AuthorDaniel Cartland
LinkedIn
Often due to the setup of internal eCom teams and agencies marketing channels are pitted against one another with results seen as, at best, distinct, and at worst, competing against one another for success.
I too have been guilty of some paid search vs organic search partisanship. However, the truth is that customers do not make the same distinction between how they reach your brand as many of us trying to reach said customers do.
In this article we explore the direct and indirect ways in which SEO can support and enhance your other eCommerce marketing channels and your marketing efforts as a whole.
How SEO can support your CRM strategy
Gaining new customers into your database
A lot of SEO work is about understanding the customer journey and building out different types of content in order to reach them at different stages. A lot of this top-of-funnel content is great to build expertise in certain relevant topical areas and support key transactional pages to rank for SEO. However, this also has the benefit of being able to leverage this content for email sign-ups to build your customer database.
Example 1 - Blog Content
Blog content can often be neglected because, due to it’s primarily top of funnel nature, it’s hard to quantify the value of. However, whether you have a blog that generates a lot of sessions, or you’re trying to build one, leveraging this with an email sign-up pop-up form can support your CRM and email marketing channels whilst also allowing you to quantify the value of this content to your business.
Blog sessions / Email sign ups from organic = Email sign up %
Email sign up % x Revenue from email = Email value of organic blog sessions
Example 2 - Seasonal pages, discount pages
Another common recommendation that can (and often does) arise from SEO is the focus on building successful seasonal pages (Black Friday/Christmas etc), or discount pages. Leveraging email sign up forms from these pages when out of season or on these pages can directly build your customer database.
Providing content for your existing customer database
Another big benefit of the focus of SEO on building content around the customer journey is a focus on relevant content that is beneficial to your customers. Branded content is great and plays a vital role, but can often be a lot more sales-focused. Having content to choose from that can build trust and expertise when used via CRM can often be much more flexible and different targeted to your customer segments.
It’s not just pre-purchase either! Care guides and advice which often form part of a successful SEO content strategy are notoriously hard to quantify the value of, but are much more readily valuable when seen through the lens of supporting post-purchase CRM.
How SEO can support your brand marketing strategy
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t at times been exasperated when a website change was blocked due to brand guidelines. But SEO and brand are intrinsically linked. Correlational studies suggest that brand authority is linked to better organic performance and at an intuitive level, it’s easy to understand how a strong, trusted brand can increase conversion rates and lifetime value. Like bees and flowers, brand and SEO are in a symbiotic relationship and it’s about time we admit it!
Dominating the SERPs with offsite SEO
People rarely search in a vacuum and getting placements on other sites that may appear in mixed-intent search results (but are not competitors) can be powerful for your brand.
For example, if you are a pasta subscription and can land a placement in the top 2 results for “best pasta subscription”, which are informational listicles, as well as ranking among the top spots yourself, you’re massively increasing the chances of your brand being purchased.
Reaching more customers with offsite SEO
Offsite SEO (aka Digital PR, aka link-building or whatever you want to call it!) has the primary goal of building links back to a domain in order to rank better for keywords, resulting in more traffic to the site and hopefully more revenue to boot.
However, despite a clear secondary benefit to this is that your brand will be placed on third-party websites, often large websites with lots of visitors and huge readership. Having your brand places on these sites gets many more eyeballs on your brand and can contribute to overall brand recognition.
Mentions may not be (as) valuable for SEO, but they certainly contribute towards a healthy brand! SEO tends to steer away from “traditional” PR metrics such as impression, but they can help to quantify the overall value of offsite placements outside of simply links links links.
Being brand-visible through the SERPs
At a basic level, the more visible you are across various searches across search results for relevant keywords, the more likely your brand will be recognised and the more powerful your brand will become.
Human psychology is simple. The mere-exposure effect suggests that people tend to develop preferences for things that they are familiar with. If your brand is more present across relevant searches for your customers, your brand may be seen more favourably. A successful SEO strategy therefore benefits a brand, just as a strong brand can benefit an SEO strategy.
How SEO can support your Paid Search strategy
Paid search versus organic search - natural enemies? This needn’t be the case!
Reducing reliance on paid search
One of the big advantages of SEO, and one of the main reasons brand invest in SEO, is to reduce the overall reliance on paid channels including paid search. This diversification of customer acquisition is intuitively positive at a brand level, but even if you’re an agency it can have its benefits. Reducing the pressure to continuously achieve great results every month can mean you can take more risks knowing the stakes for failure are lower (or at least not as catastrophic!). With ever-increasing CPCs, this can only be a good thing.
I know I’ve been saved more than once when paid search has covered an underwhelming month for organic search, the opposite is certainly true as well!
Improving Quality Score
Although landing page creation isn’t exclusively an SEO job, understanding the customer journey and the subsequent information architecture of a site is a key area of focus for SEO.
Creating landing pages that more directly target how customers are searching can increase ad CTRs, make them more relevant, and improve experience. All factors that Quality Score is based on.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118?hl=en-GB
Landing pages that match the search intent of keywords being search can therefore help to rank better organically and improve paid performance. A true win-win.
Freeing up spend on top performing terms
With CPCs increasing faster than my exit from the office to the pub on a Thursday afternoon, any areas to free up spend to be saved or re-invested in different areas should be celebrated. When brands perform well organically for keywords, reducing paid spend in these areas can be tested or re-attributed.
Although this should be carefully monitored - in our experience it’s seldom done very well, or at scale, one area it can certainly help in is for brand terms. One recent example we have was on a keyword related to “[brand] discount codes” and “[brand] reviews”. SEO work to create respective pages on these topics meant that we immediately ranked in first position for these terms which can lead to re-distribution of paid spend in these areas.
N.B. Another caveat here is to keep a close eye on if competitors are bidding on brand terms. But always an area to look for for incremental gains and spend reduction.
How SEO can support your CRO strategy
Increasing site speed
There’s no reason that site speed should sit within the realm of SEO more than other channels, but perhaps driven by Google’s focus on Core Web Vitals and page experience, it has become almost synonymous with SEO fixes.
A fast site however, can benefit the conversion rate across all channels, reducing bounce rate and increasing conversions.
Balancing net benefit
Conversion rate optimisation can be a bit of a false flag, since its benefit implies that all other factors, namely the number of sessions you have, remains stable.
For example a change that increases conversion rate, but decreases the number of sessions (perhaps due to being negative for SEO and reducing rankings) can be a net loss:
- CVR 5%, AOV £20, Sessions 100 = £100 revenue
- CVR 7%, AOV £20, Sessions 50 = £70 revenue
By working together, SEO teams and CRO teams can ensure that the net benefit is a positive one by balancing changes that increase conversion rate without impacting traffic acquisition to the site, resulting in the greatest possible revenue returns.
How SEO can support your social media strategy
Create an onsite experience aligned with your social posts
It’s not uncommon for an eCommerce brand to heavily push a product on social media, either organically or via paid ads, but these products are difficult to locate on-site. Although not strictly SEO - there’s certainly ways that an onsite focus (which often falls into the remit of SEO) can help to keep these customers engaged and lead them to conversion.
Example 1 - As Seen on X landing pages
A straightforward but effective way of aligning your onsite and social focus is simply by replicated the products you show on your Instagram/TikTok etc in easily accessible places on your site. & Other Stories do this nicely with an “As Seen on Instagram” landing page (although for more impact this could be linked to from a global navigation or homepage).
Source - https://www.stories.com/en_gbp/as-seen-on-instagram/as-seen-on-instagram.html
Example 2 - Utilising user generated content with easy links to products shown
Leveraging user generated content (UGC) on eCommerce sites is nothing new, with a lot of brands showing Instagram posts, reviews, and even videos to show their products in use.
However, what not every brand is doing is making it easy for customers to navigate through to the products shown. Piglet in Bed describes and links to the products being featured in the UGC on their homepage to make the journey between social and onsite seamless.
Source - https://www.pigletinbed.com/
Example 3 - leveraging social influencers with onsite content and links
Missoma give another great example of how to make a customer's journey between social platforms and onsite content seamless in how they present products that have been worn by celebrities. They do this via a “Spotted On” landing page which is linked to from their global navigation, which allows customers to shop the look. We’ve seen similar tactics from creator-led founder brands which have a dedicated page for items posted on their social feeds.
Source - https://www.missoma.com/pages/spotted-on
Leverage and target trends via organic search
If you are generating a lot of traffic to your social posts based on trends, then it may well be worth creating categories that are targeted towards these trends on your site.
ASOS are an example of an eCom site that prominently creates categories based on trending terms and styles, even linking to them from the global navigation.
However, it looks like the landing pages ASOS creates are often noindexed, meaning that they will not be useful for organic search directly. This is an area that other brands could take advantage of - creating relevant categories and landing pages based on trending terms to take full advantage of their popularity as the topic explodes.
However, we would recommend regularly auditing the pages that are created to make sure that there is a balance between the number of pages created!
Takeaways
We should try not to view eCommerce marketing channels as siloes, but instead view them as working together to amplify one another for the total benefit for a site and brand.
Here at NOVOS, as part of our NOVOS 2.0, we are expanding our services to focus on earned and owned media channels that can complement one another for the benefit of a brand. Get in touch to find out more today.
