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Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, highlight the importance of SEO for all types of auction endeavors.

Part 5 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 4)

CHRIS: Ron, I'm sure you can elaborate on this. SEO is highly dependent on performance and usability, and these are key factors. With SEO, for example, it's intermingled within everything that you do with a site. 

RON: Yeah, it's true. It's funny how often I'm talking to clients that are looking at our eAuction platform, and I tell them that the SEO is built in and they're like, “Really?” And they're surprised. And I'm like, “How could somebody sell you a platform where it's not built in?” 

For example, I've got one client right now, they've got over 8600 chemicals, right? And that's literally all the website we built is. So I'm like, “Well, if those 8600 pages aren't optimized and are not published as SEO content to Google, then the other 15 pages of About US and Contact Us, they really have no content on them, are really all your company is to the world. 

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RON: The important thing is to make sure to have an auction eCommerce platform where SEO is a first-class citizen, that’s the best way to say it. Make sure it's core, make sure SEO isn't an afterthought, make sure that there are SEO fields, SEO configuration, SEO landing pages, SEO product site maps, category landing pages, and site maps that are generated by the platform. Click a button, done, you're registered with Google and off you go.  

I did this for one of our clients. We launched their new website, and they came back because I talked to them about SEO originally. They didn't believe in it, and they finally came back and said, “How do we increase traffic?” I think it was roughly about 200 visitors a week to their website. All I did was, I went into our eAuction platform, I clicked the button that said Generate the Product Site Map XML, went into Google Webmaster Tools, registered the site map, and immediately their traffic jumped to 700 people a week just by registering the 8600 pages and making them available to Google. That was it. That's all I did. It took me all of about ten minutes and I more than tripled their traffic. 

Then they came back and then said, “Well, how do we increase that?” And then we moved into content and other things, and I'm still working with that client today and it's a lot of fun, right? So, from an SEO perspective, one of the most important things to do, since we're going to migrate data, I think we've all heard the cliche garbage in, garbage out, right? I think the important thing is to do an SEO audit of the old site. It's really easy for a vendor like Clarity—who has SEO built into their eAuction platform natively—to build you a new platform that has better SEO practices. 

But [we want to avoid] all these auctions and all this garbage from the old site, bringing it over, and undoing all the good behavior we would have done had it been built originally or had the auctions been uploaded originally in our eCommerce auction platform. One of the things we can do is, we can do a very comprehensive SEO audit of the old site.  

So when you guys make that decision of what data is coming over, we can then audit that data and figure out if we have to take and manipulate that data midstream so that we can improve the data to the new SEO solution best practices like the SEO Permalink structure. So it can be blah blah blah.com/auction/, and then in position three where Google wants it, we have a really nice lower case, separated by dashes, property formatted auction title.  

Well, if the old site isn't that way, the new site should be that way. But if we manipulate that, we lose any value that the old site would have built up. So instead of walking away from all the SEO potential—or we really don't know what it's built up over time—we want to make sure to put the 301 redirects in place so we can have those permanent redirects. If you flip the auction site over a weekend, anybody who bookmarked or was watching that auction before can still get back to that same auction even though it's now at a new URL.  

We'll want to make sure that the 301 redirects for SEO are taken into place. We want to make sure that all of the new pages are canonicalized, and we can spend hours on that. And I know we're not going to do that in this video. I'll go ahead and do another webinar that’s SEO-specific to eCommerce and auction sites and put it up on the channel. That's a great video.  

Make sure the canonicalizations are there, make sure the new permastructure’s there, so even if a user doesn't know what SEO is, even just the basic information that they type in, maybe we auto-generate the SEO URL based on concatenating certain information and fields, making it all lowercase, adding in the hyphens so it becomes a relatively good SEO optimized URL, even though it's not perfect.  

We want to make sure all the meta tags are properly formatted. Most people don’t know how to write a proper meta tag for any types of auctions, so maybe we'll want to make sure that they're auto-populated so that Google has great SERPs. The SERP, the search engine result page, is really what increases the click-through rate (CTR), right?

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RON: So if one of your auctions shows up on a Google search—somebody's looking for a used John Deere tractor—and you've got an auction for a John Deere tractor. You want to show up, but you don't want to just show up on Google with a poorly formatted result. It comes up “Tractor For Sale" and doesn't really help. You want to make sure you know it's a John Deere, whatever model number such-and-such tractor, and it's got all the appropriate information that somebody would read and go, “Wow, that looks like what I'm really looking for,” and they click.  

That's what improves the click-through rate to your eAuction platform. If you have a bad click-through rate on your searches, it's all about the SERP. Improving your SEO page titles and meta descriptions is literally the number one and two items you need to work on to increase your click-through rate. It helps to improve the rankings, those are two of the five highest-rated factors to Google to ensure a proper ranking. But the click-through rate is directly tied to those two fields.  

I don't know if you ever talked about link building, or if anybody in the audience understands link building, I like to call this the HOA vote. We're all in a neighborhood. We're in the same HOA, we're in our neighborhood HOA meeting, and the president stands up and says “We're going to raise the HOA rates from 50 bucks a month to 500 bucks a month.”  

And you and I are like, “That's crazy.” And so you jump up and go, “Guys, I've done this stuff before, let me do it.” And I jump up and go, “I've been president of another HOA before, I can do it.” And the room splits in half and half the people are voting for me and half the people are voting for you.  

How do you break the tie? So now maybe it looks at external links. So what if Ross Perot, since we're here in Texas, walked into the room and said, “Hey, I worked with Chris before he worked on my campaign. I love Chris." Well, you know what happens to most of my votes? They all swing, right? They become swing votes and go to you and you win the election. That's pretty easy.  

That is exactly how internal and external thinking works. So now if you can start promoting your options externally on highly ranked site, those are what I call Ross Perot votes. Those are heavily, heavily weighted. However, sometimes those are difficult and expensive to achieve and gain. So what you can do is get those internal votes. How do I swing more of the neighborhood to vote for me instead of you? Well, that's an internal anchor text link.  

So maybe the way we do that is at the bottom of the page—and I think everybody listening in has been on an eCommerce platform like Amazon before—when you scroll down to the bottom, what do you see? Other people bought stuff like this other item from this seller. People often buy these two things and bundle with this. Why are they doing that? Because they're actually promoting and linking to other products that are similar on their site from this product page.  

So now when it goes to one of those other products that are in that list and Google crawls that Google says “Oh, here's a John Deere tractor, but I got 75 other pages and auctions, 75 other pieces of content—Google sees things as content, not pages, because they could see a PDF as a video, as a page, as an auction. Those are all just unique pieces of content—I can have numerous pieces of content all linked back to that John Deere tractor. And so if I have other tractors for sale on my site or other auctions from this seller on that same page down the right sidebar, those additional links to those products in that sidebar are actually promoting and voting for those other autions. 

You might think of it as cross selling, and the other sellers might be like, “You're not going to promote anybody else's auctions on my auction page.” Okay, then put a right sidebar that says, “More auctions from this seller,” and go ahead and link and vote for other auctions. There are many ways to get around this to help improve the other auctions by cross-linking without making it in-your-face upsell or cross-sell opportunity where one of your people selling on your site might think you're sending traffic away from their auction. 

Continue to Part 6 to find out more about writing copy for eAuctions.

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