DIGITAL – EXCLUSIVE SERIALISATION


E-commerce SEO is a continual process, but there are two important things you need to consider when it comes to e-commerce and SEO:


You need the basic structure set up properly, which many sites have not, and, if you’re migrating from one platform to another platform, the most important thing is to do so carefully and get expert advice if possible.


It’s vital to figure out if you have any bad practices in place on your current website before moving everything over so you’re not just repeating mistakes and continuing bad SEO. Often, we find developers change site URLs from one site to the new site just to make it easier for themselves, when this can cause a lot of issues. Sites should be built with a growth-first approach, rather than a development team first approach.


PAID TRAFFIC Traffic growth is all about paid traffic. To make paid traffic work you need to be able to pay for the traffic and then make a profit after all costs are taken into consideration.


It’s a numbers game and as you scale you will need to keep tweaking your optimisations to keep the profit window open. Fundamentally this is the industry of advertising.


If you have not read Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to this book. Written in 1923 you’d wonder what relevance it has today for e-commerce


but given the man’s genius for marketing its learnings are evergreen.


Here is what David Ogilvy said of the book: ‘Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.’


Here are some key points that we can apply to our online stores that we can use to help scale our advertising spend profitably.


FAMILIARITY If people are familiar with your brand, product and service before they decide they need xyz product they will more likely buy from you. Today brand awareness does not mean carpet bombing TV with generic adverts to hit everyone; instead, we can create a very specific audience and be totally focused on that audience. You need your store to be famous, but only with a tight subset of people. Tis is very possible with Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn.


So, the hard work comes down to really building up that audience list that you need to target knowing they are right in your sweet spot.


RUN THE NUMBERS If Claude Hopkins found that he could send out 1000 coupons and get $5000 back, he would then send out 10,000 coupons and see if he could get $50,000 back. He would keep going until he couldn’t find any more people to send coupons too. He went BIG and fast. With our e-commerce stores,


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as we have talked about before, we seem to have an internal thermostat that stops us spending more. We mentally tell ourselves ‘we are not the type of business that spends £50K a month on Facebook’ even though we would get a good return. If the numbers work, go big or go home.


PEOPLE LIKE CERTAINTY Claude had early success with a restorative cure by making the pharmacist sign the guarantee about the product rather than the guarantee just being mentioned on the bottle. Guarantees are good but only if people trust the person offering the guarantee. With e-commerce we need to tie the guarantee back to a visible, real person that people trust. Making a guarantee from a faceless brand is much less powerful. Build some rapport with the store brand and a person who works there and then offer a personal guarantee.


PERSONALISATION Personalisation might be the latest buzz word in e-commerce but back in 1929 Claude Hopkins already understood it. Selling life insurance to businessmen, a message was sent with the offer of a free book: ‘Your name will be printed in gilt on each book’—the personalisation of the book with their name was novel at the time and it sold well.


We can use personalisation to match the product to the consumer. We can show the consumer their name embroidered on the suit inside pocket on the product page. We know their name, we know the product they are


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