Most advertisers aspire to be number 1 on paid search and number 1 on natural search with a particular focus on Google since it typically drives 80% of search-sourced sales. Retailers in particular, though, may have noticed that for a wide array of products, Page 1 is actually dominated by Google Product Search listings and the CSEs, which push retailer-specific keywords down in the rankings, primarily affecting natural search listings.
Despite good intentions, there may be technical limitations, branding priorities and business rules that have prevented a retailer from optimizing their site well enough to jump over these sources. You may have also recently noticed that Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Facebook are all bumping down traditional, retailer-specific natural search listings even further.
(Note: As of the past few weeks, Google has moved their top three Product Search listings from just below the top paid listings and above natural listings to the bottom of Page 1, so Google Product Search will have less of an impact in pulling traffic away from highly-ranked natural keywords.)
An interesting and effective tactic is to attempt to own as much of the Page 1 Google real estate as possible. If a keyword is very important to you and is rife with competition (in the apparel vertical “cashmere” would fall into this category), retailers should consider focusing tactics to be highly ranked beyond just SEM and SEO and experiment with optimization through these other sources if the goal is to own Page 1.
Experiment with this: pull out a video camera and make a rough, not necessarily slick because it doesn’t always have to be, video of the core product you want to promote and list it on YouTube making sure it’s tagged appropriately. Next, write about the product in a blog. Then feature it on a Facebook page and tweet about it, too. To be visible within Google Product Search top 3 placement, optimize your datafeed and make sure it’s submitted daily to Google.
There is no guarantee that you’ll make it within the top 3 placements, but these tactics will go a long way toward achieving that. Lastly, if there are internal issues preventing your site from being well optimized, try focusing SEO efforts on just this keyword in order to move it up the rankings in natural search.
If all these tactics are done correctly, you will be visible multiple places on Page 1, owning a much larger portion of the real estate for that important product, and your sales will climb as a result. Future efforts should be focused on the next highest revenue-generating products and so forth.
Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.