Protect – Grow – Diversify

Charlie Norledge is Head of SEO Performance at Impression and responsible for supporting the team on their strategies and driving innovation within the department. Petar Jovetic is Customer Experience Director at Impression, overseeing the SEO and CRO departments.

How do you approach pitching for eCommerce clients?

Charlie:

I wouldn’t say our pitching process has changed per se. We start by doing a really in-depth audit of the client’s site, find out any opportunities they have, and, from there, we start to put together a pitch deck that goes through a strategy proposal. 

One of the things we’ve recently introduced is an SEO maturity framework where we have a protect and growth phase. Protect means we look at things like technical issues and fixing what’s there, and then we move into a growth phase, where we look at what we’re doing moving forward and their opportunities. 

Petar:

There’s a third pillar to that — diversify. We look at not-so-obvious opportunities. Perhaps image SEO, or maybe even looking at different platforms like YouTube or how SEO can work well with PPC, or introducing digital PR. 

Charlie:

The pitches are much more competitive now because there are probably fewer clients going to market as things are starting to slow down a bit. 

We’ve had to make sure that we include innovative tactics in there. For example, talking about how to utilize social media trends in organic, and we’re going to utilize automation in our campaigns. Also, when we talk about tech SEO, we’re not just putting a list of fixes together, we’re making sure we have priority behind things and just giving them as much detail as possible around their impact and ease of implementation. 

Do you use forecasting for pitching or upselling to eCommerce clients? How do you approach it?

Petar:

That has been an ongoing trend for a few years now. I think, as Charlie said, everything we propose has to show more value. If we invest in X, this is what we expect to achieve at a micro level but also at an overall performance level. And forecasting plays a part here. 

Charlie:

Yes, forecasting is a really important piece. Now, when we go to a competitive pitch, forecasting is, I’d say, required. If we didn’t do that, we could miss out. We were in pitches against other agencies, and because we had forecasts in place, we ended up winning the work.

What are the main SEO challenges your eCommerce clients are facing?

Charlie:

If an eCommerce client is selling luxury goods, this is fairly obvious, but lots of people are spending less on high-ticket items. Search volumes for more luxurious items, as seen in SEOmonitor, started to reduce significantly. Those keywords are not driving as much traffic even if we’re holding high-ranking positions. 

Petar:

This was the point we communicated in Impression’s version of the State of Retail report. In the industries that we analyzed, keywords associated with high-ticket items dropped in search volume. Especially in the Home and Garden sectors. Then, there was a bit of growth in some affordable luxuries, looking at the Beauty sector. 

Charlie:

We found that a lot of clients have been questioning the value of informational content. Obviously, eCommerce clients are really focused on ranking their categories or products as high as possible. You try and tell them: okay, we need to create content and support these categories, but it can be challenging to tie value against that because those categories might not drive revenue directly. Using things like assisted conversions to show how that content can impact revenue down the line has been really helpful. 

There’s one point, maybe more generic, but Google updates are a lot more frequent now, especially this year. That makes it challenging because if the clients are hit by an update or competitor visibility improved, it’s difficult for us to decide if we change the strategy straight away, or wait and see. That can be quite a challenging conversation with our clients where we want to demonstrate proactivity while also not being too knee-jerk. 

Can you give me an example of a successful SEO campaign for an eCommerce client? Which were the main tactics and challenges? 

Charlie:

There’s a client that we have that sells beds, so a luxury item that’s seen a big decline in search volume at the time, as we said. They wanted to launch new categories for a certain kind of bed. That meant around 80 new landing pages to create associated with this campaign. 

Previously, it would have taken us a lot of time, but we decided to use automation. We leveraged GPT-3 to automate our category copy, and then we did QA work.

What it’s allowed us to do is optimize all those categories in a much quicker fashion. So we could actually deliver a lot more value quicker.

Petar:

We’re baking innovation more and more into our proposition. It’s been quite compelling to leverage AI to handle higher workloads and then do it more efficiently. I’m also keen to explore using our CRO department, especially at the bottom of the funnel where every user counts, to grow acquisition strategically with more A/B testing, multivariate testing, etc. Plus, I want us to look into how CRO and SEO can complement each other more. I think that is really appealing in the current economic climate. So we’re not just throwing additional users, we’re actually nurturing them through the funnel and through to conversion as best we can. 

Charlie:

Another challenge that we see is that keyword research tools aren’t very reactive to social trends that are happening. We have a client selling bamboo socks and as part of our quarterly meeting with them, realized we can identify trends from TikTok that people are searching for and create categories on the site to answer that intent. Being able to do that has shown extra value to our clients. 

What have you noticed in terms of search behavior trends within your 2022 campaigns? 

Petar: 

The overarching theme is higher ticket items against lower ticket items. 

For instance, in Health, although you could call it higher ticket items depending on the product, it’s seen as a necessity. We have a few clients in that industry where it seems like they’re not as impacted by search behavior. Probably because it’s to do with people’s physical and mental wellbeing, there’s still an appetite there for obvious reasons. 

I guess there’s something to learn from the COVID period, where there were some similarities. If you can maintain your brand presence, that can benefit you in the long term once we’re out of economic hardship and impending recession. SEO can play a part certainly within informational content, but also how it works in building campaigns, digital PR, etc. There’s a point there around not neglecting brand building. 

Charlie:

We’ve also seen white goods, so things like dishwashing and washing machines, showing really strong increases in revenue this year. Maybe things like luxury, DIY for your home aren’t going up too much or even going down, but then people are still buying things like TVs and washing machines that are essentials. 

On another note, I expect this year’s Black Friday not to be as big as it was before. One of my colleagues posted a story from Charge Retail today. Spending is going from £168 down to £86 compared to 2021. It’s going to be interesting to see how this impacted Black Friday. 

Have clients’ needs or requests changed over the past year?

Charlie:

Now, with tightening marketing budgets, clients are very keen to see the value. We have to do a lot of reporting consistently and prove our work. By having robust goals and forecasting in place, we’re very clear on what we’re trying to do. Because clients also know what good looks like. 

How do you approach the SEO budgets in the context of 2023? 

Petar:

Everything we do has to show value and be targeted. In the last few months, we’ve seen the new business pipeline taking longer. There have been some cases where we had to show a proof of concept, and then we could scale. So in the first three or four months, we’ll introduce this phase of work. If that is successful, we could look to include more budget and grow incrementally. We had a few occurrences like that.

Charlie:

This is me having been involved from a technical perspective, but I have seen quite a few projects working on changing or reducing scope. Maybe a client is doing a migration for a new site, and, initially, they’re looking for a brand new website. Then, a couple of months later, it changes and they have to reduce some scope. 

Also, from our side, it’s more of technical audits highlighting what’s going to make an impact. Not just putting a million changes that aren’t going to make any difference in there, but making sure that we have the priorities clear. Because people’s development budgets will be tighter due to having less spending power. If we are making development changes, we make sure we’re very clear on the benefits. 

Petar:

Then there’s scenario planning. Within forecasting, because there is still an element of uncertainty, we do a high, medium, and low forecast. There are pros and cons with scenario forecasting and one con is you typically just lean into one anyway. Still, showing some different outlooks of how things can perform is important. Clients appreciate that kind of transparency, especially moving into the uncertainties of 2023.

Charlie:

We’ve done that with SEOmonitor for some clients where we used ambitious or not ambitious. When it has gone well, you can say we’re achieving our really ambitious target. Not so well, you’re still achieving the target, but it’s just a minimum. 

How you leverage SEOmonitor for your eCommerce clients?

Charlie:

I’ve been sharing SEOmonitor data with clients much more frequently. We’ve also helped them set up the Data Studio connectors. I think they want to delve into our data much more now than beforehand. I have seen a lot more exports or giving them the guest login type of access, so they’re closer to the data.

Petar:

The search volume insights continue to be intriguing. That always sparks really useful strategic discussions around the competitiveness of the SERP landscape. Then there’s Google as a competitor with its SERP features. SEOmonitor helps in understanding where there is an opportunity to leverage certain features and where there isn’t much space to play. I think that’s really intriguing for businesses as well. 

Charlie:

For SEO, because we can categorize the keywords ourselves, we can show a client how a specific group is performing. The SEO Visibility graph can be really helpful in showing them just how a specific set of keywords that we’ve agreed upon is performing. Actually, sometimes we put that in our monthly reports. The flip side of that is, if the client is hit by an algorithm update, we can use the Visibility graph and spot it easily. 

Also, when you log into SEOmonitor, you can quickly see the Visibility percentages of each keyword group. It’s always helpful to have a top-level view without having to dive into it too much. If you see a section has gone really far down, then you can look into it more.

Petar:

Segmenting data has always been a good practice as you can make more informed decisions and know where to focus your efforts. Plus, seeing how competitors fare amongst those segments, that’s really useful.

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