Google has Created an Important New SEO Opportunity for Online Stores

Scott Anderson of Iterate Studio sent me an internal memo he wrote last week on the implications of Google’s movement towards semantic search.  It’s interesting and important, and he offered that I could share it.  So here it is:

I pulled the attached article from my favorite SEO/SEM site. It gets into « semantic search » which is the big new thing at Google as evidenced by Knowledge Graph, which is a meager step 1 down a path to answering complex questions for searchers.

Since Google wants to be the place that dishes up answers to questions, the clear SEO implication for ecommerce sites (well, any site for that matter) is to dish up more and more quality answers to relevant questions.

This frankly makes TurnTo an even more strategic solution provider. Using customers to ask and answer questions in their own words for SEO is actually a main reason we adopted it at Vitamin Shoppe.

Of particular interest given Google’s increasing focus on complex questions is the product’s support for category-level questions, which are more likely to be asked on Google than the very detailed product questions.  Again, it’s user generated content so there isn’t a burden on the retailer’s overworked staff.

While TurnTo’s mission is to lower customer support costs and humanize the user experience, the content getting generated is right in the bullseye of what Google wants to see.

Traditional SEO practices will remain essential, but the future is already here.

Promoting the idea of Q&A on eCommerce sites at the category (or « topic ») level the last couple of years has felt a lot like pushing a rock uphill.  On the whole, our customers have been focused on the traffic and conversion benefits to the product detail page.  So at first I thought it was coincidence that we’ve recently had a number of our customers come to us to begin implementation of category-level Q&A.  But what’s really happening has become clear:  businesses are figuring out that more general topic discussion and Q&A content is increasingly important to their organic traffic strategy.  And they are realizing that hosting this sort of discussion on their category pages is a great way to generate it.