The goal of building an e-commerce website is to convert its visitors into customers. The journey of visitors on your site can take place over several days and across multiple stages: Google search, price comparison, checking customer reviews, recommendations from friends on social networks, and more. So to reach and attract these consumers specifically to your site, it is important to map out their journey (customer journey), and then choose a marketing strategy. The idea is to be present across the various channels where your audience might search for you. In this article, we will focus on promoting an e-commerce website organically and provide practical tips that can help with that.
What Are the Various Digital Marketing Channels?
- Organic search – also known as Organic SEO / SEO
- Google Ads advertising
- Facebook Ads advertising
- Additional social networks and communities
- Blogs
- Various price comparison platforms
What is the Path to Digital Success for Your E-commerce Website?
Inbound Marketing
On the practical side of things, Inbound marketing is essentially defining a set of actions around content to interest and entice consumers who are looking for the product you market. This is usually done through content marketing: SEO, campaigns, technical reviews on high-authority sites, etc.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is designed to spread your message to consumers. In short, to go “hunting” for them. They haven’t necessarily searched for the product, and we reach out to them in various different ways: TV, radio, SMS, newsletters, email marketing, Facebook ads, Google GDN ads, etc. After reviewing the general approach to take for e-commerce marketing success, we will now focus on everything related to the realm of organic e-commerce promotion.
Organic E-commerce Website Promotion - How to Do It?
#1 Optimizing the Content of Product Pages on the Site
First, you need to increase the volume of content around the product pages on the site. It is not about creating content just to “inflate” it, but about improving the user experience around understanding the product. It is important to understand that for a visitor, this page is the only interaction they can have with your product before purchasing. Therefore, it needs to answer all the questions that arise for the visitor. We often see on many e-commerce sites a short product description, a price, and that’s it. However, you can go much further with a product page. You can find relevant elements that will drive the visitor to take action and make a purchase:
- Full and very detailed description – imagine all the questions a customer could ask themselves about the product and reflect that on the page.
- Consider downloadable assets related to the product (where necessary and relevant, of course).
- Product review and testing videos.
- Customer reviews, and if available, reviews from well-known bloggers.
- Related products – this definitely works and increases the cart value.
Although it is not possible in every industry to provide all the options presented to you, it is still necessary to lay all the cards out on the table for the potential customer to increase the conversion rate.
#2 Optimizing the Content of the Site's Category Pages
Similar to the first tip we gave, the second tip concerns category pages. Unfortunately, most e-commerce sites forget about them. Remember – like other pages, they are pages crawled by Google and can rank for highly relevant queries. Therefore, it is recommended to review all of them and improve them, both for the site’s SEO and to improve the user experience.
On every category page, it is recommended to add brief content at the top of the page and additional content at the bottom. This is a great way to use content to build an internal linking profile that will strengthen various relevant pages on the site itself. This is critical and important for Google crawling and improving organic SEO results.
#3 Blog – Turn from Sellers into Advisors
Our third tip is setting up a blog on your e-commerce site. This is one of the best ways to establish yourselves as experts in your field. You need to convey to users (potential customers) that you are here to help them choose their product.
In terms of SEO, this will allow you to emphasize the importance in Google’s eyes of the key keywords in the industry and capture rankings for new and more targeted keywords (professionally known as: “long-tail keywords”), where none of your pages currently rank.
Important – the topics covered in the website blog should clearly show that your brand is an authority in your field – an excellent way to create authority and trust for the site, which will simultaneously allow you to promote the website better in organic Google search and, of course, win more and more customers.
#4 Customer Reviews, Synergy of SEO and E-Reputation
Our fourth tip is a must for online store sites. It’s a customer review strategy: monitoring and optimization for the online store. This strategy has a triple impact: SEO, conversion, and branding.
How is it recommended to display user reviews?
- Google My Business account – you can pull reviews directly from the account to the site.
- Plugins that show an overall review score (yellow stars, for example, which are very eye-catching).
- User reviews on product pages – this provides reassurance just before making a purchase. Sometimes Google also highlights these comments directly in search results (SERP) – professionally known as “rich snippets”.
Important – when a customer leaves any review on the site or on the Google My Business listing, make sure to always respond, whether their comment is positive or negative.
Another important thing – do not leave fake reviews – Google penalizes things of this sort. If it’s one or two reviews, it’s fine, but nothing beyond that.
#5 Moving from SEO to SXO
From an SEO strategy (aimed at search engines) to an SXO strategy (aimed at search engines and users). Although this concept is not new, it hasn’t entered the consciousness of many. The goal is to take actions not just to attract maximum traffic to the store website, but to attract high-quality traffic and tailor the site content to the visitor – which will usually translate into more conversions.
And as a bonus:
Define the right keywords for your site. This tip applies to all websites and is especially relevant for e-commerce sites. It involves choosing the right keywords for the site. You must understand that not all keywords are of interest to you. Before choosing the terms you want to focus on and promote in Google, you need to understand what the user intent will be, which is divided into 3 types:
- Informational search: These are queries from internet users looking for specific information. The visitor is usually not yet ready to make a purchase;
- Navigational search: Reflecting brand images.
- Purchase intent: These are queries made to make a purchase. Perfect for your e-commerce site!
I did not elaborate in this article on the ever-so-important topic of backlinks, which is nonetheless well-known and familiar. I’ll say it in one sentence: make sure to stay relevant and natural. Always ensure that the sites linking to you are relevant to the niche and as natural as possible.