E-Commerce Search Marketing To-Do’s

Use multiple channels
Look towards other channels than just regular search engines. Comparison shopping searches has doubled compared to last year. What we see on comparison shopping sites is that visitors search on generic terms, while most shoppers trough search channels are used to type in brand names.  Also YouTube could be of interest to start with. YouTube is a great opportunity while it is not a crowded advertising space like regular SEA.

Put effort in your most important pages!
Most attention to design and content is paid to the homepage and individual pages. Only 40% arrive on a websites home page. We are used to put a lot of effort in our homepage but it is mental. Close to 60% leaves on your product pages immediately  and in average 33% on your category pages leaves immediately. When setting up a category page you should treat it as a landing page.

Optimize your landing pages
How are you able to increase your conversion rates? The most important question is where should I start. We see that most companies focus on the wrong elements and pages. You should focus on top landing pages, pages with high bounce rates and low conversion rates. You should look at the correct metrics and think of implementing a funnel in your analytics software to see what your visitors are doing. Take in mind what you want a visitor to do. Visitors navigating to you product pages is great, but navigating towards other category pages means that they cannot find what they are looking for. You have a golden opportunity if you add keyword-rich copy on landing pages. You’ll rank better and with quality content you will increase your conversion rates. Do not forget to mention your USP’s and try to differentiate your services.

Speed up!
Take care of your load time. It will affect the frequency search engine spiders will crawl your website and grab your content. Besides so, your users will enjoy fast websites too. It will decrease your exit rates. Look at your content, try to compress it and take care of a fast server.

Recommendations
Using recommendations will be a great opportunity. It will give extra content to the search engines but will also result in a better experience. It will increase the average pages per visit, the time spend on your website, it will lower your bounce rates and increase your conversions!

Take care of technical SEO
Prevent duplicate content issues. It will increase indexation. You don’t want to split your PageRank and that it dilutes your pages. You could fix trough canonical tags, but the best and easiest choice would be 301 redirects.

Check out the slides for more tips:
Adam Audette
Karon Thackston
Jiyan Wei