The vast majority of brands, when they “enter the Internet”, start by starting their own website. It is almost always a sensible choice – your own piece of the Web allows you to present your brand, products or services to customers, offering freedom in form and content, without limiting the reach, as in social media.

When designing and publishing the brand’s official website on the web, it is difficult to do without SEO. SEO advertising is a long-term investment, but this marathon usually pays off! Moreover, it fits well with other online promotion methods such as Google Ads.

SEO as an advertising channel

But let’s start with what exactly is SEO advertising, otherwise known as website SEO. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, i.e. website optimization in terms of their visibility in search engines.

Pages displayed in the search results of individual phrases in the engine (for example, Google or Bing) are not accidental – their set and order is the work of an advanced and constantly updated selection algorithm. It is based primarily on the so-called keywords, i.e. keywords. So when we enter any phrase, the engine returns a list of results that in theory best match a given query – that is, Google tries to limit the time spent by the user on searching and redirect him to the desired destination as quickly as possible.

On the part of the algorithm, such page ordering to actually shorten the search time to the absolute minimum is a huge challenge. The search engine has to “guess” what type of information the user is looking for – are these the products they want to buy? Or maybe he wants to broaden his knowledge on a given topic and collect specific data? Teaching the algorithm a sensible “understanding” of the user’s intentions is the greatest difficulty – and although the search system is still far from ideal, thanks to updates the algorithm becomes slightly better at fulfilling this function every day.

SEO – what it is all about

The algorithm largely takes into account the content placed on the page, i.e. its length, quality and presentation, but content is only one of over 200 factors analyzed by the algorithm. Below, we will describe the most important elements that make up the position of the website in search results – their refinement can, under favorable conditions, bring amazing results when it comes to SEO advertising.

However, before we get into the SEO advertising guidelines and rules, let’s start with how to prepare for SEO. The first step should always be an in-depth analysis of keywords – what phrases are entered by users into the search engine if they want to find products, services or data contained on competing websites? What keywords are related to the industry in which you operate?

Many programs and services that analyze key phrases and positions of specific pages come to the rescue. It is worth paying attention to free Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner, as well as various paid solutions: Ahrefs, Semstorm and Senuto, among others. In the case of positioning, your intuition must give way to the collected data – if you think that a certain keyword will attract valuable (i.e. converting) traffic to the website, but the analysis suggests something exactly the opposite, probably in 99% of cases the program will be right.

It is worth remembering that from the point of view of the business owner, the value is only the user who converts – buys a product or service or performs another action that we have planned (e.g. watching a video on the website or downloading a PDF file). This means that your keywords must be related to your image or sales goals. You can easily attract many users to your website, but the wrong choice of keywords will bring people who are not interested in the topic to the website, without having a positive impact on important business indicators.

Without meaningful keyword analysis, SEO is an internet wandering in complete darkness – sometimes you can attract a client, but you have no real chance of competing with someone with night vision. If you haven’t had anything to do with SEO before, perhaps in your case you should consider outsourcing an SEO audit to an SEO professional who will check the keywords with the greatest potential and suggest necessary changes to the website.

There are many tools on the web that allow you to perform an independent SEO audit. This is a good start to understanding what a page is missing and worth paying attention to. Automatic audit, however, will not replace an analysis made by a specialist, taking into account the specificity of the website, industry and other aspects that the machine is not able to properly develop.

SEO advertising starts with content

When adapting your website to the requirements of the algorithm, it is worth starting with the content. It has to be – of course – user-engaging and encouraging to buy, but also search engine-friendly. This means that the content should be:

– Full of keywords – so that it does not obstruct reading as much as possible and does not give an unnatural impression. The potential customer will reflect on the inauthentic and simply strange-sounding text. The same will be done by an algorithm that better and better recognizes “junk” content.
– Long enough to comprehensively describe the topic – the user can learn more (and your brand gains an expert image). It also enables collision-free interweaving of more keywords.
– Properly formatted – divided into paragraphs (nobody likes a compact wall of text – neither does the Google algorithm), decorated with graphics and written in a readable font. It is also good practice to include your title and subheadings, possibly with keywords, in the form of H1, H2 and H3 headings.

If you don’t have a site where you can post more content, it might be a good idea to start a corporate blog. This gives you basically unlimited possibilities – you can strengthen the expert image of the brand, show off your successes, present your know-how and specialists, and at the same time, thanks to the publication of content, attract valuable traffic from the search engine to the website.

On-site SEO

Content optimization is one of the elements that make up the so-called on-site SEO, i.e. activities that can be performed directly on a positioned website. In addition to refining the content, other important aspects of the website are also important for Google and it is worth bearing in mind for seo advertising to be as effective as possible.

Google also places great emphasis on technical issues, such as:

Page loading speed
The faster your site loads, the better – it’s obvious. If the entire process takes more than a few seconds, a large number of users simply give up their visit and turn to the next page in search results. Google knows this, so loading time is an important ranking factor. How can the waiting time be shortened? Actions include JavaScript minification, image compression, server migration with faster response times, and more. Google PageSpeed Insights can help you find out what you can improve on a page.

Responsiveness
Users browse pages on a variety of devices – desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, TVs and many more. This means that your website must display properly and allow comfortable viewing on multiple screen resolutions. The algorithm pays attention to, among other things, whether the text is readable (for example, whether individual characters do not extend beyond the screen).

SSL certificate
Encrypted communication is absolutely essential today – Google knows it too. The correct installation of the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is indicated by a green (or gray in some browsers) padlock next to the website address.

Friendly URL’s
The URL has a specific structure, but the form of the URL may vary depending on the administrator’s actions. Friendly addresses are much more intuitive for the user, and at the same time allow network bots to better “understand” the content of the subpage.

Internal links
We have devoted a separate section of this text to links, but it is worth mentioning internal links here. These are the links in which you redirect to subpages within your own domain, making it easier for both the user and the bot to navigate.

Picture descriptions
Each picture can be provided with a title and the so-called alt attribute, i.e. an alternative description. They are not usually visible at first glance, but they are in the code, which makes them well understood by web crawlers.

These are just some of the actions that should be performed on the website to improve its position in search results as part of on-site SEO. However, SEO is much more than just the methods presented above. In addition to other ideas for adapting the website to the requirements of the algorithm, it is also worth taking an interest in the second SEO department.

Off-site SEO – the power of linking

Off-site SEO can be simply called all activities that focus on obtaining links from other pages pointing to a given domain. This is largely what a page’s rank is based on – often referred to as (digital) social righteousness. The algorithm assumes that if many other pages of high “value” link to a given page, the linked page is also considered valuable – so it is probably worth raising its position.

However, it is not that simple. The key is getting quality links that will often be worth much more than a few hundred links from a zero-reputation microsite.

It is also worth paying attention to the attribute of a given link. There are several types, the most important of which at the initial stage are:
– Dofollow – a link that “opens the door” to a web crawler – encourages him to go to the linked page, ergo has a clear positioning value.
– Nofollow – a link that the bot theoretically does not pay attention to – i.e. sees it, but does not go any further. This includes links from social media such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as Wikipedia.

However, it is not that every nofollow link is meaningless from the point of view of SEO advertising, and each dofollow link will bring a specific value. The natural link profile is important for the algorithm – suspected spam may result in the imposition of a filter that will limit the website’s visibility in the search engine.

Where to get the links? Valuable content will organically diverge to some extent, but this is usually not enough. So you can arrange an exchange of links with the owner of another website or simply buy them. There are many websites on the Internet market that allow you to buy space for a given domain, but the selection of the “linking area” must be supported by thorough research – otherwise you can burn out the budget allocated for it, and in extreme situations, severely damage the painstakingly built position of the website.

SEO Advertising – What Should You Remember?

SEO of websites does not bring immediate results – you have to wait up to several months for the first noticeable changes. The power of SEO inertia is considerable, especially when compared to PPC systems (Google Ads or Facebook Ads), where a well-configured campaign brings profits right away. For this reason, positioning should be planned in the long term – only this approach provides meaningful results.

Positioning the website

Our client’s company has been operating for over twenty years, providing high-quality furniture throughout Europe. Nevertheless, when we started SEO in December 2020, its online visibility was very low. The website did not appear on any phrase, neither in TOP3 nor in TOP10 of search results, i.e. it was never visible on the first page in Google for phrases related to the industry. What’s more – it appeared only for one phrase in the TOP50, which almost completely limited the organic traffic on the site.

Top phrases in December 2020
Therefore, it was necessary to take both on-site activities, i.e. within the website itself, and off-site activities – consisting in acquiring high-quality external links. We started out by optimizing the site technically to improve loading times and usability for the user. We also focused on adding meta elements, important for the website evaluation by search engine robots. However, these changes were only the beginning. Together with the client, we also decided to implement a blog with tips on the website, and saturate each entry with key phrases best suited to the store’s offer. In addition, we strengthened the website by acquiring links on external websites leading to the client’s website.

Thanks to these actions, after six months we can see a significant improvement in the visibility of the website – we currently have 5 phrases in TOP3 of search results and 25 phrases in TOP10, i.e. on the first page. Naturally, the TOP50 saw the greatest progress – here we have already introduced over 500 phrases and we are constantly fighting for their even better positions.

Top phrases in June 2021
It is worth remembering that indexing pages by search engine algorithms is a time-consuming process, and it is sometimes even a dozen or so months for Google robots to be “recognized”. So this is just the beginning of the SEO road, and even better results can be expected in the coming months.

In a short time, however, you can achieve a significant increase in traffic and conversion thanks to Google Ads. Let us compare the results of our client’s campaign from 3 months ago with those achieved now.

In the period from February 16 to March 16, the ads generated over 21,700 clicks. In the period May 16 – June 14, this number dropped by approximately 1,500 clicks. However, does this mean a decrease in the effectiveness of the campaign? On the contrary. Clicks themselves do not bring the customer tangible profits – they only mean that the user has entered his website. In the process of optimizing ads, we try to limit accidental, empty clicks from recipients who are not really interested in the offer and do not plan to make a purchase. Choosing the right target group may therefore slightly reduce the number of clicks, but this does not translate into a reduction in profits.

The number and cost of the conversion

During the three months of campaigning, the number of conversions doubled – there were 319 of them at the turn of February and March, and now their number is 663 per month. At the same time, however, the cost of acquiring one conversion decreased by over 50%, which means that at the price you had to pay three months ago to acquire one customer, you can now acquire two.

How it’s possible? The answer is simple. The longer the campaign runs and the more data our specialists and bid optimization systems have to analyze, the more effective your ads can be. We constantly monitor when there is the greatest chance of conversion, what devices are used by users who most often show interest in the offer, where are the people who convert and many other factors. On this basis, we can predict which actions will bring the best effect and optimize the rates per click to achieve the campaign’s goal at the lowest possible cost.

What profits did the campaign bring?

Together with the client, we agreed that we would stick to the chosen budget for the campaign – for 3 months it increased by only 2.6%. With almost the same budget, revenues increased by more than 56%, i.e. about 88,500.

So how has the return on investment changed? At the turn of February and March, each euro spent on campaigns brought the client about EUR 14.50 in revenue, which is a very good result anyway. Now, however, EUR 22 in costs corresponds to EUR 22 in revenue, an increase of 50%.

Channel bonding = more profits

By combining a Google Ads advertising campaign with positioning, you can significantly increase not only brand visibility and recognition, but also real profits in a relatively short time – this applies to both online stores and service industries. Can we promise that the profits for each company will be on a similar level? Of course not. Marketing campaigns on the Internet are governed by too many variables to take anything for granted, and we focus on honesty and transparency in contact with the client. Instead of empty promises, however, we offer experience, knowledge and commitment, and this in many cases, with good cooperation with the client, brings even higher profits than expected.

Why is ecommerce analytics so important?

Collecting and analyzing data allows for better use of available resources and the selection of strategies that will positively affect the company’s development. In business, instinct is what counts, but making decisions based on your gut feelings may not end as happily as we would like. It is similar with the evaluation of our work – relying on your own assumptions or sympathies does not give the full picture of the situation. Collecting complete data allows you to indicate specific areas and activities that need correction. An analysis based on these data allows for setting a clear path and effective implementation of plans in further periods.

Analytics in e-commerce has many advantages:

A. It allows you to make informed decisions based on real information – as mentioned above, concrete data allows action to be taken based on real needs, not subjective feelings.

The collected records make it possible to identify groups of recipients and adjust the method of communication to their needs and expectations. The analysis also allows you to adjust ads and offers to current trends that have a significant impact on how and what we buy.

B. It enables you to increase your income – proper communication with the customer is not only an effective way to convince him to buy in our store, but also to return to our virtual thresholds. Analyzing data and drawing correct conclusions from it also allows you to expand your audience. Greater reach translates directly into greater profits.

C. Zooms to Better Operational Efficiency – Data allows you to make better business decisions, such as allocating your budget to different advertising channels. Choosing the channels that are the most effective and investing more money in them is a chance for more profit.

One of the basic features of the e-commerce world is its constant changeability. The flexibility of the solutions allows you to quickly adapt to trends that are visible, among others, thanks to the tracking of user behavior on websites and a quick response to external factors. The first part of 2020 showed it perfectly well – the global lockdown made it necessary to increase spending on Internet activities of many enterprises, and in some cases – even to start operating online. Many of the companies have found out that running an e-commerce business is significantly different from what their brick-and-mortar stores are used to, where sales are carried out on slightly different principles.

What data to collect?

Sales in online stores depend on many factors. The most important ones certainly coincide with what we know from stationary sales, e.g. the price and availability of a given product. In the case of online sales, however, there are also more technical aspects of the website – such as speed, navigation within the site and, for example, the availability of popular technology solutions.

The same applies to marketing activities – in a stationary store at the checkout, additional products are recommended, here in the basket you can encourage to supplement purchases with what other customers have bought. When it comes to advertising – stationary solutions are based on television and banners, which will not always attract the eye of a potential customer. On the Internet, advertising can be more effective – for example, remarketing allows you to track an undecided customer and remind him of the store and products that he has previously viewed.

Information about the client and the possibility of tracking him appears along with the implementation of solutions enabling the analysis of his behavior. Most of them are based on data provided by cookies – cookies that identify users and their computers, save preferences and play a huge role in supplementing Internet activity statistics.

Data is collected by appropriate software – here Google Analytics definitely dominates, without which analytics in e-commerce would not be the same. The information base can be extensive and the records very detailed, such as the age and gender of users, location and language. Information about their interests can also be obtained from the reports. The other information collected relates to more technical elements – e.g. the operating system and browsers used by your potential customers.

Collecting the results, tracking and comparing them with each other allows you to get quite detailed information about who visits our pages and:
– from which pages users come to the site,
– how long do they spend reading posts and which of them are the most popular,
– what products are most often bought together,
– where the customer most often resigns from buying in the store,
– how many sessions does it need to finalize the transaction.

How to use the data?

Data collection and analysis are not enough. Outlining the points where our business loses or does not use its potential – this is a real value that should be translated into specific actions. Ecommerce analytics allows it.

The information collected by Google Analytics and other tools should be taken into account in many processes related to the online store, including while designing the site. Analytics is also necessary during UX processes, especially in the phase of optimization of ready-made solutions. The data is also useful for planning marketing activities and solving problems with the website.

Website tailored to the user

Designing and checking already implemented changes allows you to increase the availability of the website and make it easier for users to navigate through them. Simple paths and easy access to information also work well for online stores. A large number of unclear categories or a chaotically designed form for customizing goods can frustrate customers and, as a result, make them give up the purchase. Difficulties with finalizing the purchase are also sometimes the reason for making a decision about choosing a competitor – even if the price of their products is higher. Controlling all steps leading to the completion of the purchasing process allows you to catch the moment when the customer gives up and design it in a way that will allow you to change the user experience for the better.

From the UX and website design point of view, the information on what devices the website users use will also be valuable. In the case of an advantage of traffic from mobile, it is necessary to ensure the correct design of the website and its appropriate size – not only adjusted to the smaller screen diagonal, but also to a weaker network connection. The time when your customers visit the site may also be important – some of the night audience will certainly be delighted with the possibility of using the dark mode option.

Marketing – with analysis

Google Analytics and related solutions are at the heart of every Internet-oriented marketer. This is where i.a. information about users is obtained – who they are, where they come from, what interests them. The tools allow you to select the content that engages them the most and those that do not arouse much interest. In the case of e.g. newsletters, tracking codes allow you to control how many e-mails have actually been opened and whether their recipients have made a decision to switch from them to the pages promoted therein.

Knowing your users, which will allow you to divide them into more or less engaged groups, is useful when setting up Google Ads campaigns. Increasing the financial outlays for a given group may bring better results than advertising aimed at everyone.

Analytics allows you to create events and goals, which makes it much easier to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Additionally, in the case of Google Analytics, dedicated e-commerce reports are also available, which allow for a broader view of sales in the store.

Creating goals is one of the elements of building an effective marketing strategy, especially if it is created in a SMART way:
– Specific,
– Measurable,
– Attractive,
– Realistic,
– Timely.

This methodology allows you to create real goals, the level of fulfillment of which can be controlled using Google Analytics. Goals can be set according to what works best for your store.

When analyzing problems with conversions (that is, meeting goals), it is worth asking yourself a few questions … basically one, only a few times. “5 whys” (5 why) is a method that allows you to effectively drill down into a problem and find its cause with a single question. Answering subsequent questions, e.g. the most popular product stopped selling. Why? There was an error on the page and it cannot be added to the cart. Why? Recent update changes have been badly implemented. Why? The pressure to introduce changes was too great and the acceleration of activities was done at the expense of testing. Why? The outlays for the IT department are too small, and their lack affects the quality of the entire store.

Analytics in e-commerce – react to changes!

Keeping your finger on the pulse – for example in the form of tracking within your website, definitely facilitates quick response to potential problems. Example? A sudden lack of conversion or the abandonment of the cart may suggest problems with a given subpage – e.g. its significant slowdown or technical error, preventing the transaction from being completed. Quickly locating the problem saves time and money.

Analytics in e-commerce – where to get knowledge?

The basic analysis of your own online store should start with the implementation of the Google Analytics tracking code. You can learn about how this tool works and how to set your own goals from official Google sources:

Analytics Academy – there are 4 courses on the platform:
– Google Analytics for beginners,
– Google Analytics for advanced users,
– Google Analytics 360 package – first steps,
– The basics of Google Tag Manager

Basics of analytics in e-commerce

Investing time in your development and skill development is never a waste. In the case of business issues, a different – more analytical – view of the world of shopping will allow you to pick out the subtleties that will allow your store to grow and achieve real profits! Failure to implement analytical tools and actively use them is simply a waste of money. Don’t take chances – check out our guides today!