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Transcript

All right, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I see people still logging on, but I’m going to get us started because we have a very full agenda for you today.

Welcome everyone to Commerce and Coffee. Today our amazing group of presenters will be going through one of commerce’s most powerful use cases in SEO. We design our webinars to be interactive, so we encourage you to ask questions in the question box throughout the presentation. Type them in there because we’ve designated the last 10 minutes or so for Q&A. I also want to mention a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. First of all, we are presenting in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connect today and we’re live, but don’t worry, this session is being recorded and can be viewed on demand or shared with someone on your team at a later time. You’ll get that recording from us within 24 hours after the event’s end. We will also be sharing a handout at the end of today’s webinar available for you to download. Our presenters put together a ton of resources for you, so be sure to download that and take it with you. Lastly, as we’re closing out the webinar, we have a few survey questions that will be at the bottom of your screen. If you could just take a minute or so to answer those questions, we’d really appreciate it. And with that, I’d love to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Umeguana. I’ve been a digital engagement strategist at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ for a little over two years now. I lead the production of our webinar series for all of our Experience Cloud products. Prior to my time at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, I spent two years working in advertising for several global agencies in New York. If you have any questions or feedback on today’s event or about your experience with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connect overall, please feel free to reach out. And with that, I’d love to hand it over to Agbir to introduce himself. Thanks, Jeff. Good to see everyone here today. Excited to be with you. My name is Agbir Borushi. I’m a commerce business advisor or strategy consultant here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. I’m kind of newer to the team. I joined a little over a year ago, but spent the last almost two decades in e-commerce and digital marketing, mostly working with Magento, but of course, well versed in many other e-commerce systems and other third party systems. So excited again to be here and working with you all. And yeah, pass it off to Corey here.

Awesome. Thanks, Agbir. Well, welcome everybody. Commerce and Coffee SEO. Quickly, let me introduce myself. So I’m Corey Gelato. I’m a senior commerce strategy consultant or a senior business advisor for commerce here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. I’ve been with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ for a little over just shy of six and a half years now, actually. So I’ve been in the ecosystem or in commerce landscape for over 20 years. Kind of always in this type of a role that I play here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. So our role, Avi and I both, what we essentially do is we strategize and work with commerce customers around various KPIs, goals, objectives that they might have. So if you’re ever interested in speaking to one of us and looking for some advice or we can talk about war stories or anything in between there, you can reach out to your Sam and they’ll get us connected and we can always have a conversation. We talk about anything from UX strategies, conversion rate optimization, SEO. So what we’re talking about today. We talk about anything with the platform, third party services and softwares, et cetera. So happy to engage. And obviously this is one of our top events that we always do is our Commerce and Coffee series. And honestly, this topic specifically is a big one today. So let’s get underway. Jeff, if we can go into our first kind of slide, I just want to talk a little bit about our agenda. And then I’m going to get us kicked off with a poll here. So Jeff, we can go to that first one, please. Yeah, of course. Thank you both. Let’s get right into it. All right. Awesome. So our agenda today. So obviously we already did our welcome. We’re going to go through a presentation today just around different slide where. So really what we’re going to focus on is kind of pillars of SEO. But we’re going to talk about, you know, anybody that’s ever joined this in the past, you know what we do. We kind of focus on, you know, what this is, why we’re doing it, and then we go into how we’re doing it. So really that’s what we’re going to fix it and focus on today with the SEO side. We’ll go through a demonstration and then we have carved out some time at the end for Q&A. Appreciate anybody that had submitted questions pre-advanced. That gives Avi and I an opportunity to prep for it. But I do love obviously the real-time questions too. So as we’re going through presentation, feel free to drop those questions in there. You don’t have to wait until the end, drop them in throughout the presentation. We’ll do them at the end and we’ll make sure we carve out that time. Before we get kicked off today, I want to start with a poll though. So Jeff, let’s get that poll started.

So really when it comes to SEO, think about your businesses, think about what you guys are doing. Where do you feel your team is currently? So either you individually or as your organization, are you just getting started? Are you talking about, you know, we have the basics now. We’re doing some things. We’re doing some meta stuff, what have you. And then we’re fairly advanced. So we’re leveraging structured data. We’re doing content strategy. We’re doing performance tracking. Or do you rely on an agency or external partner to really kind of do all of your SEO efforts? And I would say, you know, we’ll tag in there SEM as well. Why not? And then not sure you want to learn more today. So give everybody a few minutes here. Looks like we’re tracking a little bit more of the we’re fairly advanced, which is good. Have about 45% of the audience today is looking at that. So and then we have some folks that are just getting started. This is looking really good. I’ll just give another few seconds there. And then Jeff, if you can actually, you know, why not broadcast the results? I think we’re actually really broadcasting them, aren’t we? Perfect. Yeah, we are. Awesome. All right. So you guys can kind of see. You can see what everybody else is kind of focused on. So I love it. So it’s kind of the top three. I love the fact that no one’s relying on an agency or external partner for most of your SEO efforts. And then they’re not sure I want to learn more today. So that’s great. All right. Let’s get underway here. We got a lot to unpack today. So we’re about even.

All right. So first and foremost, what is SEO? I like starting here because I like talking about, again, it’s the what, the why, the how we’re going to do it. So at its core, SEO is about helping search engines understand your content, ensuring that your site and your brand shows up when people are searching for products, services, or answers that you offer. If I were to kind of think about this, right, taking a step back. Think of SEO as making your site or your business discoverable, making your content relevant and making your experience valuable to your customers, whether someone is searching with keywords, voice or AI generated prompts, SEO helps make you show up and stand out. It’s extremely critical. So there’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle here. So I don’t want to say today we’re going to give you magic bullets and you are going to be off and running and getting everything out there. But I think it’s in its synopsis of what SEO kind of is. If you think about it that way in a digestible way, that is what it is. It’s discoverable, relevant, valuable. That’s what you’re thinking when you think about SEO. You know, and I guess kind of taking another step forward with it. So why should you care? Right. So as you’re as we’re going through this day, you’re probably thinking, you know, why do we care about it? Or you know why to care about it because there’s a lot of you that are somewhat advanced in what you’re doing with SEO currently. But why should you care? It’s because your customers start with search, whether it’s Google, whether it’s Bing or AI powered summaries, search is the gateway to your brand. A lot of the times I say, you know, gateway or anything like that is word of mouth. So it’s your customers talking about you. But how did they find you? Right. Even in the B2B realm, in certain ways, they’re doing their research. Your customers are doing their research. So to ensure that and why you should care, this is the gateway. Search is the gateway to your brand. So what are the stakes? Right. Traffic comes from organic search. It really does. There’s a significant amount of traffic and there’s a lot of substantial or, you know, there’s a lot of research that’s out there. And I think there’s some subjective numbers. I’ve heard 53%, I’ve heard 60%, I’ve heard 70%, I’ve heard 50%, 40%, etc. Of all website traffic comes from organic search. Honestly, it depends. It’s very interdependent. So I don’t really like pulling out stats specifically and critical for this. But, you know, there is a significant amount of your traffic that is coming from organic search. And then from online experiences, they’re beginning with search engines. There’s a good portion of those. So even outside of just say the organic search, there’s a good percentage of your customers. If you look at your traffic, they’re coming from a search engine and the AI generated answers, right? So as you search on your phone today, as you look for anything, or even on a browser or anything like that, you’re starting to see that that AI searches in there as well. So where’s the opportunity, right? It’s free. To some extent, this is free, right? And I’ll talk a little bit more in just the next slide around where the part I feel like isn’t free. And it is my own opinion. I’ll say that I know I’m on the record today, but it is my own opinion on it. But it is free. So it’s high intent traffic. It’s increasing product discoverability, right? It’s increasing your brand recognition, which is something I talk about all the time. And it’s long term ROI without relying solely on paid ads. So in short, SEO is no longer an optional aspect. It’s how people find you. They trust you and they buy from you, especially in a world where AI is reshaping how results are delivered. And, you know, I’ll kind of go to the next slide here. You know, all of that to be kind of said, right? And what we’re thinking about, you know, what search engines are doing, what’s happening in the world, right? We know that the algorithms are changing and evolving and so forth, so on. And we know we’re in a super AI world now, right? So overall, you need to be prepared to adapt, to evolve similar to how your customers evolve, right? So if we start thinking about what’s going on, so outside of the search engine ranking updates, talking about spam and so forth, so on, because a lot of that is just, again, it’s super fluffy words in some way. That’s kind of how I’ll call it out. Where I think it really comes down to it is we know AI tools. So tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Claude, et cetera, et cetera. Content creation is faster, but Google’s focus does remain on experience, you know, to an extent. Even though they are using AI algorithms, it is focused on experience. It’s on expertise, it’s authoritativeness, it’s trustworthiness. AI-assisted content must be human-reviewed and fact-checked to rank well. Google can detect, that’s what’s being called here from that spam sign. It can detect low-quality, unoriginal, or thin AI content, and it will panelize accordingly. So it’s not the only factor in that, but it’s making sure that you are prepared and you’re looking at things like this. The search, I would say it’s like search-generative experience. There’s this new theory behind SEO actually becoming, instead of search engine opportunities or so forth, so on, it’s really about search experience. So that is what I would start saying. So instead of it being search engines, start thinking of this as search experience. That’s the optimization you want to focus on. So voice search optimization that I would say, again, thinking about aspects of mobile first. So the Core Web Vitals 2.0, it’s a really big deal. Google, etc., they’re all doubling down on mobile first indexing and improving that aspect. So really best practice, prioritize, performance optimization, mobile UX, and accessibility. So we’re going to call that out. Ogby’s going to really take us through some good details around that. But think of it that way. Think about it from a user experience. I can’t stress that enough about your user experience. Don’t get too bogged down. I know I’m going to say this and it’s going to sound super like you said this the other way, but don’t get too bogged down with what Lighthouse tools are telling you. Make sure that you’re benchmarking across multiple things from a performance side. Look at things like other services. I’ll call them out. So GTmetrix, use like webpagespeedtest.org, etc. Use a bunch of different types of things that you have that are available and at your fingertips to really think through and see what is happening on your site from that performance side.

Best and absolute best as you can.

With that, Ogby, I’m going to turn this over to you. Let’s kind of take everybody through this, man. And then I’ll come back and we’ll get through this demo too. So let me hand this to you, man. Fantastic. Thanks, Corey. Thanks for like the awesome setup here. Like really setting the groundwork for why this is so important. You know, what SEO is all about. And, you know, on the earlier slide, I saw, you know, the stat about, you know, the opportunity really for tackling and implementing an SEO strategy. You know, a lot of the respondents in the poll, you know, already have a pretty advanced strategy, but you know, I saw some quiet people. We have a bigger audience that then responded, right? So, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of businesses that aren’t practicing SEO or are doing so, you know, minimally. So there’s a good opportunity to, you know, grow your business here.

So, on this slide, we’ve listed some of the key principles of onsite SEO. I do want to call out that this is definitely not an exhaustive list. You know, there’s more things to think about. And they’re all sort of pieces of the pyramid, right? Or pieces of the puzzle. I also want to call out that the items in the order that they’re listed, you know, there’s no implication or anything like that as far as what’s more important than the other. These are all pieces of the puzzle that all need to be there, you know, for this practice to work well. So let’s dive in and we’ll go through some of the examples here. So when we talk about content quality, you know, again, the practice of SEO is focused on, you know, helping your site rank better in search engines. But like Corey said, you know, the context matters, the relevance matters, right? So think about the end user and that customer experience, right? It’s important that this content is relevant for that user and has a benefit to them.

There’s a lot of factors that improve ranking, not just, you know, keyword density and things like that that we’ll talk about. But, you know, how long somebody stays on the site and things like that. So, you know, as these algorithms continue to refine, as we introduce more AI to the process of rankings, the context is going to become even more relevant and important. So make sure that, you know, the search engines know what your site’s about, but also that customers can learn about your site and find what they’re looking for.

Next, when we look at keyword optimization, just like with content quality, we want to make sure that the keywords set the intention for the website. You know, what is this site about? You know, and what are you trying to convey to your customers that find your site? This process needs to be clear and focused. I think those of us who have been in e-commerce and digital marketing for a long time probably remember doing a lot of keyword stuffing. So the idea of having just these sort of really keyword dense paragraphs on our site to sort of game the system, that was really effective, you know, two decades or so ago. But over time, you know, search engines learned that this is a practice sort of to game the system, right? If there’s no contextual value to keywords on the site, there’s going to be no relevance, you’re not going to see a return from that effort, right? So make sure that, you know, you are inserting keywords that help sort of again, set the intention for the site, but that they are practical and their placement is relevant and important.

Let’s talk a little bit here about linking strategy. So there’s a lot of pieces to this, you know, at a high level, developing a good linking strategy, help search engines find where things are on your site and discover sort of the breadth of the site. That can help, you know, pass what we call sort of like link juice, you know, rankings and authority across your site. So maybe you have a page that ranks really highly on your site, you know, linking between that page and other pages will help distribute that ranking across your site.

It’s also, you know, practically speaking, a good linking strategy is visible to a user and helps them find what they’re looking for. So again, remember that, you know, it’s not just hiding links on the page or putting, you know, big link walls that search engines can see, you know, it’s making sure that the links are relevant to users. One of the other things that I want to call out here that we see a lot when we do SEO strategy sessions is make sure that the links are good on your site, right? So if you’re linking to a 404 page, that’s not good. If you’re linking and redirecting, you know, it’s not great. So make sure that, you know, you’re keeping an eye on the links that you are curating on your site and they are pointing to the place that they ought to be.

All right. Moving on, Corey touched on performance earlier on, and I think that’s really important and that’s kind of where the image optimization comes in. So when we think about site performance, oftentimes I see images being the main problem, right? Are we caching images properly? Are we using images that are way too big, both in dimensions and file size, right? A lot of times companies will use the same images for print marketing as they use for the web. And so the file sizes are, you know, 5, 10, 20 times the size that they need to be for the web. So make sure your images are optimized to be performing on the site. Make sure your caching policies are appropriate and your caching images appropriately. The other thing is think about how people are accessing the site. An image from, you know, that’s used on desktop, it may not be appropriate to use on a mobile screen, right? The dimensions may need to be altered.

Scaling maybe doesn’t work as parts of the image are going to get cut off or they’re going to overlay text or whatever it is. So make sure you’re designing content for the viewport, for the device that somebody is going to access the site on and present the correct images to people.

The other thing I see a lot is using flat images. So like an image that has the sort of call to action text on it. That’s a practice we want to move away from. It’s another opportunity to insert relevant text that helps users, you know, search engines know what the site’s about and learn, you know, what this image is for and where it’s going to take me if I click through.

As always, you know, when we’re thinking about, you know, the impacts of performance, it’s trying to find the right balance, right? How many images should we place? Are they sized correctly? Are we specifying again the right, you know, image for the right viewport? Work with your development team, run performance tests, use the free tools available like GT metrics, web page speed test. That’s a tongue twister. Lighthouse, use all these tools that are available to you to see how things are working and performing. And consistently, this is again, this is a repetitive process, you’re always going to be refining and improving and optimizing the site.

This one’s a little bit more specific to certain businesses, but I think to some extent can apply to most companies, right? So for businesses that have, you know, physical operations, in addition to their ecommerce presence, you know, there’s a great opportunity here to target local customers that may or may not know about your business. So make sure that you’re implementing localized SEO efforts and capturing on this opportunity, right? So make sure that you’re implementing localized SEO efforts to help customers find your business online. And whether that’s, hey, let’s drive them into the store for service or for, you know, to try things on or whatever that might be, or let them purchase online and offer buy online pickup in store, right? There’s a lot of opportunity to market locally, right? Refine, specialize your marketing range, and then, you know, capitalize on that.

Lastly here, we’ll touch on accessibility, right? So I’m sure a lot of us have had to navigate this, you know, the WCAG standards are continuously being refined and ensuring compliance is really important. You know, both from, again, the practical experience of users with disabilities accessing your site, of course, from, you know, a legal exposure standpoint, right? So we want to make sure that we are continuously optimizing and refining the site to make sure it is accessible to those users. This is another thing that search engines look at, you know, they care about that practice. More importantly, right? So we’re offering a better experience for those users, but that has a broader benefit to users, right? So the broader group will be able to better access the site, better, you know, find things in the menus and things like that. But this is going to improve your metrics on the site, right? It’s going to make people stay on the site longer. It’s going to make those metrics that help boost your site, it’s going to make those go higher and really help improve your ranking. So there’s multiple reasons that we want to focus on accessibility and the benefits greatly outweigh the efforts and costs there. So, yeah, I think the next slide here will transition to Corey, touch on a few more points and then dive into the demo.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Agri. So I mean, we’re talking about really kind of high level areas, but things that are super impactful. So I appreciate Agri taking us through everything because I think it’s super critical to understand where the layers that you can or levels that you can kind of look at from an SEO perspective. Here’s the one thing that I always get whenever and I know Agri gets this too, him and I in our day to day, you know, quote unquote jobs that we do, where we’re speaking to customers and to merchants just around various things that you’re encountering with SEO. It’s always this idea of, you know, how can we do this? How can we have enough resources? That’s the biggest thing that I typically hear whenever thinking about SEO. And I’m not going to lie, it’s a giant. It’s a lot of things. We just went through that. We just started talking about just a little bit of scratch of the surface of each of these pillars. There’s a lot that’s involved in it. And it’s about consistency. And it’s about that. You know, I know A.I. is that big raven. And as much as you can potentially utilize A.I., it also can impact you in a negative way. That’s the thing of where there is a balancing act of everything that you’re doing, especially when it comes to A.I. But where I think the working smarter comes in, it doesn’t have to be this all in one and everything at once. You know, things that I think about where it’s kind of the scratch of the surface foot in the door. I’m going to take you through it today. Right. There’s ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce native functionality, native features that you can absolutely utilize that are really going to help you and get you into a place that’s not A.I. generated, but it is actually a human touch. But in a masking way. So it’s ways to do it and automate things in a humanized way without using A.I. that’s going to potentially fluff the language and not really kind of create this. You know, I say fluff the language. I make this this more or less like flourished type of content instead of it being that it’s going to be something that’s much more humanized. It’s going to be what you’ve actually put in there. But there’s ways to do it in an automated way and in a way that it’s not going to get flagged. I mean, it can help you with a ranking, not, you know, basically decrease your ranking aspect. So the things that I usually say is utilize the tools that are available to you because they are almost in ways of set it and forget it. You know, utilize A.I. tools, too, but utilize A.I. tools from an experience perspective. I’m not saying from a content side, although it is relevant to but from an experience side, things like product recommendations, things like live search, all native capabilities within the platform, utilizing category merchandising. Again, you have to think through how customers are interacting with your website. And that experience is extremely critical to search engines and then ultimately using things like site map generation and making sure that you are following that site map aspect, too. So when I say that, it’s it’s looking at your search console. It’s making sure if you’re getting flagged for errors, resolve those. Make sure you don’t have a consistent error basically out there. What I would say from that side is make sure you send yourself a report. Right. So send a report daily, send a report a few every few days that basically is coming from search console that tells you what those errors are. If you what I will say is and I’m not saying that this is definitive, but I will say I have never seen in my career 20 years where you’ve gotten an error one day and Google basically or a search engine basically knocked you down in a ranking. So you don’t have to think about it as like, oh, I had this one error and that’s it. Now I’m done. No, but the resolution of that should happen if it sees it consistent. You know, the search engine sees it consistently, especially if you’re the one that’s submitted a site map that’s telling Google that you want to make sure you’re resolving those. So that’s like 404 pages. That’s 500 and so forth, so on. So make sure you have redirects around that. So a lot of ways you can think about that, even from an analytic side to monitor your analytics. I have had conversations with customers that are like, I haven’t been in my analytics in a long time. And I know and I get it from a GA for perspective. That there’s a lot of things that are not as intuitive as they might have been before, but there’s still ways to do it. So if you’re unaware, it’s easy things to kind of brush up on to understand a little bit around analytics and how that’s working. So that’s what I would say is you don’t need to have this huge expense or a huge budget around organic traffic. It is about doing the things that are going to thread the needle. Essentially, not one thing is going to be the magic bullet to get you into a place where you kind of need to hit that. It’s there’s a lot of different things that you should be looking at from that side.

With that, I want to get us started with our next poll quickly, and then I’m going to get into our demonstration. We’re going to knock a few things out here. I’m going to show you guys a little tidbit thing. So which aspect of SEO are you most excited about in improving using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce? Now, the fact that you guys have said you are advanced, the things that we talked about a little bit today. What areas are you really thinking about? What are you most excited about with the improving of using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce? So is it site speed? Is it product content and meta optimization? You are all structure and indexing control, the technical SEO, so quote unquote technical, right? Think about site maps, redirects, robots, etc. The search experience and discoverability, or is it really all of the above? We are broadcasting the results so everybody could see this in real time of what everybody’s kind of thinking about.

There is no incorrect answer here, but I love the answer of all of the above. So I’m not trying to persuade anybody, but if everybody wants to click that, I’m all for it. I’m here for that. I see it changing right away. See, people are changing. I love it. Keep it going. This is great. So because we’re going to talk about a lot of these. And again, I think what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about here, it’s all important. So yeah, let’s let’s we’re going to end this poll. We’re going to get right into demo. Appreciate everybody voting there. Thank you for participating. We love that. I am going to start sharing screen now. Everybody let me know, Jeff, if you can see. Should be dashboard right away.

Still loading. We can see it now. We got you now. Perfect. Awesome. All right. So we’re going to hit a few different areas today. I’m going to go through things relatively quickly, but I mentioned it before. This is not where we’re going to do an exhaustive aspect. And again, foot in the door. Think about it this way. So first and foremost, let’s just do the most simplistic thing. Site map generation, right? I’ll start at one point. You do not need an extension for this. This is something that’s native in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. I’ve worked with a lot of customers that use extensions for site map generation. This is native. So I’m going to show you two points of it. So first, if you do have a site map, it’s going to be underneath marketing. You’ll see site map underneath SEO and search here. This page specifically showcases that it will tell you what your site map is.

And this is where you can also click on it to see it. If you also need to regenerate it for whatever the reason might be, you can do that at this point in time right now. Now, what you do want to have happen is you want this to run basically daily, right? You want maybe run it at night, maybe run it during the day. However you want to do that, you would want to make sure you’re running that daily. This is a super simple thing to do. So this is where that site map is. So just to regurgitate that underneath marketing, SEO and search, the site map is here. Where you actually configure that site map generation, you go to stores, go to configuration. In this page specifically, we’re going to be here for a little bit. So I’m going to stay here for a bit, but I want to go through first and foremost that search, basically the creation of that specifically. So underneath again, stores, that configuration side, you’re going to go into catalog, you’re going to go into XML site map. So it’s going to be stores, configuration, catalog, XML site map.

With the XML site map, this basically gives you a few different things. So I want to talk about these a little bit and then I’ll get into the generation aspect. But essentially you can tell Google too. So I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at your site map, but inside your site map and what Google looks at or what search engines. I keep saying Google, you know, I’m just going to say search engines. What search engines look at is they do actually think about your frequency and your priority of what you are earmarking is essentially for. So typically what I say is, you know, it’s not something that probably holds much weight if, you know, I know I’m saying that it does, maybe it doesn’t. I have not had any specific evidence around that it does or it doesn’t. But I always think like, why not? It’s a super simple setting. You can tell Google, you can tell a search engine how often are your categories updated. Maybe they are updated frequently, right? If you have an AI tool that’s in there, like live search, that’s actually doing category merchandising for you too. Your categories are adjusted frequently because of the sorting of those. You know, your products are moving around based on different user experiences. So something like this could be daily and you might want to prioritize this a little bit more. If you’re adding new categories frequently, that’s something. Same thing with products and so forth, so on. The theory behind this is you’re telling Google prioritize this because we’re doing this daily, right? Prioritize the ranking of this, prioritize this aspect because we’re doing that daily, so forth, so on. Again, you could see that throughout there, like your store URL, it’s probably not going to be something you’re changing that often, but there could be certain aspects of that URL that you’re changing, right? Certain different content pieces.

Your generation settings, this is kind of where you’re bringing this to life now, right? So this is the automation, the auto generation of that file that I just showed you underneath that marketing tab. Essentially, you have the ability to set this obviously to yes, to enable. This is by store view too. So if you are in a multi-store view and let’s say you don’t really want a site mapping generator, right? You have a B2B site and it’s completely locked down. I don’t want to say which direction you should go with something like that from if you should have the site locked down or not, but there are businesses that I understand do have a completely locked down until you actually get into a registration process. So you could say you don’t want this to be enabled by that store view specifically, but by store view, you can enable this. You talk about the start time too. You also could say how often you want this to happen. Do you want it to be daily? Do you want it to be weekly? And then I would say you always want to have an error email recipient. So this basically means that an email will be fired off if for whatever reason the site map was not generated. Remember, these are the things that are automated. It sounds like there’s a lot to do. No, we could set this up in a few seconds and making sure that we get this email, setting up this to be auto generated. And that way, remember what I said, those little things, not having enough folks that are there to be able to do the SEO aspect. This is an SEO aspect. This is important. This is you basically being friends with Google and with search engines. You’re telling them, you know, I know you can crawl my site, but I’m also going to give you that site map too. That error email recipient, you can also make that a common delimited list. You can make sure that multiple people receive something like that.

Beyond that, that’s kind of your site map settings, right? So again, if you need to regenerate for whatever reason, you do that underneath the marketing side, but you do want this to be daily. Now, again, I told you I was going to stay in here for a little bit. We’re going to talk about a few different things here. I want to walk through certain aspects of this. One area that I do like to call out pretty quickly is friendly URLs, right? We all want friendly URLs. We want to make sure that they’re not something where it’s just some obscure or ambiguous type of an ID. You want it to actually be something that somebody can look at the URL and be like, oh, that makes sense. You know, I’m on commerce and coffee right now for SEO. You don’t want it to be like, commerce slash coffee dash or equals 123 ID 45, something like that. You don’t want it to be something like that. You want it to be and look something that’s very good from an experience side. Remember, everything that I kind of thought I’m thinking about through this is around experience, right? We’re talking about search engine optimization. Like I said, if I were to rephrase that, it would be search experience optimization because it is focused and very geared towards experience side too. So with that few different things that you can kind of call out. So there are aspects of like redirect and so forth, so on for URL options. This is the main part though, your use web server rewrites. This basically is doing rewrites for you. You’re still going to do it in catalog too. But this URL rewrite is essentially taking because what ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce does is when those emails or not emails, I’m sorry, the URLs are generated for content pages, so forth, so on. They are IDs, right? Database shows it as an ID. What you want the actual front end to be is that friendly URL. So this is where you’re doing that. You’re saying search engine optimization. You want a web server to do URL rewrites. So essentially it’s doing that creation of that friendly URL from whatever that ID was before. Now to double down on that.

In the catalog side, so catalog, catalog underneath the stores and configurations. Like I said, we’re staying here, stores configuration for now. In this section, so I’m going to come back to the product field auto generation. Let’s continue on just kind of the pathway of what we’re on right now. A few different things that you want to do is you do want to create permanent redirect URLs if something has changed. So whatever that is, if you change a product name for whatever the reason is, maybe there’s a copyright, maybe some sort of mishap when you’re typing something in, etc. This is something you want to create those permanent redirect for. Why? Because Google has already indexed this, right? So if you change that URL, you want to make sure that the redirect is created from the old URL to the new URL. But also the same reason of what I was saying before, those friendly URLs, you want to make sure that the ID ones that are initially created for products, for category pages, etc. are basically going to redirect here too.

Same thing. I don’t have URL rewrites. This is something you would want to have generated. You want to have something like that. The other thing too is the dot HTML or your product or URL or category suffix. You can kind of create this as you want. Most commonly I do see dot HTML, but you can make this with or without something like that.

Again, there’s a toss up between that. I’m not finding any evidentiary research around this that is very specific towards one or the other. But it is something where I see commonalities of dot HTML.

Again, think about this case by case, think about this product by product or again, brand by brand. But that’s something that I would kind of just mention as well.

Other things that are on here is the canonicalization. There’s a lot of duplicate content out there. Right? There’s a lot of even inside of your business. Right? If you have categories that have the same product and they’re just cross category. So you have it maybe in a top level on a sub level where you have it in one sub level. Let’s say you have a sale page and then you also have a feature page and then you also have an actual direct category page for that product too. That basically means that you’re representing that product in three different sections. You do want canonicalization. You want to make sure that there’s authority that’s driven through there. So that is important. So canonicalization, I see businesses get flagged for that all the time. Whenever I start looking through any sort of search engine tools, that is something that commonly comes up about canonicalization. So just, you know, again, native capability, it’s available to you. You can utilize it right here.

Beyond that, that is kind of configuration side. I would say from around, you know, thinking of site map generation, doing friendly SEO and so forth, so on. Now, here’s the next point. Is your product filled out of generation? So I again, same thing I said before. What I hear pretty often is that there’s not the ability to where we have bandwidth to create meta information for every single product, for every single category page. This is where you really can kind of build this out. So remember before I was saying, AI generated is great, it’s good, but you need human touch here. So instead of having AI, which I hear a lot of customers trying to go towards that direction, I’m just going to have AI create everything for me. I’m going to have them create the content base. I’m going to have them do this. What I would say for that is this is an opportunity for you to kind of intermix that, right? Because this is the human touch. What you could do with this product filled out of generation is essentially what this will do is it’s creating those meta fields or the meta details for each one of the products, for each one of the categories, et cetera. So essentially what you see here, this is a really good example of it. What we’re doing for like my masking for my meta description right now is I’m using the product name and I’m using the product description. So my attributes, product name, product description to create the meta description for this specific, any sort of product page essentially. So I don’t have to go into every product and create that meta description. It essentially will be created based on my product name and my description, which I do have filled out already. So I’m not having to do that again. Now that all said, I also have the same thing for my meta title too, right? And your meta title probably should match the product name anyways for a product page, right? You want to make that. Now again, that depends on your product naming too. If your product naming is something that, you know, manufacturing wise could not make too much sense to your customer, that’s something I would call out. But remember, this is why I was saying, don’t think of this as engine optimization, experience optimization, the experience. Think about your customers. That’s who’s finding you.

This is going to sound odd, but you don’t care about an engine finding you. You care about a customer finding you. You care about the experience side. So that’s why I’m calling this out is around like the meta information. What is somebody searching for specifically when they go to a browser, when they go to a search engine, et cetera? What are they searching for and how can they find you by doing that search? And it is based on things like this, that meta aspect. Now keywords, I’ll say it. I know, not relevant, not helpful, doesn’t do anything. It’s not something that Google search engines look at anymore. But here’s the thing. What happens if they decide to again, right? What I always say to anybody is if there’s no negative impact by having this in there. If you have keywords, keep them. Just let them ride. They’re not doing anything bad to you. They’re not impacting you in a negative way. I would say don’t go out of your way to create them. That’s it right now. Beyond that, because they’re not being utilized, but who knows when search engines will decide to change that and be like, you know what? I’m going to do it this way instead. So just be mindful of it from that side. All right. Site map generation. We talked about URL structures. We talked about even product field auto generation, et cetera. Now I want to talk a little bit about each one of the products specifically. So let’s just say, and I’m getting, I know this is going to be basic. I’m going to go into this pretty basic from this side because it’s important. We still need to think about its way. So in each product you have the ability to actually create and put inside SEO impacts. So meta title, description, so forth, so on. Remember I have the auto masking. So what that auto masking does, that configuration that we’re just on is if there isn’t an actual meta information entered into a product, so like we’re going to now, what you would see from something like that is it would basically mask it. But if it is entered in there, it overrides that masking aspect. So I’ll go to scroll down here. My search engine optimization here, I put my meta information in there. Not by no means am I advocating what I wrote here. Like don’t follow this way because this is not good. But this is essentially what I wrote in there. So it will override that masking aspect by putting that meta title in there. If you go to a product page and you have the auto masking set up, and you go to that product inside of your admin side, and you don’t see anything in there, you don’t see like the actual meta title or anything like that, that’s okay. It doesn’t, it’s not going to show there. It’s going to be auto masked. So it’s just going to be kind of there. So that’s essentially what you do with product pages is you can enter it all in here. Category pages, same idea. I’m actually going to go from here and we’re going to go into more of your kind of design aspects. We’re going to talk a little bit about robot.txt. We’re going to talk around just kind of the general aspects too. So bear with me for one second.

Just around kind of this aspect of your categories. So you could see it top level, default level, et cetera. There’s a search engine optimization tab here. Same idea here. I don’t have this filled out. It is being auto masked. That’s what I was mentioning before. But you can put a description in there. You can put the meta title in here as well. Okay.

So one last kind of aspect here that I want to focus on. So obviously content pages, they also have the same thing. Super quick. I’m going to show this really, really quick because I’m actually going to stay in this content section side. But inside of your actual pages themselves, there’s the same idea. You have search engine optimization. It looks the same as everything else. So you have meta title, keywords and description. Like I said, keywords or I’m sorry, title and description. Those are the two ones that you want to focus on. Now another part. Your content and basically for robot.txt, you don’t need developers to do everything for you from this side too. So you might hear somebody say, I’m going to do this in your HD access file. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. This area is where I would say you can also do robot.txt. You can do no index, no follow. You could make sure that something like that happens. So within your content side, underneath your configuration of design, basically all your store views are going to be here. So I’m going to use my US English for just an example here. Inside of here, a few different things. So I’m going to just pop open the HTML head. What I do have is my default meta description. So that means if there is no meta description that’s found, it will utilize my default one here. The same thing with my keywords, the same thing with anything else that I have here. My default page title, so forth, so on. So I do have a lot of defaults that are noted here. So this is important for you to kind of see something like this. The other thing is this search engine robots aspect. So you have the ability to tell the site, do you want to do no index, no follow? What do you exactly want to do here? I’m actually on a store view here. So let me just do one backtrack here. I will show you this on the website version.

So if you go into that aspect and you’re looking at your search engine robots, you can add things into this. You could say, oh, you know what? I want to disallow something. And my disallow, what I want to do is I want to put in maybe it is, I’ll say disallow. And you could put it, you could basically put in, let’s say it’s checkout, for instance, right? We don’t want checkout to be indexed for whatever the reason is. You can do something like that. You could also add in here and allow. So you can do both here as well. So this is that disallow, the allow aspects. You could do that here. You also can change it. Again, if you’re a business that’s B2B, you’re only ever using for registered customers. You might say, I want to do no index, no follow or something like that. Or you want it to be indexed, but no follow, something like that. You can basically tell. That search engine and bots won’t at all, to be clear. But you’re telling them you don’t want them to, essentially. So again, it gives you that ability there. I will also say from this side, it is important from SEO. Make sure your copyright is always up to date. You can see mine, 2025. Make sure your copyright that’s within your footer side. This is across the board as well. So make sure you have that in there.

Okay. Now we’re getting on time. I want to give some time for Q&A. The last thing that I would talk about here from this side is your URL rewrites. So you do have the ability to also create URL rewrites. So underneath marketing, SEO and search, you have your URL rewrites section here. If at any point in time you want to create multiple, or as I was saying before, let’s say you are getting alerted from your search console that you have a ton of 404 pages, whatever it might be, for a specific URL and you keep getting it and it’s not basically recreating, you can go in here and you can create a URL rewrite. So up here you see the add URL rewrite. You click on this, brings you to a page, asks you what the request path is, and then you can go to that specific target path. You can see I have a ton in here. As I was mentioning, there’s friendly URLs that you could see throughout here. You could see what’s the request path, what’s the target path, and these are kind of those friendly URL aspects as well. So most of these are auto-generated. I’m showing you this mainly for the perspective of saying if you ever need to go in there, enter it in one manually, you can absolutely do that. All right. That is the demo today.

Jeff, I think I’m going to turn this to you and then we’re going to get underway for Q&A, but let me turn this over to you. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you, Corey and Ogby. That was awesome. All right, everyone, as promised, I want to go over a few questions you submitted here today, but first I’d love to let you know a bit about our Champion program, which is a great way to take that to the next level. You’ll get access to exclusive opportunities like speaking engagements, direct collaboration with product teams, and a powerful community of experts across the entire ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ DX stack. Applications are open through June 6th, and you can scan the QR code on this slide to apply, or even if you just want to learn more and take a closer read. I’ll give everyone a few seconds to go ahead and scan that QR code, and I’ll go ahead and get into some of your questions.

Cool. So there was one that really stood out to me that I’d love to start out with. It was how will the SaaS version of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce support SEO improvements? And kind of kicked that one off. I think a lot of what Corey showed here today is still going to be available to you all. I think one of the major improvements is going to be performance related, so delivering everything on the edge and that improving. I know we told you not to focus too closely on your Lighthouse scores, but there is no downside to having really good Lighthouse scores. So seeing a big improvement there will definitely benefit SaaS. I don’t know, Corey, if you have anything else you want to add there.

Yeah, I would say, so I’ve been doing regional roundtables with customers, and it’s something that’s come up a few times.

There is no negative impact of having a great Lighthouse score. I just say in a way where I think it’s a little bit subjective sometimes how that scoring is done, but yeah, the SaaS service is, it’s SaaS. It’s SaaS based. Everything is instant. Everything is fast paced. And then yeah, you were talking about edge delivery, which is following the best practices of what search engines and that evolution of search engines and what it’s looking for. So yeah, I mean, the answer is just performance based is a significant aspect of it. And you’re talking about being able to do things from, again, when I say experience, right, I keep saying that experience side, you also can create mobile versions of things, right? It’s not just one way of doing it and then maybe just changing assets out based on mobile versus a desktop device. So yeah, that I would say is high level. That’s what it’s going to change for you. Got it. And another question we had that’s a bit similar is what’s the best SEO approach for handling discontinued or seasonal products in categories specifically? Should customers be looking to keep, redirect or delete them? Yeah, so I’ll kind of start off and I’d be feel free to kind of add into it. What I would say, so if it’s a seasonal product, right, it’s a good question. And it’s seasonal product and you know, it’s going to come back online. You can obviously add a 301 redirect or a 302 redirect, I’m sorry, because it is a temporary. So you could do a 302 to relevant type products. The other thing you could do is, and again, from experience side, you know, you could say, you know, seasonal product, the available date is going to be this date. So it’s a different approach to it because you typically say like, people are always like, let me do 302. But you can do that seasonal product with the available date on it essentially or available month or something as such. The other opportunity around that too is throwing some recommended products, right? You could throw that in the window that’s right there too. So you could do something like that. Using structured type data, right, availability equals out of stock. That’s a really good way to do that too. That helps search engines understand. It retains that SEO value and avoids kind of that 404 if you do it in that way. If the product is permanently discontinued, I would do a 301 redirect to be fair. I think that that, you know, having something like that, you could also do wildcards around it like a 301 wildcard where it’s going to a category page that has like type products or go to something specific if there’s not a very close match to it.

And then I would say, you know, keeping up at like legacy products, I hear that too. You know, removing that from internal navigation, search engines and so forth, so on like search and site maps, you could still make it available and just mark it clearly as discontinued. It just helps alleviate the search engine kind of looking at it and being like, hey, why do you have this there? I don’t know if you want to add anything to that, but that’s, you know, what I would say is kind of the recommendations for that. Yeah, I think that’s all good advice. And I think the only other call out I would make is that in some industries having access to those historical pages, whether they’re seasonal or more importantly, if they’re discontinued products, you know, there may be some industries where you, where customers need access to say like data sheets or things like that that you might store on that page or spec sheets. So think about your customers and what they need. And if there’s relevant information, even for a discontinued or an old product that’s no longer being carried, you know, keeping that active on the site, but again, you know, removing it from site maps or things like that is still valuable to customers.

Perfect. Thank you both. I think we have time for one last question. I know we’ve talked a ton about AI today and its impact on SEO. As AI generated search results become more prominent, should we shift focus from more of that traditional SEO to creating Q&A style content to improve visibility and authority? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think again, you know, thinking about the context and relevance of the content is really important, right? So if that’s something that your users are going to find value in, you know, definitely include that. I think, you know, it’s keeping up with the existing practices will still benefit you though, going forward. Right. So don’t like abandon, you know, what’s happening now, right? We haven’t made the full transition, but you know, definitely to think to the future and include content like that is important. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn’t just, I couldn’t agree more. I think you, again, we have to evolve, right? We are going into an AI world, you know, not that we’re going into, we’re in an AI world.

You know, we’re, we’re in that, that sort of phase where, you know, again, I think what I’m calling out for that, and I’m not going to say that it’s, it’s my terminology by any means, but that search experience optimization, I think it’s, it’s extremely relevant. You’re using things in AI where you can create content is super powerful, right? And if it gets you to 70% of what you had to do, that’s 70% you don’t have to do, but you still need human touch, right? Creating high quality authoritative content is extremely important. Focus on publishing details, right? What are your customers looking for? Because they’re not looking for flourished content and that’s it. They’re looking for statistical, they’re looking for data-driven, they’re looking for all the things that are important to them from either a services or a product perspective. They want to know from you as that brand. AI is great. It’s learning more and more every single day. It is not at a place where it can completely replace what a brand is doing and understanding the products of a brand too, no matter what you can do from that side of it. So I’d say still have a humanism inside of there. You cannot completely just move a complete direction away from that. Yeah. And I think that that’s an awesome point, Corey, because AI can only ever know what it can see and what it can read and crawl. So there are certain things that you as the business owners and operators know that AI can never know, right? Because you interface with your customers and there’s just a level of sort of intuition and data that AI doesn’t have access to. So definitely making sure that you’re stepping in there and curating and refining what you get from AI is really important.

Perfect. Thank you both for all of the insight. I think this is a perfect point to wrap us up today. Thank you, everyone, for joining. On the screen, we have a bunch of resources for you in the web links section, as well as a few survey questions for you. In the middle of your screen, you’ll see that handout I promised at the start of today’s presentation. If you have a question specific to your account and we weren’t able to address it today, please reach out to your solution account manager. You can always reach out to me directly and I’ll put you in touch with the correct person. And as a reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event in an email from us within 24 hours. So that is all for us today. Thank you all again for your time today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and we look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.