By Mauricio Antunez
This is the story of how I built and made visible the SEO area at Cornershop.
Cornershop was Chile’s first unicorn and I had the honor of working at that great company, where I gave everything to achieve success. I joined Cornershop in the middle of the pandemic as an SEO Engineer. In the midst of the uncertainty we were living in those days, I faced the challenge of creating and building the company’s SEO area from scratch. This meant planning a strategy that would allow us to compete with major E-commerce players across the American continent, but with minimal resources and being as fast and effective as possible.
I have a mix of academic and work experience, I started as a Web Designer, worked on the website and internal applications of the second-best clinic in Latin America (I designed it entirely twice). It was a great school and I had to do everything during that time, from UI for complex health interfaces, UX testing before designing new subsites, and also supporting the development of the website and web applications (while studying Software Engineering at night). Among all those things, I also worked on that site’s SEO, where through consistency and hard work we managed to increase total traffic fourfold and a fairly high percentage of reservations began through organic traffic.
Finally, I arrived at Cornershop thanks to the vision of Daniel Undurraga, one of the Founders of Cornershop, who asked me to improve the company’s web performance at the SEO level to attract new customers in the markets we were entering. In new markets, nobody knew what Cornershop was, but we knew what we offered was good and that SEO could support and boost our long-term growth strategy. This was the beginning of the great journey.
First Step: Understanding the Business and Current State
I came from a company in the Healthcare area, where a completely different technology stack was used. Arriving at Cornershop was a radical change. Before starting any changes, I needed to understand the product we had well and the technology stack we used. Unlike my previous jobs, here I was 100% in Engineer mode, so I explored the data model to understand what information we had available in the databases and how it could be exploited at the SEO level.
Metrics: What Will Be Our Source of Truth
Metrics are fundamental to understanding the state of the business. At the product level, there was clarity about what was measured and why it was measured. However, at the web metrics level to be able to track the progress of SEO efforts, there was a rudimentary implementation of Google Analytics. After resolving many doubts and having clarity about what and how to measure efforts, I improved the Google Analytics implementation following best practices to have consistent numbers over time.
First challenge: Re-implementing Google Analytics to have a reliable source of truth in the long term
This was the first project that had an important impact. After the Google Analytics re-implementation, we could start trusting and making decisions based on that data. I was certified in Google Analytics, which sped things up and avoided any kind of delay.
Current state of the web application
The technology stack I found at Cornershop was completely different from what I had worked on before. We used Python both in the backend and in the Front-End, and React for certain parts of the Front-End. Additionally, we had two webapps that complemented each other. Some pages were rendered on the server side (server-side rendering) while others on the client side (client-side rendering). This technological diversity had a direct impact on the strategy we could adopt, since it was linked to the resources available to make the necessary changes.
After researching the React implementation, I realized it wouldn’t be viable to use it for the SEO strategy. The React application had been developed and refined without considering SEO as a relevant factor. In the state it was in, the cost of applying changes was too high compared to the benefits it could provide.
Evangelizing the Company about SEO Benefits
The product originated as a mobile application, adopting a completely app-centric approach. However, over time, a web version naturally emerged to allow users to interact without having to download the application. The lack of understanding about SEO made implementing changes difficult, which highlighted the need to evangelize the team. It was essential to explain why SEO was beneficial, how it aligned with the business strategy, and what advantages it offered.
To support our evangelization with concrete data, we organized weekly meetings with key people within the company. During these meetings, I presented the actions taken, current progress, and next steps to follow. We also shared insights from our work, both positive and negative, to learn from them. We established a dedicated Slack channel, which all people related to our projects joined, from the founders to the product catalog managers from different countries. All our presentations were published in this channel so that anyone could access the information and observe how the metrics improved consistently, thus supporting our strategy and efforts.
Strategy
At the beginning, I was alone on the team and then another engineer joined to support the tasks. There was a lot to do with few resources, it was necessary to strategically plan what to do first. I decided to build a 4-phase plan to implement improvements in website structure, information architecture, and web performance. All of this would improve aspects of the website that would eventually translate into an improvement in our metrics.
The SEO Strategy Involves the Entire Company
Even though someone can lead the effort, applications are not simple; there is a complexity of intermediate decisions that affect performance. In my case, the freedom that Daniel Undurraga gave me was crucial. Thanks to this, I could talk to the necessary people to implement the required changes. This openness facilitated the speed of improvements. At Cornershop, communication was direct: I could explain my actions and resolve doubts with Daniel. This dynamic contrasted with the usual bureaucracy, where each change can take months.
My strategy not only involved planning my actions, but also evangelizing different people and teams to make certain changes that would unlock my main objective. My requests were never unreasonable; they were always aligned with business objectives. If the initial implementation wasn’t possible, we found alternatives to achieve an equivalent result. Working with talented people allowed us to overcome blockers and achieve objectives.
This aspect highlights Cornershop’s work culture, where passion and common focus were evident. Problems were considered simple obstacles on the path, surmountable to keep moving forward. The company stood out for its collaborative and direct approach, which allowed us to adapt agilely to business needs and achieve constant improvements in our metrics. Additionally, transparency in communication, from key meetings to the dedicated Slack channel, reinforced our joint work and ensured the continued success of our efforts.
Thanks for reading to this point, I will publish the second part of this story in a few more days.
Continue reading the second part of this article at Building Cornershop’s SEO Area – Part 2