Landing pages can play a central role in nearly any successful online sales strategy. On the surface, the customer journey seems straightforward enough. They arrive on the landing page, engage with the call-to-action, and complete the desired behavior. Indeed, landing pages can serve as powerful lead generation tools, which lead to increased sales and bigger profits.
But, as with everything else in business and in life, the devil is in the details. Whether you’re thinking about adding landing pages as a new customer touchpoint or you want to improve the performance of your existing landing pages, make sure that you nail all five of these critical components if you want those landing pages to perform the way you want them to.
Attract the Right Kind of Traffic
Your initial inclination might be to drive as much traffic toward your landing pages as possible. You must fight this urge. If you seek out traffic indiscriminately, you’re simply throwing your resources (and your budget) out the window. It’s a waste. It doesn’t make sense to drive millions of page views if only a tiny fraction have even the remotest of interest in what you have to offer.
And when it comes to knowing who your target audience is, it’s all about the offer and value that is being presented.
A perfect example of this can be seen through accessiBe, which is an automated solution for helping websites and online businesses become ADA & WCAG compliant.
And this is important to note, as their obvious target audience is business owners and brands that have a website in place that isn’t fully accessible to all audiences. This also means that pretty much all of their marketing and paid advertising should be focused on obtaining only that audience type, while not focusing on a general audience.
To further stress this point, when it comes to the actual landing pages and content found on it, accessiBe has done an excellent job here. Not only have they covered the basics and necessities of compliance, they’ve also listed free trial, demo, and user chat right on the same page.
And as we continue to see more site owners and brands searching for keywords relating to “ada compliance,” it’s important to have a great first impression and sales page in place, while also showing offer exactly how the site and solution works.
Leverage a Smart Sales Strategy
Just as you need to be mindful about how you might spend your paid search marketing budget, you need to be equally strategic with your sales strategy as a whole. This means, in many instances, that you may need to fight against your gut instinct and let the data do the talking.
To this end, developing the best sales strategy means tapping into the best sales intelligence. A great example of this is what you find from a service like SimilarWeb. Use the digital insights of the tool to “find, close and retain more business.” Using the context of B2B, this sort of sales insight and intelligence empowers you to filter through relevant opportunities from over 100 million potential companies.
The interaction between your landing pages and these emerging opportunities is very much a two-way street. When you better identify exactly who your ideal customers may be, you can better optimize your landing pages to address their “pain points” more directly. It’s an old adage that still holds true. Sell the benefits, not the features.
When you know your customers, and you know the problem they’re trying to solve, you can better articulate the benefits and value you can provide. This is how you can craft the perfect sales pitch and implement it into your existing or new landing pages.
Focus Your Call to Action
Just as some beginning marketers might take too broad an approach in targeting keywords, they may also be tempted to throw everything at the wall in an effort to maximize their chances of success with a landing page. Sign up for a free trial. Subscribe to our newsletter. Follow us on social media. Buy this product.
That’s far too many calls-to-action (CTAs). The truth is that having too many CTAs will not give you the “best chance” at getting something out of a visitor. Instead, all it will do is confuse and distract the visitor. When there are too many options, the visitor is likely to interact with none of them at all. In other words, clearly define what your goals are before you even get started.
Take a look at this example for the upcoming Nissan Pathfinder SUV. Yes, it has multiple CTAs, but the intent isn’t really diluted. Two of the most prominent red buttons are for “build & price.” They want the customer to envision themselves buying and driving this vehicle.
Both “view offers” and “reserve yours now” encourage a similar step forward in the buyer’s journey.
Offer an Immediately Enticing Incentive
As much as you would like a visitor to read through the entirety of your cleverly crafted sales copy, most of them won’t. You’ve got literal seconds to grab their attention and entice them to act. So, make it obvious and make it immediate. Act now. This is a good deal. Look how much you can save right now.
You must clearly articulate your value in a way that is immediately obvious. Take this example from Audible.com, particularly for Prime Day.
You can see the yellow button to “try Audible Premium Plus free.” That might catch your eye, but it probably wasn’t the first thing to catch your eye. Featured even more prominently, even though it’s a bit further down the page, is “save 53%.” You’ll notice that “save 53%” is larger than “on your first 4 months” too.
Amazon is making it immediately obvious what benefit it is offering. Here is an incentive for visitors to act now. Depending on context, you can also create a sense of urgency with “act now” or a countdown timer for a “limited time offer.”
Keep Accessibility and Usability in Mind
When putting together a landing page as a cornerstone touchpoint for your larger sales strategy, you might think about your keywords, your traffic sources, your visuals, and your offer, among other considerations. One aspect that many marketers overlook is accessibility.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) strives to develop “open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.” One big part of that is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). You might think that people with disabilities and other challenges make up a small proportion of your potential customer base, but it’s likely that you’d be mistaken. Even that aside, accessibility and usability are important for all users everywhere.
If your landing page doesn’t quite render properly on a certain mobile device, you’ve already lost a customer. If the text is hard to read, you’ve lost another customer. It is absolutely in your best interest to be as vigilant as possible in this regard.
What’s more, accessibility can indeed be a ranking factor. It’s “good for SEO and sales,” according to Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal. Accessibility plays into many factors, including SEO, bounce rates, sales and more.
Prepare to Pivot and Adapt
The five elements or considerations discussed above will continue to be critically important to your sales strategy generally, and to landing pages in particular, even if certain specifics change in the future. They serve as core principles, building a foundation for a sound sales strategy. As web design standards evolve and search algorithms adapt, so must your approach to customer acquisition.
Your landing page is not a static entity. It also needs to improve, grow, and optimize over time. Take the right sales insights and metrics to heart, and adjust accordingly. Let the data be your guide.
Welcome! In our guide to ecommerce SEO, we’ll be diving into the marketing strategies that SEO experts use to drive traffic, and profit, to their own ecommerce sites.
Introduction
SEO is all about strategy. It’s about picking your target and tailoring your site in order to get the highest SERP rankings possible across as many internet searches as you can.
This is a surefire way to maximize sales, which becomes all the more important when working with an ecommerce website.
When doing SEO for an ecommerce site, the stakes can be more intimate. This is especially the case if it’s your own site with your own sales on the line.
When you’re not a merc working for another site or an affiliate hawking other people’s goods, it can make you afraid to change up your strategy since you’re likely working for your own profit, not for a pre-arranged commission.
Paralysis by analysis is real, and it’s an easy trap to stumble into when creating an SEO strategy for your own store.
If that sounds like you, you’re going to want to read our guide. We’ve kept things simple to make for an easy read while giving you all the info you need to craft a capable ecommerce strategy.
Below we’ve covered what ecommerce is and how ecommerce SEO is different from standard SEO practices, as well as what you should or shouldn’t do to find success.
How Is SEO For Ecommerce Different?
If you have your eyes on ecommerce SEO, the chances are that you’ve got a knowledge base of standard SEO practices, but there are some fundamental differences between the two that even the best of us can ignore. Let’s break down common SEO and ecommerce SEO to find where they differ.
What we’d call standard SEO could be considered a catch-all term for all Search Engine Optimization attempts, including those for ecommerce, with more specific SEO applications having their own rule sets and ways of climbing the relevant SERPs.
If you’re here, you already know what SEO does, it helps your site appear towards the top of results pages where all the clicking is happening. Most SEO is practiced in aid of site monetization, whether that’s an affiliate operation or, you guessed it, ecommerce.
When we say that SEO aims to make your site hit the top of a results page, we mean it. The internet landscape has only gotten more and more competitive in the last decade and being able to hit that first page just isn’t enough for many webmasters out there, you need to be at the very top.
The CTR drop-off is quite dramatic and that linked study comes from 2010-2011 when the online population was smaller than it is today, so even though everyone will get a bigger slice of the pie nowadays it’s still that top spot that gets all the gold.
Since then, we’ve seen the explosion of mobile smartphones that can deliver your site into the hands of thousands… If you’ve optimized your site for mobile-friendly use, that is.
SEO can be a competent marketing strategy when used correctly, using Google’s (or your search engine of choice) algorithms to put your site in front of other people for relatively little overhead.
Without SEO, you’d instead need to rely on PPC or paid advertisements that can be costly to set up and bear inconsistent revenue streams.
So, with the above info in mind, what does ecommerce SEO do differently from other types of SEO? Well, we’ve condensed what ecommerce SEO is and how it’s different into a few handy points.
First, ecommerce SEO is simply SEO for ecommerce sites. It’s also called shop SEO and is essentially where you try to rank a site that facilitates the sales of a product or service directly. This means you, as the webmaster, would likely make most if not all of the profit.
We have time to go into more detail later, but ecommerce SEO places more importance on certain pages like category pages, for example. You want to target people who are looking for a specific product and the vague category of products that you stock.
In the same vein, the site structure is even more important. You’re not an affiliate giving users directions to the nearest retailer, you are that retailer inviting them into your store to browse, and there’s no easier way to lose a sale than to have a confusing site layout.
The homepage is even more important. It’s the front lobby of your store, not a blog, so it must be an efficient but welcoming and informational landing page that gets clicks, closes sales, and creates loyal customers out of random strangers.
One aspect of ecommerce SEO that’s the same as other sales-generating SEO practices is product page optimization. This means your site should have clean, convincing, and informative product pages that catch a lot of traffic.
Unlike other forms of SEO, ecommerce sites will be closing sales themselves. This means your cart and checkout functions should be airtight. This maximizes your conversion rate and thus the profit you make from those sales, and who doesn’t like making more money?
Key Strategies For A Successful Ecommerce SEO Strategy
It’s good to know how ecommerce SEO differs from other types of SEO and how you should pay attention to different parts of your site, but how do you do that well?
We’ll walk you through the entire process right here, so you can have a stable foundation on which to build a successful ecommerce strategy.
We’ve condensed the journey down into eight easy-to-read points, so give it a read or even follow along in real-time as you edit your site and make it the best competitor it can possibly be.
1. Keyword Research
We start out simple enough with some keyword research.
Before taking a shot, you need to line up your sites, and that’s exactly what keyword research is to an SEO campaign.
For ecommerce research, we’d advise you to pay special attention to three areas.
Find keywords to be used for your homepage and product pages. Homepage keywords ensure your site appears in more vague and directionless searches while product page keywords target those who are ready to buy.
You can use long-tail keywords on blogs, especially one owned by you, to help your ecommerce site rank. Hit local exact match search volume and low difficulty, there’s no need to go toe-to-toe with the big dogs if you can avoid them.
Don’t target the same pages with the same keywords, A.K.A keyword cannibalization. You have enough work to do without you self-sabotaging your SEO by getting too over-eager with keyword use. A spreadsheet is great for managing your keywords and where they’re targeting.
2. Site Architecture
We’ve alluded to it already, but the layout of your site is important in creating an effective ecommerce business.
By layout, we don’t just mean the design of each page but how those pages interconnect via internal links to take customers to where they want to go.
Ecommerce sites tend to be bigger and offer products directly, so you want people to get to the goods easily and make their sales.
3. On-Page SEO
This is the bedrock of most SEO campaigns but there are some areas you’ll want to pay specific attention to if you want your ecommerce site to get off the ground.
First, content is king.
There is a demonstrable edge from having content rather than copy and pasting relevant text to your product pages, and it’s much better for the topical relevancy that the giants like Google are moving towards.
In your content, don’t overstuff keywords and kill your SEO campaign before it even begins. There is such a thing as too many keywords and it can be fatal for your site.
Add content to your category page, in particular, that’s where many e-commerce sites tend to sag. By adding informative content and ensuring all internal links are relevant, logical, and accurate, you can get your category page ranking to sweep up vague product searches too.
Adding words that exist in the sales lexicon, as in words like “deal,” “buy” or “shipping” or “review,” are great for generating long-tail traffic to your site, more specifically your product pages.
You want your site’s category and individual product pages to rank so that you mop up all the customers out there, from those who know what they want to those who are just browsing without direction.
4. Technical SEO
Yes, backlinks.
Technical SEO is important for all kinds of SEO and that means you’ll need a link profile for your ecommerce site.
As we said, ecommerce sites tend to be bigger, so simple math and probability dictate you’ll have more technical SEO issues.
This isn’t all inside baseball either, technical SEO profiles often decide which sites rank over one another when all else is equal.
You want that edge, so iron out all technical SEO issues so you’re not falling at the last hurdle. Run technical SEO audits like a madman and especially when you’ve been building out a new section of your site.
Trim your site like a fine bonsai tree and tie the branches so that no ugly technical issues sabotage your site’s performance.
Two of the most reputable tools you can find in the SEO community are SEMrush and Ahrefs, so check them out for all your site auditing needs.
5. Local SEO
This one is important if your site has a physical store somewhere.
If you haven’t already, you’ll want to let Google get real familiar with your business.
That way you’ll enter the search engine’s business database which will help your placement for local SERPs.
If I’m looking for the nearest shoe store, Google will want to recommend me the one four blocks away over one the next town over, even if that competitor’s site outperforms yours in typical SEO.
Go tell Google all about your business to reap the full benefits of having a local presence.
The local equivalent for backlinks when optimizing your local SEO presence is citations. Start with the Yellow Pages, or your local equivalent, and then see if newspapers and magazines can get you a shoutout in the local media environment.
They’ll also have an online presence nowadays, so see if you can’t negotiate links to their local websites to build authority. It’s just like link building but you’re more likely to know or have had contact with the people you’re reaching out to, improving your chances of success.
6. Content Marketing
You’re familiar with the online world, you are part of it, after all, so you should know that you have endless opportunities to become familiar with your ideal client base.
Depending on what your ecommerce site sells, join online communities formed around these products.
Specialized forum sites are great but there are massive sites like Reddit whose entire purpose is to unite people across a wide variety of interest bases that’ll surely encompass whatever it is you’re selling.
Once you’re in, what do you do next? Here’s a handy point-by-point guide:
After you’ve joined the various communities where your product is popular, scout out the words they use. Learn their language like a foreign infiltrator, picking up which words and phrases they use most often and the contexts they use them in. We’re sure you see where this is going.
That’s right, you just found some handy new keywords to play with. Create content – good content, as in your best content – aimed straight at these words and phrases. Raise the bar and watch your traffic count rise with it.
Rinse and repeat! You’ll run out of terms at some point but doing this when starting up a new operation is the great jumpstart that you’ll need to get the ball rolling. Also, if your ecommerce site is based in a field where the terminology changes or gets updated, like tech for example, then you can repeat this strategy whenever some newfangled technological term becomes the talk of the town.
7. Link Building
We’ve already established this is going to be necessary, so let’s get it out of the way and look at what ecommerce link building looks like.
Most SEO folks hate this part because it’s the imperfect combination of tedium and rejection, but there are definitive ways to improve your success rate.
The usual applies, stay away from low-quality sites and especially content farm links.
Google doesn’t take kindly to these sites and you don’t want to become an algorithmic leper by associating with them.
We’ve practiced the barter system since civilization has begun, so offer something nice to quality sites and see if they offer a nice inbound link back, it’s that simple in concept.
HARO is a great resource for finding people in need of a site to link to. It’s Help A Reporter Out and, by registering as a source, you can communicate with journalists and negotiate a deal that’ll be beneficial for you both. You get your link while journalists get a source for a piece they’re writing.
Outdated resources are also great for redirecting expired domains and link-heavy pages towards your own site. This is its own skill that requires training, but it’s possible to root out domains that have expired or been moved.
Grabbing up parked pages and redirecting them to your site is a surefire way to expand your traffic net. They’re also covert, your competitors can’t see these redirections easily, making them the perfect way to gain a much-needed edge.
8. Measure SEO Success
Just like how you need keyword research to plan where your shot is going, you need to see if it actually hit afterward.
Running a site involves a lot of tinkering, so it can be difficult to see if that one change you made alongside twenty others is what’s responsible for that SEO spike you saw on the weekend.
You’re going to need tools that measure this stuff, otherwise, you’re throwing phrases and keywords at the wall and you can’t even see what sticks.
The obvious candidate for this is Google Analytics, they’ll get you an accurate reading on your traffic and the engagement that the traffic is giving to you.
This means you can see how many people have found their way to your site but, more importantly, see any sticking points where engagement is concerned.
Filtering traffic by landing page and location is also great for optimizing on-page and local SEO performances.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the important metric to get from your engagement stats, too, since it’ll show how many have liked what they saw and chose your site to click on.
What’s more important, you can break these down by their queries, the country the searches came from, and what devices they used, which can all be used to tailor your content towards those demographics in the future.
The traffic you’re getting will depend on your search rankings and finding these out can be rough because of the personalization that Google adds to your searches.
Don’t search yourself, instead look to SEMrush, Ahrefs, and other sites that provide a Google Search Console for a flat and unbiased view of where your site is ranking.
Even more important than clicks are conversions and the revenue you’re getting from those conversions, assuming you’re running a for-profit business.
10 Common Ecommerce SEO Mistakes To Avoid
When it comes to SEO of all types, you want to avoid mistakes like the plague. It’s possible to stay afloat and adapt your strategy if you aren’t doing the right things, but doing the wrong things is a one-way ticket to search irrelevancy.
1. Inadequate product descriptions, titles, and images
Would you believe that there are people in the ecommerce game who have inadequate or downright inaccurate descriptions for their products?
That’s not you, right? Because that’s a great way to kill your SEO rankings.
Everything in your content, from the titles, images, and especially the product descriptions, should all be accurate and above board.
Tell me, how can you rank for relevancy when your content is irrelevant to the products you’re selling?
On the more technical side, there are a bunch of handy tips that can help you rank a page over other ecommerce sites.
Look at title tags and meta descriptions, as in the 160 characters of text that’ll appear directly under your site on a SERP. Those are the first words potential customers will read, so make them good.
Try to have high-quality product images, obviously, but it goes deeper than that. You should keep file size low so that your site will load promptly and without any resizing issues.
There are image formats that are great for web performance without having to sacrifice quality like WebP, so maybe look into using images in that format from now on.
2. Using duplicate content for product descriptions
Having bad product descriptions also includes wearing out the copy and paste shortcuts on your keyboard.
Don’t be that guy who duplicates content descriptions for their products, it’s once again antithetical to relevancy ranking since you create a soup of shared descriptions, making no individual product page shine when its keywords are looked up.
Keep it unique to get the most out of your product page SERPs. If you have a lot of similar products, ask yourself if you can combine them.
On sites that sell products, they’ll often have all colors and variants of the product share a page where the customer selects which versions they want. This is much better for ranking and standing out when Google does its crawls.
Keep checking your website scripts. That seems like obvious general maintenance advice, but it’s the simplest and most foundational advice that tends to be forgotten.
This is because you can get away with it, for a time. Your site won’t crash and burn if you don’t remove that bunk code that controls a plug-in you deleted last month, but it will harm your site’s load time. This tends to happen with ecommerce sites because of how much larger they are.
3. Mishandling out of stock pages
Handling in-stock pages is going to be great 80% of the time, but what do you do when an item is out of stock?
Slapping the words “out of stock” up there and calling it a day isn’t the best solution.
That’s called poor UX design.
So, what should you put there?
Provide an ETA on when the product will be available again, so your customers know when to come back.
Add an option to notify your users when that product is back in stock. Nudges like this are great for reminding your customers to take action and close a deal, and it’s a great customer service gesture that they’re sure to appreciate.
If the product isn’t available for the foreseeable future, find a similar product, and recommend that. An actually similar product would be nice since many sites think they can get away with improper product recommendations. This is a UX problem dealing with humans, not the almighty algorithm, so make sure that your suggested product is what your human customers will be looking for as a potential alternative.
During one of those site audits that we should be doing regularly, you’ll want to flush out any products that aren’t in your inventory and won’t come back. You don’t want them cluttering your site and baiting customers where there’s no product to be sold, and so no money to be made.
4. Poor website architecture
We’ve already talked about how poor website architecture is a problem, so let’s go into some more detail about what you shouldn’t do when building out your site.
You’re juggling more pages than most webmasters if you own an ecommerce site, so you should put your UX hat on and figure out how to balance a pleasing and logical site format with SEO performance.
If you’re doing it right, one shouldn’t really come at the detriment of the other.
Splitting your products into categories and subcategories is handy. Even if you stock just one kind of product, you’ll want to split it between the classic sub-categories of gender or cost, or both, whichever is applicable to what you’re offering.
For example, you can separate jackets into men’s and women’s, and that’s before categorizing all the different types of jackets you stock.
You can even add sub-categories for brand, material, color, you name it. This is easy with clothes, of course, but even with tech, you can separate by brand, cost, and whether they offer the newest tech features (think 4K for monitors and TVs) that’s trending.
Focus on what makes logical sense to you, a human, at least we hope. Don’t chase keywords, the purpose of the categorization is to reel people in once they’ve already gotten to your site.
They’ll get to your site via keywords and how they rank on SERPs, but once they’re in your site they’ll look for neat categorizations that appeal to their logic and sense of orderliness.
5. Poor URL structure
Good URL structure needs to come hand-in-hand with a sensical website architecture for you to get the most out of your site.
All the new categories and subcategories can make new URLs that need managing.
Following our jacket example from earlier, say you’re the proud webmaster of www.exemplarjackets.com, a nonexistent site.
You have jackets, obviously, but you can’t present a pile of unsorted jackets to your consumer base.
Watch how the URLs should progress as you add different product filters to narrow down your jacket-wearing options.
www.exemplarjacket.com/jackets – This is what we’d start with as a customer looks at the jackets on sale.
www.exemplarjacket.com/jackets?size=L – Then we add a size filter because they’ve chosen L.
www.exemplarjacket.com/jackets?size=L%material=denim – Now we’ve added that it’s a denim jacket they’re looking for.
www.exemplarjacket.com/jackets?size=L%material=denim%color=black – And now they’ve specified they want dark denim, so it’s been added to the URL chain.
www.exemplarjacket.com/jackets?size=L%material=denim%color+black%price=low-to-high – Finally, before making a purchase, they’ve sorted by price to get the most cost-effective option.
The order of each addition to this link isn’t concrete, it’ll change depending on the order the filters are applied. You see what this means, right?
Just one page can have tens of variants, if not a hundred, and this is why ecommerce sites end up being very big. You need to have canonical tags otherwise your SEO game is done.
By adding canonicals to these URLs, the search engine crawlers won’t count all of the different variants. Instead, they’ll only count the root product page and leave the rest to be explored by potential buyers.
Make sure your H1 headings and title tags also have the model numbers of any products you’re supplying, as well as the brand name if that’s relevant.
Be as specific as possible so both the crawlers and customers who know exactly what they want can find your site.
6. Keyword stuffing product pages
Keyword stuffing dilutes the quality of the keywords you are targeting and ranking for too many keywords across too few pages will limit the SERP potential that your site has.
It’s a common SEO mistake since we’re told that keywords are great, but as we said, there is such a thing as too many.
You’d be surprised how many sites make their pages literally unreadable in the pursuit of an extra five, or twenty-five, keywords on that page.
Don’t try too hard, it’ll turn away both your customers and your search engine.
It backfires in a spectacular way, increasing the bounce rates from your page and attacking your site’s SEO, harming your relationship with Google’s crawling algorithms, so you’re losing favor with the two parties that you want to keep on your page.
7. Not using product schema markup
Product schema markup is often neglected, especially by newcomers who might be intimidated by it.
The images you use on your site should be easily findable via Google Image Search functions since you never know where your next customer will stumble upon your site from.
Expanding your options is only a good thing.
It’s pretty simple, just make sure that the image filename and its alt tags are all specific and descriptive, and of course relevant to the product itself, and it should make it easier.
If your jacket images are called image001.jpg or some other vague and useless title, then you have a problem.
People will find their way to your site through images and ranking for image searches using schema markup is a great consolation prize for when you can’t quite crack the relevant keywords or phrases.
8. Using tabs or accordion content
When you’re formatting the product pages of your site, check the product descriptions as well as the specs and accompanying reviews if there’s material there to be displayed.
Is it all laid bare, or is it collapsed?
This has been a debate between UX and SEO specialists for quite some time. From the UX perspective, collapsing these looks much neater and is better for the eyes of your customers.
The SEO perspective, however, has dealt with Google in the past and know that material not immediately visible on-page may be forgotten.
Google’s track record on this, like with many things, has been mired and contradictory. Since 2016 they have said that everything is counted after saying that it wasn’t before then, but some SEO case studies have shown an increase in organic traffic when drop-downs aren’t used.
You’ll need to decide where you fall in this debate, we can’t do that for you.
What we can say is that a hover drop-down menu seems to be a happy compromise between SEO value and UX minimalism since it’s ostensibly counted by Google yet isn’t visible until customers show interest by moving their cursor over the drop-down trigger.
9. Using dynamically generated content
Organic searches rank static pages more consistently, building up a cumulative traffic base that you just don’t get with dynamically-generated content.
Besides, the more unique pages you have, the better, so it’s a good habit to acquire early on.
Don’t worry about having too many, just get into the groove and let the number of static pages grow as your site grows organically.
It also makes for a more solid site structure as you can organize the static pages around categories and other similarities they have.
For example, dynamically-generated content in a subcategory won’t be properly linked to the parent category, meaning that the subcategory won’t rank with the power of that parent behind it.
If you already have an established ecommerce site with many dynamically-generated pages, you may want to reconsider a URL migration. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but your lack of static content could be what’s holding you back, and it’ll benefit you in the long-term.
10. Focusing only on classical SEO ranking factors
Finally, ecommerce SEO is different from standard SEO, that’s the premise of this entire guide, so why would you treat your ecommerce site like any other SEO project?
Being hyper-focused on titles, H1s, or query rankings is fine, but you should be looking even deeper than that.
You should constantly be asking why users are clicking your site over another person’s, and vice versa.
With ecommerce, you’re providing a product, so it’s not as simple as “mine was the first site they saw when the page loaded.”
Product range and pricing are usually where it’s at. Become obsessed with your closest competitors, above and below you, to see what they’re doing right and wrong in comparison to your site.
SEO tools and algorithm pandering will help you out but remember that SEO was always about keeping users on your page instead of someone else’s.
Sometimes the edge you need isn’t found in tech jargon on your site’s back-end, but in good, old-fashioned sleuthing of your competition.
Discussing Ecommerce SEO Case Study Success Trends
Fortunately, we have a wealth of information to draw from when looking at how the big players conduct their own ecommerce SEO.
Think about it, every large retailer has made the leap online over the past two decades and, while they may have name recognition on the streets, every SERP is a free-for-all where even smaller sites can edge out larger, bigger-budget retailers as long as the right SEO strategy is implemented.
That said, we’re not going to get into case study specifics here. We’re going to go over the general trends that we’re seeing in big-name ecommerce SEO, because who better to learn from than the retail industry giants?
It’s apparent that even the largest ecommerce sites out there have trouble with two things, technical SEO and on-page SEO.
On the technical SEO side, even the largest sites were reluctant to have long redirect chains and Hreflang integration into their sites, which they seem to be being punished for when compared to smaller sites that have a tighter technical SEO profile.
As for on-page SEO, the ecommerce giants still struggled with H-tag structure and sub-300 word landing pages, which is a big no-no. Perfect on-page SEO is crucial to ecommerce success. There were also some messy URLs that could do with trimming, so make sure that your URLs are neat and easy to understand by both people and the algorithm.
Surprisingly, page speed is a problem for larger retailers on the desktop. It would seem that attempts to optimize for mobile have led some retailers to neglect their desktop speed performance when both are key to maximizing site success.
The best performers seemed to stay on top by virtue of many inbound links tied to quality content, which is all the more reason to employ a rigorous but above-board link building strategy.
What to take from these points? Keep your technical and on-page SEO in order, no matter what. Nothing gives you more of an advantage over larger competitors than a neater SEO profile.
Get Hreflang if you need to and clean up those URLs, try to have at least 300 words of content on your landing pages that are informative without being dense.
The rest of your content should be good, that’s a surefire way to get incoming links. Try to load your site as fast as possible on both mobile and desktop, letting one suffer over the other is unacceptable and it will cost you.
Summary
That’s all we have to say for now. We’re sure the landscape for ecommerce sites will change moving into the future but we’re confident you’ve got it down from here. There’s a lot of plates you need to spin, so refer back to us when you get stuck and you should find something that can help.
We can do you one better, actually, here’s a point by point breakdown of our entire guide:
Optimize all of your content for keywords, but not too much, while creating unique and original content that isn’t duplicated or dynamically-generated. Keyword stuffing suffocates SERP potential and can offend customers, so leave well alone after you’ve ranked for the terms you were targeting.
When an item goes out of stock, give its page some TLC. Add as much info as you can to draw customers back when it’s in stock, which you should give an approximation of. If you have the means, set up notifications for them. If the product isn’t coming back, then recommend them a similar product and clean out any unnecessary code corresponding to the unavailable product.
Decide product categories and subcategories based on UX, not suspected keyword volume, and use canonical tags to avoid a meltdown in the Google indexing algorithm that’ll only obfuscate your useful site pages and harm SEO performance.
Use product markup schema so that image-finding tools can find your products and display them properly, increasing traffic by this means. Remember this option when you can’t crack a keyword or phrase, it could be a consolation prize that your competitors haven’t thought of.
Use hovering menus to get the best of both tabbed and un-tabbed content. It looks good from the UX point of view while not sabotaging your page in Google’s search rankings, so it keeps the SEO side of things running smoothly. Descriptions, reviews, specs, slap a hover-triggered drop-down menu on all of them if you don’t want to have them on the page permanently.
Use good old competitive tactics like research on your competitors’ prices and product ranges. Offer more than what they are for less where it’s financially viable. Combining old school market aggression with an airtight SEO strategy can be the key to edging out your opponents and reaping the spoils.
How many times have you seen a killer marketing campaign and thought to yourself, “Wow, I wish I would’ve thought of that!”
(Glossier, I’m looking at you.)
We’ve all been there.
The truth is, when you’re just starting out, it can be tough to know whether your strategy is as comprehensive and powerful as it could be.
To help ease some of that uncertainty, we’ve created this guide that’ll show you step-by-step how to create a marketing strategy that leaves no stone unturned.
Let’s dive into the five critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2019, followed by some examples for further inspiration.
How to Create a Marketing Strategy
Build a marketing plan.
Create buyer personas.
Identify goals.
Select the appropriate tools.
Account for existing resources.
Audit and plan media campaigns.
Bring it to fruition.
1. Build a marketing plan.
Wait, I have to make a plan for my strategy? What’s the difference? Your marketing strategy provides an overview behind the reasons why your marketing team will need certain resources, take certain actions, and set certain goals over the year. Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve that strategy.
The right template can help you build a marketing plan that identifies your budget for the year, the initiatives your marketing organization needs to tackle, and the marketing channels you’ll use to implement those initiatives. And it will tie everything back to a business summary, to keep you aligned with overarching company goals.
2. Create buyer personas.
If you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s the chance to do it. A buyer persona is an example of your ideal customer.
For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30’s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.
With this description, Macy’s Marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in-mind.
Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information — including age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Notice how Belinda has all of those attributes in her description.
You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun). Buyer personas should be at the core of building your strategy.
3. Identify goals.
Your marketing strategy goals should coincide with your business goals. For example, if one of your business goals is to have 300 people attend your annual conference in three months, your goal as a marketer should be along the lines of boosting online RSVPs by 10% at the end of the month.
Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value. Whatever your goals, identify what they are and how your marketing organization can work to achieve them over the next year.
4. Select the appropriate tools.
Once you have your goals identified, make sure you have the right tools to measure the success of those goals. Online software like social media schedulers gives you analytics to help you keep track of what your audience likes and doesn’t. Alternatively, you might consider Google Analytics to measure blog and web page performance.
Additionally, it will be helpful if you make your goals SMART — to do so, take a look at How to Write a SMART Goal [+ Free SMART Goal Template]. Here are a few tools that can help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals:
Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicating about the projects they’re working on. Create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.
Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.
Pricing: Free; Business Class, $9.99/user/month; Enterprise, $17.50/user/month for 100 users
Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.
You can also transform data pulled from timeline and Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com and ensure deadlines have been met. Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and ensure your whole company is collaborating.
SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website. SEMrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.
But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. Use SEMRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.
BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry to increase engagement. Use the platform to identify influencers who may help your brand reach, and monitor comments and trends to make the most of every turn.
They also have tools to help with crisis management and video marketing as your needs evolve.
Need to optimize your website this year? Consider getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to. You can even make sure your “buy now” buttons are in the best place.
Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help ensure your website is offering the best user experience and the best return.
Pricing: Basic, $24/month; Standard, $49/month; Plus, $99/month; Pro, $249/month; Custom options available upon request
5. Account for existing resources.
Decide what you already have in your arsenal that can help you create your strategy. To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories — paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid Media
Recall that paid media means any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn offer paid media options that boost your exposure.
Owned Media
Owned media is any of the media you create — blog posts, ebooks, images, and infographics that your marketing team has created are examples of owned media.
Earned Media
Earned media is another way to say user-generated content. Shares on social media, tweets about your business, and photos posted on Instagram mentioning your company are all examples of earned media.
Gather your materials in these areas and consolidate them all in a single vehicle so you’ll have a clear vision of what you have and how you can integrate the three channels together to maximize your strategy.
For example, if you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media), you might consider promoting your blog posts on Twitter (paid media), which customers’ might then re-tweet (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded strategy.
The free option? Tweet it from your company’s Twitter or post it on Instagram and use relevant hashtags to spread it.
If you have resources that don’t fit into your goals, nix it. This is a great time to clean house or identify gaps in your materials.
6. Audit and plan media campaigns.
Cleaning house segues straight into this step. Now, you must decide which content is going to help you. Focus on your owned media and marketing goals. For instance, will updating the CTAs at the end of your blog posts help you increase RSVPs to your event?
Next, look at your buyer personas. Let’s say you work for a video editing software company. If one of your persona’s challenges is adding clean sound effects to their videos but you don’t have any content that reflects that, make a 15-second demo video for Instagram to show how great your product is at solving that challenge.
Finally, create a content creation plan. The plan should include the title, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it’s solving for your buyer persona.
At this point, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your strategy will be executed (and by which teams).
The final step is to bring that all together — to put actions into your planning. Create a document that maps out the steps you need to take to execute your campaign. In other words, define your strategy.
Think long-term when creating this document. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured timeline should be the home base for your strategic marketing efforts.
To paint an example, let’s go back to the video software company.
Maybe in January, you will launch a software update that improves the exportation process for users. In April, you want to publish an ebook that explains editing terms to your buyer personas, and in September, you plan to launch an integration with other software.
Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be, as well. As long as the strategy includes all of the necessary information, you’ll be all set to take your company’s brand from okay to outstanding.
Now that we’ve explored five critical steps of a complete marketing strategy, let’s look at some “Why didn’t I think of that?” strategies to inspire your own.
Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies
1. Regal Movies
Digital strategy: Owned media
Regal Movies took the Halloween spirit to a new level, even re-naming their Twitter to reflect the spirit of the season. This “Monster Madness” poll is a fun, interactive way to get followers invested in Regal’s content:
Regal’s tweet is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers followers gave (and, apparently, American Werewolf didn’t stand a chance). Regal effectively kept true to their brand by using only classic movies in their poll,, while still putting a modern spin on it.
This is also a good example of how retweets don’t necessarily equal success. While four retweets isn’t that big of a deal, check out the votes: 461. That means there were over 400 interactions with a single tweet.
2. Taco Bell
Digital strategy: User-generated content, earned media
Real love is taking your engagement photos at your favorite fast food Mexican restaurant — right? User-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy — it demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, and also incentivizes other users’ to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out. Plus, sometimes the content your brand-lovers create is really, really good:
It’s not every day someone takes engagement photos at a fast-food restaurant, and Taco Bell jumped at this earned media opportunity. Earned media is at work here because this couple is saying they love baja blasts and crunchwraps as much as they love each other — so it must be delicious.
3. Small Girls PR
Digital strategy: Event marketing
Wait, is that Keke Palmer?
Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company’s talents is throwing amazing events for their clients, like Olay. This event recap carousel on Instagram is an effective event marketing example.
Event marketing is a fantastic opportunity to boost awareness for your brand. Not every business needs to throw lavish events, either. Event marketing can be as simple as the last company outing you had at your team’s favorite brewery.
Posting a quick recap on Instagram sheds light on your business’s culture, and demonstrates your appreciation for your employees’, ideally incentivizing others to apply.
4. Diesel Cafe
Digital strategy: Word of mouth
Boston-local cafe Diesel Cafe is more than just a great location to get vegan bagels. It also rocks at word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, Diesel even has a website dedicated to it — a place where fans can submit letters about the fun times they’ve had at the cafe:
Check your company’s Yelp climate. Are people giving you nice reviews? Showcasing some of them on your social channels is an effective opportunity to provide social proof that your products or services are a worthwhile investment, since people typically trust peers more than ads.
5. Target
Digital strategy: Paid media, Twitter cards
If you’ve got the budget for paid media, take full advantage of it. Paid media is when you pay social channels, like Twitter, to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:
Get wrapped up in soft sweaters and fleece-lined jean jackets.
An inclusive ad from Target about fall shopping uses Twitter cards to promote their brand and offer easier ways to shop — simply click on the photo, and you’re redirected to a purchase page. More social channels are offering ways for shoppers to purchase in-app or close to it, driving sales and boosting exposure for brands.
Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn’t something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to ensure you’re reaching your ideal audience, whenever and wherever they want to be reached.
Stick with it (and use some of the resources we’ve included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to ensure you’re spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.
Editor’s note: This post was originally publishing in October 2019. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.
Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.
SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website. SEMrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.
