Blog

Get Me Everyone! The Gary Oldman Approach to Ecommerce Consulting

“Bring Me Everyone!”

If you’ve seen the movie “The Professional” by Luc Basson starring & Gary Oldman you’ll probably know the scene. Leon (Jean Reno) is holed up in his apartment after taking out half of the police force and Stansfield (Gary Oldman) is at wits end and calls for backup. When asked who to get, his reply is simple – “Bring Me Everyone!”

Similarly, when dealing with large ecommerce projects, we find it’s best to make of what you have to work with by taking the Gary Oldman approach to SEO ecommerce consulting and “Get Everyone!” involved.

Do Your Homework.

Fire up your research tools and take a deep dive into the client’s website to get the full picture by identifying all the important stuff. Check everything from webmaster tools, analytics and rankings, remember to spider the site to identify the duplicate URL’s, fetch status codes, page titles and heading information required to make sure that the client’s on-page factors are on point. Compile a site audit and set time aside get the client’s development team on-board and chipping-away at the fixes. Most importantly, conduct a link audit to assess the competitive situation and get a glimpse at the volume, quantity and quality of links you’re going to require to get in the game.

Do Your Homework.

Formulate Your Battle Plans.

For us, the meat of any successful organic SEO campaign is ultimately the quality of a client’s link profile. With one client in particular, our link audit revealed that the client had a small, but healthy and natural link profile as very little off-site search engine optimization or link building had been performed. Additionally, one of their major competitors had the advantage as they had been aggressively building out their own link profile and domain authority for some time – this presented both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge was to make up the ground they had covered in building the sites domain authority, but the advantage is that backlinks are public and can be mined to look trends or additional sites that we too could reach out to to with the aim of building mutually-beneficial relationships and getting exposure for our client.

Plan Your Attack.

Getting everyone.

While building our initial client link building strategy and presentation it became clear that resources would be limited. We’d have to cover a lot of ground and had only a small in-house team and the client’s development agency to work with. This situation was serious, in the way that it would take an all out effort from everyone involved to makes things happen, so in our first client meeting we prefaced the link building strategy discussion with the recommendation to go “Gary Oldman” on this job and “Get Everyone!”

Development

Get development involved right away. Provide them with what they need to fix on-page SEO issues identified in the site and content audits. Focus on resolving site architecture issues, crawl errors and warnings, file naming conventions, page titles, meta descriptions and finally content headings. This should keep them busy while you turn your attention to the 1200 pound gorilla in the room – linking.

Obtaining the right kind of links in the right volumes without putting our client at risk called for a squeaky-clean, content-centric approach to marketing which would also have to include business blogging, guest blogging, content syndication and social media. This would ensure that links were genuine, authentic, relevant and valuable and contributed positively to our client’s domain authority and great rankings with longevity.

Content Writers

Next stop are the content writers. once their daily workflows, tasks and outputs have been assessed. Educate the team members on the value of links and how to write with SEO in mind. Provide a reference guide for business blogging and assist with the creation of blog post templates for different types content before establishing a manageable content calendar to ensure regular unique content is produced around the clients chosen products, promotions, themes, topics and keywords.

Once your content is sorted, setup syndication and begin educating in house teams about how to incorporate social media into their daily routine for the purposes of building relationships, staying informed and syndicating content. Focus on one channel at a time rather than trying to be everywhere at once, build a road-map to cover the remaining major networks by adding one at a time as capacity allows.

Marketing & Design.

Marketing departments vary. Understand the client’s daily production responsibilities, media formats and output channels to identify points in the workflow process where SEO best practices can be implemented easily without disrupting production. Think files names, calls-to-action, image optimization and the use of image based social media and web 2.0 websites to showcase, curate and share the clients creative designs for added exposure and linking opportunities. In short, leverage what you have to work with.

Every client has different strengths, play to them. If a client has great creative designs, showcase them on Flickr with a branded profile and incorporate these updates into the business blogging mix. If your client has a killer photo library, put it online, label it and provide thematically relevant sites the opportunity to use your media under a creative Commons License, this can be a fantastic source of both traffic and links.

Understand. Educate. Lead.

To Summarize.

Doing your homework, choosing the right keywords and knowing what needs to be done to get a client ranking is one thing, but sometimes the resources are just not there – at times like these it’s ok to go a little “Loco” and get gangster on a problem. Our strategy worked, not only did we manage to help educate the client teams on SEO and get their content and link building rolled-out, but our client is now front and center in the SERP’s for the chosen ‘primary’ keywords and ready for the next phase of the project.

Your Turn.

Thanks for taking time out to read our blog. I hope that you enjoyed and found value in our Gary Oldman approach to monster ecommerce consulting jobs and would love to know your thoughts.

How do you tackle big projects? Do you go a little gangster too? Sound off in the comments below to join in.

Categorised in: Online Marketing

This post was written by Bronson