Technical SEO & eCommerce – with Kristina Azarenko

Welcome back to another tidbit-packed episode of The Marketing Microscope!

We welcome Kristina Azarenko, technical SEO specialist and founder of Marketing Syrup – a Toronto-based digital marketing company. In addition to running her own firm, Kristina offers a course called SEO Challenge. The course teaches 24 of the most important SEO skills to build a career.

I am joined on this podcast by Darshak Patel, SEO analyst at E2M, and Taral Patel, SEO Manager. This podcast was Taral’s last hour at E2M after spending six awesome years with the company. We wish Taral all the best in his future endeavors in Bangalore!

On the show today, we’re talking all about technical SEO and how it applies to an eCommerce site.

We start off by asking Kristina about the trademarks of every successful eCommerce store, which include:
– Excellent user experience (no annoying ads and pop ups)
– Categories optimized with long tail keywords
– Optimized product pages/category pages
– Fine-tuned product search (tracked by Google Knowledge)

To flip the script, we discuss some of the trademarks of an unsuccessful eCommerce store, including:
– Many categories with only a couple products in them
– The homepage having “home” in the title tag
^ It’s definitely worth listening to the podcast to dive deeper into this one!

We take the conversation more general by discussing the most important things to understand about eCommerce SEO, the impact the site builder platform has on SEO, and what the “perfect” product page looks like.

The next stop in the show is keywords. Every SEO specialist knows transactional keywords are essential on an eCommerce site. But what role do informational keywords have? How does this impact content marketing?

We close out the first segment by discussing how to allocate time and budget to content marketing on an eCommerce site.

After a quick intermission, we get right back into it by talking about the biggest technical challenges in eCommerce SEO, including:
– Faceted navigation
– Dynamic stock
– Expanding categories to account for long-tail keywords

We dive deeper into these challenges, especially faceted navigation. Next, we get some excellent insight on the auditing process, as well as a list of Kristina’s favorite tools for the job.

As the show begins to wind down, Kristina discusses some ways to optimize crawl budget – and the key signs it’s time to change the SEO strategy for an eCommerce site.

In normal Microscope fashion, we close the show by getting some parting advice from Kristina for technical SEO analysts.

For more useful tidbits on technical SEO, check out Kristina’s eBook, eCommerce SEO Master: 10 Huge Wins for Any Online Store

Kristina also has a free extension – SEO Pro
If you’ve got a large eCommerce site and are trying to crack Google’s code, this episode is worth every second!
You can find more episodes of the Marketing Microscope on Stitcher.