RON: The important thing is to make sure to have an auction eCommerce platform where SEO is a first-class citizen, that’s the best way to say it. Make sure it's core, make sure SEO isn't an afterthought, make sure that there are SEO fields, SEO configuration, SEO landing pages, SEO product site maps, category landing pages, and site maps that are generated by the platform. Click a button, done, you're registered with Google and off you go.
I did this for one of our clients. We launched their new website, and they came back because I talked to them about SEO originally. They didn't believe in it, and they finally came back and said, “How do we increase traffic?” I think it was roughly about 200 visitors a week to their website. All I did was, I went into our eAuction platform, I clicked the button that said Generate the Product Site Map XML, went into Google Webmaster Tools, registered the site map, and immediately their traffic jumped to 700 people a week just by registering the 8600 pages and making them available to Google. That was it. That's all I did. It took me all of about ten minutes and I more than tripled their traffic.
Then they came back and then said, “Well, how do we increase that?” And then we moved into content and other things, and I'm still working with that client today and it's a lot of fun, right? So, from an SEO perspective, one of the most important things to do, since we're going to migrate data, I think we've all heard the cliche garbage in, garbage out, right? I think the important thing is to do an SEO audit of the old site. It's really easy for a vendor like Clarity—who has SEO built into their eAuction platform natively—to build you a new platform that has better SEO practices.
But [we want to avoid] all these auctions and all this garbage from the old site, bringing it over, and undoing all the good behavior we would have done had it been built originally or had the auctions been uploaded originally in our eCommerce auction platform. One of the things we can do is, we can do a very comprehensive SEO audit of the old site.
So when you guys make that decision of what data is coming over, we can then audit that data and figure out if we have to take and manipulate that data midstream so that we can improve the data to the new SEO solution best practices like the SEO Permalink structure. So it can be blah blah blah.com/auction/, and then in position three where Google wants it, we have a really nice lower case, separated by dashes, property formatted auction title.
Well, if the old site isn't that way, the new site should be that way. But if we manipulate that, we lose any value that the old site would have built up. So instead of walking away from all the SEO potential—or we really don't know what it's built up over time—we want to make sure to put the 301 redirects in place so we can have those permanent redirects. If you flip the auction site over a weekend, anybody who bookmarked or was watching that auction before can still get back to that same auction even though it's now at a new URL.
We'll want to make sure that the 301 redirects for SEO are taken into place. We want to make sure that all of the new pages are canonicalized, and we can spend hours on that. And I know we're not going to do that in this video. I'll go ahead and do another webinar that’s SEO-specific to eCommerce and auction sites and put it up on the channel. That's a great video.
Make sure the canonicalizations are there, make sure the new permastructure’s there, so even if a user doesn't know what SEO is, even just the basic information that they type in, maybe we auto-generate the SEO URL based on concatenating certain information and fields, making it all lowercase, adding in the hyphens so it becomes a relatively good SEO optimized URL, even though it's not perfect.
We want to make sure all the meta tags are properly formatted. Most people don’t know how to write a proper meta tag for any types of auctions, so maybe we'll want to make sure that they're auto-populated so that Google has great SERPs. The SERP, the search engine result page, is really what increases the click-through rate (CTR), right?