Commerce & Coffee: Organic Growth

Transcript

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Commerce and Coffee. I see that there are still a lot of people joining, but let’s go ahead and get started. We’ve got a lot to get to today, so I’m going to jump right in. So welcome, everybody. If this is your first time joining us at Commerce and Coffee, this is an ongoing webinar series hosted by myself and Cori Gelato. The session is designed to be interactive, so we really encourage everyone to ask questions in the questions box in the GoToWebinar control panel throughout the presentation. You type them in there and we’ll do our best to answer as many of those as we can for you. I’d like to quickly mention a few housekeeping items before we get started. So we will be recording this webinar to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team that may not be able to attend today. You will get the recording 24 hours after the end of the event in an email from GoToWebinar, so keep an eye out for that. Audio is routed through your computer, so please ensure that your speakers aren’t muted. If you can hear me, then everything should be good to go. We’re going to leave a bunch of time at the end to answer questions, so please feel free to start asking those throughout the presentation. And if for some reason we’re not able to get to your question today, please follow up with your Success Account Manager or your SAM for additional information. And at the end of the webinar, please complete a short survey that’s going to pop up on your screen to help us continue to deliver the best and most relevant information to you, our customers, at these types of events. So with that, let’s dive into today’s agenda. First, I’m going to formally introduce myself and Cori, who will take us through the presentation. And then Cori is going to run through a demonstration of a few key features that we’re going to discuss today in the product. Then we’re going to cover a few upcoming events, one that you can also have the opportunity to potentially meet Cori in person. So exciting stuff. And we’re going to actually poll the audience today to choose our next Commerce and Coffee topic in May. So stick around and you can have some impact on what the next topic is going to be. And then we’re going to dive into Q&A. So as mentioned, please start asking questions throughout the presentation, and we will do our best to get to as many of those as we can. So to introduce myself, my name is Alana Cohen, and I’m on the Customer Success Strategy team here at Adobe. I’ve been with Adobe for over four years and spent the last about two and a half years working with our digital experience customers, organizing and hosting our customer exclusive events. Prior to my time on this team, I spent about two years working with Adobe’s advertising cloud customers, creating data driven campaigns and helping customers implement and execute their advertising strategies, which is also what I was doing before I came to Adobe for many years at different advertising agencies around New York. So if you’d like to connect with me on LinkedIn, please feel free to scan that QR code. And if you have any questions about any of our customer exclusive events, please do reach out to me. So next, I would like to introduce Cori Gelato, our Senior Commerce Strategy Consultant, who I’m sure almost everybody knows. Cori brings a ton of really rich experience to us and Adobe. He has now over 16 years of experience in eCommerce, advising merchants across a variety of different industries. Almost all of his time has been with Adobe Commerce or formerly Magento. So he is the one that we want here today telling us all of this really great information. So Cori strategizes directly with customers to ensure that they’re maximizing what Adobe Commerce has to offer. And we are very lucky to have him here as a mainstay at our Commerce and Coffee webinars to help us answer all the questions that we have. So with that, I’m going to hand the presentation to Cori for today’s session. Awesome. Thanks, Alana. And welcome, everybody. Guys, we’re in February of 2023. How crazy is that, right? I feel like the holidays and everything just flew by. And here we are talking about 23 and figuring out different types of strategies. I’m a huge fan of this topic today because organic growth seems like a lot of kind of the buzz that’s happening right now. Every session, I feel like I get on with merchants one on one is really geared towards this idea or theory around how can I grow organically. So we’re really going to dive into that today. And I’m going to show some key features within the Adobe Commerce platform to really kind of help you position yourself in a better place and to rank better, obviously, with search engines. We’re going to talk about AI today, too, because we have also the big buzzword of chat, GPT, etc. And how does that kind of play into this? So we’re going to hit on that. But, you know, taking a step back, why grow organically, right? This essentially is building and those that have joined this in the past, you’ve heard me say this, brand awareness, brand awareness, brand awareness, the big deal, right? You got to build that brand. And to do so, you can’t just only pay for that you Yes, that’s part of it, right? At the end of the day, I’m going to talk about all these different strategies that’s organically. But at the end of the day, paid search, paid PPC, all that stuff is definitely also a part of kind of the mix. So you know, don’t misunderstand as we’re going through this, that that’s not also part of it. But at the end of the day, you know, what you’re doing is you’re building this brand, you’re bringing traffic to landing pages, you’re building relationships with your customers with your buyers, if you’re a b2b company. So you want to make sure that from a branding side, and from Azure business, you are informative, but you’re also making sure that you’re driving simplicity. So we’re going to talk a little bit about UX in this too. So I think for anything with growth, I kind of look at this in so many different facets. And I really don’t think that, you know, I was trying to kind of break this down with Alana. And I was like, All right, you know, listen, I think there’s probably this idea of seven ways to grow your e commerce business organically. And I cheated here a little bit, because every single one of these has their own little intricacies around it. So it has their different strategies, and so forth, so on. But I want to break it down into this, because I feel like it’s a little bit more digestible. So, you know, again, research is really showing that these kind of seven ways, as I kind of call them, really make an impact on organic growth for brands. As most of you know, search is the number one source of traffic for most websites. And I’m sure your data would state the same. So the first one I’d like to cover is really optimizing your website and what that may look like for you. On page or on site optimization is all about optimization or optimizing the elements of your web pages, such as the title tag, meta description, header tags, and URL structure to improve their visibility and relevance to search engines. Really kind of this idea around keyword research and optimization is finding the right keywords related to your business and incorporating them into your website’s content and meta tags. Let’s not forget about the kind of elephant in the room, the technical SEO impact of organic growth. Corey, what does that mean? This is improving the technical aspects of your website, such as website speed, that’s a big one, mobile optimization, and crawlability to ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index your pages, which leads to higher ranking and drives traffic. And to kind of round out this optimizing your website, and I know I’m kind of synopsis in a lot of this and saying like, here’s these little buckets, but it’s link building is about really acquiring links from other websites to improve your authority and credibility of your website in the eyes of search engines. So again, thinking of it from that branding perspective. Kind of continuing this, seven ways to grow your ecommerce business organically. Again, if you guys could see me, air quotes, because again, I’m cheating here. There’s a lot more to it. But thinking this is kind of like, you know, I like to call this out, focus on customer satisfaction, you know, really offer excellent customer service, and encourage customers to leave reviews. During a lot of my one to one merchant sessions around SEO, customer satisfaction is always a little unknown nugget for SEO. Connecting with customers and understanding their preferences is not only great from a UX side, but it also helps drive organic growth through search engines by way of seeing different stats like bounce rates, exit pages, etc. So those are kind of dwindling down, because your customer experience is, you know, spot on. It’s awesome. At the end of the day, search engines see that too. So it’s not just about what a bot is doing crawling your site. It’s also about the stats of what the folks that come to your site, what they’re doing, how they’re connecting with you, and how they’re connecting with your brain. Are they doing things like UGC, right? You know, there’s those little pins, little plugs that we have here. In addition to kind of connecting from a virtual world, optimizing your website to rank well for search engine queries, such as claiming your business by, you know, again, through Google listings. Again, that will continue to kind of drive that growth. So it’s this idea of kind of the localized SEO perspective. So again, it’s something that you might not think of, but claim your business with Google. Claim your business with search engines, because that will help that organic aspect. Again, it’s all about that brain recognition and connecting different types of points. So it’s not just the on-site too. You got to think about kind of that external force that you have that’s there. At the end of the day, that’s where traffic’s coming from, right? At the end of the day, that’s it. Now, I kind of like this idea of like, you know, again, you’re thinking about the different types of content. So really, I think of this as like invest in content marketing. Create valuable, relevant content that will attract potential customers and establish your brand as a thought leader.

What does that mean? It really means that you don’t want to present content that is irrelevant to the brand, to the product, to the category, to your target audience, to the industry. You want to make sure that you are connecting at a deep level when it comes to content. So, you know, thinking of like the creation of that content too, it’s producing high quality, relevant, and regularly updated content that provides value to your audience. I want to say that one last point. Again, regularly updated content that provides value to your audience. There’s going to be a theme here. It’s all about, this is not a set it and forget it. You guys are going to hear me say that throughout this presentation, not a set it and forget it. You have to continue to keep evolving as your customers evolve, as shopping experiences evolve as well. AI tools like ChatGPT, they’ll help brands. They’ll help you guys scale production, but it will also generate tons of low quality content. Brands need to be original. Human research content is going to stand out more so than anything else. So again, you’re connecting with your customers at a deeper level, understanding what their needs are, but also understanding what your brand is about and presenting that to consumers. You know, you’re in a digital age. It’s sometimes a little bit tricky.

So I like the idea of this too. And again, something you’ve probably heard me say in the past, you know, word of mouth, person to person, that is kind of through social media now. So social media presence, using social media platforms to really engage with your audience and build your brand can also attribute to your website visibility and search results, right? So I know it kind of comes into question sometimes and I’ve heard it.

That doesn’t make sense to me because I have a domain and it’s out there and I have a brand that’s already there, but social media is a huge traffic driver as well. So the more that Google sees other channels and other ways that people are adopting, finding your brand and really interacting with your brand, right? This idea of interaction with your brand, that is going to drive those search engine rankings. So it’s all about the impact of your brand from a digital ecosystem. It’s not just thinking of it from kind of this one siloed my website content and what I’m delivering from that experience. It’s all about the different channels too. So utilize social media. I’ll say it again, utilize social media. I know some are against it. I’ve worked with merchants that are against it and at the end of the day, you have to join them. You can’t ignore it. You have to join where consumers are kind of interacting with each other. It creates, you know, make sure you’re creating a profile on relevant social media platforms too. So when I say relevant, think about your business. Again, it’s about your target audience, your industry, who and where do they typically come from. If you’re a design type of a business, at the end of the day, that might be somebody like Pinterest. It might be Instagram. Those that have others like fitness and so forth, so on. That could be Facebook and you know, in Instagram, etc. So again, there’s different ways and different opportunities out there. It really kind of comes down to your business. So think about your business and encourage really that word of mouth at the end of the day. That digital word of mouth offer incentives to customers to refer friends, family, to your business, anything. You want to make sure you’re able to provide that experience too. And while I’m not going to demo it specifically today, know that Adobe Commerce has a reward program that’s built into the platform that you can do things like refer a friend, refer a family, and you can give different types of reward points. You can give different types of promotions and so forth, so on. So it’s a huge point where even could drive a sale beyond just getting somebody to the site. You could also do conversions and rewards based on that as well. So here we come. We’re rounding this out. So I like this idea, right? And I know we have some stats here. So I haven’t called out these stats. Hopefully you guys are seeing the slides and you guys are following along the stats. So I’m not going to go through the stats, but I want to talk about the marketing channels and diversifying or diversify your marketing channels. Don’t rely solely on one marketing channel. Instead, experiment with different channels to find what works best for your business. Guys, there’s no silver bullet. There’s no here’s one size fits all when it comes to organic growth in the essence of where is that acquisition coming from. So diversify your business when it comes to organic growth. It’s different channels. It’s different ways. It’s kind of all the steps we just went through. It’s thinking about social media. It’s making sure, I would say no matter what, me personally, make sure your user experience is awesome all the time. Don’t ever falter kind of on that experience with the traffic that you have on the site and the traffic you’re going to acquire on your site. Make sure that that experience is awesome and simplistic and drives those conversions. Continuously to improve your offerings, keep up with the market trends and customer demands and continuing to improve your products and your services. So again, we’re not in a set it and forget it world. I think for all of you that have been in the e-commerce space for as long as you have, whether that’s a month, whether that’s 10 years, whether it’s 16 years like me, I can tell you right now that every single day I learn something new. A different research comes out. I do my own research all the time and it changes and it evolves. How you deliver to your customer today is going to be how you’re going to deliver something tomorrow differently. So you want to make sure that you’re again keeping up with those trends, keeping up with that consumer demand and you’re following what that demand is and you evolve your business around that customer experience and that customer demand. So remember, you know, one of the things I’ll call out pretty often, organic growth takes time. It is a pain in the neck sometimes. It is something where it’s not that set it and forget it. It is consistent effort but honestly with dedication and hard work and I know that that sounds like a little odd and it’s like yeah, you know, okay, a pun intended a little bit but honestly, dedication and hard work and your research, data research and following your customers and seeing what they’re doing, you can see sustained success in the long term. So as much as it will impact you right now, you’re going to evolve organically. You’re going to continue that evolution and as you’re doing that, the growth will come with it. You will see that that tide will change, you know, things that we’re going to think about today and what we’re going to go through from really the platform side. That is just kind of again, we’re scratching the surface. If I can tell you everything in one hour, you know, geez, that would be amazing and if I could help you get to the place but again, it’s about this idea of continuing to evolve and continuing to watch what’s happening in the digital ecosystem. So tooling that you have, right? So yeah, sure I’ll talk about what we got here in Adobe. So you know, really kind of beyond what as one plug for it, you know, search console, making sure you guys are following search console is critical. So while I’m not calling that out specifically here on the slide, I want to make sure it’s very clear. Search console will tell you about errors. It’ll tell you about what you got going on from an indexed perspective, from a search engine, from Google side, what they have you know, if you have errors, if acquisition is faltering in any sort of way, you’re going to be you’re going to know that through search console. Search console is kind of like go there, see what’s going on, see what’s indexed, see if you got errors, you’ve got 400 errors, you’ve got 500 errors, see what’s going on and what Google sees because as that happens, doesn’t matter if you do all these different types of things. If you have those errors happening within search console, your ranking is going to be dinged by it. And especially if you don’t suppress that early, if you don’t hit that early on, and you have something that’s much longer impact, that’s going to be critical towards your success of organic. And again, I’ve seen it from merchants where if you kind of get into this place where it’s trying to figure out the best way to say it, but it’s like this bad wave with Google, it’s very tough to kind of come back from that as you dig that hole to get above again is tough to do. So you want to make sure that again, this this idea of making sure you’re following what’s happening in the ecosystem, but also ensuring that you’re monitoring everything, right? These are the data, these are the tools that are going to be able to do it for you. So search console, understanding your analytics, so analytic tools are definitely key. And along with BI tools, right? So at the end of the day, what I mentioned before is absolutely a fact. It’s customer experience also drives organic growth. So you want to make sure you have that in place to watching, monitoring. And again, continue to experiment. Don’t be afraid to push. Don’t be afraid. But also don’t be afraid to adjust and pivot when needed. If you see something not working, don’t be afraid to pivot on that. I understand I said be patient, take time. That is absolutely still true. But you still want to make sure that you are not afraid to pivot on certain areas. And again, as that evolution happens from a customer experience side, you’re evolving with that from a brand. And so again, these tools definitely critical search console, if you’re not doing it, if you’re if you say, yeah, if you say, Hey, Cory, yeah, I have it. But my my developers, they are the ones that moderate. Okay, that’s fine. As long as it’s being monitored, make sure again, daily, you’re looking at something like that. You want to make sure you’re not getting those types of errors, because those are easily, easily identifiable. But then also, you can fix those really quickly through the platform itself. So let’s kind of get into that. I want to talk a little bit about your kind of the core functionality, the core features to the platform. And we’ll talk about these in a few different ways. So you know, you can get if you have questions throughout this, this is definitely a good time. And hopefully it kind of drums up even things that we went through too. But today, what I want to demo, I’m going to go through obviously meta information, right? So simple enough, we’ll go through CMS pages, we’ll also go through some product category homepage and what that looks like. I’m going to show you two different ways of getting to the homepage and getting to that that meta information because yours might be set up a little bit differently than what I have on my demo. So anything like that walls talk about auto generation too, right? That’s fun, because you don’t have to go through every single thing. Remember what I mentioned before, though, auto generation, AI type tools will kind of get your foot in the door, you still want to make sure that there’s human touch on things, and yet you are doing things that are going to kind of generate that. We’ll talk about sitemap generation, search engine robots, right? So those that aren’t sure what that is, we’re going to talk a little bit about what that means. We’ll go through URL rewrites, we’ll go through canonical meta tags. And we’ll just talk about a little bit with onsite experience too. So content, self-help pages, rewards. Again, if we have time, I’ll kind of go through that rewards aspect, but we’ll kind of round that out. I’ll also talk about copyright. Man, so let’s call it out right now. I want to start there. Copyright, everybody, 2023. I know I said it before when I started, make sure that your copyright is updated. Every time I’ve done UX assessments, I almost call this out probably eight out of 10 times is that this is at either 2021 or 2022. Make sure your copyright is updated. So you want to make sure it’s updated for current year. And there’s a way to set that up, ask your developers, where you can have that updated automatically. So as the time changes, as the year changes, it’ll update automatically. I’ll show you today just where it is natively in Adobe Commerce. That might be dependent on your theme, but I’ll show you where this is today too. All right, so let’s kind of jump in here. So simple enough, let’s go through, let’s start with the CMS page. So I am getting a little bit ahead and I’d like to start preparing for where we got summer coming, right? So I know spring hasn’t happened yet, but hey, I’m in New York. It was 60 degrees today. It’s 60 degrees today, 60 degrees yesterday. So you know what, it’s making me feel summery. So what I’ve done is I’ve created my summer page. So I’m going to go into this page. I’m going to go specifically to the SEO side. So we’re not going to really talk about too much of the content right now. And then making sure your content is relevant and making sure that your meta information is tied to that, right? So as much as I’m showing you this right now, I still want you to think of, you got to make sure that your meta information is tied to the content on the page. So that’s title, that’s your description. You don’t want that to be not the same content. You don’t want it to be the exact same, but you don’t want it to be irrelevant to each other. They have to be relatable because that’s what search engines utilize. So what I have is kind of this whole page built out. My summer sale, I have some content that’s happening here and so forth so on. And then from that, what I’ve done is I created my search engine optimization. So I’m kind of doing quick hits, right? So this is my summer sales landing page. This is the page that I’m going to land all my traffic under, my summer sales. What I’m doing for my meta title is simple enough. Room of fitness and wellness, summer sales. So simple, but it’s super descriptive for the title. So I kind of call that out really quickly. And I’m saying, this is what you should be focused on. This is where it is. Guys, also a thing to call out, character wise, I hit this question pretty often, try to stay within the boundaries of what Google, again, they haven’t drawn a line in the sand, so it makes it a little bit difficult, but I think it’s usually around that 50 to 70 areas. Try to keep the titles in that area, right? You want to keep it simple. We’re going to talk about mobile in just a second because that’s obviously impactful. But meta title, that’s what you see in this top bar right here. So I’m going to just highlight this. And you can see Luma Fitness and Wellness, that area, that little title, that’s exactly what’s driving this, is this meta title information area. Now description is what you see in search engines. So when you search for something and you’re at the top of those results, what you see is this description. Get ready for summer with the best fitness equipment deals. Find discounts on everything from home gyms to outdoor gear at limited time only. I’m not, this is not all of my content. You just saw it. I have a ton of different content that’s throughout this, different types of sales things, different types of CTAs, but it’s descriptive of what the page is going to entail. That’s the point. Create like this idea of like a summary, essentially, of it. A quick little snapshot of summary. This character wise, roughly, I would say, you know, what you’re looking at is anywhere from like 120 to 160 characters. Yeah, I know it’s a lot. The only reason why I’m kind of going to that lower half of 120 is now what I was mentioning before, mobile optimization. We know traffic is coming from mobile. So at the end of the day, you want to make sure that this is easy to find when somebody searches for something. Mobile devices are much smaller. To read that, to have something that’s 170 characters, 180 characters, 200 characters, I think it’s 220 that’s allowed. But at the end of the day, you want to try to be descriptive. You want to try to kind of summarize that very, very quickly that’s in that like one punch area. So this is where you would do this for the CMS pages, right? So this is your search engine optimization that’s created. URL keys are going to be usually automatically generated as you create a page title or page. But you can always update this, too, if you need to. Make sure you have URL rewrites on that’s auto generating those URL rewrites. So if you do make this update, a permanent 301 redirect is created. So I want to call it out. You want to make sure that that 301 redirect is created. Anything, again, anything that I can say for this, 301 redirects, wildcard redirects, all that, super critical, guys. Don’t forget that. If you’re ever migrating the site, if you’re going from on-prem to cloud, if you’re going from M1 to Adobe Commerce, if you’re doing any sort of thing like that, make sure you have 301 redirects. If you’re thinking about just doing a category restructure, right, and you put some boards out there, your wireframe and everything out, make sure you do 301 redirects. You got to make sure that’s in place because if that URL is indexed, you’re going to get flagged for it, which again, just to kind of call that plug out there, look through search console. It’ll be identified really quickly. You could fix it really quickly. All right, let’s get into the product side. So products, simple enough, right? Again, same exact thing. This is really easy, really simple. I know it’s going to be repetitive and I’m sorry for those that are on here that are like, yeah, I know how to do all this already. I want to make sure we’re kind of thinking about this from the basic side because basics are often missed, to be honest. I see it pretty often. So this is the search engine optimization, right? I’m just in a single, simple skew right now. It’s in different locations and so forth, so on. I have different sources, but what’s important is my search engine optimization. Guys, same thing here. What I’m doing is from attribute wise and also my content on this page, what I’m doing is I have different types of things that’s really, again, content wise. I want to make sure that this information, the meta description is relevant to what is on the page. So if you click on it from the search engine and a bot clicks on it, right? Let’s say the bot, the indexed bot grabs this and goes to the site. It’s going to crawl. It’s going to basically look for viewability. It’s going to look for relatable content. I want to make sure it’s relatable content. Can’t stress it enough. Make sure it’s relatable. So here, what I’m doing, super simple. Again, my meta title, adjustable weight bench, really straightforward. That’s exactly what this is, even though it says weight bench here. It is an adjustable weight bench. My meta keywords really kind of, again, in this idea. So keywords is something I get. I get this question. So there’s no negative impact, not to my understanding, not to any research I’ve ever done, not to any research I’ve ever heard. There’s no negative impact having keywords, but also don’t go crazy and going out there and putting keywords in because keywords are not ranked anymore. So Google doesn’t use this at all. It doesn’t use it in their algorithm to do anything with SEO. Now, why I have this still in here from my side, and maybe this will give you guys a little bit of a nugget, but I have it because I don’t know when Google will change their mind. Google might change their mind tomorrow and I’m going to start doing keywords again and utilizing that. So want to make sure you have that in there because why not? If there’s no negative impact, and who knows about another search engine, what if any of the other search engines decide they want to start utilizing it? So kind of keep it in there. No negative impact. Again, follow the search console. If you start seeing a negative impact, follow your analytics. If you start seeing your traffic sources and you see organic growth kind of going down and there wasn’t any major changes you did, maybe looking at something like that. Doing different testing. Remember what I was mentioning before. Pivot. Ready to pivot. And then what I have here for the description, really straightforward, right? Again, I’m going in that 120, 150 character limit because I know that my traffic is coming from mobile. So when you’re on a mobile device, I want to show up and I want to be descriptive and I want you to be able to get to me. So it’s really straightforward. Get a versatile and effective workout with an adjustable weight bench. Target different muscle groups and intensities. And again, I’m basically calling this out and what this page is and what this product is specifically. So be descriptive, but summarize that description. Don’t make it where it’s this big bloated description that you’re going to have to see an ellipsis and you’re going to see dot, dot, dot when you’re in Google on a mobile device. You want to kind of make sure you’re kind of hit out there. All right. Category page. I know, repetitive, but we got to think about all this different concepts. So we went through CMS pages. We went through our product pages. Now let’s go through our category pages. So let’s go right back. Summer sale. So see my trend. I got this. I want to make sure that I’m kind of focusing in on this full consumer experience from my landing page to my product page, my category page. I want to make sure that everything is relative to what that person has searched for and what’s going to be helping them in their search engine. So with mine, again, super simple. You can see in this case, I didn’t put keywords because I didn’t have it pre-filled out, but I’m not going to, you know, again, with the last one, I didn’t wipe it out. For this, I just not adding them right now. I could at some point, but here, meta title. What am I doing here? It’s my sales. So it’s my Luma summer sales equipment. So I’m just selling my summer sales. This is my meta title. And then my description, super straightforward. And I love the idea. So because this is a sales event, I’m doing a little bit of a marketing aspect. I have a little bit of a CTA here where I’m like, hey, knock, knock, limited time only. If you don’t show up, you’re going to miss out because limited time only. So I’m even, in essence, from a search engine, I’m trying to drive that traffic and trying to drive a little bit of like, you know, don’t miss this, don’t miss this. So that’s not, you know, it’s okay to do that. This is a sales page anyways, right? So I’m saying it’s a limited time only. When I decide to put this up into content staging, I’m likely going to put this in a specific timeframe. I’ll probably do, you know, again, for mine, it’s going to be June to August, June to September, something in that area, where I’ll have the sales event going on. But it is, it’s going to be actually, in fact, a limited time only. So I want to make sure, again, content wise, it’s relevant to what the page is. And this page, I might not have any content in it. I might not put anything throughout this. I might not put anything within the description. I might just have products straight up, right? So my display right now is products, just straight products. I don’t want anything else. But it’s descriptive, because I have summer deals happening. I have exercise equipment on this page. And guess what? Limited time only. So I’m kind of hitting everything that I said that I would throughout this. So that’s our category side. Now, I’m going to show you two different ways for my homepage. Because again, I think that you guys might have it set up a little bit differently. So mine, I have a new homepage. I have it through my CMS pages. Here’s where I edit this. Really straightforward. My search engine optimization is all right here. So again, what you see in the top bar here, Luma Fitness and Wellness, matches right to that title. And then in my description, I say, at Luma, wellness is a way of life. We don’t believe age, gender, or past actions define you. Only your ambitions and desire for wholeness. So again, I’m actually just kind of calling it out as, I want to hit all different target audiences, right? Because I have different types of fitness enthusiasts, and I have different likes, different types of things. So I want to make sure that that’s descriptive enough to be able to kind of just get your foot in the door. And I’ll create the personalized experience once I kind of capture you. So this is where I have this for mine. So that’s anything that’s within here on my homepage. I basically have that through that place specifically. Now, the other side of this as well, and we’re going to go through a few pieces of this through the configuration. But underneath content and configuration, you’re going to see your different kind of theme areas or design config. So you’ll have, if you have multi-store, you’ll see this in a multi-store fashion. If you have multiple websites, you’ll see this in multiple websites. Usually you only see one global view. So here you could kind of see, and I’ll start at the website level. I might have to jump back and forth here a few times, but I want to make sure I kind of hit this because this is where robot.txt is going to be in place and different types of things I might want to put out there. So one plug, right? robot.txt, you don’t need to disallow and allow at a developer level. They don’t need to do that through htaccess. They don’t need to do that through SSH. You can add some custom snippets directly through here if needed. So just calling that out, but, and I’ll show you how to do that right now. But for kind of the start, again, same idea here. You could see I’ve overridden this already, but if I had default, I could use that through this meta description. This is potentially where you’re going to see things. Same thing kind of with the header. There’s just different things that you can have logo, image, alt text. So I didn’t call it out before, but make sure your images do have alt text, right? It’s still, you want to make sure robots can read the site. They are going through things. And another thing, accessibility. At the end of the day, you also want to make sure that you are accessible to, no matter who the audience is, no matter who the person is. So making sure that things are readable and that you can do kind of a read through through the browser, right? Let it do an audio for you. If it’s reading it through, fine, then that’s great. That’s perfect. That’s exactly what you want.

Remember before I said footer. So this is where you would manage the footer. Mine is actually at my store view level, but in here you could see the copyright. So copyright, again, just as point, go into content, go into configuration. I’ll take one step back. So content, design, configuration, store view. I’m going to go to my store view so you could see the update and I’ll go back and show you robots. In here, you can see I’ve updated it. Copyright 2023. That is what drives the footer here. Your design could be different. I want to call that out. So if your theme does not follow kind of the blank theme and different types of aspects here that I’m showing, then you might have a static block that’s driving that. You might have some sort of way that that’s being delivered, but that is kind of the native functionality. Even if you go to our user guides on experience league, it’ll call that out explicitly. So that is where that’s updated. So I hope that everybody is jumping into their admin and going, okay, I’m going to update this right now because mine does say 2022 or hopefully, actually, I hope that you guys have already updated it. So here, this is that search engine robot. So I’m actually going to go back because this is at my website level. So I’m going to go back here, go to my configuration. Here is my main website. So you can see it doesn’t have store, store view. This is my website level. My robot.txt is here. So I’m saying, yes, I want you to index and I want you to follow my site. What this means, guys, is I’m just telling Google, come to my site, crawl it. I’m going to send you the site map, but I want you to crawl my website. And I’m also saying the areas where I don’t want them to essentially follow or I want them to index is a specific area. So this could be anything. And our user guides are really good about explaining this, but you could have multiple disallows here that says I don’t want you to crawl something specific. So if you were like, I have a landing page that’s going to be out there and I’m only using it for a PPC campaign and it’s going to be super temporary. I don’t want them to do anything with it. Or I have a private sales event and I don’t want, and it’s a landing page and I don’t want Google to index it. You could also throw that on here too. So you could do it, you know, kind of any which way that you’re looking at it. Or you can do it at a Google level where I’m doing like checkout, right? Don’t do checkout. This is a bad example, but don’t do checkout. But I would say, you know, again, this is an area where you can say, I’m disallowing you to basically do that. So a bot will see that and it won’t, you know, theoretically, again, Google does what Google wants to do, but theoretically, you’re going to stop that from kind of crawling it there. So, all right. We kind of went through the different types of aspects. I’m going to go through some configuration settings, right? I think it’s important to see this because there are things that are adminable. It’s not where you have to have development kind of go into it, change certain things. Again, native functionality, native feature gives you this opportunity. So we’re going to talk about site generation, site map generation, sorry, site map generation. And I’m going to show you where that site map actually resides. We’re going to talk about URL rewrites quickly. We’re going to talk about canonical meta tags as well. So to kind of start, everything is going to really be in this catalog section. So I’m going to close everything else up. So where I am right now, just point of reference, stores, configuration. So underneath settings and within here, you’re going to have a few different areas that you’ll be looking at. So meta information. You guys have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of products. There is product field auto generation. So with this, you can allow attributes to essentially create that meta title, that meta keywords or the meta description for you. Again, remember the meta description. Try to keep that character limit down. Same thing with meta title too. Maybe the meta title is simple enough. Keep it as the name, right? So content pages, those can match. That makes sense. It’s the meta title anyway. It’s the title. Try to be descriptive. But again, it is the title of that page, title of that product, title of that category. So it’s pretty straightforward. The way that this is done is through curly brackets. So you would say, if you want to add an additional attribute to my meta title, you just kind of had those curly brackets and be able to add that in there. And then basically what this does is it creates a masked type of name for this specific field. And if you do put something in manually, like I was showing before, it’s CMS page, category page, product page, it’ll override what you have here. So if there’s something that you’ve manually put in, it’ll use that versus this. So just to add clarity there, because I get that question. If I have this, does that mean it’s going to be the end all be all? No. If you have something that’s manually put in there, like if you’re coming out of gauge of 10,000 products, 10,000 SKUs, throw this in there. Get your foot in the door, but make sure little by little, again, what I mentioned before, it’s continuation. It’s that hard work. You got to make sure you’re doing things like this because this is where you set yourself apart from competitors is doing things like this. So make sure you have that type of information because the auto generation is going to give you something that’s like, it’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be everything to you. So I just want to call that out. So that’s the product field auto generation that kind of helps you in there. So that’s masking again, masking auto generation. Let me close this up. Search engine optimization. So we’ll talk about a few of these things, right? So I’m really going to kind of hit on mostly just the URL rewrites. So you got URLs, create permanent redirect for URLs. If URL key has changed, I’m calling it out. Yes, I have that set. By default system value, this is going to be set to yes. You would probably have to go into there and change that either yourself, your developer, and so forth, so on. This is also creating category and product URL rewrites. So same exact idea. So the create permanent redirect is for URLs that are changed on the pages. Here, this is category and products. So this is calling these out specifically. So this will generate your URL rewrites. If you’re ever like, hey, what rewrites do I have? Underneath the mark inside, you actually have underneath SEO and search URL rewrites. So you could see everything underneath there. We’re going to go through that in just a second, but I just wanted to make sure I call it out while we’re going through it. Now, canonical link meta tag for categories and products. So this idea, I get this question and I did see even questions that were pre-submitted around this and we’ll probably hit this a little bit more during Q&A, but really canonical URLs really help with products that are in multiple categories. It gives you the ability to kind of create this one product URL that Google will use as kind of that top level. And it will say, okay, I’m not going to use each one of those breadcrumb trails and so forth, so on. I’ll create this. Again, we’ll go through that a little bit more during Q&A because I want to make sure I hit that. So these are kind of the ways that you’re creating, again, more things that are the synergy from that SEO perspective. Now, sitemap generation. So in this, I do extension evaluations and I do see this really often where there’s different types of sitemap generators that are installed. So Adobe Commerce natively offers this. So underneath, again, catalog, XML sitemap. You actually could see it here. I have the generation set. I’m doing this daily. I also want to see if this ever errors out. And I would highly recommend if this is not filled out for you, fill it out. You could do a common delimited list of different email addresses, but make sure you’re receiving an email if there’s ever a fail on the generation. It’s important to have that. So this is kind of that. And then everything else throughout this, you can kind of see different priority aspects, frequency that you’re updating things and so forth, so on. So definitely look around this, but this is that generation setting. URL options, kind of the same thing here too. But again, you can kind of see this for that generation. You can also change it to weekly, monthly. You can play around with it that you need to, but this is really kind of where that’s coming from. All right. So rounding this out. Sitemap, right? Because we just went through it. This is where the sitemap resides. I’m going to go through that one more time. Marketing, SEO and search, sitemap. This is where that sitemap is. I could see my last generation. I could see exactly that time stamp that I wanted this to auto-generate. If at any point I ever needed to regenerate it, I could do that here too. But you can kind of see again, this is where my path is. This is that sitemap. I could see anything that I want to with this. I could pop this open and see what Google, I’m basically going to submit this. So I take this URL as point of reference back to Search Console. I’ll take this URL and I’ll give the Google Search Console this. I’ll say, hey, here’s my sitemap. I know you’re going to do your own thing, but I’m trying to give you a leg up through this and I want to make sure you have this as well. So I would highly recommend Search Console, you submit your sitemap. It will also say if there are any errors too. So important to kind of note out there.

And then last, but certainly not least for this demo, but for your URL rewrites, everything is here. So anything that you’ll see is going to be within here. If you ever need to add a new URL rewrite, whether it’s temporary or if it is a 301 and so forth, so on, again, you can see the redirect type is temporary, is a 301 redirect. You could say what the request path. So reason why I’m pointing this out to guys is because this is important. If you do see something in Search Console, if there’s an error somewhere, 500 error, 400 error, so forth, so on, super important, throw it in here. Make sure you have it. Don’t worry about hdaccess file. Put it in here. It’ll do what it needs to do. You’ll be all set. You don’t have to focus on, you know, something going through a process or anything like that. Here’s everything that you have. So anything that might be errored out, anything like that, you could filter things in here too, just as a point. You could see different 302s. You could see what the request paths are, target path. So you always see the filters in this as well. All right. I know that was a lot. But let me kind of pop back open the presentation. I hope that that kind of answered some questions that you guys did potentially have just around what’s kind of in there, what’s native, and so forth, so on. But there’s definitely a lot more, and there’s some good things in there. But Alana, let me turn this over to you, and then we’ll get to the Q&A. We’re saying you answered all my questions, Corey. So thank you for that. All right. Let’s quickly cover a few resources and events. I am popping in some links into the chat pod right now.

Great presentation, by the way. Thank you, Corey. And as a reminder, this is being recorded, so you can, you know, watch all of that back at your own pace at a later time. All right. So the first link that I dropped in is the merchant site assessment tool. It is live on Adobe Experience League, and it’s an interactive assessment that helps you identify any UX or UI gaps in your platform. It walks you through questions about your site, customer experience and usability, checkout and payments, and product availability and logistics. So once completed, you’ll be provided with a report of recommendations on how you can improve the customer experience that you provide. It is a super cool tool. Corey had his hands in helping to bring the tool to life, so definitely recommend checking that out. And the second link that I dropped is that we recently refresh our demo videos on Experience League. So in the videos and tutorial section, you can now find a full library of short demo videos about our core features. It’ll help you easily learn how to use new capabilities. I’ve watched the videos myself, learned a ton, so also recommend checking those out. So those are the resources and we’ll follow up in the email tomorrow with those links as well. All right. So quickly to go over a few upcoming events. I hope you have heard, but if you haven’t heard about Adobe Summit, it is coming up and after three years is finally back live in person in Las Vegas on March 19th through 23rd. So if you would like to attend virtually, you can register for free and I definitely encourage that at the very least. However, if you would like to join in person, you can reach out to your success account manager, your SAM, for a discounted code on tickets. And I highly encourage everyone to do that because as I mentioned earlier, our very own Corey Gelato will be meeting one-on-one with customers at Summit. Fantastic opportunity to have like this one-on-one session with him. So definitely speak to your SAM if you would like to set one of those sessions up or if you need any more information on Summit. So Summit is a premier event for marketers and experience makers to learn how to create, deliver, and manage great customer experiences. So in person you’ll get keynotes, innovative super sessions, sneaks, and lots of breakout sessions, and labs, and networking, and virtual attendees will have the ability to watch the live broadcast of the keynotes and sneaks and some of the innovative super sessions. So definitely, definitely recommend signing up one way or another in person or virtual. So besides Summit, we have a bunch of other customer exclusive events coming up. As Adobe customers, you get access to all of our customer exclusive events. So we are excited to be able to bring you our next Marketo and MOCA’s event. Part one will be on March 9th and part two on April 5th. These events will focus on email deliverability as well as email reputation, how to minimize bounces and keep engagement levels high. So we will be sending a couple of invitations to our commerce customers in case that is of interest to anybody and they want to learn more. Feel free to join those sessions. Then looking ahead to the week of April 24th, we’ll be hosting the first DX quarterly of the year and the topic for this event will be Grow with Adobe. So we’re going to be taking a different look at a handful of Adobe’s digital experience products and how they complement and integrate and really work together really well to raise awareness of the different options for you to both grow your business and also grow with Adobe. So finally, as I mentioned, we want to hear from you. So our next Commerce and Coffee is going to be on May 11th and we would like for you to choose the topic. So I am going to pause quickly for a poll, launch that and take a moment and choose what you want to hear about in May. So we have some of the options are tips and tricks for e-commerce success, building customer loyalty and retention, trends and predictions for the future of e-commerce, what that kind of looks like in the coming months and years, managing and scaling your e-commerce business and then finally building an effective B2B e-commerce strategy. So I’m going to give everyone a moment to see what is top of mind to you. I’m going to give another second. And some themes are going to be, you know, across end up touching upon all of these potential topics like AI. But yeah, we definitely have a few different things in mind for these.

All right, I’m going to give it one more second. It looks like we have a majority of the votes in. I will share these results so that we can all see and be held accountable for the next topic. All right, let’s see. We’re building customer loyalty and retention. All righty, cool. So that will be our next session on May 11th. Fantastic.

That speaks to my heart. I love it. Appreciate everybody voting for that. That’s really good. Yeah, it’s something that Alana and I were talking about. So we kind of figured that those, the two that were the highest, so building customer loyalty and retention and building an effective B2B e-commerce, definitely things that we thought were going to be top of the list. So thanks for proving this right.

Definitely. And that is not to say that we will not be touching upon B2B this year. That is definitely in our queue. So even though it’s not going to be the topic for May, it is on the docket. So let’s dive into Q&A with our last couple of minutes here. All right, Corey, you ready? I am. Okay, cool. So first question, should we be optimizing metadata for mobile or desktop? Yeah, so great question. With the rise of mobile usage, it’s really important to optimize your e-commerce websites metadata for both mobile and desktop. I kind of mentioned that before, but actually note like really that it’s important to ensure your content is optimized for both, right? I’m going to say it again. Make sure it’s optimized for both. For mobile devices, it’s important to keep that meta title. Remember, we were talking about that in description, short and concise. As mobile screens, there’s less space than desktop screens. So mobile meta description should be limited to around that 120, 150 character limit. While desktop can be longer, I think it’s up to like 160. So there’s not a big difference. So that’s why I kind of say like kind of just focus again, look at your traffic, what’s going on with that? And that’s really kind of where that looks at there. Mobile researches or mobile searches, they’re really looking at kind of think it as like they’re looking for quick answers, and it may be more likely to engage with content that addresses their immediate needs. So it’s really important that it addresses their immediate needs. So it’s thinking of things like a short synopsis, short summary of what that page for. So it can be helpful to optimize mobile meta descriptions to include really kind of actionable calls to action. Remember what I showed you before, it’s limited time. So I kind of like pushing the thread a little bit like, hey, come in here. So again, I think it’s overall, it’s important to take a multi-device approach to really kind of metadata optimization. It’s making sure that your titles and descriptions are optimized for both mobile and desktop users. This can help improve your website’s visibility and attract more traffic from both types of devices. So at the end of the day, make sure it’s consistent, make sure it’s consistent, but also make sure that that summary is again with CTAs and so forth, so on. So yeah, great question. Cool, thanks. I’m actually going to jump into one that came in in the Q&A pod. Regarding the canonical settings, are you proposing that the best way is to enable those for both products and categories? Yeah, really good question. So your best practice is yes, it’s kind of called out there. That is typical, what you see. I don’t like a blanket answer like that. So for me, it just kind of, again, it really does depend on your business. It depends on how much you have cross-pollination between different pages, different hierarchy of data content, as well as PLPs, PDPs, categories, products, and so forth, so on. But yeah, it is kind of quote unquote, again, if you could see me, I’m doing air quotes right now, it is considered a best practice for canonical meta tags, but it is a business decision. I can’t tell you one way or another without really understanding the business and what you guys are doing. But if you have a lot of cross-pollination, yeah, it’s a best practice. Well, thank you. Okay, another question. With a small team with limited bandwidth, what would you prioritize for SEO? So this is a question I’ve received quite a bit in the past. And honestly, I saw this as a very popular question during registration too. And I’m sure that this is resonating with a lot of folks here. And it’s like, yeah, yep, I feel that. So while I don’t believe that there is any one answer that fits all here, especially with different target audiences and industries, I see these as some of kind of the high impact SEO tactics that could be universal. So it’s keyword research. So it’s ensuring you conduct thorough keyword research to identify the most relevant and high value keywords for your business. This will help you and can help you organize your content and products to attract more targeted traffic. And basically, it’s going to impact or important to your rankings at the end of the day. I kind of think of it as like optimizing, remember we talked about this before, but optimizing your website’s on-page elements. So this is meta titles, descriptions, headers, and content to ensure that they’re really properly aligned with your target keywords, and provide a positive user experience. So similar sentiments to kind of that previous question that was before the canonical, you know, kind of around mobile. Mobile is continuing to grow. And it’s important to ensure your website experience is frictionless from both a UX UI, as well as a site speed and performance side. So while I’m calling out mobile here, this is just as important on desktop. The experience for a customer should really be uniform, no matter the device that they’re visiting the site on. Shoppers typically repeat, and there’s a good portion that will visit your site on desktop and a mobile device. So ensuring that experience is consistent is definitely critical. And I’ve also seen on, you know, high impact from high question links, you know, to sites from authoritative, you know, really sources. So this can help improve your website’s, you know, authority like we were talking about before, and visibility and search engines. So research and your result pages. This can really drive more traffic to your site. Essentially, you’re creating a multi channel and multi experience brand recognition is like a kind of call it so really good question, though, because I’m sure a lot of folks here resonated with that was like, yeah, I wear multiple hats, and I’m doing all this stuff anyways. So yeah, really good question. Yep, definitely. All right, we have time for like one or two more. How can we ensure that our site is not flagged for duplicate content, especially when we have the same product in multiple categories? Yeah, so this goes right back to canonical. And this is what something again, I saw a lot of this in registration, I’m glad that somebody asked it today again. So it’s also, you know, kind of canonical URLs can help with SEO by solving the problem of duplicate content. And as kind of the question notes, duplicate content can occur on a commerce websites with multiple versions of the same product are accessible through multiple categories or filters. So when search engines encounter duplicate content, they may not know which version of the page to rank essentially, which can dilute the visibility and authority of the page and search results. This is where canonical URLs can help the canonical URL is a preferred URL for the page that tells search engines which version of that page should be considered the primary or original version. By including canonical tag on each of the pages in the website, you can ensure that your search engines, that search engines know which version of the page to rank, even if there are multiple versions of the page, which are accessible through different URLs. So by using canonical URLs, you can help avoid the negative SEO impact of duplicate content on your ecommerce website, you know, and ensure that your pages are properly optimized for search engines. I know we went over this during the demo, but remember that Adobe Commerce does natively offer configuration for canonical meta tags for product and categories and so forth, so on. So, you know, like that question was asked before, you know, what are the best practices on it? It is industry, it is target specific and dependent on your structure of your website. But, you know, kind of I hope that that answer is like really that that mean crux of it, what you’re really thinking for duplicate content aspect. Great question. Yeah, great question. And thank you, Corey, for your responses. I know we are at time, so I think I’m going to have to stop there with Q&A. If you had another question that we weren’t able to get to today, please reach out to your success account manager to get some answers on those. And as a final reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event in an email from GoToWebinar tomorrow. So last reminder, as you’re leaving today, you’ll see a very quick, brief survey pop up. It’ll take you less than two minutes. In the survey, you’re going to be asked if you’d like to share your Adobe story, and we would love to hear from you. So, if that’s something that you would like to share, check that box and we’ll reach out to you. So, we really appreciate you taking a moment to do that. So, thank you again to everyone for joining and for Corey’s time and presentation, and I hope that everybody has a really great day. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day.