Rasmus says: “My Additional Insight for SEO in 2024 is about how small changes in SEO e-commerce can make a big impact on rankings and traffic.”

What small changes are we talking about here?

“You as opposed to always going full-on with audits and trying to rank on those very high volume keywords. We've experienced over the years that just doing small things to your site can make a big impact. For example, we're in the e-commerce space selling blinds and curtains. And we figured that since it's made-to-measure, made-to-order, just putting those small words on the pages made a huge difference for us. So, we became visible on make-to-order, bespoke, custom-made, and so on. And we didn't have that on the page search. So just adding a small sentence to a page made a huge difference on those not-so-popular but long tail keywords that made conversions for us.”

Are we talking about page titles, meta descriptions, headings, or any particular element?

“We made a snippet on the site where in the corner beside custom-made or made-to-measure and populated all the pages so a little bit of content on each page, emphasizing that we are made-to-measure. So, just a sentence on each page made a huge difference for us.”

Are you doing keyword research on these phrases? Because obviously, there are many different phrases that people could use. So, how do you determine them?

“Yes, we've always been made-to-measure, it's been our theme. But we looked at it and thought, what about made-to-order? What about bespoke? What about custom-made and all these variations of the same thing? And we used some of those and figured out from keyword research that one had a higher volume than the other. So, we added that variation to our pages and saw a great increase in traffic on those bespoke terms.”

Do you still need to add all variations nowadays, is Google not clever enough to understand the context and some words? So, will we still rank for similar phraseology that's not necessarily included on the same page?

“Yes, at least the singular and plural versions. We realized that Google couldn't figure out the difference between custom-made and bespoke and made-to-order. So, we added variations of those to the pages. We used some of the variations where it made the most sense. We looked at keyword volumes, and customers sometimes said made-to-order, custom-made, and we used those variations accordingly.”

Did you tweak certain key pages? Or did you add those phrases to every important page to you?

“We did both. We added the highest volume version to all the pages as a tagline or a snippet. Then, we went into specific pages and saw specific products that customers were more prone to search for, made-to-order than custom-made, and we added that variation to that page. We had both on many pages but went into specific pages and cared for those. The big impact came when we added the same snippet to all the pages. And suddenly, they all had a slightly different theme in bull's eyes, and we started ranking for them.”

Do you find that adding specific phrases important for your customers also impacts the click-through rate from the SERP?

“Our customers suddenly realized what we did in essence. Now, selling in blinds and curtains, we only sell the custom-made or made-to-order, made-to-measure that was one of the phrases. So, that seemed to increase click-through rates because people were aware that what we were doing specifically, that it was custom-made rather than off the shelf.”

Are you just focusing on Google, or are you focusing on other search engines as well?

“We are focusing on Bing and Google. Google is the big one, but also one of the biggest businesses in the UK, Bing is certainly a player for us as well. We focus on both. And we are international. So, we have companies in Japan. So, there we are focusing on the more popular Japanese search engine. But primarily Google.”

Is there anything different that you have to do to optimize for Bing?

“I think what works well on Google also works well for us on Bing. No, we don't specifically target Bing for our optimization efforts. However, Bing seems to be faster at implementing all the AI stuff. So, that's something that we're looking into. Let's say the chat enabled search that Bing is offering.”

We've got Search Generative Experience with Google coming and AI integrated into Bing. Is there anything that you have to add or do additionally to optimize for AI?

“What we've done is look at the customer journey more. Up until recently, we were very focused on converting keywords. So, the lower funnel, the end of the funnel, but now we are trying to create content that has a broader appeal to customers. And since our made-to-measure customers are a little bit scared about measuring for their windows. We do a lot of content in the upper funnel, teaching customers to measure and install our products. We are trying to come in on the SERPs on that more inspirational content, informational content. It's not only e-commerce for us. We are trying to be inspirational and informative as well.”

How do you know what keyword phrase to aim for in just a single page and what phrase to add to multiple pages? I'm thinking of your made-to-measure type phrase. So initially, if that's important to our customers, we should create a single landing page for that phrase made-to-measure and explain why our particular blinds are made-to-measure, why that's beneficial, and the selling points. But you've identified that phrase you should incorporate on multiple pages on your site. So, how do you know the difference?

“All of our products are different product variations are made-to-measure. Everything we do is made-to-measure. So, it became obvious for us to have that on all the pages. In combination with, let's say, kitchen blinds, made-to-measure was an obvious one. We looked at the volumes and saw the word search volume for that particular one. We decided that would be good for all the pages. But we can also see in the search results and see in 'people also ask' that there were a lot of questions around how to measure all that upper funnel, but also how to install them. Once you get them to your home, how do we install them? We have a lot of installing videos. But we weren't visible around that. This will create many guides and videos to remove some of that friction and uncertainty when people look at the product. They searched for made-to-measure blinds. But then we tried to create some content that would take that uncertainty and to take all the listing, inspirational installing, and do that as more inspirational content and then have the sure made-to-measure on our e-commerce pages. So that's how we bring them in made-to-measure searches with products, and then we have all the inspirational guide to carry them on and convert better.”

The challenge with the 'people also ask' questions is they often don't have any immediate obvious search volume. So, you're comfortable optimizing for long-tail questions that you can't determine if they have any search volume.

“Yes, at least for us. It’s been since we became a global e-commerce company, and we have e-commerce sites in almost every country selling blinds and curtains. We also realized from our customer service department that it was the same questions we get asked repeatedly. ‘How do I measure it? Do we have any guides? How do I install it? How do I clean it?’ So, even though at that point when we started it, the volume was not comparable to kind of the word blinds or curtains obviously, we could see for customer support and also in Search Console and in 'people also ask' that at least some customers had these kind of questions. And then, once we created content, we could see that the breadth of keywords was creating these blog posts or informational pages. We've started to rank on all kinds of long-tail different queries, so it was worth it for us even though initially we didn't see shoots volume around it, but when we added up to all the sites, all the products, it started making really good sense for us.”

You're saying that even though strategically, you can't guarantee that there will be traffic when you do it, you can tell that organic traffic is available for these questions.

“I think that's more to do with the keyword tools that we have out there, the keyword research tools, and how Google presents it. One of the takeaways is that there can be a vast opportunity in all those long-tail queries rather than going for the vanity for us blinds and curtains. But really, even though the keyword tools are not showing a huge amount of volume, asking customer support people what the pain points, people have and starting to create content around that and expanding on it was effective for our customers and us. When people phone or chat, we can refer them to these pages, so they also have a customer support issue, a benefit.”

How do you measure success? Is it all about increasing volumes of organic search traffic? Or can you measure the direct ROI from this traffic you're building?

“In this day and age where we can organically see which keywords are converting in analytics, for example, we start from one and look at rankings and visibility. And then, we figure out where does the visibility come from? Is it actually on the pages we've been working on? We might group them and see the combined visibility. We go into the Search Console and see the specific pages we know we've been working on. Have they seen an increase in visibility, clicks, and rankings? And in the end, we're looking in our back end to see what products we sell. Can we see at least an indicator of what we've been doing that has affected our sales? We might ask the customer support people if they see an increase or decrease in requests around these, such as installing guides. We’re looking at many areas, but at the end of the day, we were looking at the cash register and seeing how much money we were making. And see if it seems to be coming from some of the efforts we're doing. But obviously, rankings and keywords are what we were looking for.”

And for the long-tail keyword phrases that you're targeting with these questions. Do you attempt to do some link-building or promotional activity to drive traffic to it? Or is building internal links enough to generate the traffic you're looking for in Google organically?

“Our UK site is a 20-year-old site. We can quote-unquote get away with many things because we have high authority. We have so many links from so many different sites like the BBC. So, because of this authority on our big sites, we can publish anything, and it'll rank. If it's not within our theme, then that's harder. But we need to do some authority building for our small sites like newer ones. And we do it from a wide range of perspectives, mainly using digital PR. And one I know at that site just made them an arrangement with the Van Gogh Museum in Holland, and then we're doing their prints on some of our stuff. So the collaboration there that this Van Gogh Museum is mentioning us, that's a great link. But we also actively pursue relevant links through PR work through creating content and notching like home improvement sites and so on. So yes, in some cases, we actively pursue PR on those new content efforts. In the UK, we are doing Treatwell because it's an old and one of the most authoritative sites. But the newer the site, the more we engage in digital PR and try to get some authority built on the site.”

But your focus is primarily on the homepage and the brand instead of building links to these sub-pages.

“We recently launched some products that you don't need any tools to install. For those specific product categories we reach out to at your home improvement sites, DIY people for that specific product need to get some traction and some mentioning around that poor new product that has not been seen very much in the business. We also tried to build awareness around it because it's very new. In some cases, yes, we go specifically on product groups that new products and new initiatives.”

You shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024? “In my case, the answer to the question might be AI. Recently, we've seen so many examples in the industry where people mindlessly build sites and build content from AI, ChatGPT, or whatever builds content for them. And creates that without any interference from a human perspective, which usually works quite well initially. I think bots, especially Google, are very good at figuring that out, and rankings decrease significantly. As powerful as AI is, it could also be counterproductive if you're not having that human aspect. I know our copywriters use it for inspiration for guidelines, so they read it afterwards and always find something that doesn't make sense. I think it's AI as a general topic. Use it with caution, but use it. I think that's the takeaway.”

Rasmus Sørensen is the Global SEO Director at Blinds 2go, and you can find him over at blinds-2go.co.uk.