Blog Archives

Cutting through the noise: key takeaways from Google’s latest algorithm updates for ecommerce brands

Google is constantly evolving to remain the market-leading search engine, continuously adapting to try to deliver the best results for its users. This evolution is achieved through core algorithm updates, where Google makes significant changes to its algorithm and systems to ensure that it consistently provides reliable search results.

Google typically makes hundreds of updates to its algorithm each year, but most of these changes go unnoticed and are not officially confirmed by Google. However, unlike minor updates, core updates are substantial and often cause many websites to experience fluctuations in their rankings and traffic.

So what exactly are these algorithm updates, and how do they impact ecommerce brands?

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO): How ecommerce brands can adapt and thrive

The recent emergence of powerful, intuitive and easy-to-use AI technologies is transforming how people discover, create and engage with information. And one of the areas most affected by this transformation is web search.

Thanks to AI, the way people look for information, and the way it’s presented to them, is currently undergoing a genuinely unprecedented change. In recent months we’ve witnessed the emergence of numerous AI-powered answer engines and the surge of voice search (some 50% of the U.S. population using voice-enabled search each day).

If you manage an eCommerce website, it’s going to be very important to understand and be aware of these shifts. They will have a significant impact on how you run your domains.

The hidden costs of a botched site migration: Why ecommerce brands can’t afford to get it wrong

Are you planning a site migration for your company’s online presence? You might be looking to change your domain name, or move to a different CMS, or making some structural changes to how your website is accessed. In any case, a site migration is a challenging project an ecommerce website owner will ever take on, as they can have a significant impact on the site’s performance and visibility.

The costs of a poorly planned site migration can be catastrophic, leading to a collapse in organic traffic and revenue. So, making sure your site migration is well planned and executed is, of course, vital.

Google’s shopping SERPs update: What it means for ecommerce

Today, Google unveiled significant updates to its shopping search results pages (SERPs) in Europe, aligning with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. Users will now find additional tabs labelled “Products” and “Product Sites” situated just beneath the search bar at the top of the results page. This development introduces features directly linked to organic search results, specifically, organic product tiles. These tiles bear resemblance to the paid or sponsored product tiles familiar to users for many years.

However, they now emphasise a more organic presence within Google’s search results, marking a noteworthy shift towards enhancing the visibility of non-sponsored content. This change aims to foster a more competitive and diverse online marketplace, ensuring that users have access to a wide array of product choices without the direct influence of advertising.

Key takeaways:

Google’s Compliance with EU’s Digital Markets Act: Google introduced organic product tiles and tabs (“Products”

Re:commerce 2024 – Recap

I’ll start where Re:commerce2024 ended, with a speaker quote that struck a chord, and sums up some our of the thinking behind our Re:commerce event – “SEOs are pack animals, we are educators” – we’re an industry that shares, we follow the latest developments, interpret the insight and generally enjoy being ‘in it together’. SEO is a discipline where the goal posts constantly change, where learning and adapting are intrinsic to success, where we have to be educators and influencers within our businesses.

Re:commerce exists because at Re:signal, we want to play our part in sharing expertise, passing on knowledge and connecting clients and like-minded brands with the broader SEO community, so we can all learn from one another and navigate the future together.

I clearly found something funny! » Read more about: Re:commerce 2024 – Recap »

SEO for headless ecommerce platforms

What is “headless ecommerce”?

Headless is the term used for separating your backend website infrastructure from the frontend interface. In ecommerce, the backend infrastructure will power your shopping cart, checkout, customer accounts, inventory, merchandising, and fulfilment systems. When running a headless ecommerce solution, these services are then presented as pure data via an API, rather than as HTML web pages. Because of this, any UX, SEO, Performance, or Conversion issues which were present in the ecommerce platform, can get left behind. You are no longer platform-dependent and are free to build any website design or structure that you wish. SEO changes are mostly tackled on the frontend, and slow backend servers are mostly mitigated by delivering fast frontend web pages from a high performance CDN.

What are the pitfalls of headless ecommerce?

Re:commerce 2024 preview

After a successfull inaugural conference, we are thrilled to be back hosting Re:commerce 2024 on the 15th of March 2024!

Once again we will be hosting the conference at the beautiful Ham Yard Hotel. After receiving so much positive feedback about the venue last time, it was a pretty easy decision to return. Our attendee feedback consistently gave the venue a 10/10 score, with several details impressing. It’s eye-catching decor, large open spaces, impressive theatre, and the delicious food were regularly cited in the feedback received!

Re:commerce 2024 promises to be a must-attend event for businesses looking to stay ahead in the world of online retail. The conference will focus on ecommerce SEO, content marketing, technical SEO, and online revenue growth, and aims to equip attendees with key strategic insights to push their businesses forward!

What our beauty industry report uncovered

Re:signal recently released an SEO industry report on the Beauty sector, to see how high street retailers, DTC brands and online goliaths such as Amazon, were performing in Google.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a revenue shift towards online for the Beauty industry which has remained strong even today, with 24.2% of revenue coming from online purchases. This is a significant foothold in a £13.95bn industry, previously driven by consumers trying something new in local retail stores. The industry as a whole continues to grow as well, with Beauty expected to reach £15.1bn revenue in the next five years. There is a limit to how much of the market Online can capture though, with ecommerce sales predominantly consisting of repeat purchases.

As with most consumer verticals, Amazon has beaten out high street giants Boots and Superdrug in Google’s organic results. The world’s 4th largest company achieved 100% visibility across the 3,544 popular non-brand Beauty keywords that we analysed. Amazon has a powerful combination of near-limitless product range and one of the most powerful domains (authority) on the internet. Its product range comes mostly from the Amazon Marketplace, allowing third-party manufacturers and wholesalers to sell products on Amazon’s website, in exchange for a percentage of the sale.

Superdrug teamed up with Mirakl at the end of 2022 to build their own marketplace, which launched with over 300 new brands and thousands of additional SKUs. It seems like a no-brainer at first glance, bringing increased range/keyword coverage, a slice of the revenue and the potential to sell own-brand products in the same order. There are downsides as well though, such as diluting brand reputation and own-brand sales. Perhaps that is why high street leader Boots delayed their own marketplace launch at the end of last year, with the decision supported by nine financial quarters of continued sales growth.

Amazon’s dominance in the Beauty vertical isn’t insurmountable either, with Boots leading our report’s Skincare league table across 938 keywords and over a million monthly searches on Google. It will be interesting to see whether Boots manages to stave off launching their marketplace and opt for in-house range expansion, to retain more of the profits. Own brand products are key to Boots’ success and flooding their site with cheap marketplace alternatives could put a dent in their winning streak.

We have also seen tremendous SEO growth from DTC websites, such as Estée Lauder’s MAC Cosmetics, which came 4th in our Makeup league table. For all but the most price sensitive shopper, DTC sites can offer a far superior shopping experience with exclusive content, tips, imagery and even exclusive products. MAC’s content, UX and strong backlink profile has helped them to outrank Amazon for big non-brand keywords such as [eyeliner] and [makeup brushes]. Our report highlights internal linking as a key catalyst to their SEO success as well, effectively interlinking related product categories using keyword-optimised anchor text.

Another DTC success story has been L’Oréal’s brand Kiehl’s, which ranked highly in our report’s SEO analysis of the skincare market. We estimate that they receive over 18,000 organic clicks a month from around 6,800 non-brand skincare keywords. Kiehl’s also ranks in the Top 10 for 31% of the keywords analysed. Success has come from the significant content investment made on their website, including answering common skincare questions and issues. This has naturally garnered links for most of the major beauty publications as well as bloggers, telling Google that Kiehl’s is a major authority in the skincare industry.

To win in the Beauty industry online, takes a strong technical foundation and high-quality content covering the entire buyer journey. Even if the customer is buying a £3.50 lipstick, they expect to be informed and nurtured with guidance along the way. As MAC can attest to, heavily investing in great content can also deliver SEO (and referral traffic) success via industry coverage online.

The biggest hurdle faced by most of the brands we’ve examined, is overcoming technical issues caused by their ecommerce platform or design frontend. Seemingly simple techniques such as cross-linking between PLPs in the SEO copy, just isn’t technically possible for some retailers as it stands. All of the success experienced by our mentioned market leaders is repeatable and replicable, but may need further technical investment to achieve it. This doesn’t need to be a blind leap of faith, as it’s now possible to calculate an SEO ROI based on estimated keyword ranking improvements, traffic delivered and ultimately conversions. Online is the biggest opportunity for new and underperforming brands, with SEO delivering the most cost effective return on investment in our experience. Whether any other brands take up this opportunity –

Ecommerce platforms for the fashion industry

Something that stood out to me at a recent roundtable event in San Diego, was just how many different ecommerce platforms US retailers were using for their sites. In Europe, large retailers tend to use either SAP or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Occasionally you come across Magento or Shopify Plus, but it’s often with an additional layer or two bolted on.

But according to Builtwith data, the market for ecommerce platforms is as diverse as our roundtable alluded to. Out of the 100,000 most visited websites on the internet, 37% of them had ecommerce functionality, with Shopify being the most popular platform. However, Shopify powers less than 8% of those ecommerce sites –

How ecommerce stores can boost sales With Chatbots

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are being used more frequently and the ecommerce industry is no exception to this.

Chatbots can be used for a wide range of tasks, from driving sales to working in harmony with an existing customer service team. Throughout my career in Digital Marketing, I have used chatbots in a variety of contexts and multiple sites and channels to drive conversions from existing traffic.

In this article, I’ll be taking a closer look at what chatbots are, the benefits of using them, and how they can make a big impact on ecommerce sales.

Category: Blog