SEO is one of the most overlooked aspects of eCommerce - which is why we’ve brought the expert Azeem Ahmad in to show you the tricks of the trade.

As the host of the globally renowned podcast, “Azeem Digital Asks,” and presenter to groups of thousands, Azeem is coming to share fresh ideas to the outdated SEO approach.

He might even tell you how he fuels his 4AM workouts with chocolate 😯

🗣️: How important is content marketing for eCommerce SEO?

💬 Azeem: Content marketing is INCREDIBLY important for eCom SEO, IMO. I've seen in the past too many websites focus on conversion, and end/bottom of the funnel traffic, and far less at the top. For example, in your own case, think about how much content you have on site (outside of PDPs) that describe the benefits of your products, and their applications? When created and optimised well, these can attract higher funnel traffic, win featured snippets, and put your brand front of mind when users are ready to convert. It will also help you rank for more keywords and longer tailed queries - but most importantly - position your brand as a source of authority in the space.

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🗣️: What are some common technical SEO issues that eCommerce brands face?

💬 Azeem: I could literally type out an 180k word answer here but I'll list my top one - duplicate content! Lots of ecom sites have product pages for each variant of their products, and they're usually set up in such a way that Google can't understand - e.g without proper canonicals set up, poor redirects, etc.

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🗣️: How important is site speed for eCommerce SEO?

💬 Azeem: Site speed is very important IMO. Google released a tool a while ago (the name escapes me) where you can plug in your average page load time and a metric like AOV and it will literally tell you how much revenue you are leaving on the table due to a slow loading website. Add into the mix a poor user experience, and the harm to conversion rate and you've got a recipe for disaster.

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🗣️: How important is international SEO for eCommerce brands?

💬 Azeem: If you're operating in multiple markets, then this is a MUST, IMO. Not offering localised content to users in specific regions is a surefire way to harm your conversions. It's not something you can take a shortcut to either, you need to be able to demonstrate an understanding of the nuances in language for different countries which means stay away from Google Translate!

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🗣️: What are some effective strategies for optimizing category pages for SEO?

💬 Azeem: Category pages are a great way to further cement features and benefits of a particular product range. Broadly speaking, users may need assistance in selecting a particular product from the category by this point - so things like high quality photography, solid descriptions, and a focus on technical aspects are good areas to begin with.

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🗣️: How can eCommerce brands use influencer marketing to improve their search visibility?

💬 Azeem: Great question and something I literally had a conversation about earlier today! Influencer Marketing (IM) needs to begin with finding the right person in your space - e.g if you sell homeware products, you don't want to reach out to a haircare influencer to promote your brand - it wont look natural. Typically, you can offer paid routes (e.g pay per post) where you have more creative control and can offer a contract - particularly good if you have stringent brand guidelines, or go for the gifted route where you send them a product for free so that they can promote it - but generally the influencer will have creative control.

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🗣️: How can we use customer reviews to improve oursearch visibility?

💬 Azeem: You can do quite a few things with reviews. It's not necessarily a review but your question reminded me of this campaign which used clever creative and UGC to get people talking about it. Reviews are great for social proof and more often than not, customers use phrases and keywords in them that are highly relevant and things you'd probably want to include in your content strategy.

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🗣️: Also for visibility/indexing, we're looking to optimize the use of Quickpages(modals) over General Landing pages, will this affect our visibilty? Are search engines able to crawl on Quickpages the same as General Landing pages or they're treated differently?

💬 Azeem: There's not a one size fits all answer I can give you here without knowing the specifics of your problem. That being said, one of the main reasons people often choose quickpages is due to their load speed - I think they work well for time limited campaigns, but often sacrifice content over speed. Landing pages that will last longer and can be refreshed often will benefit more from ongoing optimisations IMO.

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🗣️: And lastly, What are some effective strategies for optimizing product descriptions for SEO?

💬 Azeem: Outside of what you've already tried, one thing I suggest often to people is to scan the SERP. Search the keyword for the product you are trying to rank for and look at the landscape. What are others ranking higher doing better than you? What can you say/offer that they cant? How are you different? A good option would be to include the social proof I mentioned before (people buy from people remember!) and start to look into schema markups to get an advantage on your competition.

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🗣️: How can we use email marketing to improve our search visibility?

💬 Azeem: Interesting one - the obvious answer being to drive an uplift in traffic to your website because you've got an engaged audience list (I imagine) - but I would hazard a guess and say that the goal of most email marketing isn't to improve search visilbility - it's to build a captive audience list - which is what we're doing with search too. With a solid content strategy, you can leverage this for email lists, and social media posts too - so win, win!

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🗣️: From your experience, how important is mobile optimization for eCommerce SEO?

💬 Azeem: VERY IMPORTANT! I'm glad someone has asked the question. I once saw a site that focused on desktop only optimisations where over 70% traffic was on mobile. One tip I use with my teams is to take the average no of clicks to conversion, then give the site on a mobile device to someone who hasn't used it, and asked them to buy a specific product as a test. If they can't do it in those number of clicks or less, time to get to work!

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🗣️: What's your take on AIs-SEOs?

💬 Azeem: Ooh. I like this one. Instead of being on the fence, I welcome it. When used properly (those being the key words), it can be a huge help and time saver. e.g - need to classify a large amount of keywords by intent? AI can do this in minutes, it would take a human hours. Same with RegEx, no more writing and testing different options, AI can write it for you in seconds. Anything that saves an SEO time in the right places, I absolutely welcome!Hope this helps!

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🗣️: How can eCommerce brands keep their content fresh and optimized for search engines?

💬 Azeem: Regularly update your product category/detail/landing pages. Make sure you're targeting the right keywords and as I mentioned in another answer below - scan the SERP you are trying to rank in, what are others above you doing better than you, how can you be different?

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🗣️: How can eCommerce brands use competitive analysis to improve their search visibility?

💬 Azeem: I briefly touched on this above. I'm a big advocate of the eye test, scan over the SERP and see what competitors are doing better than you, and see how you can stand out. As well as this, you can use competitive insights to find out gaps in each others backlink profiles, scout top performing keywords, and gaps in them, but most importantly for ecom - see if they are offering discounts or incentives that you are not. It's always worth keeping an eye on competitors, but not ALL of the time.

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🗣️: How important is brand authority for eCommerce SEO?

💬 Azeem: IMO, having an authoritative brand is crucial. You're asking people to part with their money, and therefore they need to trust you. You need to give them a reason to trust you - especially if you are selling high ticket items with a long purchase path over multiple touchpoints - they are going to be exposed to your brand a lot if your optimisations are on point - so make sure you demonstrate you can be trusted. Search engines need to trust you too - so a solid backlink profile really helps here.

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🗣️: How can eCommerce brands ensure their website is accessible and optimized for search engines?

💬 Azeem: A big one, and probably one we can only scratch the surface of here. In short - high quality, unique (not duplicate) content, optimised for multiple devices and with clear technical signals to google - e.g the right canonicals, and hreflang if you're in multiple countries - to incentivise them to rank you for it.