I met up with the Director of SEO and Marketing of AJH Co, Fay Friedman, in a nice park in New Jersey named Branch Brook Park. Fay has been doing SEO now for over 10 years for a multitude of companies but did a ton of e-commerce SEO in the first part of her career and now is in other forms of SEO. She got into SEO through her writing, she loved to write and someone came to her about a negative SEO issue and she was able to recover the site in 6-months. That experience got her hooked on SEO and the power of SEO and taught her it is worth doing everything right from the onset. So just some advice - do not mess with an SEO, they can ruin your reputation online and in Google for a long, long time.
E-Commerce SEO vs Other SEO:
Fay explained the difference between e-commerce SEO versus property management SEO. She explained that e-commerce SEO is way more technical and nuanced because of pagination, filters, and so on that you need to spend a lot more time with on-page technical SEO. But local SEO, the website is less complex, so you need less time to devote to technical SEO and more time on being creative with content and content marketing and link building.
Common SEO Audit Issues:
To start, Fay said that often and audit is the first step you need to take with a new site. People just come to you with a website and say optimize it to rank in Google for me. But there can be many issues with the website, which an audit can reveal. Some of the most common issues that come up in these SEO audits are around meta data, page titles, descriptions, duplicate issues, and all those basics that can be easily fixed. Then sitemap files and robots files, and many sites do not even have Search Console set up. On the more complex site, sometimes the site architecture won’t have your pages readily available in the navigation. In e-commerce, a big thing is around pagination and category filters and with rel=next/prev not being available it is even more complex. On the site migration front, she sees issues with redirects, content, broken links and more. So those are the most common things she finds in SEO audits.
But often when you do a site migration, it gives you an opportunity to fix all the issues you always wanted to fix. It is also a great time to breath new life into old content that you put time and money into, Fay explained. Fay’s biggest pet peeve with this is that when a site does not have Google Search Console set up. Google is giving you the information on what is wrong and you don’t even have it.
To connect with Fay Friedman, connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her there.
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