Introducing our Fast Five series – a weekly rendezvous where we invite digital marketing thought leaders to share their insights on SEO, SEA and e-commerce.
For the first edition of our Fast Five series, we interviewed Mathias Noyez, SEO Consultant at Toels – SEO Consultancy. Speaking to Verbolia, Mathias talks about his journey as an SEO specialist and expressed his views on the main challenges of SEO for 2021.
1) What was your first SEO project, and how did it go?
My first SEO project was buildyourhome.be. A website where you can find handymen or contractors to do construction work in your home. At the moment, the site only had a few pages indexed, although they had thousands of handyman / contractors in their database already. It was only possible to find them via the search function, which we all know Google cannot use. There was none to zero internal linking to these contractors pages. I enhanced this by adding (sub)categories pages which linked contractors to each other and made more ways for Google to find all contractor pages. This resulted in a +500% increase in organic traffic after 1 year. Having such a successful project really boosted my confidence and kept me learning more about technical SEO.
2) What are the main challenges of SEO in 2021 ?
New features from Google coming in 1 2 3…. . Google Is constantly looking for ways to beat Amazon in the e-commerce space. In 2021 and 2022 they are trying to do this with organic shopping results, payments in Google & cooperation with E-com CMS providers. This looks really cool, but will make the job of an e-commerce SEO harder. As this feature will grow, the job of an SEO will become more technical, and you will be dependent on Google even more.
3) What is your favourite SEO software ?
Screaming Frog is by far my favorite SEO tool. It’s like the Swiss army knife of SEO tools.
When I do migration or technical SEO audits, this is the crawler I mostly use for small/medium-sized websites. The tool has been massively improved over the years with new features like crawl compares and visualizations. It’s not the most UX-friendly tool, but it does the job for a small price. 😉
4) What is the most common SEO mistake you see people making?
Losing yourself in technical issues. Sometimes you could spend days or even weeks trying to fix every small SEO issue on the website. While it’s definitely not bad to do that, it’s better to also focus on having better or new content (categories, products, blogs, …). By only fixing the tech issues, you will not grow your organic visibility in the short term*. Try to prioritize the issues based on impact / workload.
* Unless it’s a critical SEO issue like internal linking, rendering, …
5) What is a typical low-hanging fruit optimization to make in SEO for e-commerce?
Including commercial words in your metadata. I have been noticing that it can often help to mention “buy … online” in your page titles and meta descriptions. Also don’t forget to mention your USP’s in the metadata, it can boost CTR.
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