Leading Digital Strategy: Driving Business Growth Through Effective E-commerce by Christopher Bones & James Hammersley

Author:Christopher Bones & James Hammersley [Bones, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

is the generation, support and maintenance of a registry detailing the keywords for which

the organization wants to compete to attract attention when customers are searching online

in their market. Chapter 4 has suggested one approach to establishing a keyword list and this should be done as part of the strategy development for your e-commerce operation.

This is, however, not a one-off action. Keywords and keyword performance need regular

review in markets that change quickly. Keep key competitors and new entrants under

review and be willing to keep evolving your strategy.

Once the keywords are agreed e-commerce teams should reflect them throughout the

copy on the site. Finding the best combination of keywords and phrases around which to

build site copy is by definition a test-and-learn process. It requires a constant review,

monitor and improve approach and regular assessment of competitors as well as your own

performance. In terms of organic search, your site will only become relevant for the target

audience once search engines decide that your copy is more relevant than other competing

propositions. Copy is therefore one of the critical success factors in search engine

optimization (SEO) for any e-commerce site; however, it is important even before this in

presenting the most attractive headline and supporting copy on the advertisement itself.

Even if you are paying for traffic there is a penalty for poor copy. Google will place

your ad even if it’s completely irrelevant. It will cost you more because your ‘quality

score’ will be low, for which Google then penalizes you financially. (This is informally

known as the ‘stupidity’ tax.) Of course, if your advertisement is irrelevant to the keyword

a user searches, your click-through rate and conversion rate will be poor.

It is worth remembering that there are such things as negative keywords. These are

keywords you don’t want your advertisements to appear for. You see this all the time when

you search for something and an advertisement appears for something that is not relevant

because of a semantic problem. For example, if you own a stationery business, you might

want to create an advertisement group to sell notebooks. Wordstream offers a free negative

keyword tool (http://www.wordstream.com/negative-keywords) that suggests clusters of terms that may trigger your ‘notebook’ ads. If you try putting ‘notebook’ into this tool most of the

terms that appear are related to notebook computers, not spiral notebooks! You wouldn’t

want to bid on these computer-related terms as it would be a total waste of your

advertising budget.

Developing the most effective snippets

Snippets are the advertisements that are placed in front of the customer as a result of a

search enquiry. They consist of a headline (or meta-title) and a description. The art of

producing a successful snippet is to communicate so complete a message that they attract

more clicks than competing alternatives and so drive and then maintain themselves at the

highest possible level in a search outcome. They have to do this in a very limited number

of characters for a title and 140 characters for a description. This is one of the biggest

copywriting challenges in online marketing communications: using these limits to create a

compelling message that attracts more clicks than those of competitors.

Since Google changed their font and style of presenting search outcomes the industry

standard has reduced from 70 characters for a title to more like 55. 5 The rationale for this is primarily that as other characters are rarely presented to the customer, it is a waste of

effort and more than likely it will mean that what the customer is really looking for may

not be on your title and therefore fail to attract their interest.

This is equally true for the descriptor that can help customers decide where to click

when they are searching for a product or service rather than for a brand or business name.

Often e-commerce businesses fail to meet the limit requirements and their snippets end up

finishing in ellipses. Snippets that do this are said to attract fewer clicks despite their

positioning as the really relevant text is hidden from view.

Presenting the most engaging site links

‘Sitelinks’ or ‘rich snippets’ are six additional pages that are presented to the customer by

the business that gains top place for an organic search result. We believe that good e-

commerce practice should be to select these pages for their attractiveness to customers in

the market: one approach to doing this is to present the ‘most landed upon in the site’,

another would be to present ‘the most searched for propositions in the market’ and a third

is to present the six best landing pages in terms of sales conversion. Whatever the strategy

is, the team needs to make an active decision as to the pages presented, otherwise the

search engine will make the decision for you on the basis of the most visited pages.

Using Google Plus

Relatively new at the time of publishing, Google Plus is an enhanced search offer that has

particular value in the SME sector. Google argues that when you create a Google Plus

page, you can create new business opportunities across all of their products: from bringing

you closer to the top in searches, to having a map with directions to your offices/retail

sites appear when someone searches on your name.

Ensuring good site health

The e-commerce team must also take responsibility for the page performance of a website.

Page performance is driven by having what we describe as a ‘healthy site’, which means

that it is error free, accessible and has little ‘technical debt’ (ie few if any HTML or CSS

errors), by attaching effective descriptors and ‘snippets’ which sell the proposition in a

way that encourages click-through and by having a site well linked to other effective sites.

Maximizing the return on paid advertising

As well as determining the SEO performance of the company website(s), the team will

also be responsible for executing all online advertising campaigns. Paid advertising comes

in two forms: advertising that appears as a result of a customer search, normally called

‘pay-per-click’ (PPC) and banner adverts placed on other sites (for example, online media

sites and sites with similar customers to your own target segments) which are either paid

for in advance regardless of the number of transactions they generate or paid for in

relation to the number of clicks they generate.

Much is made of PPC and a great deal of myth has built up around it; however, PPC

execution strategies are best built around a simple model that divides investment choices

into three key buckets:

Brand: investing in terms that use the brand. This is normally done in markets where

competition is high and as market leader other competitors are buying your brand or

where aggregators are active and are using your brand to attract customers to their

site as opposed to yours. In less competitive markets buying the brand is often used

to highlight a promotion or special offer taking customers to a dedicated landing

page. In niche markets this isn’t normally an effective investment as a business can

end up paying for visitors who would have clicked through on the organic search link

at no cost.

Fat head: investing in terms that are the most searched for in a particular product

segment or proposition. This is a classic strategy, often best employed in markets that

are very competitive and where similar or same products are widely available to the

customer. Here the strategy is to identify a list of c 20 terms and to be able to outbid

the majority of the competition sufficiently to gain a ‘top three’ advert placing. The

better the landing pages for these adverts at converting visitors to a ‘sale’, the higher

the bid that can be placed on the term. This strategy requires a disciplined ‘test-and-

learn’ approach to term selection and both the advert and the conversion performance

of the landing page.

Long tail: investing in discrete terms that are not subject to significant search

volumes but where the value in the transaction is substantial as the searcher is

looking for a specific product with an assumed higher propensity to buy. This

strategy can be used powerfully by niche businesses that are serving a smaller, well-

informed, and normally higher-value customer base. Here the approach is to buy as

many terms as possible as the cost per click tends to be very small, and although the

click-through rate is very low, the value created by a sale gives a powerful return.

Figure 5.2 uses the model introduced in Chapter 4 to think about the effectiveness of a campaign strategy. This is a retailer in a highly competitive market where there are a few

volume products and a very long tail of niche products. Here the model would be to buy

brand, buy a limited number of fat-head terms closely aligned to the key volume products

and then buy a very large number of long-tail terms where specialist buyers are much

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