Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, talk about the importance of SEO and CRO for eAuctions.

Part 2 of a 3-part series (Return to Part 1)

RON: Those are external links, the other half of it is the internal stuff. So how do we optimize each auction so that, when Google comes and crawls that page—and there in itself lies the problem, does Google crawl it? How do they crawl it? And how do you force Google to crawl each eAuction?  

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RON: Google crawl sites for free, because obviously it's trying to fulfill one main purpose...to make money. But its other main purpose is to try to find all the information out on the internet. And then when somebody comes and searches for it, they serve up the most relevant answers. That's what their claim to fame is. 

However, if they have any errors or if they don't crawl certain pages on your site, you don't know about it, and they don't tell you. So one of the things that they've done is to provide an additional tool. It used to be called Webmaster Tools, it's now Google Search Console. What you have to do is, you have to ensure—everybody understands what the site map XML integration is, right? The site map XML is supposed to include a link to every page, the frequency at which we're telling Google to crawl it—and that we supposedly update the page, which doesn't happen—and then a priority of the page. So Google, when it sees the site map, can know how to crawl the site, which pages are updated more often, and what the priority of them is. 

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RON: Everybody used to hack that and put daily and all that, but nobody goes in and updates their home page daily. So Google devalued those, and now it just uses a site map for the URL. So we go to the Search Console, we register that site map, and it tells Google, “These are the URLs that you are supposed to crawl.” And that helps force Google to crawl your site.  

One of the things in our eAuction platform is that we have a thing for the product pages or the auction pages. So we have an “auction XML.” Once these B2B auctions get created, our platform will have a site map XML for the pages of the quote-unquote website, which would be the Contact Us, the About Us, the FAQ. All of these pages that you might want to write to start initially driving traffic to the site, you specialize and give a lower percentage for people that are being estate sales and things like that to help drive people to come to your site so they can make more money. Those would be the static pages on the website. Those are going to be within the sitemap XML.  

Within the auction XML are going to be all the listings on the eAuction software. What you can do is register that with Google and tell Google, “Hey, we also want you to come crawl through our entire catalog and index each of the individual auctions as well.” 

So if you can put in all of the on-page optimization fields like the SEO URL, the page title, the meta description, some keywords...we put a limitation on that because Bing has finally started penalizing websites if you put too many keywords in the keyword field now. You create a field that allows for 50 words but nothing more than that in that field so you don't overstep and get penalized.  

You optimize the B2B auction really well, and the platform dictates that. And if those fields are filled in and then, what you described, if people are looking for more information, we call it long-tail keywords. So you've got a keyword. Like if you and I were financial advisors and we hung a shingle and put up a website people go out and Google “financial advisors.” You and I are never going to show up, right? It's just way too common. Fidelity, Charles Schwab, all those guys are going to show up.  

But if we go out and do what's called keyword research, instead of a keyword that has 500,000 pepole searching for it—that is so competitive, we'll never show up—what if we found a big, long-tail keyword, like, “financial planning for kid's college fund.” Five or six words strung together, which we call a keyword phrase and can use it for keyword bidding. Maybe there's only 900 people a month searching for that keyword, but the competition is really low, so you and I can show up in the top categories. If out of that 900 even 10%, 90 people a month, every single month came to our website and hired us for financial advisors, our business would completely change. 

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RON: We have to look at our business. We have to look at our needs to drive traffic. And then what you explained going after these long-tail keywords that aren't as competitive so we can show up. If you do that for a lot of different auctions and a lot of different long-tail keywords, the next thing you know, you're driving thousands and thousands of people to your site, which is exactly what we're looking for. 

Do you want to go in and talk about the technical aspects at all, about the site maps and feeds and the schema at all? 

CHRIS: If you don't mind, I think this might be helpful for some folks listening. What you were talking about with the on-page optimization, it's still a huge opportunity today. And this is something, that a lot of businesses will work with organic SEO experts and a lot of the SEO experts will say things like, “You can't have a directory, or you're going to have duplicate content,” and things like this. 

But ultimately, at the end of the day, Google—and Bing and other search engines—is looking for valuable content for their users. And if you're focusing on that with your operation, then you can deliver massive results within your space. And probably the biggest piece of advice we can give is to hyper focus and get better and better results.  

To be specific, for a particular long tail product, let’s use the example of an office space provider. We would pick a specific brand name and we would pick a particular model. But instead of just showing that on the site, we can also get the product details specifications document if we have that. And we can also maybe get instructions, a set of instructions that people can download. That might be extremely valuable to folks. 

We've worked with folks who have literally made seven and eight figure businesses from having more content than their competitors. Literally, that's their competitive strength. They literally just put more content out there for folks to find and get indexed.  

And then our job—and this is what we specialize in with these eAuctions, among other aspects on the on-page optimization—we're really good at understanding mechanically how to deal with the schemas and automate this, so that if you're publishing content, if your team is publishing content, if your sellers are publishing content, we can encourage them to include extensive information so that the site's content is getting indexed. We can go through approvals and workflows so we can make sure that the process incorporates some form of quality control.  

If your team, collectively between your internal team and any sellers, are able to publish a lot of valuable content, then we're going to work with you to automate, making sure it's presented in the right schema, and that it's sent to the right feeds, so that it's getting indexed fully. This can be a massive competitive advantage.  

We've seen many of our clients grow their business literally 50% to 100% a year in some cases, just by making changes like this, because it can massively increase the number of online auctions that are occurring, the bids on the auctions, and it can become this upward spiral that occurs. 

RON: Yeah, I totally agree. And you're not wrong about the results. We can provide that, and I might even show a few of them here when I go and post the video. One of the clients that I worked with, and still working with today, had 8600 items on their site and no traffic whatsoever. They had less than 200 people a week coming to their website.

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RON: I went in there and put the site map together. It had 8604 items within the catalog, registered that with Google, and within a day Google started indexing 700 pages a day and the traffic rose almost immediately to about 500 to 700 people a week visiting their website. 

Then we started writing the content and linking them all and voting for each other and it immediately went up, and within six months we had quintupled the traffic to their website, and we had quadrupled their online sales in just six months of focused, targeted SEO work. 

CHRIS: Yeah, that's powerful. It works. 

Continue to Part 3 to find out more about paid advertising.