If you want to grow your e-commerce, the formula is simple: traffic multiplied by conversion rate equals sales.
Even if your conversion rate remains constant, the more traffic you drive, the more your sales grow. How, then, do you drive traffic?
Traffic comes from a combination of paid and organic search results. Paid search includes paid ads, media, and promotion with a strategy anchored on key search terms across retailer websites and online marketplaces. Organic search rank represents visits that come from a search engine and not paid advertising.
For some time, it’s been critically important to rank on the first page of search results for a keyword term. This is because fewer than a third of consumers ever make it past page one. If your brand or product doesn’t rank, you can forget about winning space on the digital shelf.
Over the last year, enterprise e-commerce has grown substantially while consumers’ shopping habits have forever shifted. In our new, digital retail age, consumers increasingly rely on retailers’ sites and online marketplaces as platforms for product research as much as purchases.
This is why e-commerce SEO is fundamental to your brand’s omnichannel digital marketing strategy. It’s also why we’ve launched the performance analytics platform Line Item. Let’s look at what’s important and how Line Item can help optimize your e-commerce SEO.
Is your SEO working?
Simply put, when your e-commerce SEO strategy is working, you’re selling—profitably. But you need to know more to optimally manage it. Line Item helps you understand how your SEO is working across all key search terms on retailer websites and online marketplaces, including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and many more. Line Item reveals whether your brands or items rank on page one and analyzes your page share and rank by brand or any other attributes.
The best opportunity to improve page rank, other than sales itself, is to be sure the titles and keywords of your items respond well to all applicable search terms. Line Item does this by calculating organic page rank for all yours and competitors’ items across a wide range of search terms. Line Item then compares titles and keywords in better ranked items to recommend improvements
Is your product information keeping you off page one?
What you don’t know can hurt you. Inconsistent or incomplete product descriptions and images can cost you page rank and by extension sales. Line Item will analyze whether your content and images are consistent across retailer websites and online marketplaces. This can help you resolve gaps that may be keeping your search results off page one.
Are you priced right online?
e-Commerce Consumers have access to a world of information at their fingertips—which has radically changed shopping behavior, preferences, and price sensitivity. Line Item can help you answer if you are priced right online by comparing unit pricing item by item across competitors and web sites daily, weekly, and over longer periods. It can also send pricing alerts, including MAP violations.
Who is your competition?
You simply must monitor your competition. New products show up first on the Internet. Line Item enables you to search to find new brands, items, flavors and more. You can also detect new trending items, as Line Item tracks hundreds of items in each product category you specify. This way, you can know what’s coming and adjust your strategy and promotions in real time.
Are long-tail keywords worth promoting?
Competition for certain keywords can be fierce, with costs per click (CPC) eating into profitability depending on category, seasonality and other variables. Some e-commerce marketers choose to focus on long-tail keywords in their SEO strategy, but it can be challenging to know whether or not this truly drives marketing ROI.
With better business intelligence, you can boost profitability and drive growth across your product and brand portfolio. Line Item is your lifeline to more profitable e-commerce.
