Nordstrom
Nov. 2012 – Aug. 2017
During my tenure with Nordstrom, SEO driven visitors increased from 110M to over 191M and online sales increased from $730M to over $1.5B. As an SEO strategist, I provided recommendations to the Shoes and Beauty divisions which were the 2 fastest growing in 2013. As an SEO project manager, I made recommendations for new traffic opportunities and recommendations to improve overall SEO performance. Eventually I managed a small team of 3 SEO professionals, collaborating on sitewide SEO strategies and development ideas. I continued to evangelize the importance of SEO company-wide and spread best practices. I reported to leadership weekly, did monthly and quarterly SEO forecasting, budgeting, and reported new SEO algorithm changes and their implications.
SEO Manager, Technical Project Manager, Strategist
- Evangelize SEO to leadership to secure development resources and enforce SEO best practices company-wide
- Convinced Beauty Department to use “perfume” and “cologne” instead of “fragrance” on the website due to the stark differences in search volume
- Eventually adopted in all marketing materials, catalogs, and in-store displays
- Lead initiatives to reduce errors and save traffic
- Unpublished page report shared across all marketing to reduce the use of non-functioning URLs
- Processes to dynamically and manually redirect old URLs
- Improved ranking for high volume keywords by allowing certain filters and facets to be indexable without duplication
- Evaluate and manage vendor relationships
keyword: “fragrance”
# of variations: 205,915
total monthly volume:
6,115,770*
keyword: “perfume”
# of variations: 896,444
total monthly volume:
25,388,990*
Source: SEMRush 10/19/2024
On-Page SEO
- Duplicate content mitigation
- Meet regularly with merchandising for keyword research, department naming, and new department suggestions
- Coordinate with marketing strategy, copy writers, content producers, and social marketing
- Create keyword and traffic dashboards specific to departments
- Identify rising brand and product trends
Technical SEO
- Work with product and engineering teams to build project scopes, business objectives and secure resources for development
- Create user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria
- Test releases
- Improve crawlability of links and content
- Set up weekly crawling to report and rectify site errors and duplicate content
Local Listings
- Optimized and managed local listings for 700+ stores, restaurants, tailors, and other services with Yext
- Google My Business, Apple Maps, TripAdvisor, Yelp, others
- Provided requirements and testing for API tapping Nordstrom’s store database
- Over 1B Google My Business impressions in 2018
Nordstrom SEO Recognition
How Nordstrom strategically beat Zappos in Google Search
Five years ago, in April 2011, Zappos’ market share in Google was more than three times as large as Nordstrom‘s. Today, Nordstrom has twice the market share on Google as Zappos.
Juan Gonzalaz – Search Engine Watch
5/10/2016
Top 1000 internet retailers: how Nordstrom wins in eCommerce
Nordstrom’s breadwinner — organic search… Nordstrom gets 34% of its website traffic from organic search, while Macy’s only gets 23%. Beyond this, Nordstrom gets hundreds of thousands more website visitors through this channel than Dillards and Neiman Marcus combined.
DemandJump – Medium.com
8/15/2018