like if you look at the trees only in the summer months, you might be very, very scared to see all the leaves fall off because trees are supposed to have leaves all the time.


CRYSTAL CARTER: I think that the overwhelmed and underwhelmed thing is something that I’ve encountered sometimes. Sometimes when SEOs go to a Dev, they say, “right, we want to make all of the title tags do this and this and that and that” and they go, “well, that only took me a minute to implement”, Why is that really important?”, “Does that really matter?”, and it’s like from an SEO perspective, it’s like, “yeah, that makes a big deal or that can make a big difference.”

I’ve spoken to developers, and I’ve been like, “I need you to add this particular bit of schema markup” and they’re like, “well, I just copied and pasted it”, and I’m like, “well, you know, that’s fine. That’s great. I’m glad that it didn’t take you long to implement”, but it does have a big impact on things like how Google crawls it and things.

So, something that’s super simple that a lot of developers miss and then something that I always check every time there’s a new, we launch a new website is the sitemap. Like literally putting a sitemap on the website.

Sometimes I explain it to people, like, you know, if I went to a restaurant and I said, what’s on the menu? If they give me a menu, then I can figure out what’s on the menu. Or if I don’t have a sitemap, then it’s like just going to the restaurant and then just being like, “have a look around and you just see what other people are eating”, which is essentially what you’re asking Google to do. You’re asking them to guess whether or not there’s a Caesar salad on the menu. And like, they’ll probably figure it out. Google’s very sophisticated but it’s better if you give them a menu.

MARTIN SPLITT: I like that. Yeah. Again, beautiful analogy. That’s, that’s lovely.

Tools for Testing Sites During Development

(16:27) MARTIN SPLITT: But going to the testing and the tooling, you mentioned a few tools and you mentioned Search Console. Search Console, the bigger challenge is that I as a developer can only use it once the site has gone live and Google has had a look at it.

Can I use things like crawlers? Which one did you mention? ScreamingFrog, and all the others. Can I use those in development as well? Like before the site goes public?


CRYSTAL CARTER: Yeah. So, in a staging setting, you can use ScreamingFrog to sort of understand if you’ve got, if you’ve got gaps with like, with page structure things.

So, for instance, H1s are super important. I think people very often underestimate that. That’s another one that I very often see. So, people very often don’t put an H1 on the homepage and I’m like, that is an easy win. Like please put an H1 on your homepage.

You can use ScreamingFrog to see a lot of different things. There are many, many, many, many, many different layers and many different configurations of your ScreamingFrog setup. So, you can see a lot of the structural things like headings and title tags and meta descriptions and URL structure. And you can see all of those sorts of things.

So then, and then you can also see like the navigation and various other elements. And ScreamingFrog is really useful with helping sort of understanding how that, like the crawled up through different pages. And this goes back to indexation, which is about your website in the real world. So again, another metaphor, I speak in a lot of metaphors, but sometimes I think of it like the developer builds a plane and the pilot flies it.

And so, the SEO sort of flies it. And like in the real world, the way that it interacts with, you know, very different things are different. So, that’s something that’s really useful for understanding how the site is performing and how it’s crawlable and how it’s readable online before you go live with it in a migration setting. It’s also useful. There’s a couple of different Chrome extensions that are really useful for sort of understanding what the page was before and what the page is now and versus, what it’s going to be in the future.

I was working with a client the other day and they were talking about changing their homepage, which isn’t a full migration, but changing a homepage can change a lot because of most websites, the homepage is the most visited page. So, if you change the number of links on that page, then that can change the crawl depth and that can change the performance overall.

And so, there’s a couple of different tools. There’s a tool that I use called SEO Pro Extension, which is really, really good, so I use that a lot. Also, a tool that I use particularly with migrations, if you’re thinking like, let’s say you’ve developed something, and the client says it’s not as good as it was before. But that website is gone. Something called Wayback Machine is really good. I’ve used that a few times to understand why a site before was working and why it’s not now.

So, there was a site that we had where they used to have a most recent content feed showing on the home page and that helped with crawl depth and help with retetion of new content and that sort of thing. And then when we moved to the new website, it didn’t have that. So when we moved, using Wayback Machine, I was like, we need to put that back on so that goes back, so that gives us more tools.

Moving The Needle Efficiently

(20:29) CRYSTAL CARTER: We always need a super-wizzy, technical fix, and sometimes it’s not necessarily the case that you need something super fancy. I know there’s a lot of AI at the moment and there’s a lot of automation, and lots of things like that. But sometimes you can do something pretty straightforward that will fix it.

So for instance, I’ve seen it before where, from an SEO point of view, we’re looking around and we’re going, “oh, there’s a bunch of 404s”, and “oh, we need to fix this”, developer needs to sort something out or something. It’s like, well, if you’ve got loads and lots of 404s, let’s say most of the pages on your website have seven links, and there’s 475 404s to this one URL. It’s probably in your menu. It’s probably in your menu. You’ve probably got a 404 in your menu. You probably just need to change the link on the menu and sometimes people think, “oh, we need to do this whole thing and fix that”.

It’s like, you might literally just need to change one little thing that isn’t even a dev thing, for instance. So, I think that, thinking about what is really genuinely required from a developer point of view is really, really useful.

And also thinking about how complex the solution might be. So for instance, in the situation you were talking about where you built it one way and the SEO wants a bunch of other things, if your tech stack is resistant to the implementation that you want, then there might be an external tool that you can use that solves the solution or that gets you where you need to go, or there might be another way that you can do it.

So for instance, I had a situation where I wanted an RSS. We were trying to build an RSS directly on the website and we ended up using a third-party tool and it works fine. It does exactly what I needed to do. Or I could have spent a month trying to get someone to build one from scratch. But why? But why? I go to third-party tool, and it works perfectly fine. I don’t have any third-party lag for JavaScript. It’s literally just one little line and it’s totally fine, and I had enough.

I find other times where, for instance, structure data is something where everybody’s going JSON, JSON, JSON, and JSON is fantastic. But if the website already has a microdata setup, then you might be able to move the needle close, like more quickly, by just updating the microdata if it’s already in place. So, you know, I think it’s useful from an SEO point of view to think about not only what moves the needle, but also what moves the needle efficiently, and from a tech point of view and from an SEO point of view.

MARTIN SPLITT: And I really like that statement because I wish a lot of the SEOs that I had to work with in the past would acknowledge that. And oftentimes I feel like there is a bit of dogmatism in the way that some people operate as in like, as you say, you identify the thing that moves the needle and moves the needle efficiently, like what is, what is easy to do, but like has lots of impact, and we discussed that in a previous episode as well. But the thing is oftentimes it seems that people, SEO specifically, go from half knowledge of someone on the internet said, or it used to be like that 10 years ago, and then just ask for a solution for something that isn’t even a problem in the first place.

JavaScript is one topic that invites this kind of situations, it seems. It’s like there’s still a lot of people wondering around, like, “oh, no, we need to implement dynamic rendering or server-side rendering for this client-side rendered application”, because unless we do that, it won’t show up in search.

And then I’m like, but if I Google for a thing on your page, then it shows up, so it’s already there and I see that it has traffic in Google Search Console. It gets the impressions; it gets the clicks. Why are we doing this? “Oh, because Google doesn’t understand client-side rendered JavaScript applications”, and I’m like, “but the data clearly shows that it does. It’s there.” I’m not saying that it’s true for all the situations and all the cases and all the pages. Yes, for some pages, it still matters. For some, it still makes a lot of sense.

If you see a problem, then this might be a solution to that problem if the client-side rendering really is the issue that you’re dealing with. But oftentimes, it just isn’t and you spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money on implementing something that invites more trouble for solving nothing. Why does that happen?

CRYSTAL CARTER: I think sometimes people will hear a buzzword, or they’ll hear, “oh, yeah, we really need to sort out this and that,” and so I think sometimes people get excited about a new thing. And I mean, I can hold my hand up. There’s definitely been a time when I’ve done that.

Improving Communication Between SEOs & DEVs

(26:15) CRYSTAL CARTER: It’s great. But the other thing I think would be really, really useful, which I would appreciate as an SEO, speaking with Devs, is that if you don’t know what I’m talking about, tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about.

MARTIN SPLITT: Right. Yes. 100% yes. Yes. Yes, please.

CRYSTAL CARTER: And also, if you need me to give it to you in a different way, please let me know. There’s a lot of tools that will help you to do that. So, I use a lot of screen recording tools.

So, Loom is one that I use a lot and I think Slack now has an integration where you can just record your screen really, really quickly and send it in a Slack message, and that makes a really big difference.

Chrome Developer Tools is fantastic. I do tons of PowerPoints where I’m just like, “this is here, and that is like this, and this is like that, and that is there”, and sometimes if you can see it and if you can show them the code, then even if you don’t know the exact words, they can figure out what you’re talking about. But it’s also useful to learn some of the words as an SEO.

So, learning what is and isn’t a variable, learning about what’s going on with your server, how is it deployed, how is all of that working. It really helps from an SEO point of view for you to get things moved on action quicker if you can give the developers more information.

So for instance, there’s a couple of sites where I have access to the folders and things and I don’t change things very often, but I can route around. I’ve had clients where they still had a static sitemap, and I was generating the static sitmap, and there’s smaller sites or whatever. And if that’s something that’s taking dev resource, you can ask them, “can I have access, please?” and then you can learn how to do it, and you can do it. Like creating a static sitemap is a really simple operation. Uploading it is really simple, but waiting around for one can be quite a pain.

So, if you can do it as an SEO, then that’s really, really great. So there’s some things where you can ask for access to certain parts of the stack so that you can give them better information. But again, that’s about building trust. So, if you have the conversations with your developers, before things get heated, before things are broken, before you start moving around everything, then it really helps.

And I mean, even if you’re working with remote teams, we work with a few remote developers. We have developers in-house, but we also have developers that we work with, that they work with for other clients or developers that work in other countries.  And we use Slack and email, and stuff. I will literally send emojis and hooray gifts and that sort of thing. Like if they fix something, I’m like, “oh, hooray, thank you so much”. Say thank you. Thank you, gets you so far.

MARTIN SPLITT: Same for developers towards SEOs, by the way. If I made it a point whenever I was, something was pointed out to me where we could do better, than we just did. Then, we saw the business impact and then it’s like, thank you very much for bringing this to our attention and thank you a lot for guiding me through the process.

Because oftentimes I didn’t know why I was doing something or how exactly it’s expected to be, and where I would verify if it’s done correctly. Then having someone to guide me through that was great and I was grateful for it, so say thank you.

CRYSTAL CARTER: Right, absolutely and if you work really well, then as a developer, that’s adding another string to your bow, then it’s something that it just keeps, it makes everything better. So yeah, I think that it’s really important to build good relationships in that way.

MARTIN SPLITT: Absolutely.

Recap

(20:33) MARTIN SPLITT: So I think it’s important to communicate if you don’t understand something, be it you as an SEO or you as a developer, if you’re not sure about something, just ask. Find the tools that the other people are using, just ask your developers what tools are you using, ask the SEOs, what tools should I be using to check when I’m building this or implementing this or fixing this, phrasing it as opportunities of improvement, is probably much, much better than phrasing it as a problem or a challenge.

And if we just work together and finding the right solutions together, I think we are doing each other big, big favors. I guess that’s, that sums it up quite nicely.

CRYSTAL CARTER: Absolutely. Absolutely.

MARTIN SPLITT: Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation, Crystal. This has been really, really exciting and interesting, and I do hope that everyone out there got something out of it as well. I certainly did, and I am looking forward to see what other cool things you will be sharing with the community and us in the future.

And again, thanks a lot for joining and take care, have a great time.



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WHY IS BRANDING CREATIVE VITAL FOR ECOMMERCE BUSINESS?

To attract and maintain customers in a marketplace saturated with brands from all industries, it is crucial your business stands out with an innovative, trustworthy brand that is focused on building community, as well as straightforward customer appeal.

LION Digital acknowledges the significance of brand strength and prominence by partnering with an established full service creative, brand-building agency The Reactor.

So how do you achieve brand success for your business?


Bolstered by breakthroughs in technology, consumer behaviour and the intensifying demand for convenience and efficacy in the digital age, especially in the mCommerce sector, the evolution of eCommerce continues its forward march.

Within this explosion of offerings, as well as increasingly savvy customers, your brand can’t afford to be tame. The Reactor is an Australian-based premium strategic creative and branding agency specialising in building brand equity – that recognisable quality that brings status to your products and services.

Aside from increased customer loyalty, strong brand equity has many benefits, including:

Standing out from competitors, especially when scrolling on social media
Stronger desirability and status for customers
Organic influence, as loyal patrons promote and share your products and services
Improved emotional connection, which allows the brand to identify with consumer wants and weaknesses
Less price sensitivity, so you can charge more, based on a greater perception of value, without losing customers
Credibility for new products and services to ensure seamless integration into the marketplace
Increased sales, loyal customers spend on average 67% more than new customers
Acquisition of the best teams to enhance overall employment attainment and retention for your business.

WHAT LOYALTY LOOKS LIKE FOR YOUR BRAND

Strong brand loyalty creates a more receptive audience for an easier “sell”. Plus, by retaining customers, you save at least 6-7 times the cost of obtaining new ones.

Sales from new customers sit around the 5-20% success rate, while existing customers will push the chance of sales success up to 60-70%. This, combined with 20% of your existing customers taking up 80% of your future profits, makes achieving and maintaining loyalty a key element in your success.

BE THAT STANDOUT BRAND

If you’re feeling the pinch since the pandemic-pushed eCommerce boom and want to climb out of the slump, relaunching your brand strategy is a brilliant way to make a statement.

The internet is scattered with cut-price products and services that could send you out of business if you set cost as your focus. So, finding the point of difference by identifying the meaning behind your brand is key for customer allegiance.

Partnering with eCommerce specialists LION Digital, The Reactor takes a goal-based approach to building your brand and starts from your intended outcome to turn your brand into a winner. Either creating your brand from scratch or reinventing your legacy, the agency will not deviate from your intended vision of what a “win” looks like for your business.

Ensure your brand appeals to that primal human urge to “belong” to a community. Build a strong foundation and always look for new ways to reward loyal customers, as well as the traditional special offers, discounts and pre-order waitlists.

The Reactor’s goal is to create a stellar result that pitches you above your competitors. There is no room for “ordinary” when you are focused on “extraordinary”.

It was this ethos that captured eCommerce SEO agency LION Digital’s heart and reinforced the partnership offering for our clients.

WHY IS EMOTIONAL BRAND ENGAGEMENT SO IMPORTANT?

A prominent and polished brand is adept at creating emotional connections with customers to become top-of-mind when they are making purchasing decisions.

A robust creative brand campaign can make shoppers feel safer buying from a trusted business.

The Reactor creates brand creative that ‘speaks’ to customers, including weaving the USPs into the company story.

Do you have a unique story that buyers could relate to?

Effective storytelling can position you as perhaps an underdog that has risen to stratospheric heights by pure grit, guts and determination. Or, you could label your brand an ethical supporter by partnering with causes and charities that are front of mind for your target market.

Customers are looking for honesty and integrity, so pulling their heartstrings on a consistent basis will only appear inauthentic. 

Avoid saturating your marketing with lengthy and overly flourishing accounts of your brand journey. Keep it simple, consistent and always highlight how your brand has helped resolve the challenges and needs of your clients. 

EFFECTIVELY SOLVING ISSUES FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS IS A BOON FOR YOUR BRAND

The best way to beef up your brand is to win at helping people. 

There isn’t a customer out there without an issue to fix. So, if you can position your brand as that reliable “go to” problem-solver, this will instantly amplify your credibility.

Word-of-mouth referrals is purchasing gold, with 88% of consumers stating they trust recommendations from someone they know.

The Reactor has been producing premium strategic campaign creative for brands and achieving remarkable results. These include RAWW Cosmetics, DITC (Diggin’ In the Cellars) wine sales, and Upflow non-alcoholic beer, as well as many others.

The Reactor launched the RAWW Cosmetics online and on social media campaign to great applause from shoppers, making it easy for Total Beauty Network to stand out in the aggressive pharmacy cosmetics market and appeal to young women wanting to find “Super Good” health-conscious products.

Proving their creative flexibility, The Reactor stepped up for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic brands, DITC and Upflow respectively. 

DITC (Diggin’ In The Cellars) called for a complete campaign pivot after Melbourne Lockdowns shut down their 6 funky inner-city bars. So, The Reactor came out swinging with creative punches for online ordering, same-day home delivery service and social media saturation that saw their “wine that goes with” campaign help DITC match and even surpass their pre-pandemic sales numbers.

For the growing sober-curious market, The Reactor helped Upflow answer the call when they focused on building the brand’s online profile and social media campaign. Upflow’s point of difference is they are a completely zero-alcohol craft beer brewing company, not just a standalone single label, which have been produced to appeal to the industry major players’ newly minted alcohol-free customers.

QUALITY VS LOW-COST, HOW CHARGING MORE CAN BE YOUR ALLY

The Reactor recommends you don’t go head-to-head with the cheaper products in your industry due to the fact that like attracts like. Being the best at being inexpensive can cost your brand by offering substandard products and services, as well as penalise your status and influence.

Think of some of the biggest brands you know, the household names, the high-density marketers. These brands come with street cred. They come with prestige and desirability – a quality that “money can buy” if your marketing is on point. 

Increased quality, looks, feel, functionality and stature in society all come with a higher price tag. So why cannibalise this offering by cutting costs?

The current retail landscape requires action, rather than complacency, when it comes to promoting your brand.

Here at LION Digital, we only partner with organisations and services that help you amplify your offer. We take pride in our hand-selection of quality partnerships for our customers to help your brand go from bland to brilliant.

If you’re looking for outstanding campaign and branding creative, The Reactor specialises in delivering stunning brand identities for a diverse array of industries, while LION provides highly strategic approaches that drive targeted traffic, while generating relevant conversions, ensuring your business remains top of mind for your customers.

Leave the lacklustre results behind and go from ordinary to extraordinary today!

GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH

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Jennifer mccarthy –
Digital Content Manager

How to SEO Optimise Your eCommerce Website (8 Tips)

Introduction

(00:00) Alan Kent: So, you want your eCommerce website to be number one in search results? Go for it. The challenge is, so does your competitors. Hi. My name is Alan Kent, and I’m a developer advocate at Google.

In this episode, I introduce some basic SEO tips particularly relevant to eCommerce. These tips are not a guarantee of success, but they will help you get started on your SEO journey. SEO, or Search engine optimisation, covers actions you take to improve the ranking of your web pages in search results.

You can have different goals when you tackle SEO. For example, a website that earns revenue from showing ads typically wants to increase the volume of site traffic. However, for eCommerce, a more common goal is to increase sales. A large number of visitors that do not make a purchase is less useful than a smaller number of visitors that do make purchases.

Similarly, think about which products you want to drive traffic to. Do you want to drive traffic to fast selling products in the hope of getting return visits, or to products with a higher profit margin?

There is no single best answer for all sites. Such considerations come from your business strategy. It is, however, important to think through your goals for your own site so that you measure and optimise your support for your business goals.

In this episode, I share eight SEO tips for eCommerce sites. But there are many more great resources on Google Search Central. Let’s dive in.

TIP #1: Get the Technical Basics Right

(00:55) Alan Kent: The first tip is to nail the technical basics. Maybe you’ve developed a great content strategy, but you’re not getting the traffic you expected. The first step is to make sure you have the technical basics in place.

For example, if Google cannot crawl your website, it does not matter how great your content is. One great tool to find technical issues on your website site is Google Search Console. There are a number of reports available reporting on a range of potential issues on your site.

To address issues on your site, follow the advice given by Google Search Console. If there were issues with individual URLs that you have since fixed, use the URL Inspection tool to check to see if issues have been fully resolved.

Also, if you control the URL structure of your site, make sure your URLs and internal linking are friendly to crawlers. Check out designing a URL structure for eCommerce websites on Google. Search central for advice on how to design URLs for your website.

If your platform does not give you control over the structure of URLs on your site, don’t worry many common platforms take care of these issues for you.

Next, it is worth checking details such as page titles. Consider including the details in the title, such as the brand name and the color of products, so that the title provides useful information to shoppers and clearly distinguishes between different products on your site. The page titles are used as a basis for the title links shown in search. You may also consider adding structured data to your web pages to ensure Google correctly understands the purpose of each page.

For example, there is structured data for describing products on product pages that can help Google understand your product attributes with greater accuracy. Again. Check out Google Search Central for advice on adding structured data to your web pages.

Finally, review the remaining eCommerce guidelines on Google Search Central for additional techniques. There are many considerations, such as whether to keep out of stock products listed on your site and, if so, how to inform Google that they’re currently not available for purchase.

Product pages are an obvious choice to optimise. You want shoppers who are ready to purchase to find the product on your site. But what else?

TIP #2: Check Your Breadth of Content

(04:28) Alan Kent: Tip number two is to have content relevant to users at different stages of their shopping journey.

For example, your homepage may be a great landing page for a shopper who wants to buy a photography gift but does not know what to buy. Yet your homepage often describes many products you have in stock.

Along with special offers, category pages allow you to get more targeted describing areas you have a range of products in for example, bags to hold photography equipment rather than products. Shoppers early in their shopping journey may be looking for advice on how to pick the right product. Product reviews may be more important to such shoppers.

Providing useful resources for shoppers may also help increase the recognition and reputation of your website. To check the breadth and quality of your site, think about likely searches by shoppers at different stages in their shopping journey.

Once you have set the queries, try them out. Does your site come up well positioned? What about your competitors? Also check the search console performance report for queries where your site is being shown. This may help you understand where you are doing well and where you are not. Once you’ve determined a set of queries that you want to rank well for, analyse sites that rank higher than your own. To see what inspiration, you can draw from them.

What gaps exist in your own site? How can you fill out your own unique story so you stand out from the crowd? If you find product pages are struggling against competitors selling the same products, consider writing your own product descriptions in a way that is unique to your site.

This can help you capture different search traffic than your competitors.

In summary, develop your own content strategy. Try it out, measure its effectiveness, then continue to refine and adjust to help create your own distinctive voice for your site.

TIP #3: Ensure you Mark Up Product Variants Correctly

(06:25) Alan Kent: The third tip is to make sure you mark up your product variant pages correctly. Product variants are when you have multiple colors or sizes of the same product. Informing Google of the relationship between product pages can help Google better understand your site content.

To look for issues, Google Search Console can be used to explore the relationship between pages and their levels of traffic. The URL Inspection tool can also be used to check the status of individual pages.

On your site, it is recommended to give each product variant a unique URL. For example, add query parameters to hold the product color or size. Then select one of the variants to be the canonical variant. All variants should include the URL of the canonical page to help Google understand the relationship between the pages.

Finally, check that the canonical page includes text describing all of the variants available, such as all colors and sizes. This could be using text in the product description, such as this product is available in green and blue. But it can also be as simple as having a color swatch on a page to let the user change the color. With alt text describing each color choice in text. This is so the canonical product variant page will match searches for all of the variant colors and sizes a user may try.

TIP #4: Preserve Deal Page URLs

(8:04) Alan Kent: There are also a number of sales events that occur on a recurring basis, such as Mother’s Day. Tip number four is to make sure you reuse the same URL across all event occurrences rather than introducing a new URL for each event.

This can help Google correctly understand and trust the purpose of such pages. To identify problems, check the URL for promotional event pages on your site. Sorry, there are no automated tools for this.

For example, avoid URLs that include the current year in the path. Once you’ve picked a URL for a promotional event, remember to reuse the same URL each time. After the event, consider leaving the page up with a summary of previous offers or describing products that are likely to be on sale next time.

For example, for Mother’s Day, you may include a number of traditional Mother’s Day gifts that you sell. Update the page before each event with the current offers, but keep the page alive and in Google indexes all year round rather than waiting for Google to find and index a new page each time.

TIP #5: Performance Matters

(09:14) Alan Kent: Tip number five is performance of web pages matters. Performance is obviously important to users, as a page that takes too long to load may be abandoned by the user. Performance is so important that user experience has also been made a Google ranking signal, influencing the ranking of pages in search results.

This can be particularly important if you use the same supplier provided product description as other sellers online. If two product pages have the same textual content, page Speed may be the factor that decides which page comes first in search results.

The Page Speed Insights Report is a useful report for checking the performance of the web page. You can provide the URL of one of your pages, and it performs a number of lab tests on the page, as well as displaying field data from the Chrome User Experience Report for your page, if available.

You can also use tools like Google Analytics to measure the performance of your pages. The PageSpeed Insight Report includes a list of potential problems it identifies on your site. It also includes a list of recommendations on how to address the problems.

You can also check out the other episodes in this series for advice on specific topics such as image and JavaScript optimisation. Okay, so you’ve been following Google’s SEO advice for a few weeks now, but you’ve not seen much benefit. What’s next?

TIP #6: Be Patient

(10:49) Alan Kent: Tip number six is wait for it to be patient. SEO, unfortunately, is a long game. Some ranking signals may take many months to change. Worse, there is no guarantee of success. The HTTP archive reports that approximately 20% of the websites it archives support eCommerce. That means there is a lot of online competition out there.

Google Search Console, as previously described, is the best tool to check that your content on your site is being next correctly without errors. It can also be used to explore traffic to your site. If traffic is trending upwards, that may be a positive sign you’re on the right track. It can take months to reap the benefits of a content creation strategy, but that does not mean there is nothing you can do until then.

Think about how to diversify your site traffic sources. Do you have a marketing campaign? Are you active on social media? Do you have an email newsletter? Have you approached independent reviewers to review products on your site?

If you also have a physical store, do you have signs or pamphlets that link to your online presence with URL or QR codes, as well as the additional direct traffic, authentic external links to your site can improve your ranking.

TIP #7: Consider Expert Help

(12:19) Alan Kent: If you have done your best to improve your site but are still not getting the results you want, tip number seven is to seek professional help for your website.

There are many agencies available to provide expert SEO advice. Beware, however, of schemes that claim to improve your ranking by paying them to create more links to your site.

Artificially linking to pages on your site goes against Google quality guidelines and may have negative repercussions on your page rankings.

TIP #8: It’s All About Users

(12:54) Alan Kent: Still here? Great. Let me finish with my ultimate tip for SEO. Remember, it’s all about the user. The ultimate goal for Google Search is to put the best possible content in front of users performing a search.

Algorithms change over time, but the ultimate goal does not. This does not mean you should not measure your site’s performance. It is still recommended to make use of tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to collect data on your site.

But think about changes to help your customers rather than focusing on Google Search results specifically. For example, check the bounce rate of pages on your site. If users land on a page but do not stay on your site, it may be worth reviewing a content strategy. Maybe you’re attracting the wrong sorts of users with your current content.

The best strategy is to create content and experiences that best serve your customers. Rather than think about Google specific ranking algorithms that seem to work at the moment, build your content strategy around serving your customers and let Google worry about the search algorithms to find the best content. This may involve checking what typical customers are searching for or staying on top of current search trends. Google makes search trend data available for public access at trends.Google.com as well as textual content.

Also, make sure you include high quality images and videos on your site. Visual media is increasingly important on eCommerce sites and the web in general.

I hope you found this episode on SEO Tips for eCommerce Websites useful to get you started on your SEO journey to be informed of new content as it becomes available, make sure to like and subscribe until the next episode. Take care!

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Why Should You Want a SEO-Dev Liaison?

Why Should You Want an SEO-Dev Liaison?

SEO & DEVS: Harmony in Tech

(1:05) MARTIN SPLITT: Ruth, I’m super excited to have you here. I saw you at a I think it was React next summit, where you gave a talk on SEO for developers. And specifically, I think you focused on React JS, was that right?

RUTH MESFUN: Yeah. In regards to mobile first indexing? Yeah.

MARTIN SPLITT: Right. Yes. That was super cool. And I was so elated when I saw that because I see so very few non SEO people talk about SEO, especially in developer circles. So, it was very refreshing to see you do that.

When Tech SEO and Development Collide

(1:39) MARTIN SPLITT: What was the experience you had giving that talk? Did a bunch of people say, “I didn’t know that”, and that was interesting and exciting, or were you met with suspicion or what happened? Did you get any feedback on that?

RUTH MESFUN: I didn’t have any feedback in regard to suspicion. A bunch of feedback was mainly like, “I didn’t know it was that easy”, “I already know this stuff kind of thing”, but they didn’t realise that actually connected with SEO. So, it was great to essentially build a bridge, if that makes sense.

MARTIN SPLITT: It makes perfect sense, because this is exactly why this video series exists. Because I think this bridge needs to be built, and it hasn’t been built not only specifically to specific topics like mobile first indexing or client-side rendering, server-side rendering, all that kind of stuff.

MARTIN SPLITT: But I think also in general, between our two professions or the two sides of the coin, one being SEO and the other one being development or engineering, there isn’t as much of a bridge.

MARTIN SPLITT: I breached into this space in 2018 when I joined Google, and it was tricky to even get developers interested in SEO. So, what got you interested in SEO?

RUTH MESFUN: It was actually really funny. So at a previous job I was in, we were hearing about this mobile first indexing, but didn’t really get into. And we’re like, okay, whatever.
And we had other projects to do until someone said, “Wait, I think that mobile first indexing or mobile first is going to mess up our index ranking because we don’t do mobile first”, and we have like a separate page for mobile.

RUTH MESFUN: When we were looking into it, we’re like, oh my God, yes. And then at the time, Google’s deadline was September and it was already end of July. And we’re like, we got to get this done. That was the reason why.

RUTH MESFUN: Especially since, where I was working was like a marketplace, essentially. So, we didn’t realise how heavily reliant we were on Google searches. So, yeah, our users would search for us on Google and most of the time, and that’s how they got to our site. We thought that it was just like word of mouth or, honestly, I didn’t even think about how they came to our site.

MARTIN SPLITT: Then having a big change in the way that Google and other search engines work then probably becomes a surprise priority.


RUTH MESFUN: Yeah, it was definitely a surprise priority for our team.

How DEVs Approach SEO

(4:40) MARTIN SPLITT: I mean, I’ve worked as a developer for over a decade at this point, and I’ve experienced that where out of the blue, someone from the marketing department comes in and say, we have an SEO problem that we need to fix, and then oftentimes they have a really hard time even formulating it.

MARTIN SPLITT: So, the fact that you started with knowing that you were looking for mobile first indexing is already very nice because oftentimes it just, “we have an SEO problem”. It’s like, “what is it?”, “We don’t know, but we have an SEO problem.”

MARTIN SPLITT: It’s like, oh, great, and then you have to figure out you need to figure out what you don’t know. Right. It’s like, “how do I search for we have an SEO problem”, “How am I going to get a meaningful search query for this?”

MARTIN SPLITT: But where did you then take to or what kind of resources did you look to in terms of figuring out what you need to do and what is the supposed best practice and what’s the solution to the challenge you were facing? How did you go about this journey of figuring out what you need to do next?

RUTH MESFUN: I really like front end in general, so I naturally gravitated to, I’ll do research on SEO for my team and be one of the “experts”. I’m going to put quotation to “experts” because no way I’m an expert at SEO. But to be well informed, to explain it to my team and whatnot. And honestly, the webmaster’s videos, I watched almost all of Google’s SEO videos.

RUTH MESFUN: Because I was like, all right, well they’re the ones who are setting this whole mobile first indexing thing, so they must be like the experts if they’re the ones doing it. So, I watched the videos, which was great. So even like y’all’s, quarterly, or I think it used to be monthly videos of what’s going on and what’s the updates. I’d watch those and then all the best practices that Google put for mobile first as well. I read those up and had a couple of resources in regard to the difference between desktop first versus mobile first. Because I think a couple of the rules or guidelines changed a little bit because it was mobile first now. But honestly, I just went straight to Google for everything because since Google was the one who was stating that they were going to make it mobile first indexing only, I figured they were the most expert in SEO for what we were looking for.

MARTIN SPLITT: Interesting. I mean, it’s very flattering to hear that you watched all the videos and you probably are a fan of Google search news at this point. John is going to be really excited about that as well.

Google’s SEO Resources for DEVs

(7:51) MARTIN SPLITT: But it’s quite interesting that you went straight to, well, the source as far as it goes there because a bunch of people are not, and especially developers oftentimes are like, “how hard can this be?”, “We don’t really need to do any research”, “We’ll just fudge our way through it.” So, it’s really, really cool to hear that you went with that.

MARTIN SPLITT: Did you have any experience of looking at third party sources that said other things or did we have any holes where you’re like, there’s information missing?

RUTH MESFUN: That’s actually the main reason why honestly, I went straight to the source. It’s boring as that might sound of like, “Oh, go to if you literally Google Mobile first indexing and you find webmasters, Google click that,” the reason why was because there was a lot of misinformation with third parties.


RUTH MESFUN: So for instance, I had a product manager who came up and was like, “Oh no, we can’t do accordions or this or this or this, because that’s going to hide the data and it’s not going to show..” andI didn’t read that on the mobile first indexing. That doesn’t make sense. “Oh I saw it on this article..”

RUTH MESFUN: So, I read the article and I was like, well, this article seems like it’s a couple of years old and this looks like they are talking about desktop and not mobile-first. So, this might be out of date, and I think some people ran with that article essentially and wrote their own articles of what the complications of mobile first.

RUTH MESFUN: And I was like, no, it’s still they’re trying to make sure that they’re more forgiving because it’s mobile first and there’s such a compact screen now that it doesn’t make sense that they’re going to say, “no accordions, no this..” It’s more of like, as long as you’re doing server-side renderings, this is populating data, like all this stuff, it’s more forgiving because it’s mobile-first. And so looking through and going back to the source, which was Google, I was able to tell them, debunk that statement or that resource, essentially.

Debunking Outdated Info

(10:15) MARTIN SPLITT: It but that’s really, really nice, because oftentimes information used to be correct and then things change. Or people looked at one specific aspect and then generalise that too much. That does happen. That happens all the time. That happens in development, too, where people are like, you cannot test, I don’t know, angular code. And it’s like, actually, you can. You just have to know how


MARTIN SPLITT: It’s good to hear that we could debunk some of that stuff. That’s nice. But to be honest, I would just wish, because if you think about it, and if you look at what you discovered and what people have said, a lot of it, there are some aspects that are kind of rocket science, but a bunch of it is relatively easy to grasp concepts and best practices, and yet most developers don’t really pay attention to it or don’t care about SEO.

MARTIN SPLITT: Do you have any idea where that could come from? Like, why don’t they just know these things? Because I think all of us know how to make a link, a semantic link, and what semantic HTML is supposed to look like, and what the latest JavaScript feature is, and where it’s useful and how it works and what’s the syntax for it. But these kind of basic concepts seem to be missing in the developer world.

RUTH MESFUN: So, a couple of things. I think there’s like two or three points in regards to that. One, I don’t think every essentially, developer knows about JavaScript and semantics and structures and whatnot.I would assume that most or if not all, front end engineers should, but not all software developers.

Measuring Impact

(12:12) RUTH MESFUN: And then the second thing is, honestly, I didn’t realise the importance of SEO until we completed our SEO project to be mobile-first, and then our product manager and actually the marketing team sent it to our product manager. And the product manager told us, like, “Oh, we had a huge increase of views on our site, which converted into an increase in sales or revenue.” And when they showed us the graph, it literally made it a nice incline right at the time we shipped our project, essentially, or turned on the feature flag.

RUTH MESFUN: So, it was used, and we’re like, “Oh, this is important. It was great.” And I don’t think it was just because of the SEO, to be honest. I think a lot of the things we did was made our pages more performant, made it more user friendly, made it more accessible.  And those are actually the big three items or key items when it comes to SEO and mobile-first indexing.

MARTIN SPLITT: Exactly. There’s like two things that I want to tag onto. One is it’s very interesting you say that we didn’t just do things for SEO purposes, we did things for the user and that was rewarded in search engines, which is exactly what we want.

MARTIN SPLITT: A search engine tries to find the best possible experience and the best possible answer to a query from a user and present sites that are good for the user to fulfill whatever intention they had with a query, they entered into the search engine. So, making it better for the user is usually also equal to making it better for search engines.

MARTIN SPLITT: And the other thing is, was that the first time this kind of information like, “hey, here’s the thing you did, here’s the impact”, was that the first kind of opportunity where they brought back impact information to the changes you made? Or is that something that only sales normally does? Like, “Oh, you’ve deployed this new feature and it has gotten us this amount of customers that we didn’t have”, or like this amount of revenue that we didn’t have before, or does that happen more often? Or does it happen more often, but not with SEO? Do you usually get to see the impact of your work?

Why Seeing Results Matters to DEVs

(14:54) RUTH MESFUN: Yes, so for all of our projects, we always get to see the impact afterwards. It’s not rewarding if we don’t. At least for me, it’s not rewarding. Regardless of if it’s revenue or ease of use because of that feature or increase of review ratings or whatnot. But for the SEO one, honestly, I did not expect, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but I honestly didn’t expect that we were going to get a result so quickly or any real result.

RUTH MESFUN: I just thought, “Oh, this is going to help with SEO”, “That’s going to increase traffic eventually”, or at the minimum case, keep it at the same, which was actually our goal, was like, let’s not deprecate or decrease our index rating, was like our actual goal.

RUTH MESFUN:So, the fact that it not only like, we not only kept it, or we didn’t get it deprecated or decrease our ranking, it looked like it had a positive effect In regards to our users.

Interactions Between SEO and DEVs Matters

(16:18) MARTIN SPLITT: I’m not blaming you for not expecting or anticipating that, but it’s something that I find interesting. So the SEO team doesn’t usually let me rephrase the question. How often before did the SEO team interact with the engineering side of things?

RUTH MESFUN: Not that much.

MARTIN SPLITT: Not that much. Okay, that’s interesting. That seems to be like the underlying systemic issue between developers and SEOs that there is this weird gap and there is not that much collaboration or information sharing and that’s really, really unfortunate because oftentimes SEOs tell me that they are kind of fighting the development team, like, “oh, they want to roll out this thing and they screw us up and then we have to clean up after them for like a month”, and I’m like, “but did you talk to them beforehand?”, “Well, they didn’t talk to us beforehand”. And I’m like, so no one wants to talk to anyone at any capacity or time? Which is like super unfortunate.

MARTIN SPLITT: And I feel like this is close to the root cause of the issue where developers don’t care that much about SEO or don’t even know about SEO. Right.

RUTH MESFUN: I think that it’s mostly of a combination of the developers don’t know about SEO or don’t understand the value or the importance.


RUTH MESFUN: And then I would also say there’s a third thing of not realising how easy to do either SEO practices or run through if the feature you’re building or developing might be performant or not performant, which would actually cause a decrease in SEO and a decrease in performance in your site, which is not good.

MARTIN SPLITT: Fair enough. Yeah.

RUTH MESFUN: So, I think those are the combinations. If it’s something that deals with in my opinion, if it’s something that deals with main pages on the site that is going to be searchable on Google, right. Then that’s something that should, like, during the roadmap or design doc or like the SEO manager or expert should come in and look into and give their feedback on it. Because it’s just so hard as a developer that you build this feature and then you have to come back to fix it. You want to hopefully be able to complete the first iteration of it before having to fix bugs, ideally.

SEO Tools for DEVs

(19:13) RUTH MESFUN: And then I think the second thing is in regards to it, is there’s like a couple of tools that developers can actually utilise to see if that feature is going to be performant or not. Or at least use it while you’re building this feature. And then eventually you’ll develop a muscle where you could kind of feel if this is going to be a performant feature. So, Lighthouse was super useful on that.

RUTH MESFUN: The web platform team built a script around Lighthouse. So, whenever you built a feature, and it has, like, a feature flag, you can run the script like 500 times with that feature flag on or off and off to see the difference of performance between what’s already on prod versus what you’re going to push through, essentially.

RUTH MESFUN: And so we’re able to see “oh, this is going to make things better. LCP is lower. This is great.”

MARTIN SPLITT: It’s True. Yeah. I think it’s important to integrate that in your workflow as developers, so that it kind of becomes a natural part of your work and you see the impact as often as possible. Right?

RUTH MESFUN: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s called bundle phobia. So whenever introducing new packages or if someone’s like, “oh, I love this graph package, for instance, of building graphs or whatnot”, I always go to a bundlepedia or bundle phobia to see how large the package sizes. Because if it too large, right? Even if it is a great package. That’s going to actually decrease our performance and it will increase load and it won’t give a great user experience, which can also mess with our index rating or SEO score.

RUTH MESFUN: And it’s like, “is it worth that?”

MARTIN SPLITT: That’s a little rocket science.

Bundle Size and Rocket Science

(21:42) MARTIN SPLITT: I like that. And I think, like, rocket science in this case is actually a very apt comparison because in rocket science, you have this issue that you want more thrust, so you need to add more fuel.  But more fuel means more weight, and more weight means you need more thrust.

MARTIN SPLITT: And then there’s like this sweet spot where, adding more fuel actually gives you more thrust and not so much weight that it’s like, offsetting negatively. But eventually just adding fuel just means that the thrust you gain from the extra fuel is not as big as it needs to be to actually offset the fuel that you added. And then you get negative increase or negative benefit from it, and you actually lose performance.

MARTIN SPLITT: And it’s similar to that with packages like, “oh, we need graphs”, and then you’re like, “okay, we need a thing to make graphs now”.

MARTIN SPLITT: So, there’s this one, package A, and then there’s the other package B. Both of them allow us to make graphs, but one adds so much more weight to the page that needs to go through the wire and only adds this little feature of graphs where the other one is smaller and also adds this little feature. So, you should go for that one, but that’s the smaller one.

MARTIN SPLITT: Package B that is smaller does not necessarily make it here for developers. Like, the other one might be the more comfortable for developers and then developers gravitate towards the wrong choice.

RUTH MESFUN: That’s actually what happened with us. It was like, we saw this package A had all the bells and whistles. Package A was also ten times the size, and web platform was like, no, we’re not doing this.


RUTH MESFUN: We did package B. It was still a little large, but not as large as Package. And we were like, performance still. We weren’t feeling comfortable. So then we just built the graph, ourself because it was a bar graph. We were like, “it’s just a bar graph. We don’t need all of this”. And no package means lighter. So this is great.

Performance Culture

(23:47) MARTIN SPLITT: Yes. Good performance culture right there. Because I fell into this trap so many times where it’s like, “oh but this library is really nice and it makes everything go so fast and easy”, but then you see like, “oh, but it’s actually dragging down our performance,” And unless there’s a performance culture where someone keeps you accountable for that, its kind of just happens, and then the website just grows and bloats. So that’s really cool. That’s really nice.

MARTIN SPLITT: You said something about low hanging fruit that you didn’t know about. Is that something that you would have hoped for or expected the SEO team to reach out to you that they like because they probably knew about these low hanging fruit, but they didn’t necessarily communicate them, or maybe they didn’t know about them.

MARTIN SPLITT: Would you want SEO teams to be more proactive when it comes to, like, “oh, there’s like this small change that you can make that has this huge impact and this positive impact”, is that something that you would expect help from your SEO experts with?

RUTH MESFUN: Yeah, I think that would be super helpful on if we hear what the low hanging fruit is, and we can tell you if that is. Actually really simple and easy or not. So most of the time it is. It’s like, “oh, okay, I just need to update, and I just need to add lazy loading for all the images.“ Right? That’s really easy to do.

MARTIN SPLITT: That’s true. That’s easy to do. Lazy loading is a perfect example of that. We are trying to give guidance to SEOs in our documentation for low hanging fruits, but it’s tricky because low hanging fruits for one project and one tech stack might not necessarily be low hanging fruit for the others.

MARTIN SPLITT: So, again, I think there needs to be a dialogue, right? I think it’s perfectly fine if an SEO comes like, “hey, this thing would have a big impact. How hard is it to do this?” And then you are the experts on the engineering side, so you can evaluate if it’s a low hanging fruit or not. So, again, there needs to be a dialogue, I guess, right?

RUTH MESFUN: Yeah. I also think that though, I don’t know if this is something that every team can do, but I think it was really helpful that I was really excited about SEO. I’m usually excited for SEO and accessibility.

SEO and DEV Liaison: A New Role

(26:12) RUTH MESFUN: Yeah. So, because of that, I was almost like a liaison kind of thing of being able to connect, like, “oh, what are the SEO best practices?”, and be able to translate it to the team, and they’d be able to go to me and since I already have a strong relationship with my teammates, it was like the trust was already there. And then what they did afterwards was they actually added, like, an SEO expert within the team, because we dealt with all the essentially all of our pages were pages that were searchable for Google.

RUTH MESFUN: So, they’re like, “oh, you need kind of like an SEO expert”. So they actually added an SEO member to our team. So, he was essentially our go to person for questions.

MARTIN SPLITT: I think that’s really cool, and I would love to see that more often, because I think this liaison that you built and then the SEO expert in your team, that’s a very essential thing. And I think it requires, to a certain degree, I’m not sure about your SEO expert that you got in your team. It is helpful if that person is at least technically inclined or has an interest in development and engineering. I guess it works if they don’t, but I don’t know how it was in your case. Did they also know bits and pieces about development not necessarily being a developer themselves?

RUTH MESFUN: I don’t think that he necessarily knew pieces of development. It’s kind of like a product manager, a non-technical product manager might not know all the technical aspect. They rely on us, but we’ll say, “this is what I want”, or “this is why we need this”, and “this is why this is important”. Right? And then it’s the developer who pushes back saying, “I think this is going to be like a higher complexity”, or “can we do it this way to achieve the same goal?”

MARTIN SPLITT: I see. Yeah. So that’s interesting because I always assumed that for this to work, they have to have at least some technical knowledge. But I guess if you look at it from a product manager’s perspective, it doesn’t have to be it’s perfectly fine if yeah, okay. That’s interesting. That’s really, really cool. That’s really interesting.

Summary

(28:48) MARTIN SPLITT: The other thing that I was wondering is. You said like, it was interesting and it’s like rewarding to me to see the impact of my work and to find out about these low hanging fruits. So what you’re saying is, just to make sure that I understood that correctly, you’re saying is developers generally are interested in the impact of their work in terms of SEO and doing SEO work for the benefits that you can reap by doing it.

RUTH MESFUN: Yeah, I’ll do it based on essentially I’m not going to generalise it, but I’ll say based on myself and my team and the teams I’ve worked in in the past and currently actually is we are very invested in our users. We are user driven, user-centric, crazy about our users and wanting them to get whatever need. Our goal is, essentially, is allow our users to easily use our apps, our page, and do the thing that they wanted to do on our site. Right?

RUTH MESFUN: And so essentially, if that’s not happening, we’re not doing a good job and we feel bad about it. We’re like, “oh, we want them to access this”. This is important. What was the point? I’m very result driven and I know the teams I’ve been in have been result driven and in a place of the love for the user.

MARTIN SPLITT: That’s really nice, I like that statement. So, I do hope that there’s a lot more developers like you and your team who are doing it for the love of the user, which I think is the right attitude to things, and I think actually SEOs. Fundamentally are also doing it for the love of the user, except that they work towards or through a search engine, which I think we are doing it through front end technology.

MARTIN SPLITT: So different means for the same end goal. So I think we share that end goal and I would hope that we would connect more to reach this goal together. So, yeah, let’s hope that this series and these conversations do help to shape the path and more teams to be like this, keeping fingers crossed.

MARTIN SPLITT: Awesome. Excellent. Ruth, this has been really cool, really interesting. I learned a bunch of new stuff. For instance, that having an SEO expert on your team, even if they don’t necessarily are technical, is super helpful and can help make these things more visible and share insights into what could be done to improve SEO, and then leaving it to the engineering team to figure out how easy or how low hanging this specific thing is.

MARTIN SPLITT: Thanks a lot for your time. Thanks a lot for being here. And thanks everyone who’s watching the video out there. I do hope you got something out of it as well. And see you soon for another episode. Bye.



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A Comprehensive Comparison: Klaviyo vs. Other Platforms

In today’s digital age, email marketing is helping skyrocket eCommerce businesses to engage with their customers. With numerous email marketing platforms available, it can be challenging for businesses to choose the right one.

This article will compare Klaviyo, a leading email marketing platform, with other email marketing services. We will highlight the benefits, pros and cons and provide an overview of the platform for eCommerce businesses.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a powerful email marketing and automation platform catering to eCommerce businesses. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools and features designed to optimise email campaigns, segment audiences, and generate higher ROI. With Klaviyo, businesses can leverage data-driven insights to create personalised, targeted, and automated email campaigns. The platform also has a product reviews module and improved CDP.

Benefits of Klaviyo for eCommerce Businesses:

• Data-Driven Automation: Klaviyo leverages customer data to deliver highly personalised and automated email campaigns. By tracking customer behaviour, purchase history, and preferences, Klaviyo enables businesses to send relevant and timely emails, resulting in improved engagement and conversions.

Segmentation Capabilities: Klaviyo’s robust segmentation options allow businesses to divide their audience into specific groups based on various parameters, such as demographics, purchase behaviour, or engagement level. This feature enables businesses to tailor their messaging to each segment, increasing open and click-through rates.

Integration with eCommerce Platforms: Klaviyo seamlessly integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. This integration ensures smooth data synchronisation, allowing businesses to automate email campaigns triggered by specific customer actions, such as abandoned carts or post-purchase follow-ups.

• Powerful Analytics and Reporting: Klaviyo offers comprehensive analytics and reporting features that provide deep insights into the performance of email campaigns. Businesses can track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and revenue generated, enabling them to make data-backed decisions and optimise their marketing strategies.

PRICING
Klaviyo’s pricing is based on the number of contacts in your email list. They offer a free plan for up to 250 contacts with basic features. Paid plans start at $35 per month for a small number of contacts and scale based on the size of your email list. Additionally, Klaviyo offers custom enterprise plans for larger businesses with more advanced billing requirements.

Learn More About Klaviyo Plans


MailChimp

Mailchimp is a well-known email marketing platform that has served businesses of all sizes for years. It offers a user-friendly interface and a range of features suitable for beginners and experienced marketers.

Benefits of Mailchimp for eCommerce Businesses:

Wide Range of Integrations: Mailchimp seamlessly integrates with various eCommerce platforms, CRMs, and other marketing tools, making it easy to connect and manage your data.

Free Plan Option: Mailchimp provides a free plan with basic features for businesses just starting with email marketing, allowing users to familiarise themselves with the platform before upgrading to paid plans.

Extensive Template Library: Mailchimp boasts a vast collection of pre-designed email templates, enabling users to create visually appealing campaigns without design skills.

PRICING

Mailchimp offers a free plan with limited features for up to a specific number of contacts. Paid plans start at $6.50 monthly for up to 500 contacts and increase based on the number of contacts and additional features required.

Learn More About MailChimp Plans


HUBSPOT MARKETING HUB

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing and automation platform known for its comprehensive suite of tools designed to attract, engage, and delight customers. With a focus on inbound marketing strategies, HubSpot empowers eCommerce businesses to create meaningful connections with their audience and nurture leads effectively.

Benefits of HubSpot Marketing Hub for eCommerce Businesses:

Inbound Marketing Excellence: HubSpot’s core philosophy revolves around inbound marketing methodologies. This approach involves creating valuable content that attracts potential customers, building lasting relationships, and converting leads into loyal patrons. For eCommerce businesses, this translates into more organic traffic, improved brand reputation, and increased customer loyalty.

Powerful Automation: HubSpot Marketing Hub provides robust automation capabilities, enabling businesses to streamline repetitive tasks and nurture leads through personalised and timely email campaigns. Automation helps save time, increase efficiency, and deliver tailored  content based on customer interactions and behaviour.

Seamless CRM Integration: HubSpot Marketing Hub seamlessly integrates with HubSpot’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, providing a 360-degree view of each customer’s interactions and journey. This integration allows for more personalised communication and targeted marketing efforts.

PRICING

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a variety of pricing tiers to accommodate businesses of different sizes and requirements. The pricing is based on the number of contacts in your CRM and the level of functionality needed. HubSpot also provides a free version of its CRM with limited features, which can benefit small eCommerce businesses.

For more comprehensive features, pricing starts around $18 with up to 1,000 contacts and more than $800 per month, depending on the number of contacts and the chosen plan.

Learn More About HubSpot Marketing Hub Plans


Klaviyo has fast become the top choice for next-gen marketers and businesses offering various benefits such as data-driven automation, powerful segmentation, seamless eCommerce integration, and insightful analytics. Its comprehensive features make it an ideal choice for elevating your email marketing efforts and driving conversions.

To achieve optimum results and unlock the full potential of email marketing, we encourage you to explore  LION Digital’s Klaviyo expertise. Our team offers tailored solutions and expert guidance to help you unleash the power of email marketing and maximise your business’s growth and success.

Click here to explore Klaviyo services with LION Digital.

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Article by

Erika magpili –
digital executive & marketing MANAGER

SEO for Voice Search in eCommerce: How to Adapt Your Strategy

Why is Voice Search Important for SEO?

The use of voice search has grown significantly in recent years. This is largely due to the rise of smart speakers and voice-activated assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. Research shows that in 2022, 57% of voice command users used voice commands daily. And by 2024, 8.4 billion digital voice assistants will be used worldwide. 

For eCommerce businesses, voice search matters because it presents a new opportunity to reach customers. Voice search is shifting how people discover and purchase products online — and eCommerce businesses must adapt their SEO strategies accordingly.

This article will explore the emerging world of voice search and how to leverage this channel to create better customer experiences while generating more sales for your eCommerce store.

Voice Search vs. Text-Based Search

With each passing year, it’s becoming easier and easier for online shoppers to search for anything they want by speaking into their devices and applying voice search. But it’s important to note that people use this technology differently from how they use text-based search. 

People often use short and keyword-driven queries when typing into a search engine. However, they are more likely to use longer and more complex sentences when using voice search. They might also use a more conversational tone. For example: “What’s the best product for…” or “Where can I find a great…”. 

It’s also important to note voice search is typically used in a different context than text-based search. When using voice search, people may be doing so while multitasking — cooking, driving, or doing housework. As a result, they will likely choose the first or second result provided by the search engine. 

The user goals could also vary depending on the type of device they are using:

  • Smartphones: Quick Voice Queries. When people want immediate answers or solutions to pressing issues, they typically use their smartphones for voice searches.
  • Smart Speakers: In-Depth Voice Search Exploration. People often rely on smart speakers within the comfort of their homes for more comprehensive searches. 
  • Car Speakers: Voice Searches Addressing Consumer Needs. Employing voice search while driving is generally used for inquiring about locations, directions, and stores offering the best prices.

What is Voice Search Optimisation?

Voice search optimisation refers to adapting your content and eCommerce website to rank higher in voice search results. It requires shifting focus from traditional keyword optimisation. It starts with understanding how people use voice search and what they are looking for. 

As we’ve discussed, voice search allows users to find answers and solutions quickly and efficiently, which is why it’s becoming increasingly popular. With this in mind, eCommerce businesses must focus on creating strategic content that provides smart, helpful and informative answers to common user queries.

How to Implement SEO for Voice Search

The first step to success with voice search SEO is using conversational keywords and natural language. Optimising for humans and not for Google is always a great place to start.

Transforming your website for voice search may seem overwhelming at first glance. However, following some simple best practices will allow you to improve rankings and increase visibility among potential customers in voice search results:

  • Understand your target audience. Start by understanding your audience and how they use voice search. What types of questions do they ask? What specific challenges or difficulties are they facing? 
    You want to provide genuine value and accurate answers to frequently asked questions about your products or services. This could include FAQ pages, product guides, and other helpful content pages with valuable information and solutions to common user problems. Here’s a proven technique to get you started with some of the common questions your customers have:
    – Create a page with a title that poses a frequently asked question
    – Present a brief and clear answer to the question directly following the title
    – Use the remaining portion of the page to provide in-depth information or clarification on the subject matter
  • Conduct keyword research. Identify the keywords and phrases that your audience uses to search for information about your products. You can use Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Rank Ranger and other common SEO tools to identify relevant keywords and phrases. However, to understand how people already use voice search to find your website, you can use Google’s Voice Search API. 
    Instead of just targeting specific keywords, incorporate conversational long-tail keywords and phrases that mimic how people speak in real life It’s a good idea to include question keywords and queries that start with “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “how,”.. For example, instead of “best running shoes”, target the phrase “What are the best running shoes for marathon training?”
  • Create conversational content. Optimise for voice search by mirroring conversational style. Use natural language in your content to make it more conversational. Shorter sentences and simpler language are easier for voice assistants to understand and read aloud. 
  • Use structured data. Structured data helps search engines better understand the content, making it easier to find them in voice search results. eCommerce businesses should implement schema markup to help search engines identify your content’s purpose and context.
  • Optimise for featured snippets. “Position zero” or featured snippets are concise answers at the top of the search engine results page. The fact that voice assistants often read snippets aloud makes them essential for voice search optimisation. Aim to create content that can rank for featured snippets by providing precise and concise answers to commonly asked questions.
  • Proper text design. Use bullet points, tables, and lists in your content to make it easy for voice assistants to read and understand.
  • Apply local SEO and use your Google Business Profile. For eCommerce businesses that rely on local customers, local SEO is crucial for success in voice SEO. Voice search queries could be location-based (meaning users look for businesses and products nearby). One effective strategy is to create location-specific landing pages and content that includes local keywords and phrases. Your business may also appear at the top of local voice search results by leveraging the Google Business Profile. 
  • Advanced multilingualism. Voice search integration makes your content’s translation accuracy critical. It’s a good idea to seek assistance from a fluent speaker of the language to manage the translation and editing of your written material and content. Refer to Google’s guidelines for effectively managing multilingual websites.
  • Interact with users on social media platforms. Voice search results frequently leverage content with a lot of likes and shares on social networks. Maintaining active and thriving social media pages and providing them with ample attention and care is crucial. The higher your level of interaction with social media users, the greater the likelihood they will come across your business via a virtual assistant.
  • Optimise your video rankings in search results. An informative video can often be more effective than plain text in answering user queries. If a video can assist your audience, it is also valuable for voice search. Include conversational long-tail phrases in the video titles, for example, starting with “How To”, incorporate keywords in the video’s description and transcript, and use a clickable and enticing thumbnail that encourages users to watch your video. Where possible, Google can extract relevant video sections based on user requests.
  • Enhance your Domain Authority. The higher your website ranks, the more powerful it is for voice search. You want to intensify your SEO efforts with proven best practices — backlinks, local search, technical optimisation, and more. These will positively impact domain authority — one of the most important ranking factors. 
  • Improve your website speed. Site speed is critical in voice search SEO. A slow-loading website can result in a poor user experience and decreased rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas where you can improve page load and site speed.
  • Ensure your website’s mobile-friendliness. This is crucial, given that a significant proportion of voice searches are performed on smartphones and similar mobile devices. 
  • Focus on a high-quality user experience. Optimise your website to make it fast and easy to use, with clear navigation and prominent calls to action.

By following these steps, you can gradually optimise your website for voice search and increase the probability of achieving a higher ranking in voice search outcomes.

How to Use Google’s Voice Search API

Google’s Voice Search API is a powerful tool to analyse data and acquire valuable insights on how your website is accessed through voice search. To use Google’s Voice Search API, you’ll need to integrate it by installing a small piece of code. 

One of the benefits of using Google’s Voice Search API is that it allows you to identify which phrases are most commonly used in voice search. This information can help you identify keywords and phrases that you can start to optimise your content for. Additionally, the tool can help you determine which pages on your website are most frequently accessed through voice search, allowing you to focus your optimisation efforts on these pages first.

How to Test and Measure the Effectiveness of Your Voice Search Optimisation Efforts

After implementing voice search optimisation techniques, it’s important to track the results and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

  • One method involves monitoring the analytics of your website: looking at the website’s traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates and determining whether or not your voice search optimisation strategies are having the desired impact.
  • Another way to measure the effectiveness of your voice search optimisation efforts is to conduct user testing: having individuals interact with your website using voice search and providing feedback on their experience. 
  • Additionally, you can use voice search analytics tools like Voice Metrics to track the performance of your website’s voice search capabilities and identify areas for improvement.

One thing is for sure… voice search is no longer a trend but a necessity for eCommerce businesses that want to remain competitive in today’s digital landscape. Ignoring voice search optimisation can result in lost traffic, leads, and sales to your competitors who have optimised for voice search. We strongly suggest you start adapting your SEO strategy for voice search today!

Reach out to the LION Digital team to discuss how we can help.

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Article by

ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT MANAGER

Why should developers learn SEO?

Introduction

(0:00) MARTIN SPLITT: Don’t developers want people to use what they build? 

MONICA LENT: How do you prove your worth as an SEO? 

MARTIN SPLITT: How would you measure your work’s impact? 

MONICA LENT: Why don’t SEOs listen to developers?

MARTIN SPLITT: Hello, and welcome to another episode of “SEOs and Developers”. With me today is Monica Lent, who is a developer-turned-entrepreneur building her own software-as-a-service product, and she’s a seasoned blogger too. 

MONICA LENT: All right, and I’m here with Martin, who is a developer advocate at Google Search and a passionate underwater photographer. 

MARTIN SPLITT: Monica, I’m super, super happy to have you here as my guest today. We met at a developer conference, I think in Austria the first time when I remember correctly, back in the days when conferences were an actual thing. And I remember we talked about so many different stuff like technical topics, but also we talked a little bit about SEO because you started building your own product. And as a developer turning into product management and building a product, that must have been a super interesting challenge. And I’m guessing one of the challenges was also to pick up SEO and digital marketing skills, hasn’t it?

Build your website and they will come?

(01:19) MONICA LENT: Yeah, totally. I mean, when I started building the product, like a lot of developers, I started with the code. And figuring out where to get customers was, I wouldn’t say a secondary thought, but it was not something I realized was going to be as hard as it actually was. So SEO definitely played into getting customers and building the kind of pipeline that we have today, but it took so much longer than I was expecting.

MARTIN SPLITT: I got to say I’m not super surprised, but I have been exactly that way until relatively recently. Coming from a developer background, you’re like, oh, you just got to get all your technical ducks lined up in a row, and you’ll be fine, right? But yeah, it turns out to be a little trickier than that. So this makes you the perfect interview candidate for the series where I try to bridge the gap between the SEO world and the developer world. And you know there is this weird chasm that we somehow need to build a bridge over, and I would love to hear your perspective on these things. Like what has been the biggest cliff that you fell off when it came to SEO? What has been a thing that you needed to learn and explore to get there? What did you find hard coming from a developer’s perspective into the SEO world?MONICA LENT: Yeah, I think one of the most challenging things, especially for developers who are just getting started with SEO, is there is a lot of theory, misinformation. It’s really hard to separate the stuff that’s proven and the facts from one-off observations and anecdotes. And as a developer, when you’re used to working in code and concrete facts, things that either work or don’t, coming into the world of SEO, it feels like you don’t have those kind of more scientific tools or more fact-based tools that you can use to know for certain, if I do A, B, and C, this page is definitely going to rank. So you’re in this kind of nebulous space. And I think coming from the developer perspective, it’s almost disarming or it feels unnatural because you’re just not used to having so many variables at play which you can’t control and can’t even directly observe.

When reality and expectations aren’t the same

(03:47) MARTIN SPLITT: That’s true. That is true. But then again, sometimes in development you do have this, like, uncertainty, too, especially, when you are charting uncharted territory. And I know what you mean because I as a developer used to be very comfortable in this world of API documentation that you just happen to follow, and then the right things happen. But I don’t know what APIs you have implemented or integrated in your developer life. But oftentimes you have the same problem as developers because the API documentation says one thing, and then you try that, and it doesn’t work. And it turns out you actually need to do something slightly different to actually make the API work the way that you expected it to work. So it’s similar to SEO, I think, because oftentimes as you say, there’s a lot of lore, a lot of anecdotal evidence out there, and it’s missing bits and pieces. And it’s also mixed with misinformation– downright misinformation, unfortunately. Yeah.

Navigating the murky waters of SEO as a developer

(04:53) MARTIN SPLITT: I see that that’s a tricky one. How did you navigate that uncertainty?

MONICA LENT: I think ultimately I had to rely on my own experience and observation, which unfortunately is the very slow path. So if you’re not just taking courses or listening to what other people say, and you’re kind of putting it into practice and you have to find out what’s true for the topic that you’re covering– what’s the space like, what’s the competition like– all of those things are quite different in different spaces. So at the end of the day, even though when I talk to some people, they may say, oh, I don’t really believe that that made a difference. But it’s hard to take that at face value when you say, look, I made just this one change and saw that impact. So at the end of the day, it was a lot of trial and error and doing it for a very long time. And luckily, before starting to build my product, as you mentioned before, I ran a blog. And so that was kind of like baby steps, I would say, towards understanding how to get search traffic. But it changed quite a bit going from writing content for informational blog posts versus trying to get people to become customers. And yeah, there are just so many facets to figure out along the way. 

MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, it is not easy, and it’s a hard thing. And I do hope that you did find and will find companions in the digital marketing space who are experienced enough to actually be able to kick start this kind of journey or accelerate this kind of journey thanks to their experience. But I see that this is tricky because as you say, it’s different for every niche. And finding an expert who is holistic enough and practical enough in the niche that you’re in is not necessarily easy, right? That’s a bit of a tricky thing.

Communities help you learn SEO

(06:53) MARTIN SPLITT: So did any resources pop up on your journey where you’re like, oh, that was definitely helpful? 

MONICA LENT: I ended up learning a lot from being in different SEO communities, so lots and lots of Facebook groups. And what I found most valuable about that is that instead of things like courses or blog posts where it’s really one person saying, this is the facts on the ground, this is my observations, you always had room for other people to contradict the advice or to offer different perspectives. So no matter what you’re learning about or what question you have, in SEO you can get directly contradictory advice from two different people who swear that it’s true. But at the very least, you’re exposed to all of those different options, and you can kind of reason through it yourself. So I think that’s something that has been really helpful, is being in these SEO communities as opposed to only consuming unidirectional course material. But it is a much less organized way to learn as opposed to doing a straight-up course or something like that.

MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. But I think that’s very important. That’s a very, very important point because it is such a wide field, and you can look at it from so many different perspectives and focus on so many different aspects. You might not necessarily get singular truth or singular advice in the right direction. And if you’re being honest here, the same is true for development courses or tutorials. If you read a tutorial on whatever framework is the framework of choice today in the front-end world, they’ll be like, oh, yeah, you can use this other framework, but, you know, it sucks. And it’s going to be terrible, and it’s going to ruin everything, and you’re going to have spaghetti code. And look at our beautiful code here. And then that kind of keeps rolling and changing all the time as well. So I think seeking out experience from as many perspectives as possible is a good idea. That’s not a bad idea.

Telling the good and bad apart

(09:04) MARTIN SPLITT: How did you then evaluate what worked and what didn’t? I mean, you said you experimented, and you made a change, and you watched the impact.How did you do that? What kind of tools did you use? Where did you find out if your changes had a positive effect or had no effect at all or a negative one? 

MONICA LENT: Yeah, to be honest, I wouldn’t necessarily say I have a super scientific process. There are definitely people who are running in-depth SEO experiments, single-variable testing, and so forth. But pretty much what I did is I know that when you publish something or create something, it takes time to rank. So at that point, you just have to kind of keep going and trust. Trust somehow that if you create something that is really good, one day the algorithm will be good enough to reward that. Doesn’t always happen off the bat, but that’s like, something I at least– I strive for or hope for. That if I know what I create is better than anything else out there, eventually– eventually, it will be rewarded as such, and sometimes that takes a long time. But as I learned, what I really did is I would go back through the entire corpus of content that I had written or published and regularly refresh it with the new lessons that I had learned, whether that’s making my title tags better. Hopefully, Google would use my new title tags. Or maybe it’s changing the structure, making the article more complete. Or even the opposite, taking out sections that were maybe not fitting the search intent so well and could be split out into their own articles, and just kind of doing this iteratively. And I could see that content that had previously never ranked at all would eventually start to rank once it fit into those patterns that I had learned. So any time I had a piece of content that did really well, especially really quickly, I would just say, OK, what’s different about this compared to all the other stuff that I have? And try to take those lessons and apply it to old content because it’s so much more efficient than just only publishing stuff that’s new. And yeah, it’s not so scientific, but observations, using, for example, Google Search Console– I am in there every single day. And being able to see, OK, something is starting to pick up impression. Something is starting to pick up clicks. Or what are the terms that this is getting impressions for but I’m not really mentioning in the content? What does that mean? Do I need to include it? Or does it mean that I’m showing up for stuff that’s kind of irrelevant? And maybe I need to hone in the messaging so that I get shown for the terms I really want people to find me with. So all of those were things that I use to take a library or backlog of content and iteratively upgrade it as I learned SEO slowly but surely in practice.

What devs can learn from SEOs

(12:18) MARTIN SPLITT: It sounds like a really, really interesting journey that you have been on coming from a developer’s background, looking more into the SEO bits and pieces. If you think back at the developers who are still working as part of a larger team and working in-house in a product company or in an agency, would you say that you as a developer benefited from this journey despite maybe not having your own product to build with? If you were part of a larger team of developers, would you benefit from this knowledge that you gathered now? 

MONICA LENT: I think so. I mean, the thing about SEO which I feel a lot of developers maybe get distanced from is just the business impact of your work. Because you can really see how certain kinds of rankings or showing up for certain terms means that you’re having a really direct impact on the bottom line of the business. And ultimately, the type of content that brings in customers has a specific search intent. It communicates specific information that draws in the target customer. You present a solution, and so forth. So kind of understanding how the product that you’re spending so much time laboring over actually gets discovered by people I think is really rewarding. Because especially with my background is a front-end developer as my technical focus, the thing that drives me and people who work in similar fields to me is getting something I’ve created in the hands of users, right? And SEO is one of the key ways that people can actually discover the thing that I’m creating. And I think a lot of times engineering teams end up being distanced from marketing because it’s seen like we’re building the product, you find the people. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t quite work that way unless there is this seamless journey from discovery to activation and so forth. And yeah, I think SEO’s a very valuable skill for developers to learn, and I am trying to get as many people interested in it and picking up the basics, at the very least, because it’s just such a valuable skill when it comes to getting people to actually use the stuff that you’re building.

Why discovery matters for devs, too

(14:55)  MARTIN SPLITT: Absolutely. And I never quite understood that because in the end, I’m building my product. The code I write is for people to do something, to accomplish something that they couldn’t accomplish or couldn’t accomplish as nicely without my code being out there. And I wonder, people to this day still think like, oh, I just build it and they’ll come, but that’s not true. If you just put a website online and do nothing else, no one will come. No one will find it. You have to make sure that you can actually be found. And how do people discover new content online? Intuitively, that’s through a search engine. You just search for something. 

MONICA LENT: It’s true. I think at the same time, a lot of people may rely on these kind of one-off channels. So while let’s say I launch on Product Hunt or I launch on Hacker News or something like that– and you can get an incredible wave of traffic, lots of people talking about you. But at the same time, that’s not as important as having the same number of people visiting your site every month or having some kind of consistent flow.

Web Dev and SEO – two parallel universes

(16:12) MONICA LENT: Yeah. It’s funny because as a front-end developer– and I’m sure you’ve seen this, as well– you learn so much about how websites work. But the kinds of technical aspects of a website that you learn when you are doing SEO is actually quite a bit different than what you learn when you’re making a typical website, going through a web development course or boot camp, or learning to build front-end apps. It’s like a completely different side of web development. And so you can talk to someone who is 10 years in the web development field, and they might still say, I don’t really know what a canonical URL is for. And that doesn’t mean that they are bad at their job. It’s just there is this entire parallel aspect to web development that you don’t necessarily learn when you’re learning to build apps or a typical website.

MARTIN SPLITT: It just happens to not be part of the learning path. Most tutorials are like, OK, we put in a title because you kind of need to put in a title, but we don’t touch it. It’s just like, demo app, here we go. That’s our title. “Hello, world” is our title. Done. Meta description? No, ignore that. Meta viewport? Maybe, because mobile is actually a thing these days, so fine, we’ll put in the meta viewport. Canonical URL? We don’t need that. None of this actually matters. None of this– the tooling is all there. It’s just you need to know that you need to use it because it’s not part of the learning path. So it keeps blowing my mind. 

MONICA LENT: Yeah, totally. I don’t know. What do you think is the solution to that? MARTIN SPLITT: I don’t know. I’m trying to do a little bit of developer education there. So we did create a JavaScript SEO video series on our YouTube channel, the same channel that you’re probably watching this on. Javascript SEO series → https://goo.gle/3oxYY0e. And I explained the basics there because there are a lot of people who are using frameworks like Angular or Vue.js or React, and they’ve never even thought about it. And then they encounter these weird moments where an SEO pops in and goes like, are we using JavaScript? And then the developers go, duh, yeah. Of course we are using JavaScript. And they’re like, oh my god, if we’re using JavaScript, we can never be found in Google Search. This is a huge problem. We need to switch away from JavaScript. How can we do that? And then they’re like, I mean, I guess server-side rendering maybe, but that’s like, a lot of work. And they’re like, oh, but we have to do this. It’s very important, which is not exactly true. And there’s an education challenge on both sides because on one hand, what this SEO has said has been absolutely true, let’s say, like, five to 10 years ago, but it’s no longer true in today’s world. And the developer not even being prepared for something like this and not knowing where this is coming from or why this is a problem or how to solve this problem or how to even just come back with an informed decision-making is not necessarily a thing that happens in a lot of teams. And so I’m trying to do that with documentation and education, trying to go where developers are, to developer conferences, talk about SEO.

SEO – all smoke and mirrors?

(19:28) MARTIN SPLITT: But oftentimes, as you say, developers are like, SEO is this hand-wavy, black magic thing that I absolutely don’t care about. I care about technical things and technical decisions and technical, interesting stories. And it’s tricky. But I hope that videos like this maybe help to shed a different light on SEO and shed a different light on development as well.

MONICA LENT: Yeah, definitely. And I think there’s also this aspect where a lot of times, developers may not realize that a lot of SEO, or getting it right, also has to do with technical setup. And when I talk to developers about SEO, this is actually the part that they find most interesting. They love the tools. They love the analytics. They love, basically, how can you get a perfect score? Or how can you make sure it’s all dialed in correctly?

How to make SEO appealing to devs

(20:33) MONICA LENT: And so there are aspects that really appeal to developers about SEO. The trouble is most of them don’t realize that that’s even out there. But at the same time, they can have a really big impact by fixing a lot of these problems that tend to pile up over the years, especially when nobody’s been paying attention to it. It’s like the entropy of a website. If you don’t look at it– it’s like CSS. CSS will naturally decay. That’s my opinion. 

MARTIN SPLITT: It’s true, yeah. 

MONICA LENT: And in some ways, the “SEO,” quote unquote, or at least the technical aspects of SEO, they often also tend to do that because unless somebody took the time to explain to the developers, this is why we’re doing that, it will be forgotten. And they’ll be like, oh, I didn’t know that was important. We upgraded our framework and didn’t include that plugin that was generating the sitemap. Or we changed our styling system, and we decided to update all the headings so that they looked right, but now they are no longer ordered as you used to expect them. And these are examples of things that have happened to me when working in a tech company with an in-house SEO. And yeah, it just repeats itself that if you don’t explain the why, developers don’t want to do anything unless you can tell them why. That is in our nature. Because is not enough. 

MARTIN SPLITT: And it’s wild because both SEO and development are such broad fields.

Finding the right niches

(22:23) MARTIN SPLITT: You might have someone who focuses explicitly on back-end development. They might not touch the front-end side of things, and that’s perfectly fine. And it’s the same way with SEO. People are like, oh, there’s this SEO that talks about content and content strategy, and I’m not interested, so I’m not interested in SEO. But that’s ignoring that there’s also the technical SEO people, who are as nerdy, as geeky, as us developers are. And they’re like, oh, I’m really excited. I want to try to figure out how we can pre-render our shadow DOM in a puppeteer instance. Which is something where developers are perking up their ears and going like, that sounds like an interesting thing. How do you do this? Can’t you just serialize the DOM? And it’s like, no, because the shadow DOM is hidden behind the shadow DOM border. And that’s an SEO concern some search engines– not necessarily Google Search, but other search engines– might struggle with. So you might need to find a technical solution to overcome this challenge. And there are so many technical aspects. And as you say, if no one cares about them specifically, your SEO might accidentally not care about them or don’t know about them because they might not be in this specific niche of SEO where they are looking at the technical things. They might just use a tool that gives them a report, and depending on how good the tool is, you might get a complete or non-complete report. And the incomplete report might actually give misleading information, too, because it might just be the wrong tool for the job. And the problem there is that developers then tend to just downright dismiss everything that comes from the SEO department or from the SEO side of things instead of going like, oh, right. Let’s sit down and talk about our requirements from the technical side so that you can figure out what the requirements are or how we can fulfill the SEO requirements with this technical setup that we have. There are very, very few people out there that actually do this, and I would wish that developers would also look into this and pick it up. And I spoke with Bartosz. I spoke with Mike on previous episodes of this series. They are one of or part of this group of people, and it’s amazing to see how they work. And it’s unfortunate that from the developer side, there doesn’t seem to be much picking up on the SEO tasks. As you say, SEO naturally decays if you don’t pay attention, so yeah.

Sharing goals and wins

(24:55) MARTIN SPLITT: I don’t know how to make this more visible to developers or how to motivate developers more to look into these things. Any ideas? 

MONICA LENT: It’s tough, I think, because especially depending on the size of the company that you’re at, it’s really hard to see sometimes how your individual efforts move the needle. And that’s not what motivates developers. So I think on the one hand, if there was a way that you could actually show reports to people and say, all right, so we spent this time working on the technical SEO of our site, and there is a tangible increase in the organic traffic, that’s something that you can feel pretty good about. But on the other hand, a lot of times those improvements might be slow to show up. It’s also really hard to attribute changes in rankings, in traffic, to one specific change on your website. It’s really difficult unless you have a lot of patience and you’re just going to change only one thing for potentially weeks or months or however long it takes. It’s not really practical in some ways to just say, OK, we’re going to make this one improvement and not touch the entire site. So it’s always a bit of a mix. But I think getting developers to the point where they can see the impact and just actually explaining to them why it matters.

Explain the why

(26:35) MONICA LENT: Another thing that I think we’ve talked about before in some of our conversations is accessibility. So a lot of times it’s not so easy to convince the developer. Let’s say, oh, we want to do this for SEO reasons only. So usually when did you come to a developer and you say, we want to improve the SEO, and that’s why we’re doing this, this is a nonstarter, right? Because they’re like, well, I don’t want to make things for machines. I want to make things for users. Or in the case of accessibility, I want to make these things accessible to more people. So I think appealing to users as the reason you’re doing something as opposed to just search is a more pragmatic way to motivate people to get interested. Because at the end of the day, that’s what your focus should be on as somebody who is improving the SEO of your site. It should ultimately come down to users, although we all know that there are aspects that you have to do sometimes to appease the machine a bit. But that’s also just the way computers work. They’re not mind readers. So I think it’s that kind of balance of explaining the why, like, this is how Google discovers, indexes content, serves it, and ranks it. And then on the other hand, this is the impact it’s having on users. Here’s how we can make stuff work better for both search engines and users at the same time, make it more accessible, easier to understand. Cleaner DOM, more performant, all of those interests are actually aligned between SEO practitioners and developers. It just doesn’t usually get discussed. And I think part of that also comes down to the fact that both devs and SEOs struggle sometimes to get prioritization for these tasks so at the end of the day, you’re more hot-fixing stuff than you are working on strategic things together, and that’s a challenge too.

MARTIN SPLITT: True. It’s also that the departments are usually like, there’s an engineering organization, and then there’s the business or marketing organization. And bridging the gap, working proactively together, is not always easy on an organizational level. So that’s also probably hindering these kind of conversations and collaborations to happen. And yeah, interesting.

The search engines’ perspective

(29:10) MARTIN SPLITT: I just realized I remember the way that I usually try to get developers hooked is also to just have them think about building their own search engine. What would websites have to do to be friendly to these? And what kind of optimizations would you do as a search engine, where developers might choose a path that these optimizations cause problems. And that also sometimes works trying to figure out, turning it around and going, OK, so now you’re solving the engineering problem here on this side, on the website-creator’s side, but what would you be working on if you were on the engineering side of the search engine? And then things like accessibility and having properly ordered your headings and having a meta description, having links being actual links with URLs to point to so that you can crawl them. It becomes an obvious choice, which it is not when you don’t think of the other side. So that’s my approach to this. And I like your approach of saying here’s what you need to do and what needs to be happening for the bot to be able to consume your content, and this is the impact it’s having. I think I was missing the impact component a bit, so that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting. And you say measuring impact on ranking is so hard, and yeah, naturally, because the ranking also depends on what other people are doing. So it never is single-variable testing, right? 

MONICA LENT: Yeah. I mean, you can try to make a test, and then Google decides, well, it’s Christmas. Let’s have a code update.

The bittersweet core updates

(30:50) MONICA LENT: OK, I’m a little bit bitter because we’ve had a lot of updates this summer. But you can try to change something. And this has happened to myself. It’s happened to friends. Don’t mean to call you out, but you make some changes, and then it’s like, well, now there’s an update or whatever it is. And you’re like, well, anything that I was trying to test is now suddenly even less stable in terms of being able to give me some reliable learnings. So yeah, there are just so many factors that at the end of the day, I don’t obsess over it that much. I just try to keep making it better, keep iterating on old content until it ranks number 1, and I stop touching it out of fear, usually. Usually. Sometimes I have to, to make sure it’s still accurate. But I don’t know. I think at the end of the day, it’s a fluid situation and you have to treat it as such.

MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. It’s exactly that. Focus on building the actual product and doing the right thing for the user, and as you say, eventually search engines usually reward good things. It just might take a while. And yeah, core updates are an unfortunate reality, but they are important to make sure that we keep adapting as the web keeps adapting. And to improve our search results, we need to change things around, which unfortunately collides with everyone trying things out and testing sometimes. But that’s just an inherent feature of the reality there. Cool, awesome.

Wrap up

(32:39) MARTIN SPLITT: So yeah, in that case, I am very, very grateful for the conversation, and also happy to see developers crossing into the SEO sphere. And yeah, it was great talking to you. Thanks a lot for your time. And thanks to everyone watching this. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something as well. And yeah, stay tuned for more episodes. And again, thanks a lot, Monica, for being here with me, and all the best for your product. And keep blogging. I really like the blog. 

MONICA LENT: Thanks, Martin. Really appreciate you having me. Yeah.

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Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

Looking to drive up your conversion rates while also creating a better experience for your online shoppers?

Dynamic product discovery utilises advanced technologies, such as visual search, recommendation engines, and AI — to create a more personalised and engaging shopping experience for online customers.

This article explores why eCommerce retailers need to utilise dynamic product discovery and how it can drive more revenue for your store. It also highlights some successful examples of implementation.

Improve Customer Experience

Improve Customer Experience. Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

Studies have shown that customer experience is crucial to the success of eCommerce retailers. Companies that provide a better online shopping experience than their competitors increase revenue and demand faster. On top of that, 73% of online shoppers consider buying experience an essential factor in purchasing decisions. Dynamic product discovery is one of the most powerful ways retailers can achieve a positive customer experience.

Delivering personalised shopping experiences can improve buyer engagement in several ways. Firstly, merchants can provide personalised recommendations and visual search results based on user behaviour and preferences — resulting in a more enjoyable and relevant search experience. Secondly, it can save online shoppers time by providing them with relevant products quickly and easily, increasing satisfaction and loyalty. Finally, dynamic product discovery can reduce frustration by minimising irrelevant search results and recommendations, leading to a better overall experience.

Industry-leading companies have led the way in implementing personalised browsing and shopping experiences with great success. For instance, Amazon and Netflix use their recommendation engines to personalise each customer’s product catalogue, contributing significantly to their conversion rate.

Increase Sales

Increase Sales. Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

Dynamic product discovery can have a significant impact on sales for eCommerce retailers. By providing personalised recommendations and visual search results, online retailers can increase the likelihood that customers will find and purchase the products they want. Providing truly personalised experiences can also help retailers upsell and cross-sell products by suggesting complementary items that customers may not have considered, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Studies have shown dynamic product discovery can significantly impact retailers’ business optimisation and revenue. Companies that personalise the search and discovery experience can see a 10% – 15% increase in revenue. Also, 78% of online shoppers are most likely to repurchase from (and recommend) companies that personalise.

Stay Competitive

Retail technology is a highly competitive industry, and eCommerce retailers must continually adapt to stay ahead of their market. Dynamic product discovery allows retailers to stay competitive by offering a more personalised and relevant product investigation, leading to increased user engagement and loyalty.

Zalando, a top European fashion retailer, is an excellent example of a company that stays ahead of the curve and remains competitive. Zalando uses AI-powered personalised search to provide online shoppers with a more personalised and relevant search experience.

Meet Customer Expectations

Meet Customer Expectations. Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

Customers now expect a seamless and personalised shopping experience across all online and in-store channels. They want retailers to understand their needs and preferences and offer personalised recommendations and promotions. Dynamic product discovery can help eCommerce retailers meet customer expectations by providing a more personalised and convenient product identification experience.

By utilising machine learning and other cutting-edge technologies, retailers can offer customers personalised recommendations, search results, and promotions, helping customers find new products they are interested in more quickly and easily. Additionally, these technologies can help retailers offer a seamless shopping experience across all channels.

Gather Valuable Data

Dynamic product discovery can also provide valuable data on customer preferences, behaviour, and buying patterns that eCommerce retailers can use to improve various aspects of the business — from product development to data analytics strategies. This data allows companies to optimise product offerings and ensure stock of the products their customers are interested in. It also allows merchants to improve marketing strategies and use insights on customer behaviour and preferences to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. Additionally, retailers can use the data to improve their supply chain and logistics operations, optimising inventory levels and streamlining delivery processes.

Gather Valuable Data. Why Do Online Retailers Need to Create Dynamic Product Discovery?

A Reliable Partner for Implementing Dynamic Product Discovery

We strongly believe online retailers should consider incorporating recommendation engines, visual search, optimisation and other product discovery technologies into their strategy — to increase conversion rates and user engagement, improve search results, enhance personalisation and relevance, and ultimately stay competitive in the fast-paced and ever-changing retail landscape.

In LION Digital, we work with the market-leading platform Nosto to meet evolving customer expectations and improve business optimisation for brands that have chosen us as their trusted eCommerce advisor. Nosto was born from the idea that every shopping experience can and should be personal. With the help of powerful machine learning and a team of global eCommerce experts, Nosto uses shopper behavioural data to design digital commerce experiences that create customers for life.

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ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT MANAGER

Why Shopify Plus is a Game-Changer: The Top 10 Ways it Can Grow Your eCommerce Business and Drive More Sales

Wondering what the fuss is all about with Shopify Plus?

Selecting the right eCommerce platform is critical to the success of any online business, as it can provide the necessary tools, features, and flexibility to thrive in the competitive world of online retail. The top eCommerce platforms help businesses manage their online stores, from inventory management and order fulfilment to payment processing and shipping. They also provide tools to optimise the user experience and a marketplace of 3rd-party integrations. 

Over the past few years, many eCommerce companies have chosen to migrate to Shopify or Shopify Plus from their current platforms. Shopify vs. Shopify Plus comparison and related questions are very common. While both platforms offer the same dashboard and editor, Shopify Plus offers more advanced features and is tailored to high-volume businesses — offering enterprise-level tools to support growth and scalability. 

In this article, we will explore the top 10 benefits of Shopify Plus. By the end, you will understand why Shopify Plus can be a game-changer for online retailers and how it could help take your eCommerce business to the next level.

1. Scalability and Flexibility

Is your business growing quickly? 

Shopify Plus excels in scalability and flexibility, making it an ideal solution for rapidly growing businesses. It can seamlessly handle high-volume sales and sudden spikes in traffic or orders without compromising performance or speed. 

  • Scalability
    Shopify Plus is built on a cloud-based infrastructure that can adapt to changing business requirements. This means you can easily add new product lines, expand into new markets and handle large order volumes without worrying about infrastructure limitations or downtime. With Shopify Plus, businesses can customise their online store infrastructure to meet their specific needs, allowing them to scale quickly and efficiently.
  • Flexibility
    Shopify Plus offers a range of APIs and development tools that make it easy for businesses to customise their online store and integrate with third-party applications — giving them complete control over their growth and evolution. This level of flexibility is a significant competitive advantage for businesses requiring a platform to keep up with their changing needs.
  • Handling traffic spikes and large order volumes
    Shopify Plus is designed to meet the demands of high-volume sales, providing businesses with the infrastructure and tools to handle large spikes in traffic and orders without slowing down or crashing. The platform can handle millions of visitors and orders daily, ensuring that it remains stable and always available. Additionally, its scalable architecture allows businesses to expand and contract their resources as required, enabling them to handle sudden surges in traffic and orders during peak seasons without any performance issues or downtime.

2. CUSTOMISABLE CHECKOUT PROCESS

Customisable Checkout Process. Why Shopify Plus is a Game-Changer: The Top 10 Ways it Can Grow Your eCommerce Business and Drive More Sales

Looking to improve your buyer experience and conversion rate?

Shopify Plus allows businesses to customise their checkout process and improve the user experience — leading to higher conversion rates and increased sales. By customising the entire checkout process, businesses can create a seamless and intuitive experience for their customers, reducing cart abandonment rates and increasing customer satisfaction.

One way to customise the checkout process is using the one-page checkout feature. This allows customers to complete their purchases on a single page without having to navigate through multiple steps, simplifying the checkout process and reducing the likelihood of cart abandonment. 

Another feature is adding custom checkout fields, such as gift messaging or engraving, which can be especially useful for businesses that offer personalised products or services.

Shopify Plus also offers a wide range of payment options, including credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe and others. This allows businesses to cater to a wide range of customers and provide a convenient and secure checkout experience. Additionally, Shopify Plus allows for custom payment gateway integrations, which can be useful for businesses with unique payment processing needs.

3. ADVANCED MARKETING AND SALES FEATURES

Shopify Plus is a game-changer for businesses looking to boost their eCommerce sales and revenue. The platform offers a range of advanced marketing and sales features that can help businesses to better engage with their customers and drive more sales.

One helpful marketing feature of Shopify Plus is abandoned cart recovery, which automatically sends reminder emails to customers who have left items in their cart without completing their purchase. These emails can include incentives like discounts or free shipping to encourage customers to return and complete their purchases.

For businesses not running their email marketing through a tool like Klaviyo — Shopify Plus also offers a range of email marketing capabilities, including creating and sending newsletters, product updates, and promotional emails to specific segments of your customer base. Additionally, businesses can create and manage discount codes to incentivise purchases or reward loyal customers with exclusive discounts.

Moreover, Shopify Plus seamlessly integrates with third-party marketing tools such as Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Klaviyo and many others. By integrating these tools, businesses can gain deeper insights into their customers’ behaviour and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly. This includes tracking conversions from social media ads, analysing website traffic, and creating personalised email marketing campaigns based on customers’ past purchases and browsing behaviour.

4. ROBUST REPORTING AND ANALYTICS

Robust Reporting and Analytics. Why Shopify Plus is a Game-Changer: The Top 10 Ways it Can Grow Your eCommerce Business and Drive More Sales

Shopify Plus’s advanced reporting tools and analytics features can help businesses make data-driven decisions to boost sales and drive growth. Businesses can track their performance, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and sales trends.

The platform allows businesses to generate reports on various metrics, including sales, customer behaviour, and inventory levels. Shopify Plus also offers customisable dashboards that allow businesses to track KPIs and monitor the health of their online store. By using these tools, businesses can identify areas for improvement, optimise marketing and sales strategies, and increase conversion rates.

Shopify Plus enables businesses to gain insights into how customers interact with their website, what products are popular, and which channels drive the most sales. With numerous different report templates, businesses can generate custom reports tailored to their specific needs and receive them daily, weekly, or monthly. The platform also offers the ability to create custom dashboards that consolidate data from various reports, allowing businesses to gain a holistic view of their performance.

5. MULTI-CHANNEL SELLING

Shopify Plus offers several benefits to businesses looking to expand their reach and increase their sales. One of the platform’s key features is its integration with social media platforms. With Shopify Plus, businesses can easily create and manage their social media accounts and connect them to their online store. This allows businesses to sell products directly through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, reaching a wider audience and driving more traffic to their online store.

Another advantage of Shopify Plus is its ability to sell through multiple channels, including popular marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Etsy. This feature allows businesses to expand their reach and tap into new markets without investing significant resources into building new sales channels from scratch. Shopify Plus seamlessly integrates with these marketplaces, enabling businesses to manage their product listings and orders from a central location and providing tools to help manage inventory across all sales channels.

Centralised inventory management is another significant benefit of Shopify Plus. With this feature, businesses can track inventory levels across all their sales channels in one place, eliminating the need for manual updates and preventing overselling, out-of-stock items, and order cancellations. Shopify Plus also offers an advanced inventory management feature that allows businesses to track their inventory levels in real-time, set up automated reorder points, and manage their suppliers. By having a clear overview of their inventory, businesses can make informed decisions about their stock levels, reduce their storage costs, and prevent stockouts.

6. ENHANCED SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

Shopify Plus is a platform that takes security very seriously. Being certified as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1 compliant, which is the highest level of certification available, Shopify Plus ensures businesses comply with industry standards and provide the highest level of security for handling credit card data. This means that Shopify Plus is protected against credit card fraud and data breaches. By using Shopify Plus, businesses can be confident that they have a secure and reliable payment processing system that uses advanced encryption and security measures to protect customer payment data during transactions.

Another way Shopify Plus protects customer data is through SSL encryption. SSL encryption is a standard security technology that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser, ensuring that all data passed between the two remains private and integral. This feature is important for keeping customers’ personal information safe and building trust and credibility. By displaying the SSL padlock icon in the browser’s address bar, businesses can show their customers that their website is secure, which can go a long way in boosting customer confidence and encouraging them to purchase.

To further ensure the security of its users, Shopify Plus provides a dedicated security support team. This team is available 24/7 to assist with security-related questions and provide guidance on best practices for keeping customer data and transactions secure. The team is made up of experts in the field of security and compliance who work closely with businesses to ensure that they are meeting industry standards for security. They also ensure that they have the necessary safeguards in place to protect customer data.

Shopify Plus also offers compliance with various industry standards, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is a set of regulations implemented by the European Union to protect personal data privacy and ensure that companies handling such data are transparent about their processing activities. Shopify Plus offers GDPR compliance features such as data portability, data access, and data erasure, which help businesses meet the requirements of the regulation. In addition, Shopify Plus provides features such as cookie consent banners, GDPR-friendly form builders, and privacy policy generators to help businesses comply with the GDPR.

7. CUSTOMISABLE APIS AND INTEGRATIONS

Shopify Plus’s customisable APIs and integrations can greatly benefit eCommerce businesses by helping them streamline their operations and improve efficiency. By using these APIs and integrations, businesses can easily connect with third-party tools and services that they may already be using, such as marketing automation platforms, accounting software, and shipping providers. This allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks and reduce manual data entry, freeing time for growth and revenue-generating activities.

For example, integrating Shopify Plus with accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero can automate financial tasks such as invoicing and expense tracking. This saves time and reduces the likelihood of errors that may occur with manual data entry. Similarly, businesses can integrate their Shopify Plus store with shipping carriers to automate the fulfilment process, reducing the time and resources required to ship orders and ultimately improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Shopify Plus also offers pre-built integrations with popular third-party tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk, among others. These integrations are designed to work seamlessly with Shopify Plus, providing businesses with a unified view of their data and a more holistic approach to managing their online store.

8. DEDICATED SUPPORT AND RESOURCES

Dedicated Support and Resources. Why Shopify Plus is a Game-Changer: The Top 10 Ways it Can Grow Your eCommerce Business and Drive More Sales

With Shopify Plus, merchants enjoy exclusive priority support. This includes:

  • 24/7 Priority Technical Support
    One of the most significant benefits of Shopify Plus is its 24/7 priority technical support. This feature enables Shopify Plus customers to access expert help whenever needed, regardless of location or time zone, with support via phone, email, and live chat. This ensures that businesses can quickly resolve any issues or technical difficulties they encounter without having to wait for the next business day. This is especially important during peak periods, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas when businesses are more likely to experience high traffic and increased sales.
    Shopify Plus users also have access to a dedicated support team with a named Account Manager who can help with any questions or concerns. This team is specifically trained to handle the unique needs of enterprise-level businesses and can provide advice on everything from site optimisation to app integrations. With this level of support, businesses can ensure they are maximising the potential of the Shopify Plus platform and driving sales growth.
  • Access to Exclusive Resources and Training Materials
    Shopify Plus offers its users exclusive resources and training materials to help businesses learn and develop their skills. These resources are designed to help users get the most out of the platform and maximise their potential for success. The platform’s community of experts, developers, and partners are also on hand to provide advice and support.
    Shopify Plus users can access webinars, workshops, tutorials, documentation, and best practices on various topics, including marketing strategies, design tips, and technical support. They can also access the Shopify Plus Academy, an exclusive online learning portal offering training courses, certifications, and many other resources to help users build their expertise and advance their careers.

9. PRICING AND FEES

In contrast to Shopify’s defined pricing plans, the pricing for Shopify Plus varies based on factors such as your business model, monthly turnover, and marketing needs. Also, Shopify sets fixed fees per transaction for both platforms, but transaction fees for Shopify Plus are negotiable during the quote process.

10. THE SHOPIFY PLUS PARTNER PROGRAM

Shopify Plus is a game-changer for eCommerce businesses, providing a powerful platform and support system to help businesses thrive and succeed in today’s highly competitive eCommerce market. But there is one more amazing benefit that merchants can access for growing their stores and taking their business to the next level — the partner program

The Shopify Plus Partners program supports merchants by linking them with trusted world-class service providers (such as LION Digital) that have the platform expertise to help brands grow. By utilising the platform efficiently with the help of one of the Shopify Plus Partners, merchants can benefit from a complete eCommerce solution and tailor it to their specific needs and goals.

LION Digital has successfully applied the platform’s best practices and generated online growth for brands like Ledlenser, OneWorld Collection, Nutrition Warehouse, and Havaianas, to name a few. We encourage eCommerce businesses to consider Shopify Plus as a tool to grow their brand, increase customer loyalty, and drive sales. In June of 2022, our agency was recognised for its long-term partnership with Shopify, and LION Digital has achieved the very exclusive Digital Marketing Partner status with Shopify Plus.

GET IN CONTACT TODAY AND LET OUR TEAM OF ECOMMERCE SPECIALISTS SET YOU ON THE ROAD TO ACHIEVING ELITE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES AND GROWTH

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Article by

ASSELYA Sekerova –
MARKETING & PROJECT MANAGER