When going live with a website, SEO is an integral part that should not be overlooked. It is a long-term strategy that should be started before your website goes live.
This article is part of a GO-LIVE series that should give you all the tools necessary to have a comfortable release!
What is SEO?
Let us start with the basics here; what is SEO? Well, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process you want to use to ensure that the people looking for your site or a specific part (products most likely in the Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud space) can easily find that page.
The people who use a search engine and consequently find the page are called “organic” traffic, a term you will come across quite often when working on traffic analytics data.
Why should I care?
I think the answer to that question is quite obvious! Any owner of a website/store wants to drive traffic to it. And optimizing a website so that Search Engines and other channels will put those pages at the top of the results is a fundamental way to do that.
When should I start the analysis and investigation?
This will depend on the project and who you have available (maybe a specialist is in the team that focuses on this?). But a general rule of thumb is to start as soon as possible, as SEO can impact a project on multiple levels.
Depending on the requirements, this can be on the business or development side.
It is a team effort
Doing optimizations to the SEO of your site requires the involvement of many different people in and out of the organization.
Think of it this way: to get good SEO, you need good quality data and content. And someone needs to write that content, push it to the correct channels, translate it if necessary to all supported languages, …
So involvement is required from:
- The team managing the marketing/content
- The team managing the product data ( PIM, ERP, … )
- The commercial team
- The development team
- …
- Oh… and the SEO team 😎
That is a lot of people that need to talk to each other, right? Unless someone manages all the above on their own (good luck to them)!
Make sure to get these parties around the table when needed! You do not need to involve everyone all the time, but for most requirements, it is pretty evident who you need to invite.
e.g., “We need a good product description to show on the product detail page” will require the involvement of at least three parties listed above. (I will let you think about which ones)
And before I forget, the above is an excellent example of a “vague description.” So maybe we should have clear requirements?
Clear requirements
The rules of SEO change often, and experimentation is part of the game. Developers know quite a few rules of engagement, but will never be as educated as someone specializing in this topic.
When creating requirements for the development team, give as much information on what you are trying to achieve and how. Do not leave too much to guesswork, as this could hurt your efforts in the long run.
If a requirement was not described in as good detail as it should, making the developer take “assumptions,” the amount of time to recover from possible damage could be months.
Involvement of the SEO team
I talk about a team, but this could also be a single person (internal or hired gun). In any case, it is essential to involve them every step of the way. And that includes the validation of the implementation.
Even if a requirement was clear, some things might not be implemented correctly.
Or maybe the required data wasn’t provided by the PIM? Then the development work was done, but the data quality needs improvement.
Detecting these issues/challenges as early as possible is critical to your strategy. But that doesn’t only apply to SEO, now does it?
Where do I start?
I am not someone who likes to re-invent the wheel or write an article when there is already great content about all the different steps in a project and how to configure Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud.
So here is a list of some great articles by Edwin Romero:
- SEO Glossary
- How to do an SEO Project Plan
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud SEO Guide (The Business Manager Explained)
- Site Migration
There is much more great content available on his site! So be sure to do a bit of perusing.
