4 Vital Steps when Building an Adobe CQ5 SEO Strategy

It’s nearing the end of the month, you’re asked to present the company metrics to both your manager and their boss. Looking at your Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) metrics, you see that bounce rate is up, average time on site is down, your main marketing channels have taken some hits, and leads have dropped. This does not look favorable for you or your presentation.

The only way to make this look good is by providing solutions on how to improve. You see some hope in your organic channel, which presents a whopping 40-50% of overall traffic.

These visitors are engaging with your content and your company, but nothing is being done to increase their growth. You decide to focus your attention on growth in this area, but how?

Your answer: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your problem: The company doesn’t have an SEO strategy in place and you’re not really sure where to start.

This is a common problem for many organizations. SEO can be tricky to figure out with all the rules set by Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. The common go-to is to increase content. It’s better than nothing, but there is a lot more to developing a strong SEO strategy.

Adobe CQ5 SEO

Adobe Experience Manager is a platform created for marketers. It provides all the same SEO capabilities just made easier and achievable on a larger scale.

With all of the built-in features, Adobe Experience Manager still needs an SEO strategy to produce greater results. Addressing your strategy in the beginning will help with future implementations.

Hallmarks of an Adobe Experience Manager SEO Strategy:

1. Keyword Selection
Like all SEO, Adobe Experience Manager SEO begins with smart keyword selection. The emphasis should be on selecting high to medium-tail keywords that create the right categories and subcategories, which can be combined to create long tail words.

2. Automated Rules
Systems like Adobe Experience Manager let you create rules that load pages with dynamic content. If set up properly, AEM will generate needed SEO information. Let’s say you receive a spreadsheet with 3,000 products, automated rules will make building out those 3,000 or more product pages much easier.

It can pre-populate your tags, keywords, and descriptions from page creation. However, the rules have to be flexible because not every set of products will break down the same way.

3. Optimized Templates
At the enterprise SEO level, templates need a bit of intelligence. Pages without all the proper tags (meta description, image alt, machine readable markup) can present a hole in your SEO efforts. This can cause bottlenecks for large organizations, so developing this out in your strategy prior to template creation will make it easier when creating new pages.

4. Combating Duplicate Content
A major mistake lots of enterprise sites make is using stock content sent by a partner or supplier. It is not created around the keyword hierarchy you have already set up and normally lacks relevance to your specific keyword sets.

First, you have to make certain what you receive will work with your automation rules.

Second, you have to remember that you are not the only one receiving this content. If you get stock text from a supplier, so will everyone else with the same supplier.

Even though SEO is sometimes forgotten and strategies overlooked, organic search still tends to be the highest source of traffic for organizations. Google, though losing market share, is still the search engine of choice. Not developing an SEO strategy is simply ignoring the opportunity to increase free traffic and free opportunities. Organic traffic is a low cost, but it takes time to develop. Once done properly, it’s a machine that continues to produce with little added effort.

If you’re in the process of optimizing or implementing your AEM solution, we can help. Reach out to our team today.