“Search is the DNA of the web,” says Adrien Menard, CEO of Botify, an enterprise search engine optimization (SEO) software company. He points to the sheer volume of consumers’ searches; users make approximately 80,000 queries on search engines every second, according to SEOTribunal.
“Search is the first step in the buyer’s journey,” he says. “If your organic search visibility is broken, your brand awareness will be impacted, you will have a weaker audience to retarget, and you’ll end up spending more on paid channels, which will impact your profitability.”
Adrien Menard, CEO, Botify
But keeping up on the latest SEO developments is difficult because search engines’ algorithms are constantly evolving.
Content creation explosion
And the search landscape is growing increasingly complex as retailers have to account for mobile and voice search, Menard says. “In the earlier days of SEO, adding content and optimizing it for the most searched keywords was sufficient to produce results,” he says. “With the massive explosion of content creation and the growing complexity of the web, retailers need to consider every stage of the search process.”
That starts by retailers taking steps to understand how Google evaluates their sites, Menard says. “If Google can’t find and evaluate your content properly, there’s no chance that customers will be able to either,” he adds.
To do that, retailers should implement an enterprise-grade tool that is built to quickly crawl their vast number of URLs, Menard says. It should include a data analytics engine that provides insights on all issues impacting crawling and indexing. The tool should offer visibility into every stage of the search process—from crawling to rendering to indexing to ranking, and ultimately, to conversion. And it should include segmentation capabilities that allow retailers to analyze their site based on specific segments and categories.
Align the organization
Organizational alignment is also an important factor in a successful SEO strategy, Menard says. “How an organization is aligned around SEO very often determines the results it can expect from this channel,” he says. “If it isn’t seen as a business priority, it isn’t properly resourced and will bring less value to the bottom line.”
Retailers should measure SEO by its contribution to revenue—that is, direct conversions and assisted conversions—not simply traffic. “Online retailers that aren’t already tying their organic search traffic to direct orders need to ask themselves why,” he says.
Botify’s unified data model and enterprise search platform helps retailers achieve these goals by bringing transparency and predictability to the entire organic search process, Menard says. “Our tool enables brands to diagnose and optimize every stage of the search process—from underlying technical issues to keyword optimization, and drive sustainable revenue from organic search,” he says.
Crawl ratio
One retailer recently used Botify’s platform to analyze how it could improve the crawl ratio of its product pages. Botify identified that the low crawl ratio was due to a lack of internal linking and performance delays. After the platform identified the issue, the retailer fixed it so that Google discovered the previously uncrawled pages—leading to a 120% increase in organic search traffic and a 35% increase in revenue from organic search.
“SEO is the main source of traffic and revenue for a website, but search is rapidly changing,” Menard says. “The opportunity is bigger than ever for retailers who use the correct key performance indicators and move fast to adapt to this new environment. Forward-thinking enterprises know that to succeed in search, they must allocate the necessary resources toward all stages of the search process.”