|
Surviving the Thunderdome: SEM Advice for Online Retailersby Caitlin Miller, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect |
Speak the Language of Your Customers
Both online and offline, customers appreciate when a store (or website) understands their wants and needs. Search traffic, and ultimately online purchasing, depends on demonstrating to Internet users that your business is focused on their personal satisfaction — that you have the product they are looking for, expertise in solving the problem they’re currently experiencing, and can provide the solutions which they are seeking.
Now, this might be pretty easy for a website that sells a single product, but when you sell myriad products, how do you effectively present yourself as an expert on all of your products? How do you speak the languages of the customers of a broad variety of products?
Provide Your Visitors with “Runways”
Your potential customers need a place to land when they arrive on your site that makes them feel that they’ve arrived in the right place. And this “landing page” must instill confidence in them that you’ll be able to satisfy their needs. And because you need to do this across the entire variety of products you’re selling, a single landing page or “runway” may not suffice, so you may need to build multiple landing pages to accommodate, and speak to, each of your different audiences.
“Segmentation” is a search engine marketing technique that enables one website to effectively address an almost unlimited number of product categories. Let’s say you manage the website of a general merchandise department store that features multiple product categories: furniture, clothing, sporting goods, toys, etc. Using segmentation, you can create as many separate areas of the website as you like. You can group similar products together, compose a dedicated page of content for each area that speaks to its specific audience about the products in that category, and provide easy navigation to each of these areas/groups from your home page, as well as from each other.
When your site is optimized appropriately for search engines, targeting category-specific and product-specific keywords on each of your different landing pages allows you to use each of these pages as a different entry point to your site from either paid or natural search. Each page is essentially a different storefront — each specially tuned to address the needs of a different type of searcher. So instead of all visitors clicking on and arriving at your home page from the search results, they find and click these category-specific landing pages instead. This way, they are greeted in their own language, with content that speaks to their reasons for coming to the site.
Anticipate Your Customers’ Needs
What could be better than speaking the right language to each of your customers? Using the language of your customers to help generate that first sale and find a way to foster long-term loyalty through need fulfillment (i.e. cross-selling). Sure, the 18-year-old kid was just looking for a new skateboard when he found your site, but because you want to anticipate his needs; your site can prompt him – using a few intelligently placed internal links — to also check out the retro sneakers and the new skateboarding video game.
In traditional stores, unless you have related merchandise displayed in many different locations, this type of need fulfillment is impossible. But by speaking his language and anticipating his needs on your website, you not only have the opportunity to sell him more products — thereby increasing his lifetime value as a customer — you now have a customer who may very well demonstrate loyalty to your business as a result of such a positive experience on your site.
Is it All That Easy?
Herein lies the value of the keyword research component of search engine marketing. While this may seem simple, these efforts often backfire because a website doesn’t contain keywords within its content that are used (in a search) by its target audience. Remember, your potential customers are looking for you in their own language, using their own terms. Take time to learn their terminology by checking your site’s log files, and utilizing your Web analytics system, to identify the keywords your best customers are using to find your site.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, it really does matter whether you show up first or twenty-first in the search results. Our research has found that, on average, the first listing on a search results page drives four times the traffic to your site than the second. And I’m afraid that the volumes just keep diminishing from there. So as a retailer, you need, like all other search marketers, to optimize your site for natural search results and engage in profitable pay per click advertising, in order to drive the maximum number of qualified visitors to your site.
By understanding your customers and the language they speak, and anticipating your visitor’s needs, in conjunction with using natural search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, you can survive and succeed the cut-throat competition of online retail.
Click here to subscribe to the Search Marketing Advisor newsletter now.
Read retail search engine marketing case studies.
del.icio.us
 |
|
 |  |
|
|  |
|
|  |
|
| |
 |
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Sitemap | |
