Gemma is a freelance SEO consultant with over 15 years’ experience in the digital industry. She has worked agency-side at a senior level and supported a wide range of brands, both big and small, with SEO strategy and delivery, including international SEO, project management, and measurement and analytics.
For our WE-COMMUNITY, Gemma has shared three of the most common SEO challenges faced by in-house teams and practical ways to take control of them today.
In-house e-commerce marketing teams face a constant battle to keep SEO on track – and it’s not always easy.
I’ve worked with many in-house teams over the years on projects big and small, and even considered making the move in-house myself. Over that time I’ve seen the same pain points crop up, with digital teams of all shapes and sizes having to face very common challenges, no matter what the industry or the size of the business.
Most of these will be familiar to many and are unfortunately out of your control, be that limited resources, lack of specialist expertise, or getting stakeholder buy-in.
But some things are within your control. And you can start to address them right now – today.
It can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts and ultimately make the difference between a poor-performing website and one that is able to excel.
1. Poor SEO Site Maintenance
The product inventory on e-commerce sites is continually being updated, whether daily, weekly, or seasonally. New product ranges get launched, new items come into stock, and others are discontinued. If not handled correctly, all these updates can make small SEO problems turn into very big ones.
Eventually, these issues can build up to a point where they have a huge negative impact on performance and are very time-consuming to fix. A real-world example I’ve seen many times is the incorrect handling of product removal.
In a best practice scenario, the following tasks should be implemented when a product is discontinued and its page removed from the site:
- The old product URL should be permanently (301) redirected to the next most relevant page on the site. In most cases this would be the parent category/sub-category page, or in others it might be an alternative product page.
- Any internal links pointing to the old product URL should either be updated or removed, this includes those within any resources such as blog posts or news articles.
This seems like a very simple process, and I understand it can be difficult for large sites that change their products several times a year, but it’s a vital aspect of ensuring that a website remains technically SEO sound and should not be overlooked.
Many times I’ve manually gone through sites correcting every incorrect internal link when the problem has gotten out of hand. It’s time-consuming but massively worthwhile, as almost every time I’ve seen a sitewide boost to performance.
The aim here though is to not let it get to this point and so here’s how I’ve found best to handle it.
Action today: Create an SEO Best Practice Guide for your team
Quite often, there’ll be lots of different people making updates to the website. Whether they are junior or senior, dev, marketing, or sales teams, they all need to follow the same SEO best practices. SEO may not be familiar to everyone, and some might only make updates once in a blue moon, meaning it can be difficult to remember the process.
To make it as easy as possible for everyone to adopt, my go-to is to create an SEO Best Practice Guide, providing step-by-step instructions on the processes required.
My typical sections include things like:
- How to Permanently Remove a Category URL
- How to Permanently Remove a Product URL
- How to Update a URL
- How to Write a Title Tag
- How to write a Product Description etc.
There are plenty of other items you can add to this list, so include anything you think would be useful. Depending on your CMS, there are likely recurring issues (SEO-related or not) that could easily be rectified if everyone followed the same processes.
Lastly, make sure everyone is aware of and has access to the document. Version-control it if changes are required so everyone is working from the latest version.
Although this solution involves a little bit of upfront work and ongoing upkeep of the guide, it’s well worth the effort. It can save a lot of time, prevent revenue loss, and reduce tedious work down the line. It also ensures that any other SEO work on the site, such as content optimisation or authority building, will not be hindered by avoidable technical issues.
2. Spreading SEO Activities Too Thin
With the limited budget and resources that most in-house marketing teams face, you often won’t be able to implement the comprehensive SEO strategy you’d like to.
Even so, you’ll rightly want to implement as much as you can, but this approach can be risky, often leading to marketers spreading their activities too thin and not actually getting the results they want.
Some problems I’ve seen occur when teams try to roll out optimization updates across too many pages at once without properly understanding whether they will have the desired impact. In the worst case, teams can spend a lot of time and effort achieving very little, which makes it even harder to get stakeholder buy-in or additional budget next time around.
Action today: Run a proof of concept project
In my experience, when SEO resources are limited it’s much better to undertake a proof of concept project.
This could involve focusing on a small subset of related pages (e.g. product pages belonging to a particular subcategory, or a sample of category pages) and testing your changes there first before deciding whether to roll them out elsewhere.
Not only does this approach allow you to take a deeper look at each URL, identifying content gaps and ways to present information more effectively, it also enables you to prove whether your activities have been effective. With this data, you can decide whether to spend more budget implementing the changes on other pages or try a different approach.
Working on a small subset of pages also allows you to measure results against a control group. Things change constantly, seasonal traffic fluctuations or the introduction of AI can make interpreting results difficult. Having a control group of similar pages helps you understand the true impact of your changes.
For example, if your proof of concept project coincides with a seasonal downturn, overall traffic may decrease. But if the drop is smaller than that of the control group, you’ll know your changes have improved performance and by roughly how much.
The results from a proof of concept project can then help predict ROI if changes are rolled out to other products or categories. This is exactly the type of data stakeholders want to see, and it could even secure a budget increase to roll out site-wide if the ROI stacks up.
3. Chasing the Competition
As an in-house marketer, you’ll be well aware of who your competitors are and will likely keep a close eye on what they’re doing.
While monitoring competitors is necessary, problems arise when teams become fixated on competitor sites and feel they need to copy every change. In my experience, this isn’t a path to success and can leave you feeling like you’re always falling short.
I regularly conduct competitor audits. They provide useful insights into the industry landscape, how other sites perform, and how they target customers. This research can support future strategy, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Just because competitor sites are doing things differently doesn’t mean it’s working, or that it’s appropriate for your audience.
If you only make changes based on competitors, you’ll always be playing catch-up and miss the chance to get ahead.
Action today: Highlight your own expertise and authority instead of copying competitors
Rather than copy the competition, you need to compete and show your customers why they should buy from you.
Demonstrating expertise and authority is crucial for SEO. Most marketers are familiar with E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) but in-house teams often underestimate how much knowledge they already have and fail to convey it fully on their website.
Properly demonstrating these qualities can affect whether your site gains visibility (in SERPs or AI models) and whether customers decide to buy from you.
I’ve detailed just a few tips for improving E-E-A-T signals based on the common gaps I’ve seen in many e-commerce sites:
- Where relevant, provide guides and instructions on how best to use your products. Utilise the knowledge of all your departments and get industry experts to write about their experiences (creating author bios for each). What you’re looking to do here is generate the type of content that others will want to reference and it will help to grow your reputation.
- I’ve seen many a site fail to include its various certifications and accreditations on important pages. Most companies work hard to achieve these and so make sure to shout about them and display them on priority pages where they’re easy to see. It’s such a small thing and an easy fix but it can be a major factor towards achieving greater trust.
- Work hard to get citations and reviews, for both individual products and the company/brand as a whole. With the increased uptake of AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to name a few, more and more users are using LLMs alongside traditional search engines to find what they want/need. E-E-A-T signals are key here too, with citations and reviews being big influences upon whether your site gets visibility.
- Top Tip: Site footers appear to be having influence on LLMs so take full advantage and use this area to communicate your unique selling points as well as any other differentiators.
All the issues above are common root causes of performance stagnation. The good news is that because they’re common, addressing them will likely put you ahead of your competitors.
Although it can take time to establish these processes, once they’re in place, they provide a long-term platform for launching future SEO strategies effectively.
