E-Commerce SEO for Large Companies

By Jason Hawkins on August 7, 2013
  • eCommerce for Large Companies

If you are a marketing manager for a large corporation that is spending millions of dollars annually in search engine marketing then you need a professional E-commerce SEO Company. The Miami SEO Company is part of a large organization of SEO gurus that live, breathe and sleep search engine marketing. Our certified marketing analysts can take your campaign to the next level by making educated decisions based off of data that most people don’t even know exist in Google Analytics and Adwords. Making use of the data in your Google Analytics and Google Adwords is the driving force behind every campaign, which is why our staff stays up to date with all of the newest software feature updates.

SEO’s are only as good as the tools they use.

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A campaign manager is only as good as the tools he or she uses, and the experience they have using those tools. In this blog post, we will go over some of the reporting methods that we use for our clients. These methods if used correctly can help you reach record breaking conversion rates and ROI. If “visitor flow reports” or “Regex filters” don’t ring a bell, then you may want to consider learning the basic features of Google Analytics before readying this post. Keep in mind that this blog post is intended for the intermediate Analytics user, for more advanced examples of what we can do for your SEM campaigns please call us or fill out our contact form to schedule an appointment with a certified SEM marketing analyst.

If you would like to watch a video that is very easy to understand and that can show you the power of using Google Analytics and Google Adwords then please watch the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Google Analytics Youtube channel so that you can stay up to date with the latest videos that the Analytics team releases.

Google Analytics & E-commerce SEO Companies.

If you are reading this blog post there is a good chance that you could be a marketing manager looking for SEO companies that specialize in E-commerce optimization. As a marketing manager, you are probably familiar with how to use Analytics to a certain extent, if you’re not, then its time to start learning how to use it ASAP. One great place to do your homework is the Google Analytics Blog or the Google Adwords Blog, which we follow religiously. Staying on top of these blogs can help you stay on top of the changes and new product feature updates that can help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

Here at our firm, we are staffed with only the most experienced SEM campaign managers that have a minimum of 4 years of experience managing campaigns with large budgets ($10,000 a month in Adspend or more). Our processes are 100% conversion driven, our main goal is increase your marketing campaigns profitability through any means possible. Our campaign managers are proactive, meaning they will take the time to analyze your already existing marketing strategy to see how SEO can be integrated and leveraged with your already existing marketing vehicles. Having this type of support from a marketing analyst can help you find untapped revenues that are hiding in plain site. For example, one of our recent clients came on board and for years has been gathering loads of content for a magazine that this particular client was advertising in. We were able to get that content on a thumb drive and now it is used for a very aggressive blog campaign which has helped increase organic traffic significantly. In this example, the client had no idea that he content he has been generating for his magazine ads were best used when allocated to his blog campaign. That content was digitally dormant and because of the fact that our campaign manager was collaborating with the client during their weekly meeting, together we were able to increase the clients organic presence with a nominal expense.

E-commerce optimization strategies with Google Analytics

Whether you are selling waterbeds, Iphone cases, jewelry or real estate; E-commerce optimization is something that every business owner needs when selling products online through search engine marketing. From the moment a user finds your website to the moment that user leaves your site, there is a lot of data that can be collected, analyzed and utilized to improve your shopping cart performance.

Some of the things that you can do to improve your shopping sites performance are:

  1. Product page optimization
  2. Checkout Optimization
  3. Content Optimization
  4. Keyword optimization

Lets take a look at each point and go into further detail as to how you can  use these optimization techniques to enhance the performance of your SEM campaign. All of these items are intended to do one thing, increase ROI.

Product Page Optimization

When you have a shopping site with thousands of products, managing your products can be a daunting tasks. Using ROI and conversion racking is essential, if you are not setup with ROI and conversion tracking then your next most important task is to get that implemented right away. Go! Do it! Now! 🙂

When you have ROI and Conversion tracking set up with Google Adwords and Analytics, it allows you see which keywords, product pages, ad copies and content works best through analyzing metrics like time on site, pages per visit and bounce rate. If you have a report that shows each product page and which keyword was used to find that page, then you can start to see things like which keywords are not performing well. For example if a keyword has a bounce rate of 100% then this can mean your product page can either have poor content, content that is not useful for the user or maybe the keyword is not the appropriate keyword to use for that landing page. Analyzing the data in Google analytics can help you make actionable & analytical decisions.

Check out optimization – SEO for shopping cart funnels

If you have a shopping site, then chances are you have many funnels and goals setup in your Google Analytics profiles. Conversion tracking allows you to measure not only the number of conversion or goals but also the associated revenue value of those goals. Not only can you optimize according to conversion but now you can optimize according to revenue. Finding out which products are more profitable than others is something that is typically taken into consideration, naturally you will want to focus on promoting those products more aggressively because it will increase your ROI.

If you use Google Analytics to track the check out process, you can take a look at the funnel reports that show where visitors are dropping out of the check out process more often than not. In some cases, a shopping site requires a user to create an account in order to check out. While majority of visitors may not have a problem with creating an account, some lazy users may be completely turned off when they are force to create an account and that could even lead them to leave your site. A simple funnel analysis can allow you to see where users are abandoning the check out process and with that data you can make educated decisions that will likely decrease the abandonment rate.  Below is an example of what a funnel report looks like.

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As you can see, each step in the check out process is tracked. On the right, you can see where the visitors dropped our of the check out process, in this example, it looks like 8 people left in the second step of the check out process. This is where we would take a look at the page to see if there are perhaps to many unnecessary fields in the form or perhaps the content is not engaging enough. Optimizing your check out process can be done in many ways, this is just one of the ways we do it for our clients.

Content Optimization

If you have a coherent SEO strategy in place, chances are you website has a lot of pages with a load of good content. Naturally some pages will have better content than others and the way to see how your content is performing is to drill down into the content reports section of Google Analytics.

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In the content reporting section, we typically like to look at a few different things like Landing page reports with keywords as a secondary dimension. Typically we will apply certain filters to these reports for example a exclude paid traffic filter if we only want to see organic traffic and/or a filter that only includes the landing pages that we are working on. This can be done by including an advanced Regex filter, simply identify the pages that you want to analyze and create a include filter that uses regex to match a code that contains the url extensions for each page you are trying to analyze.

Enter the Regex code into the Advanced filter option just below the linear graph of your report as follows:

(/landingpage1|/landingpage2|/landingpage3|/landingpage4|/landingpage5)

Here is a visual example of what it should look like.

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Keyword optimization

Keywords, keywords, keywords… When it comes to optimizing the use of your keywords, you need to know how to analyze more than just your average rank or the amount of visits that you get from each keyword. It can be very helpful to check into metrics like bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit and percentage of new visitors. To take things even further you can see how certain keywords perform according to geographic location. Here is an example of a keyword report that we created using a custom dashboard for a client that has a limo company. Being that the client has campaigns targeted to many cities in Florida, we created a dashboard that shows how each city is performing according to the keywords that are used by the visitors and the different metrics associated with those keywords.

These types of reports can show you which cities and keywords are performing better than others. As shown in the example below, we can see that Boca Raton visitors are spending much more time on the site, and on average visiting many pages per visit. At this point it would make sense to allocate more resources towards the Boca Raton campaign and perhaps adjusting your bids or SEO strategy accordingly. Using Regex with Google Analytics can be done in many ways, this is just one of the ways we use Regex to drill down on segmented data.

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Data Driven E-commerce SEO For Large Companies

If theses are some of the tactics that your marketing team or in house analysts are using then you are in good hands. Going above and beyond is what we take pride in when it comes to analyzing data and improving campaign performance. Simply getting your website to the top of the search results is not enough, marketing is a service that is meant to bring you more business in the most cost effective way. We take pride in providing a true marketing service that focuses on not only SEO but conversion optimization as well.

We would love to hear from you and your team regarding your marketing goals and ambitions, our analysts are standing by ready to give you a free consultation!



About The Author

Jason Hawkins
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.