Why You Need Multiple Search Engine Marketing Channels for Your Ecommerce Site
Search marketing is one of the most effective ways for ecommerce sites to grow their business in today’s increasingly competitive digital marketplace. Simply defined, search marketing is the process of boosting a website’s visibility and traffic via search engines through a combination of efforts.
In general, search engine marketing (SEM) refers to paid advertising campaigns such as Google Ads, while search engine optimization (SEO) refers to unpaid or organic tactics like producing keyword-friendly content and link building. Search engine marketing can also be used as an umbrella term to describe both paid and organic search marketing activities.
The most powerful and successful ecommerce search engine marketing strategies take a multichannel approach that combines these various tactics. SEO and SEM work together to strengthen your brand and build trust with users. These tactics also help search engines like Google see your website as a trustworthy source of information.
While SEO helps users gain awareness about your products and services, SEM reinforces your brand identity and helps your business stay top-of-mind among users. Paid advertising also allows ecommerce companies to market themselves to targeted audiences who may already be interested in their products.
With millions of ecommerce businesses vying for clicks and views, it is recommended to use every tool at your disposal to boost your brand’s visibility and authority. In this beginner’s guide to ecommerce search marketing, we dive into the top search engine marketing channels every website should be utilizing to promote and grow their business.
Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is the process of maximizing an online store’s targeted traffic and revenue by making their products more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The end goal: ensure that your product and category pages—rather than your competitor’s—rank among the top organic (unpaid) results when users search for products that you sell.
Basic on-page optimization strategies are the foundation of ecommerce SEO. For each page on your website, you will need to conduct research in order to compile a list of keywords and related keywords that you want to rank for. Your strategy should include static non-product pages (like the homepage and about page) as well as category and product pages.
The next step is to optimize on-page content including title tags, headers, and product descriptions. Providing a clean, user-friendly experience and creating an efficient navigational structure are important components of on-site ecommerce SEO as well.
SEO Link Building
SEO link building is the process of acquiring one-way hyperlinks (also called backlinks) from another website to your ecommerce website. Why does this practice matter? Search engines use links to “crawl” the web and discover new webpages, enabling them to rank for relevant keywords.
Google’s algorithm takes into consideration both the quantity and quality of backlinks when determining how well a website should rank. Links can also generate referral traffic from other websites.
There are many different strategies for building links, each with varying degrees of difficulty and effectiveness. One of the most popular SEO link building strategies is creating content with the goal that it will be shared by other users.
Blog posts, infographics, white papers, and how-to guides are all examples of content that other web users might find valuable in some way. When those users share a link to your content on their own websites, you have successfully gained a new backlink.
Email outreach is another effective link building technique. Getting featured on a website’s resource page or submitting a guest post to their blog is a great way to gain backlinks to your ecommerce site.
Amazon SEO
All too often, online retailers who are developing their SEO strategies focus solely on improving their Google rankings. But for businesses that sell their products on Amazon, it’s becoming increasingly essential to optimize their Amazon product listings as well.
Much like Google, Amazon enables users to enter keywords and browse the results pages. And just as Google users rarely click beyond the first page, Amazon users are much more likely to click on products that appear near the top of the search results.
Amazon SEO is the practice of optimizing your product listings on Amazon to help them rank higher, thereby increasing the odds that they will be clicked on by shoppers. This can be achieved by utilizing keywords and related keywords in your product titles and descriptions.
If your product listing doesn’t feature the keywords in a user’s search query, it won’t appear in the search results. Amazon also factors in past product performance (like click-through-rate and sales) to determine how high a listing should rank on the page.
Ecommerce PPC
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising is a form of paid search marketing in which the advertiser pays the ad publisher each time one of their ads is clicked on by a user. These ads can be displayed on search engine results pages, social media platforms, and other websites.
Ecommerce PPC is one of the most powerful tools in an online retailer’s playbook, because it enables them to advertise to shoppers who are searching for what they’re selling. This strategy is scalable, making it an ideal technique for small and large businesses alike.
The key to PPC success is thoroughly researching and selecting the best-performing keywords for your products. You have the power to make your ads incredibly targeted, ensuring that they reach the right audience.
When used correctly, these search marketing channels can be leveraged to boost your ecommerce website’s traffic and revenue. Keep in mind that it can take years to master SEO and SEM, and that enlisting the help of trained experts at a top ecommerce SEO agency will allow you achieve the best ROI for your marketing dollar.
Are you interested in creating an integrated, multichannel search marketing strategy that will drive traffic and revenue? Contact our team of ecommerce SEO experts today to learn more and get started.