WHY SEO TODAY MEANS GREAT WEB DESIGN BRIANNE KEATING FORST DIRECTOR OF ECOMMERCE

WHY SEO TODAY MEANS GREAT WEB DESIGN BRIANNE KEATING FORST DIRECTOR OF ECOMMERCE

ABOUT PLOW & HEARTH Began in Madison, VA in 1980 Employ over 400 associates 5 Brands n Total of 22 stores in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina & New Jersey n Still have large catalog circulation for 4 of our brands

SEARCH ENGINES SHIFT: MAJOR ALGORITHM CHANGES Did you know? Google has over 500 algorithm changes annually

THE GOAL OF THE ALGORITHM SHIFT? Not to serve results that are based on SITE CONTENT but instead based on how people ENGAGE with the content on your site. New ways of measuring success through relevancy.

MEASURING SUCCESS THROUGH RELEVANCY How do they measure relevance? Weighting of customer interaction with your site Bounce Rates Load Times Conversion Repeat Visitors More weighting on Social Relevancy Google+ Pinterest

SEO RANKING RELEVANCE & WEB DESIGN As search engines are weighting more factors on customer engagement, how do you make Web Design Work Harder for SEO?

DESIGNING NAVIGATION FOR SEO Navigation is Sitewide perpetual identity of the brand Critical factor for engagement Customers who engage with our navigation convert at higher rates than customers who click through main images or call-out banners.

DESIGNING NAVIGATION FOR SEO

DESIGNING NAVIGATION FOR SEO Tab Fonts & Navigation Fonts don t need to be restricted to web fonts.

DESIGNING NAVIGATION FOR SEO Subnavigation Importance Every designer s bane? Marketing s request for more text in the navigation area Extremely effective in heightening conversion and increasing organic rankings for these categories

DESIGNING THE HOME PAGE FOR SEO Watch Compression Use www.webpagetest.org to monitor Google also uses this tool to help in their algorithms. Using a CDN for optimization of load times for images, fonts, and javascript is also important.

DESIGNING THE FOOTER FOR SEO The New Footer Finesse

DESIGNING THE FOOTER FOR SEO The New Footer Finesse Customer Service and About Us sections Extremely valuable to include our quarterly SEO Keyword focuses. Cross-Brand Link-Back Opportunities: Top keywords and focuses have been extremely valuable for bringing in traffic to phrases we want to own. Use professional, clean styles for this important information for your brand to look legitimate and provide confidence in buying.

DESIGNING TAB PAGES FOR SEO Tab Pages Serving Customers Less/SEO More New design has shown a decline in clicks to tab pages. Low engagement means less overall SEO growth Reduce amount of workload on these pages Ensure it s not a heavy keyword-loading but a full breakout of category names in a user-friendly design.

DESIGNING CATEGORY PAGES FOR SEO Category Pages work hard for your site key converting page to direct our traffic to from the homepage really strong topical pages for SEO links. We ensure the design allows us to easily manage both of these focuses.

DESIGNING CATEGORY PAGES FOR SEO New Design will enable better design for SEO Splitting text paragraphs Using filters in the left navigation for top refinements

DESIGNING PRODUCT PAGES FOR SEO Images Ensure product images and additional images are tagged correctly for better serving through Google s image search Integrate Video and give it prominence: video is more userfriendly, converts higher, and Google is now weighting the content and engagement more in-depth than before.

DESIGNING PRODUCT PAGES FOR SEO Be able to manage layout and design for very different product description lengths.

INCORPORATING SOCIAL FOR SEO New Strengths of Social Engagement Social engagement is becoming a stronger weighting factor This is an easy way for search engines to truly gauge customer interest in products, content, or other features of your sites.

INCORPORATING SOCIAL FOR SEO New Strengths of Social Engagement Our reps at Google inform us that Google + is important to them; we re working to build out our Google + pages and to attain customer interaction through this tool. However, the social channel usage of your customer will largely reflect upon their demographics.

INCORPORATING SOCIAL FOR SEO Understand Your Social Demographic Our core demographic is women aged 55+ who own their own home, are empty-nesters and an income of $75k+. Source: Pew Research Center s Internet & American Life Project, Omnibus Survey, Aug. 2-5, 2012. http://marketingland.com/social-network-demographics-pew-study-shows-who-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-others-21594

INCORPORATING SOCIAL FOR SEO New Strengths of Social Engagement We re finding Pinterest to be our largest opportunity in terms of traffic and conversion at the product level. Nearly 50%+ of our social traffic comes from Pinterest and 90% of our social conversions come from Pinterest. Since we re seeing the importance this adds for SEO rankings, we re working on new options to reorganize our social icons and make the strong ones be featured more prominently on the site.

WATCH BING Market Share Shift After years of consistent market share increase, 2012 marked the year of a decrease for us for Google. For our inbound SEO traffic, Google had risen to 80%+ for organic traffic but in 2012, decreased to 76% while Bing picked up a few percentage points. 2011 2012 Bing 10% Yahoo 15% Google 75% Bing 25% Yahoo 13% Google 62%

WATCH BING Market Share Shift New Browser Address Bar multi-purposing as the search bar may have an impact. IE is still our largest source of visitors at 38% of site traffic.

WEB DESIGN FOR SEO SEO = Customer Engagement The exciting news is that we won t be tasked to serve 2 masters: SEO and Usability. Search engines are starting to take into consideration overall site usability; ensuring your design focus stays in line with customer metrics will also give you the SEO wins you need.

WHY SEO TODAY MEANS GREAT WEB DESIGN BRIANNE KEATING FORST DIRECTOR OF ECOMMERCE PLOW & HEARTH, LLC BFORST@PLOWANDHEARTH.COM