 I am so very excited to be here today. This is actually super meaningful for me. Like, 10 years ago, I was actually given the opportunity for the second ever time to speak in English at this huge event. So it's like a milestone for me to be able to share it with you today. It's so, like, wonderful. It makes me look back at everything that has happened. It makes me realize that today can be a life-changing moment for many of you, too, as it was for me. I'm looking forward to that, too. Then it also makes me realize how that is how many horror stories start. Like, oh, she was having the time of her life. And then she, like, dies and goes out of the stage or something. Like, oh, the audience. The audience starts throwing, like, tomatoes because she's taking too long with her session and they need to go to the pub. So I am going to actually focus on the real horror stories that I came to share with you today and focus on how we can tackle them. E-commerce, SEO horror stories. We all know how the pandemic was game-changing for e-commerce, right? Like, and the good part of it is that, literally, organic search is massive for a lot of online stores, even well-established brands, right? SEO will only become more important because of how advertising costs are rising. Then, on the other hand, we have how Google is positioning itself as an Amazon competitor, pretty much, providing all of these merchant marketplaces, type of integrations, giving more visibility through the surf features. Oh, my God, the prognola trap. Have you seen that? It's like, oh, you cannot make you to not click under directly, right? Then, of course, we can now rather easily integrate with most of the top e-commerce platforms, online platforms from Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, et cetera, this is integration with the free product listings. So Google is pretty straightforward. And finally, since a few years ago, a couple of years ago or so, many platforms like Shopify, that was thought to be the, let's say, online platform for stores, but then also many new players that have integrated new capabilities. Have you seen Wix e-commerce capabilities? Mind-blowing, indeed, indeed. Then, many tools, SEO tools, have also started to integrate many of these functionality. So realistically, with all of this, we should be like that, right? Like, oh, my God, where is my first billion? I look like Jeff Bezos right now, right? It's like, where is it? It's like, yes, integrate quality content, profit. No, no, not so fast. Unfortunately, I asked around, and in my statistically accurate poll, very representative of what we all think about, most SEO thing that e-commerce SEO has only become harder in the last few years, right? And realistically, if we think about it, e-commerce websites have certain type of characteristics that make it harder to follow, like the fundamentals of probability indexability, not even, let's talk about, about content quality and relevance, right? It's complex, it's complex. This slows down the SEO process and can cause real SEO horror stories. Sometimes we think that everything is going great. We tend to overlook those painful configurations that they take forever to be implemented and are in the back lawn, and then all of a sudden it's like, whoops. Goodbye, my dear friend. Like, I mean, I don't want to be negative. I prefer to focus on opportunities rather than issues, so that is why today I'm going to become a little bit like this. Like, yes, let's see the good part of the story. Let's tackle, let's go through these horror stories, but in a positive light, let's see how we can tackle them, how we can make the most out of these opportunities, how we can prevent them in the first place, too. Let's start with internal search results, cannibalizing categories, right? This is very common and not only from e-commerce websites, to be honest, but shockingly, still today, I see a lot of my new clients coming with this issue because, of course, it has worked for so long and so well, and then I have this, let's say, this example here that is, like, safe for work, but there are so many crazy horror stories that I have seen of e-commerce websites that sell, like, baby stuff, indexing pages for non-baby stuff. See what I mean here? So it can be problematic and not only because of SEO, right? And it will go well until you realize that traffic is not really bringing value, and it's value that, it's traffic that won't be worthy and won't be there for so long, right? Realistically, it will mean that you will rank poorly with internal search results URLs and that leveraging the real relevant facet page that you have put so much work on trying to optimize. And this SEO horror stories, of course, happens when you lift your internal search results to be indexable without any constraint, right? Like, it's not only that, it's when you don't block any type of parameters, any criteria, no criteria when indexing these pages, generating content duplication, we meant to rank categories of facets and that can end up generating problems like this one, right? Every few weeks, you see a new internal search result page ranked, competing with the actual meant to rank facet. And, yeah, don't feel bad I have been there. Like, this is where I take all the screenshots, of course. It's like, yeah. The thing is, it's easily solvable, right? We can do it in many different ways. Some cannot equalize. Their internal search results pages, they map it with the relevant facets. If that is doable with your platform or easy to integrate with your dev team, what is important here is to actually point to the real alternate facet or meant to be index category rather than the home page, which is another horror story that I have seen so many times. I'm like, oh, yes, they are trying to canonicalize, but they are doing it so to the home page. You can also 3001 redirect the internal service or URLs to the relevant indexable pages or even avoiding them completely. This is one of those top functionalities that we can see nowadays with online stores, CMSs, right? Like, completely avoiding those internal search results referring, suggesting product pages or meant to index facet pages from internal search results. So, many ways to do it. While monitoring which are those query questions, terms that are being searched internally by the users in order to identify opportunities of new facets and categories and subcategories to index accordingly, right? So, as you can see, there are many ways to solve these issues, but there are certain challenges and misconfigurations that we need to also avoid along the way. Something similar happening in this other scenario. Indexing subcategories and facets with search potential, right? Like, many online stores, they follow these extreme stances. Like, we are going to, you know, index everything after the second level facet. All colors won't be indexable to avoid content duplication issues. I have seen jewelry's website not indexing color wedding bands' facets, losing a lot of high potential traffic. Sometimes they even block this. From being crawl-completely, right? It's like all those also not only no index them, but also like they often skate the links going to them. So, these are not existent. The problem is that many of these pages are going to be the ones that will be able to run for very popular commercially-driven, profitable queries that you really want to run for. So, the reality is that if your subcategories or facets can rank, your products will end up doing it so, but far worse, you won't give the choice to the user to be able to have diversity of products, and then you will have this consistency issue again and again, right? They will end up cannibalizing each other. Main categories can also end up ranking, too, on the other hand, but will have a poor conversion because you're adding a step in the purchasing journey. You don't want that. So, it's difficult to validate supply and demand of each facets to index, right? So, assess the search volume and intent related to each query and validate the number of products per facet to satisfy that demand, the value that this has for you, too. So, if demand and supply compensate for the effort of optimizing its facets, subcategories, or filter page, go ahead. Indent are customized while allowing, crawling, and linking, effectively, to that facet or subcategory, please stop using UTMs in internal links, in top navigations, all the ways to track clicks and behavior of users. Events, they are for something, and I heard that, indeed, in GA4, it's not so challenging to implement them. It only takes, like, 10 steps or so, more than in universal analytics. So, there's that. So, yeah, there's the point to index and optimize them in internal link to them directly, right? So, let's go to another horror story. Potentially one that we tend to overlook more, the lack of unique commercial content in categories, right? And, again, categories and facets connects with a very long tail of very powerful popular commercial searches. The problem is that if you disable JavaScript, if you disable CSS, they will look like this, and images. They will look like this. Many of them will look like this. A list of links. Very little content, right? And what many websites end up doing is this. Oh, yes, we need to improve the relevance of category pages so we will add a chunk of content at the bottom. What content? It doesn't matter. Just add the keywords there. It needs to pass the whatever content optimizer validator that we use, right? The problem is that too often, this content isn't actually meaningful. So we tend to, like, yeah, hide it to avoid damaging conversion. This content doesn't really connect with user intent. And the problem is that it can cause confusion to Google. They won't know what this page is about. It's pretty much sometimes you can see even like blog posts over there. Informational content rather than commercially driven one. So instead of doing this, let's improve the content of category and facets in a much more natural way that connect with their commercial intent. For example, rather than showing only six products per page, show 10. A great consequence is that you won't have 100 paginated pages with just 60. Nice, isn't it? Then you can expand the description preview that you can show off each product to. Then you can tackle the most common questions as FAQs in a way that can better integrate with the design, right? So this format will connect with commercial search intent. It's not content that you really need to hide. Also, you can easily identify now commercially driven queries to address customers' doubts. For example, like space surfer, master key word tools, and content optimization tools, they will provide easy ways to identify those how-to's and why type of questions that connect with the usual doubts that users will tend to have at that stage of the customer journey, of the purchase journey. So we can create FAQs or facts that can be integrated within the categories and faxed pages to support sales, addressing the most common concerns. Those that we can actually, and we want to actually feature and highlight to reassure users that the products they're seeing are the best for their own particular scenario, show why they're in the best place to buy these products, to incentivize conversion, mitigate any doubts around the usage and characteristics of these products, and blend the content in a way that actually supports sales, that doesn't only add relevance to the content, right? So we can do this rather easily by establishing patterns to generate this at scale, while leveraging content optimization tools to help writers to surfer. Neural text, amazing. These tools are not meant to replace writers, but accelerate the process. And like this, we can tackle this issue at scale in a much more straightforward way, right? We'll make it disappear. There is a challenge, but we should be able to tackle this issue. Next one. It's a little bit of the same, but even at a major scale, with product pages, product pages with poor unique descriptive content, and realistically, this is the thing. If you work on an online store, most of your URLs will be of product pages. That is a fact. Product pages target the longest tail of queries that can end up generating most of your traffic too. Also, users, they hate to link to category pages when they refer to something, a product that they love, they will do it directly to the product page. So these are pages that tend to attract a lot of backlinks, right? Direct traffic too. The problem is that when you go to the Google search console of any online store, I assure you that many of these URLs will look like this. They won't be indexed. Google will see that many of these product URLs end up showing what for them is content that is not worth it to index. Too similar to other product pages content, right? Product pages should feature specific descriptive information. Unfortunately, it's hard. Sometimes we end up selling the same product that thousands or hundreds of thousands of all the websites. So yes, we should... And this is a thing, right? This is how I envision product pages. Each product page should be like a landing page of that particular product. It should be beautiful. Why should it be ugly and thin and... No, it should engage with me and show me why these products is the solution that I was looking for. Many websites have the resources and invest the time on doing this. Many others... Well, it's not only that they don't have the capability, the problem is the scale here, right? So, again, I understand that this is a challenge, but also it's a challenge that websites should be interested to solve beyond SEO. I mean, if you are selling the same products that hundreds of thousands of other websites, why they should come to you to buy from you in the first place? So you should be the first one to try to clarify all of these challenges, right? So use unique and descriptive persistent URLs for each variant you want to index. Let's start with the base. Many websites end up generating these issues at scale just because they don't configure it well that each product variant should be in a unique URL. If you have the same product across many categories, you shouldn't be adding the category name every single time, for example. So we should also be avoiding temporary parameters when we generate these URLs, too. So there are so many fundamental configurations, issues that we should talk about right from the start. And then, of course, the next layer, the content, we can easily establish patterns to differentiate similar products and variants using their unique characteristics in the metadata, the headings, subheadings, Q&A, leverage also automated content generation tools to accelerate the process again. Oh, write this description, please. So it's not exactly the same than the one that hundreds of competitors of my website have, right? So remember this, to support copywriters, not to replace them because they have, they should have, they know how of your product, of course. So you need to leverage, and you should leverage that know-how. Use your own support insights and leverage keyword tools to create your product Q&As, too. We now also this wealth of tools that didn't exist like even two years ago that can better support us in this process. And of course, incentivize users to live reviews on product pages with discount offers. This is an actual discount that I was offered when I bought some, a few things during the pandemic, right? Of course, I will leave the review just because of that. And then, use structured data in order to specify the characteristics and improve their SERP snippet. If you have taken all of this effort on content, let's support this content disability on SERPs. Let's also help Google to understand this content better by using structured data. And the typical question here is, but Aleda, like, stop this ideal, these two ideal, but what if I have many identical, very similar products with a very short life span? If that's the case, then it will be better to consolidate these product URLs on a product aggregator page. This is what a lot of marketplaces do when there are many merchants, many providers of exactly the same product, very similar product to avoid indexing their individual URLs. However, of course, this also has a consequence. Adding many product variants like colors, for example, in a single page makes it ineligible for product-rich results because Google needs to refer to a single product page with a particular characteristic, of course. So, of course, balancing act of optimization here, depending on your own context and characteristics. There are challenges, but it's possible to tackle them, of course. Then let's continue with product pages. Product pages with traffic but inconsistent status. Again, some product URLs can have a very short life span, as we saw before, and end up generating errors. Sadly, many of this, as we saw before, attract a lot of backlinks, but a lot. These don't only affect the cycle health, but the ranking and traffic attracted by these pages at the end of the day is sad. If you go to your top competitors, not only your own website, you will see, like, oh, my God, what do they have here? And those are opportunities that you can start leveraging directly with your own website. So, it's common with checking product URLs to find not only HTTP errors, but directs with issues too, because there were so many of them through a long time, they end up referring to a page that was not even similar at the end of the day. It's critical to establish inventory rules on workflows to manage product crawl in an indexing. Don't worry if you have said them, thankfully also a lot of online store platforms allow you to configure them rather quickly. And let's go through a few fundamental type of criteria to take into consideration for this, right? When doing a product pre-launch, use the same URL that the product page will have when it's actually launched afterwards. So many times I have seen websites ranking for the product name, but not with the actual product URL where they sell the product, but the launch pre-launch URL where they were announcing that they were selling it like in a few weeks. Why? No, use the same URL, at least redirected to the final one. If a product can be featured again in many categories, don't include them in the URLs. There are so many different ways to configure this, even in the most common platforms, e-commerce platforms, to eliminate those from the URLs directly to avoid this very common issue. Create and send product feeds through the Merchant Center to maximize the visibility. Now this can be also pre-automated with most common online platforms. When product is out of stock, eliminate it from listing XML sign-maps and feeds. I hate to click on a search result just to be brought to a page that says that it's unavailable. It's a bad user experience. You don't want to give that type of experience. If it's something temporary, the page can be indexable, but offer notifications when it's going to be available again. It should be something like a matter of days, right? Don't do this if it will take forever. And then, of course, you can take the opportunity to refer and suggest very similar products, too. The product started data and feeds should reflect this updated status every single time. And if the product is permanently out of stock and has a new version, you should have it redirected towards it while alerting the user that, look, you have been brought here because that product that you were looking is now out of stock, is permanently gone, but we can provide you this, all the products here. Something that you can still see here, change RedRx with 302s with JavaScript RedRx, please let's stop from happening and don't show for HTTP errors for out of stock products with backlinks. This is the one first thing that I end up doing. I am not even an alim builder, but I go and validate all of the product pages that are still showing backlinks in Moz, in SamRosh, in Achef, in whatever backlink tool and go and validate their HTTP status. Is this still showing a 200K? Is it indexable? Is it trying to one of redirecting? First, easy to validate whenever you are doing an audit for product pages too. Of course, you can use 404s or 410s, but let's ensure that these are real out of stock, product pages that are not attracting traffic, are not attracting rankings, are not attracting backlinks too. Otherwise the experience that users will have, let's stop thinking about Google for a moment, users will have won't be positive, right? And you should again update all of this, accordingly, in your XML time-ups, in your feeds, etc. I have created this flowchart like this that you can use, of course I will be sharing the deck later on, so you can take a look at it and you can easily share it with your developers so you can integrate those rules rather easily. The thing is that despite all of this, errors will continue to happen. So you should set recurrent and automatic roles and alerts to the tech remaining product URLs with issues to be dealt with. This is a great example. This is a great example. I love to do this not only with the typical SEO crawlers but with real-time SEO monitoring tools. For example, content king, little warden, you can set this alert to be warned whenever this type of pages change of status. So you can try to eliminate these issues, be proactive and then identify these issues. You can have so many of them. No worries. You can also set criteria with these tools. So you are only warned when those product pages with a minimum value of traffic, of clicks, of impressions, of conversions are affected. So you don't need to be focusing or trying to do a lot with pages that are not delivering what you're actually tackling in terms of work. But those are affected that you actually care about. And of course, monitoring performance, rich results and product carousels inclusions to identify more opportunities. I love how many tracking tools nowadays will show the opportunities of the product carousels directly, the product knowledge drop. For example, in this case of Dunsworth ranking, many rank trackers will allow you to identify the size in order to start implementing these efforts. So another way to say goodbye to this type of product focus SEO horror stories. Let's go to all the type of horror stories, the seasonal pages with traffic, but in consistent status. Again, we all know how Black Friday, like Valentine's Day, Christmas can be huge for e-commerce website. And then again, whenever I go and out of these pages, I will see many of these former holiday seasonal type of campaign pages, landing pages showing 404s, showing 410s. So you should leverage these pages through the years. Don't change the URLs. Don't add the years in the URLs. Leverage them through the years. They will continue to have rankings, traffic, backlinks, establish themselves like this to continue delivering value. When disease and campaign is not on, you can keep them again indexable while referring all the discounts and offers that you have at the time of the year. If you need to modify the URLs again to have one redirect, update links, and XML sitemaps accordingly, it's always a good time to make the most out of your favorite holidays, of course, even if ranking, at least at the beginning, can be like a Santa wish, but we can't get there. Then last but not least, overlooking informational content and resources. This is the thing. A lot of players when they start investing in commerce, they tend to focus a lot on ranking for the most popular commercial and transactional queries. Overlooking completely those queries that are, let's say, at the top of the funeral, at the start of the journey. Realistically, very well established commerce players have grown in their authority because they have tackled the whole business journey, right? Sadly, again, not that many stores will see the value of them, but if we go and take a look at the link profile and which are the type of pages are attracting the most backlinks of the most established players in any of our sectors, we will see that these are informational resources, like all birds. If we go and take a look at the link profile, which are the top pages that are attracting backlinks are not product pages, are not category pages, but are pages like this. Informational resources. So you cannot expect users to purchase from you if they haven't seen you at the awareness stage, if they haven't seen you what you are capable to offer, why they should trust you in the first place, why they should buy from you in the first place. So you actually need to tackle the awareness stage of the journey if you want to get that click when you rank in the top positions for your top commercially driven queries. REI, they do it very, very well with their learn section, it's amazing to see how they have grown and how many backlinks and rankings they are able to bring with their learn section, something to learn from definitely, and it shows that commercial queries also have some informational intent and are ranked by resources. More and more, there's some B with T in intent, and we see also guides comparing products, reviews of products, ranking for otherwise queries that will be only ranked by category pages too. So yes, it's not all black and white. It's not all like I will overlook informational to focus on transactional and that's it. It's about addressing some of the most common questions and doubts when buying your products. So use the five Ws and H to identify and map queries with different intent to relevant areas for content optimization here. And then to help you with this, I have created this reference for e-commerce sites to avoid forgetting relevant query types. It's a cheat sheet here where you can also see examples of each type of page from the top online stores out there. So you can easily share as a reference to your copywriters, designer, developers, etc. And then of course you can use tools like keyword insights to develop your topic clusters while automating the keyword mapping process in order to make it much more easier for you. So yes, it's a world of opportunity we shouldn't only focus on those commercially driven ones that we think are the most important for you. Realistically, and this implementations will avoid the most common e-commerce horror stories which is nice and it's great to share with you. But we also know about this. That is only about knowing this. SEO is not only a knowledge problem, it's an execution problem. We need to be able to execute this error free. And this is when things become a little bit more complex, right? Many, many times we are like said back tackling bugs and issues rather than going for new developments. So a well-online SEO execution and validation is fundamental but not sufficient. It's critical that in order to minimize these horror stories, we also set an SEO quality framework to prevent errors rather than simply catching them with education, validation and monitoring efforts. This is a whole other talk but you have it here that I did in the last Brighton SEO for you to also implement all of these efforts that will end up also avoid all of these bugs holding you back when tackling SEO horror stories that prevent them also in the first place. And then you will say, okay, Aleda, this is great. It's a good actually good story, not a horror story, good story that we are also now going to the bar. Finally, this is actually a lot to do but realistically, we don't need to do it all at once. We should and we have here also across many amazing sessions from our each session to Jackie's shoe session how it's fundamental to prioritize. There are so many different ways to prioritize. You have this bullshit from me, you have another rice way, the rice framework from Jackie, also Arish has a framework too. So there's so many ways to do this. What is important to start with those most meaningful, impactful one. We can also develop forecasts to assess, prioritize and show the expected ROI of this recommended action. Again, Miracle was here before. She has this amazing resource showing how to do this from scratch with Excel and there are many more tools like advanced web rankings integrating this capabilities directly with your targeted queries that you can use. You can also run as your test on pilot projects to obtain more buy-ins if these are challenging, meaningful efforts that are difficult to implement. Even you can do this if you don't have that much budget leveraging Google Tag Manager. There are resources like the one shared here by Chris Green that will allow you to do so. So no excuses. There are so many different ways to start tackling this issue with free and paid resources and realistically this is what makes it worth it. The results not only from a growth perspective but conversion and revenue-wise which is what we are paid for to deliver value. So it's all about e-commerce, organic search growth, revenue and ultimately ROI. If it is cost-efficient, if it is profitable it should be okay and we should go now and celebrate no SRO horror stories or positive stories with a great happy ending. Thank you very much.