SEO Tricks: eCommerce SEO? Google AdWords or No Soup for You

[SEO Manager]

eCommerce SEO? Google AdWords or No Soup for You
 

<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h3>Affiliates Are a Dying Breed</h3>
<p>Being an ecommerce affiliate keeps getting harder &amp; harder unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling things with a complex sales cycle. </p>
<p>Portable air conditioners is a pretty niche category, but when I look at it I simply don't see any opportunity on the SEO front unless you take on the significant risk of carrying inventory &amp; drop hundreds of thousands to millions of Dollars on branding. </p>
<h3>The Corporate, The Bad &amp; The Ugly</h3>
<p>Head keyword: note the brand navigation, the extended AdWords ads &amp; the product search results that drive the traditional search results below the fold
</p>
<p>Tail keywords are every bit as ugly, with Google product ads sometimes coming in inline, further driving down the organic search results.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And it is nastier when Google Instant is still extended. 10% of browsers can see a single organic search result!</p>
<p></p>
<h3>Corporate, Corporate, Corporate</h3>
<p>As ugly as that looks, not only do the larger merchants have an advantage in AdWords (getting their product ads on a CPA basis while smaller merchants have to pay on a CPC basis), Google product search (more reviews), inline search navigation options (featuring the same brands yet again), but most of the organic results (that are generally below the fold) are also the same big brands after the Panda update gave them a boost while torching their smaller competitors.</p>
<h3>The Chicken vs Egg Problem of Scale</h3>
<p>For online pure-plays (outside of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, eBay &amp; a few others) the "no opportunity anywhere" problem in search also harms the ability to be competitive on pricing because without the ability to rank you don't have the leverage over the supply chain the way that the big box stores do from winning everywhere in the SERP &amp; having offline distribution.  There is little opportunity to organically grow to scale over time unless you enter the market with some point of leverage (like going so far as creating the product right on through to marketing it to consumers), sell something totally different than what is already available in the market (and hope it doesn't get cloned), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, and/or build significant non-search distribution channels first. </p>
<p>I suppose the last option on that front would be to promote your stuff on a large platform that is already doing well in Google (say eBay, Amazon, or Facebook), but doing that gives you limited control over the customer experience &amp; forces you to keep chasing new one-off sales rather than building &amp; deepening relationships with customers.</p>
<h3>Killing Off Diversity</h3>
<p>As Google collects more usage date (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login) these big box stores will have an even bigger moat between them &amp; smaller competitors. </p>
<p>The "big box stores only" search results also create an experience that is bland &amp; uniform. At first glance things may look different, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login: a lot of the brands cross hire, have similar "politically correct" cultures &amp; have roughly similar customer experience sets. When you buy from Walmart you are not going to get that caring email from a founder offering hands on tips &amp; advice. Scale requires homoginization, which generally kills of personality &amp; differentiation.</p>
<h3>Killing Off Innovation</h3>
<p>The problem with the "be huge or die" approach to search is that most legitimate economic innovation comes from smaller players that challenge the existing power structure. Set the barrier to entry too high and you might have less spam to fight, but you certainly will have less economic innovation &amp; more of the would-be innovators will be stuck working dead end job at dysfunctional corporations. </p>
<h3>Now You See it, Now You Don't</h3>
<p>Most people can't see what they are missing out on so they won't know, but (as Tim Wu put it so eloquently in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login) the same was true for AT&amp;T when it held back innovations like the answering machine &amp; what ultimately came to be the WWW. What sort of price do you put on email taking a decade longer to launch? How many other disruptive changes built off of incremental improvements will never appear You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to compete on Google's web?</p>
<p>The web was great because it offered something different. Unfortunately you have to search using something other than Google to find it.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Categories:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</div></div></div>
 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login