How ecommerce sites can use search marketing to increase traffic and conversions

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How ecommerce websites
should really use search!
By Ann Stanley, July 2012

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Ecommerce landscape
On-site Sales
On-site sales
Sales from Search from other sources
marketing
(email, affiliates, display ads, social, mobile,
(PPC, SEO, shopping comparison,
Merchant Centre) voucher sites)
Conversion optimisation
Other
Shopping platforms off-site sales
& market places
(Social, Mobile, drop shipping,
(Amazon, eBay) daily deals sites)
Off-site Sales

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Searching for products
Display options
Organic or natural
results
Universal results –
maps, news,
shopping etc....
Ads - PPC

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Summary of different shopping
results in Google
Keywords =
Samsonite luggage
Organic shopping Map
results AdWords Products
Product Listing ads and Places listings
ad extension
(Merchant Centre) (Google + Local)

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Google Venice Update

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Google Panda Update

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Panda Update from 2011 –
Optimise for the user, not search engines
• Making sure a site is optimised to provide
a rich, relevant and rewarding
experience for visitors is the best way to
avoid Panda penalties, which means:
– No duplicate content
– All pages to have unique, relevant and useful
content (even the 1000s of product pages on
ecommerce sites!)
– Good levels of interaction on site (low
bounce rates, inbound links to „deep‟ pages,
social mentions etc…)

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Google Fresh Update

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Google Penguin
Update

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Penguin - designed to penalise search
spam!
• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes – poor quality and
unnatural links
• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or
“doorway” pages
• Purposeful duplicate content

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Importance of Social

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Google‟s SPY World
“Search, Plus Your World”

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Key take-aways
• Many ways for your products to appear in the search results
– Organic results – do you appear above the fold?
– Shopping results (Merchant Centre) – free for how long?
– Local listings (Google Plus Local) – don‟t ignore Venice update
– Paid ads including Product Listing ads and new Dynamic Search ads
• Panda and Penguin may have affected your organic traffic:
– Deal with duplicate content issues
– Add unique content (category and product pages, user-generated
content, multi-media content)
– Use of blogs and social sharing – also the Fresh update
– Avoid spam (keyword stuffing and dodgy links)
– Site interaction, site speed and social signals now influence your
search rankings
Ann Stanley
ann@anicca-solutions.com
www.anicca-solutions.com