Optimization is a scary term if you dived into eCommerce marketing without any guidance or gradual experience.
But let’s face it, this term almost means making something better than it already is.
We’ll stick to this definition for a while in order to pinpoint the core subject matter of this post. You are selling your eCommerce products through different channels.
Bottom line is you want a better sales performance. What do you do? – Optimize product feeds!
Most of the times, newbie marketers or business owners themselves try to implement some random logic for multi-channel marketing that they think should work to improve the sales.
Other times, they tend to take advice from someone who supposedly seems to have an answer to everything – an arrow in the quiver to strike all the targets at bull’s eye.
But guess what? We know that’s not possible.
Every merchant site and every sales channel that you add will have a different product display mechanism – putting it in blunt terms.
Likewise, they mostly have different requirements for the product information that you provide. Let’s take some examples.
Optimizing the product title
Google Merchant’s Recommendation for Product Title on apparels category:
Brand + Gender + Product Type + Attribute
Likewise,
Amazon basically requires these on the product title:
- Brand
- Variant – Color or flavor
- Unit size or Quantity
- Keyword – (What the product actually is)
One very obvious but a strict rule of most of the marketplaces is – Don’t include a promotional message in the title! No “Offers”, “Sale”, “Discounted” or such terms. These can get your feed even to be rejected.
Optimizing for Product Search SEO
Traditionally used techniques are still in use and they’ve got some sites to go to the top of SERP pages while some domain names to become worthless – You can expect that with the penalties from Google!
However, we’ll not go into detail about how to rank your site for certain keyword – it’s not worth even a try for eCommerce, rather how to rank your products higher in the specific merchant sites.
Let’s talk about the Google Merchant.
Product Ranking on Google Merchant is not that complex. The frequency of your product feed update and higher bid on your Adwords Campaigns will gain you a prominent place in your Product Ad in Google Product Search results.
Apart from that, when it comes to Google Shopping, your product attributes work as the Keywords for your campaign. So, the more product attributes you can provide the better search results will be.
But, looking at the Amazon Marketplace, a bit of confusion may arise. You can’t neglect the product rankings on Amazon – it’s the go-to shopping portal for almost 44% online shoppers.
Alike Google, Amazon has also been updating its search algorithm – Amazon’s A9 Algorithm.
Where Google updated with the focus to provide more relevant answers to the user queries, Amazon updated the A9 algorithm with a focus to show searchers those products that were highly likely to be sold.
So, what can you do to improve sales on Amazon? That’s the big question.
Maintain a healthy seller score by not breaking any of the Amazon rules! And while optimizing your product feed for Amazon – DON’T REPEAT THE KEYWORDS!
Keyword density doesn’t matter on Amazon marketplace, rather they will make your copy look clumsy.
An Image is worth thousands of words!
Don’t try to give more than what is required – Keep your product image as simple and clear as possible.
If you are selling the package, one primary image of the package and other secondary images of what other items are included can be acceptable.
But, don’t try to clutter a single product image with multiple items. Along with that, it is not worth putting effort to add watermark or sneaking your website’s URL in the image.
Amazon’s guidelines are followed by most of the online sellers for Google Merchant and other merchants as well.
Clear images of the product, possibly from 3-4 angles in a white background, that’s what will get you the results. ‘
Optimize the right way, get high-quality images (1000px), not like hiring professional models to pose for your products.
Multi-product Affiliate Marketing… How could that turn out for business?
This one is not that serious but definitely needs some attention. If you are creating your product feed for Affiliate platforms, you are inviting publishers to grab your product information and put them on their site. Results could be a bit different than you would expect!
When you are creating your product feed for Affiliate Platforms from your site, you may want to remove the specific terms that you have used to optimize for search engines. Why?
It may seem a bit annoying to you if you search for your product and the affiliate’s site beats you in competition. You don’t want to keep paying to the affiliate publisher who stole the SERP ranking for your keyword.
Optimizing and Not Evaluating the Results – This will truly hurt your Multi-Channel Marketing!
These are some common and some uncommon feed optimization mistakes that we wanted to point out this time.
Other mistakes that popular with the sellers-on-wrong-track may be wrong product pricing, mistakes while mapping attributes, selecting different currency, entering wrong browse node for Amazon and the list goes on.
If you have some similar experiences or you feel like sharing, we really welcome them.
