I Lead a Team of People for an Ecommerce Business - Your Advice

MichelangeSEO

MichelangeSEO

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Hey everyone. I've been a lurker for quite some time in all the IM forums, starting long ago in the dreaded Warrior Forum and moving through some blackhat forums and the wonderous Wicked Fire. I found this forum through a CCarter tweet and really like the 3 post orientation idea... I've been wanting to post this in a forum for a while and this motivated me to do so.

I work for a company with a successful ecommerce website. I'm in charge of front-end web development and graphic design (which I freakin' love) and online marketing (which I also freakin' love).

Me and the programmer who works there rebuilt the site last year because it needed a rebuild and redesign and in the last 6 months I've been implementing a plan for SEO and online promotion with 2 others who I hired to help me. We've just now started to see some results from SEO... before, we were no where in the SERPs. The business relies heavily on email marketing, which we do very well. I think that's a good thing and puts us in a great position. We just want to tap into organic search traffic and other forms of traffic(e.g. traffic leaks).

What I'd like everyone's advice on, is how best to utilize this team for the best results. I'll go over what I have them doing now.

Social Media and Outreach
I've taught one of the team members to curate content using Feedly and schedule updates across all of our social media accounts using buffer. We see some results from this, but it could definitely be improved upon. The team member makes custom graphics for most of the updates and throws in links to our site between external site links.

The best thing this team member has done though is, after I found some sites for him to contact, we've got a list of about 15 sites that will publish our content. So, every time we have a piece written, he sends it too them and we get some good links. We want to keep building up this list more and more obviously and it's helped out a lot with SEO. When we relaunched the site, SEMRush was showing 0 keywords... now it shows 122. I used MicroSite masters to track KWs also and there's a lot of movement for some big terms on pages 3, 4, 5...

On Page Optimization and Content Distribution
The other, newer team member has done very well optimizing existing content from keywords I've found through keyword research. We have a lot of content on our site, but it was written without optimization. We've seen some great results with some simple tweaks for some low competition keywords.

This team member also repurposes the content for distribution, e.g. slideshows, PDFs, infographics etc. She also adds content to sites like Medium, iReport, LinkedIn Publishing platform.

This all has done some great things for the site and we're going to continue doing these things. We've done a few infographics that have worked out well. One got us ranked at number 3 for a high volume keyword. More informational, but still pretty good.

Really, I'd just like any advice and what else the team and I can be doing. I'm lucky, because the keywords, even the big ones, seem pretty low in competition, though we have two big players, one that is really, really huge. This being my first team of people to work with, I'd love any advice on how to best utilize them.

Thanks!
 
You say you redesigned the site, but you make no mention of conversion rates. Did they go up? Did they go down? Are you even measuring them?

It doesn't sound like you have much traffic, so you may be the exception to the rule, but generally it is always easier to double your conversion rate, than it is to double your traffic!

Just food for thought...
 
Do you have any big content pieces on the site that you could use for broken link building?

Try and find a broken link to a similar piece of content then reach out to all of them and get them to update their outdated links to your new content?

Just a thought...
 
As much as I hate to push anything from an SEO "guru", this Skyscraper Technique really does work for bringing in traffic. http://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

The basic gist is that you find a highly shared/popular article on a topic within your niche and recreate it by adding much more value to the end user. Then you go and do a ton of outreach (which you seem pretty good at)....and the rest takes care of itself.

Here's a case study they did that proves the effectiveness. I've also had some wins with it too...just not as large as this:

http://backlinko.com/content-strategy
 
@Meatplow, the site gets between 200 and 300 thousand visits a month, but that's all from email and PPC. The company has spent a lot of time and money on the email list and it's the driving force of the business, which I think is good. We send out millions of emails a month. So I feel like we're in a great position, because we're not relying on SEO. But it's a huge traffic source we want to tap into.

Conversion rates did go up with the new design. I feel as though the checkout process is really smooth and we can see in Google Analytics that the conversion rates are much higher for the checkout funnel.

@barney2k, we have a lot of content on the site that isn't optimized too well. That's what I have one of the team members working on. We've done two infographics, one that helped us rank number 3 for a pretty good informational term. Another one is moving some terms up with a lot of volume, but they're still on pages 3, 4 etc. We have some smaller content pieces about the same subject scattered throughout the site, so we're combining them to become more of an "Ultimate Guide" type content piece.

It's interesting, we did a broken link building campaign recently... my boss told me of a company in our industry that went bankrupt, and I found some great links using Arefs and we did a big outreach campaign. One link was from CBSNews and we did a lot of work to find the right person to contact. They were very polite and responsive, but guess what they did instead of changing the link? DELETED THE ARTICLE! We were like NOOOOOOOOO! And that happened with another one of the sites. I say it's interesting because you read a lot about broken linking building and how great it is, but it's not always that easy. Of course, we're going to try again, as I found another site with lots of great links.

@stackcash, I'm a big fan of Backlinko, despite him being known as an "SEO Guru". His skyscraper technique is definitely something we're going to try.

Thanks everybody for all the advice and suggestions. Keep 'em coming. Hopefully this will help anyone that has questions for promoting an ecommerce site!
 
Niceeee.

Hey, do your graphic design and infographic guys all work in-house or do you outsource the work? If you outsource, can you suggest a few quality designers? PM if ya want. Thx!


MichelangeSEO said:
@Meatplow, the site gets between 200 and 300 thousand visits a month, but that's all from email and PPC. The company has spent a lot of time and money on the email list and it's the driving force of the business, which I think is good. We send out millions of emails a month. So I feel like we're in a great position, because we're not relying on SEO. But it's a huge traffic source we want to tap into.

Conversion rates did go up with the new design. I feel as though the checkout process is really smooth and we can see in Google Analytics that the conversion rates are much higher for the checkout funnel.

@barney2k, we have a lot of content on the site that isn't optimized too well. That's what I have one of the team members working on. We've done two infographics, one that helped us rank number 3 for a pretty good informational term. Another one is moving some terms up with a lot of volume, but they're still on pages 3, 4 etc. We have some smaller content pieces about the same subject scattered throughout the site, so we're combining them to become more of an "Ultimate Guide" type content piece.

It's interesting, we did a broken link building campaign recently... my boss told me of a company in our industry that went bankrupt, and I found some great links using Arefs and we did a big outreach campaign. One link was from CBSNews and we did a lot of work to find the right person to contact. They were very polite and responsive, but guess what they did instead of changing the link? DELETED THE ARTICLE! We were like NOOOOOOOOO! And that happened with another one of the sites. I say it's interesting because you read a lot about broken linking building and how great it is, but it's not always that easy. Of course, we're going to try again, as I found another site with lots of great links.

@stackcash, I'm a big fan of Backlinko, despite him being known as an "SEO Guru". His skyscraper technique is definitely something we're going to try.

Thanks everybody for all the advice and suggestions. Keep 'em coming. Hopefully this will help anyone that has questions for promoting an ecommerce site!
Click to expand...
 
@MichelangeSEO with that much traffic I would definitely be concentrating on CRO. You are in a unique position to be able to test things rather quickly with those traffic levels.

With regards to the broken link campaign, why don't you try to buy the site of the competitor that's out of business and then redirect it to yours. Would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to get people to switch links.
 
@stackcash, we did it in-house, but we, by no means, are professional designers. They did well, but I feel as though we spent too much time on them for a decent design, instead of a professional one.

One of the team members will put it together, and I basically re design it with the same structure. I feel like I'm an adequate designer, just not a pro. We have 1 competitor who sponsors infographics from a company that does an amazing job with infographic design. We've considered paying for a professional designer since these last two did so well with just a decent design.
 
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