New Retail SEO Guide

Covering Basic SEO, Social and Mobile SEO

Value: [rating=4]

Source: Internet Advertising Bureau Guide for Retailers

Our commentary: Running online retail sites presents a whole raft of specific complexities for businesses, whether its systems, process or marketing related .

While only focusing on the marketing (specifically SEO, PPC & Social aspects of running a retail business) this guide from IAB is a very nice simple suite of tips & best practice guidance for running retail sites.

There is a fair bit missing from the guide in terms of what you can do with SEO for retail sites, but if a guide covered everything it would be enormous & not actionable. The simple, sector-specific approach from the iab is what makes this a useful piece of content. To give you a flavour, here a a couple of  less obvious tips from the guide:

• Google Global Market Finder (page 20) - An excellent tool which combines, Insights for Search, Keyword Tool & Google Translator to give you data about your keywords internationally - This will help you understand potential opportunities for opening your site up overseas
• Overlaying seasonal / product trends into your activity (page - 7). The guide doesn't get into what this activity is but you should consider:
  • Key panels on high traffic pages should change to reflect the trends
  • Paid search keywords & adverts
  • Email content
• Running tactical campaigns vs BAU / Always-on activity (page  8 ) - A common mistake made by a lot of retailers is to focus ALL the budget on running specific tactics and forgetting to running campaigns for particular customer types or product launches. A lot of the creativity of marketing is lost and with it sales opportunities when marketing becomes tactical. Checkout the Smart Insights Campaign Planning template for tips on what should go into these plans.

The area I rate the most from the document is the SEO section (page 10), it has 9 excellent & simple tips. I find myself repeating these same pieces of advice / questions to clients time & time again, they are absolutely key to getting the core of your site setup correctly so you can worry about growing your business!

If you run an online retail site, how do you rate the guide? What would your one key SEO tip be?