Chris Long’s Post

Ecommerce SEO Tip: Never use boilerplate text in your title tags that isn't about the primary product. This hurts your category optimization at scale: This is a common mistake I see on retailer sites. On key pages such as categories or products, they use text that contains boilerplate text that highlights a certain feature, deal, value-prop or other offering. Examples of this include things: - "Find Your Perfect Fit" - "Best Prices" - "Great Deals At" - "Shop Now" What this is doing is adding content in your site-wide title tags that aren't about the core product. When search engines read this, it lowers the similarity between your title tag and the query that a user is searching. In essence, sites that do this are hurting their title tag optimization at scale. Whenever you structure your title tags, make sure they never include boilerplate text like this. Even if you don't have time and optimize all of the title tags on your site, using logic that ensures the title tag emulates the headings is likely much better than including irrelevant text to the core category.

This is huge news for ecommerce sites. Google is introducing a completely new Google Shopping experience powered by AI + personalized features: Here's what we know about the new Google Shopping experience: - According to Google's announcement, Google Shopping now "uses AI to intelligently show the most relevant products" - At the top of the results, you'll also get an AI-generated description that gives you more information on what to consider when trying to purchase a given product. This likely pulled from AI Overviews. - In addition to showing you products, the experience also provide educational content such as videos, buying guides, helpful resources and more. - There will also be filtering options in the left-hand side bar that let users drill down into deeper categories, like a traditional category page. - Google is also introducing a new personalized feed that shows you a variety of products, videos and other resources based off your previous search history. - There will also be a personalized "Deals" page that let's users identify deals for them. When I say that Google is becoming your new category page, this is exactly what I mean. Within Google Shopping, they're trying to make the SERP a completely all encompassing page that allows you emulate an ideal category page that's been sourced from the Web. I think this also gives us insights into the direction they want to go with the traditional results. They'll roll it out to Google Shopping, see how it impacts user metrics and advertising data. From there, they can make a decision about whether they want to roll it out to the broader results.

Whoa, this is big: Semrush has just acquired Search Engine Land. Semrush now owns yet another prominent SEO media property. More details: Semrush acquired Search Engine Land's parent company Third Door Media. Along with Search Engine Land, they'll also be the primary owners of SMX, the MarTech conferences + Digital Marketing Depot.

SEO Case Study: CNN dominates searches for the '24 Election, one of the most competitive spaces in SEO right now. Here's a breakdown of how they do it: In the middle of an election cycle, publishers are all pushing extremely aggressive strategies in order to maximize their visibility in search engines for queries around the election. This includes searches that are skyrocketing in demand such as "trump", "harris", "election 2024" and more. Here's a complete breakdown of their strategies for how they do it: 1. Publish New URLs Every Day: CNN knows that they won't be appear in Google's Top Stories without publishing a completely new URL. Google really only shows pages that have been posted in the last 24 hours, so CNN needs to publish new URLs every day in order to maintain consistent visibility. 2. Include Dates In URLs: In order to send even more freshness signals, CNN includes today's date directly in the URL for all of their pages. This includes adding the month, day and year (10-15-24) in every new page they publish. 3. Utilize LiveBlogPosting schema: When you look at Top Stories, you might notice the red "Live" badge in the upper left-hand corner. This is actually result of using a special type of schema called LiveBlogPosting. LiveBlogPosting tells search engines that you're going to make updates to the content throughout the day. Using this schema type is basically mandatory to appear in Top Stories for highly competitive keywords. 4. Regular Content Updates: Throughout the day, CNN regularly makes updates to the content of their page. In fact, they're probably making 40-50 updates to their hub pieces every single day. This allows they're LiveBlogPosting schema to show search engines that they're making updates in real time. 5. Regular Freshness Updates: Each time they update the content, they're also refreshing the timestamp. So they're likely also pushing at least 40-50 timestamp refreshes a day to showcase that they're content is up to date. Also each update in their article also has a timestamp associated with it. 6. High-Quality Relevant Image: This sounds basic but the Top Stories algorithm may be really dependent on either images or CTR for success. As a result, a requirement for doing well is having a high quality image that represents the overall topic. CNN always uses a crystal clear image, generally a headshot of one of the candidates. 7. Links From Home Page: In order to ensure that the page is crawled and indexed immediately, they always incorporate a link from the home page. On the home page, they have a list of trending topics with links to their stories (Election 2024, Walgreens Closures etc). This ensures that they're most powerful page is always linking to the key content. Even if you're not a publisher, there's some really great takeaways for how CNN approaches SEO for these exceptionally competitive queries.

Hot take: Impressions will become the most important SEO metric in an increasingly zero-click world.

This is absolutely egregious. Google is testing a "Quick View" feature that steals content from publisher sites and puts it directly in the SERP. Tom Critchlow and Barry Schwartz discovered that Google is testing a "Quick View" feature for recipe related queries. When searching "pesto recipe" the searcher is offered to see a "Quick View" experience. In this experience, searches can directly see the recipe information, images and even comments. Basically no reason at all to even click on the site. Throughout the years, Google has been constantly pushing the boundries when it comes to scraping more data from websites in order to "enhance the user experience". Featured snippets, images, direct product listing, AI Overviews etc. However, this feels completely over the line as it's completely scraping the entire contents of a page.

It's FINALLY here. In a huge update, AI Overview tracking is officially available in Ahrefs. This unlocks a lot of data around AI Overviews for many SEOs: Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools in our community but they haven't had AI Overview tracking until recently. They've officially integrated AI Overview tracking into their datasets. They've integrated this functionality into several of their reports: Organic Keywords:  1. Navigate to the "Organic keywords" report 2. Click "SERP Features" 3. Check the "AI Overviews" box 4. You'll now see all of your query data that's returning AI Overviews Top Pages:  1. Navigate to the "Top pages" report 2. Click "+ Keyword Filters" > "SERP Features" 3. Check the "AI Overviews" box 4. You'll now see all the keywords where an AI Overview appears for the top keyword Now SEOs have a lot more data around AI Overviews. This update allows you to get multiple insights such as: 1. Queries with AI Overviews: Even if you're not tracking the keyword directly, you'll be able to see whether an AI Overview is appearing for a particular query 2. Most valuable queries in AI Overviews: You can also use Ahrefs "Traffic Value" metric and sort by your most valuable keywords. This will show you the most valuable queries that have AI Overviews appearing. 3. % Of Queries With AI Overviews: In the "Organic keywords" report, you can look at the number of keywords returning an AI Overview. Then you can compare that against your total keywords to see what % of queries are returning one. 4. Queries Where A New AI Overview Is Appearing: You can run a comparison for queries where you used to rank in the first position but don't any more because an AI Overview is appearing (great tip from Brodie Clark here) For those who use Ahrefs, we've been waiting for this one for awhile. Excited to see that it's finally been rolled out into their tool.

Whoa, I did not know this. For ecommerce SEO, Google actually crawls your "Add To Cart" functionality in order to verify your products' final price: Buried in Google's ecommerce SEO documentation, Google lists some best practices for launching new stores. One option they give is launching a site without products available yet. However, their recommendation is to mark each product as "Out of Stock" as opposed to disabling the ability to Add To Cart. Then they mention that Google actually crawls you Add To Cart functionality in order to confirm the final price, ensuring tax and shipping information is accurate. So the takeaway here is that the information in your Add To Cart pages needs to reflect all the information that you're sending to Google (structured data, product data feeds, on-page content). Google is actually using the Add To Cart functionality to verify that all the information you're sending it is correct.

OK, I'm not going to lie...it's pretty flattering that ChatGPT just output me for "Who are the best SEOs?"

Technical SEO Tip: Screaming Frog's "Crawl Depth" data identifies content buried in your site architecture and helps you find internal linking opportunities: Often times on larger sites, it's extremely common for content to get buried deep in the site architecture. As your content library expands you'll likely see more content get obscured in different sections, via pagination or not receive natural linking. Generally, it's recommended that content have a "crawl depth" of no more than 3-4. This means that any piece of content shouldn't be more than 3-4 links away from the home page. If you find content with higher crawl depths, you might want to consider adding internal links to those pages. Fortunately, Screaming Frog can help you identify content with high crawl depth: 1. Open up Screaming Frog and perform a crawl of your site 2. Once the crawl is complete go to Internal > HTML 3. Scroll to the right to find the "Crawl Depth" report. Sort this is descending order 4. You'll now see the pages on your site with the deepest crawl depths. If you see content with a crawl depth of 5+, you'll want to consider ways you can internally link to it. In the past, we've used to identify entire sections of sites that have poor internal linking. We would see the same page types/templates that had deep crawl depths, indicating they weren't getting linked to naturally. Next, we had to brainstorm scalable ways of linking to that content.