In one of our earlier blogs, Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo! Ecommerce Storefront Owners,¬† “Train team members to ensure all contributions to the store are made with SEO in mind“ is listed as a top tip to help boost your Yahoo! online store SEO.
Every online store owner would love to visualize their store positioned naturally on the first page of Google search results, but it’s going to take more than the regular SEO tweaks to make this a reality. It’s got to be a total team effort. Since most key departments behind online store operations tend to have some measure of direct influence over the site, they all need to keep in mind that being found naturally in search is a priority.
Everyone has a role to play:
•    The marketing department – SEO needs to be a priority, period.  Long term and short terms goals must be set, acted on, and measured.  There needs to be at least a small team devoted to this – a group that can help keep focus on SEO as a priority.
•    The product marketers РMany times, the content on product pages comes from standardized product copy that carries a marketing focus – or by a group of people putting this content together if a company is selling their OWN products.  Good language and descriptive copy is important, but so is technically functional copy from an SEO perspective.  Those that create content need to keep SEO in mind, or create alternate versions of product and section copy that are specific to the web.
•    The visionaries – Grand decision makers who drive information architecture, usability, branding, design, and functionality need to keep SEO in mind. Decisions made that affect the user experience also affect SEO.
•    The content creators – The product marketers aren’t always going to hand over specifics about what should go in the page title, headline, and meta description for all products in the store. And they will almost never hand over content for section pages. The team that ensures that content is populated on ALL areas of the store have a huge role in SEO.
•    The people that work in the store day to day – Those that are in the store with regularity need to keep a close eye on empty fields, anomalies in the store, and standards that are set by the team. No one knows what is currently in the store more than the people in there day to day making it happen.
•    The programmers – The code that makes the store function needs to be tidy and clean. A broken piece of code or a bad programming decision can cause issues that directly affect SEO.
It might take some time to coordinate efforts and to ensure effective communication between departments, but once everyone is focused and doing their part, the reward will be imminent and substantial.
There’s only one caveat: A solid all-departmental hands-on-deck SEO strategy will bring in the traffic, but make sure usability hasn’t been compromised from the heavier focus on SEO. Once traffic arrives, customers should be finding exactly what they were searching for and then be able to easily navigate their way through to check out.
If you need experts who make it their specialty to train team members to work together on optimizing SEO within their respective roles and departments, contact FastPivot.com for an initial consultation.
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