E162 – What is Digital Shelf Space and How Can it Help Your SEO?

What is the digital shelf?

Dave puts Mat on the spot and asks him to explain what he thinks it is.

Marketing channels? Or is it data in the cloud space?- Mat

Sorry Mat, nope!

What is the digital shelf - really?

Think of when you are at a grocery store and you are down the cereal or chip aisle? Think of where things are placed in terms of eye level with adults or with kids. Think of how many items are on a shelf for a brand and how much of the shelf they take up.

The digital version of shelf space is a SERP (search engine result page) in Google or Bing. For your brand, category keyword or target term how many of those listings do you directly own or indirectly own?

That (to Dave) is what digital shelf space is/means.

How brands can own the digital shelf?

For your brand you work at or your name you can leverage social sites (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dribbl, and industry specific sites), personal site, speaker bios, guest post bio, podcast bio, etc.

The video above is from Aleyda Solis' Crawling Monday YouTube series that you should check out even if you don't work at a SaaS company.

Why you should try and own the digital shelf.

Even if your brand's site or social profile is not specifically listed, obtaining shelf space on 3rd party sites will allow you to rank for keywords that you can't otherwise.

So whatever the 3rd party aggregators that show the "best" or "top" or "local" brand you can work in that "eco system" to have a strong position and while not getting a direct listing, still have an opportunity to capture interested prospects.

Why is digital shelf space an important metric?

The higher the percentage of shelf space that you own, the more often your site and thus company will have an opportunity to be in front of prospects. To calculate what the percentage is will require a bit more work than just dropping keywords into a tool and being done.

To fully know what your ownership of shelf space is you will need to pay attention to 3rd party sites AND your own sites to figure out what your shelf space metrics look like.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you join us for another one of these business of digital podcast episodes as always. Thank you very much for listening to us and taking the time out of your day. So I believe, uh, we have Dave in the house.

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:24] How's it going? Dave is in the house.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:27] And, um, I'm a little bit nervous to start this one. Cause you know, when you're, when you're again, when you're told you're going to be thrown under the bus a little bit,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:36] I did phrase it that way. It didn't. I literally just phrased it

Matt Siltala: [00:00:40] that way. This is going to be an interesting one.

We were going to talk about what digital shelf space is and how it can help your SEO. So that's

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:50] why it matters and why you should care and

Matt Siltala: [00:00:53] all that stuff. So feel free. They've put me on the spot.

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:58] So we did not talk a [00:01:00] lot about what this is. And so I'm putting you on the spot. I'm not throwing you under the bus, I'm putting you on the spot right away.

Um, it just seems gentler when you hear me say, we're going to talk about digital shelf space. What the heck do you think that is? Cause I'm curious. Cause I've heard, I hear some people say it and I hear other people say it, talk about it, but.

Matt Siltala: [00:01:24] I almost think of it as, as two different things. Cause I have to admit, I haven't heard until you said you wanted to talk about it.

I haven't really heard people talking about digital selves shelf space. Um, and so just, I have two thoughts of it is one of them would be, is this kind of like marketing channels or