Marketing eCommerce sites: search engines, advertising and reputation (Lecture 6)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 12, 2009 [1121 views]

Video from Jonathan Briggs on Vimeo.

Update 1200: Please note that because I have a sore throat I have decided to deliver this lecture by video instead of in person.

This lecture for the final year ecommerce module, should help you see how sites are promoted in order to gain traffic and customers. At the end of this lecture you should be able to plan a campaign for a site.

Why promote your site?

1. Customers will not find you unless you tell them
2. Potential customers won’t stumble across you
3. Search engines drive a significant percentage of your visitors
4. Search engine advertising is an effective way of promoting your site

Not all visitors are equal

1. Only some visitors want what you sell
2. Reaching those customers is important
3. Search engines are good places to find customers with particular needs (expressed as search)
4. Remember to create customer journeys that allow visitors to become customers

Understand search engines

1. Recognise the difference between automated engines such as Goggle, Yahoo Search and Live Search and directories (DMOZ and Yahoo Directory); automated engines use a spider to collect and index information, directories use human editors.
2. Each search engine has a different algorithm (top secret) but are all based on keyword matching in content (relevance), recency and reputation. A few (but not the main ones) add payment to this list.
3. Search engines categorise pages according to the keywords used in the content (and titles, headings, images, page links and in-bound links)
4. Search engines prefer regularly updated pages rather than old pages and can detect the creation date for files.
5. Most engines measure the popularity (reputation) of a page (usually based on the number (and reputation) of in-bound links) and rank more popular pages above less popular ones. You can get a measure of reputation by examining the Google rank of a page, search for the number of linking in sites (using URLtrends) or study statistics from sampling sites such as Alexa.com.
6. Search engines hate people who try and artificially increase the position of a page and may block the pages and sites involved.
7. Directories such as DMOZ are often used as the starting point for new crawls of the web. Try and get listed there.
8. Blogs have become useful tools for improving reputation. Bloggers tend to point to useful links and these sites therefore become more popular. It is worth creating content that popular bloggers will link to.

Here are some easy things you can do

1. Create a site with excellent content and services. You will naturally use keyword rich relevant text and search engines will index this (eventually)
2. Use predictable URLs that are easy for humans to remember and contain keywords that search engines will notice
3. Design your site and your pages with search engines in mind. This means designing a simple site with appropriate page titles, META tags and headlines.
4. Avoid things that put roadblocks in front of search engine crawlers such as Flash, frames, tables and some database techniques.
5. Analyse the words used by visitors by examining your analytics or server logs
6. Run exploratory search engine advertising to look at the demand, the effective keywords and the conversion rates.

Search engine promotion strategies

1. Understand the search engines, keywords and their importance

2. Brainstorm keywords and phrases
3. Analyse keywords looking for synonyms and alternative meanings
4. Search for keywords on Google and analyse competitors
5. Run a test campaign on adwords
6. Select keywords and phrases for your campaign
7. Create content (and landing pages) to capture those keywords
8. Create content pages that are worth linking to; they are more likely to be found and links will slowly improve reputation
9. Tell the major search engines that your site exists. This is getting harder.
10. Try and get listed in DMOZ
11. Add your URL to high ranking directories
12. Search for blogs in your subject area and comment on them

Example: How would we promote a new site such as Market Quarter http://www.marketquarter.com

1. Measure the traffic now by looking at analytics
2. Press/PR campaigns (trade and general); This is unlikely to be successful unless you can find a real ‘angle’. Launching a site is not a story. You can use personalities to create a story. The computer trade press is always desperate for stories but this is unlikely to generate leads. Try a behind the scenes story for the food/lifestyle sections of the papers.
3. Consider two-way site links – good for Google ranking. Join forums and comment on blogs leaving URL behind. Make sure that you are not “selling” or you will get flamed by irate forum members.
4. Consider affiliate deals in which other people do you marketing for you
5. Experiment with a specific keyword campaign such as “french food for christmas”
6. Register interested visitors for special offers

Designing search engine marketing campaigns

1. Understand when search engines show ads
2. Recognise the different ways keywords that can be ‘matched’: exact, phrase and broad
3. Set up a test campaign
4. Use landing pages to bring prospects directly to the content or products you want to show
5. Research and use negative words to improve quality of matches
6. Limit the ads to geographical areas or times of day
7. Experiment with different advert text
8. Bid high enough to be seen and then lower the bid on high performing ads
9. Recognise the way Google rewards high performing (relevant) ads
10. Look at ecommerce as well as advert conversion rates

How do we promote the OTHER media?

1. Word of mouth recommendations
2. Keep an eye on Google ranking
3. Sell benefits on our site through news, articles and case studies rather than products or services
4. Use blogs and expert articles to link to our site
5. Cross selling – “we’ve built this for X”
6. Brochures and newsletters
7. Networking: industry functions, seminars and activities
8. Reward people who recommend us
9. Be better than our competitors and be able to demonstrate it

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