Take, for example, Amazon.com, a major
e-commerce player that has a great SEO strategy in place on its site.
One of the thousands of products that Amazon sells is the well-known
business book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by
Stephen R. Covey. A Google search for the book’s title (with the
number seven spelled out or written as a numeral) or even for “seven
habits book covey” brings up Amazon’s page for that book at the
top of the results. This indicates that Amazon’s strategy is
working appropriately – for one type of buyer.
A buyer that is typing this information
into the engine is extremely motivated – he has already done his
research about the particular book, and he knows that he wants to
purchase it. That makes this strategy valuable – Amazon can catch
the targeted buyers who are no longer browsing but are already
buying. There’s no way to tell how often a book’s particular
title is typed into a search engine. It could be once a month, once a
week, or once a year, but it is a phrase that will likely bring in
sales.
The problem is that at the search stage
the targeted buyer is likely doing price comparisons before making a
final purchase. Therefore, he might be going from search engine
result to search engine result, checking the price of the book at one
site and then backing up to check the price elsewhere. If he does buy
his book from Amazon, there is no way to gauge if he is going to
return for future purchases. Instead, the next time he wants to buy
something, he’ll repeat the process – research, search, compare,
and then buy. He might choose Amazon, but he might instead choose
another bookseller. Therefore, in order to attract more sales, a
business’s optimization strategy needs to be broadened to encompass
more than just the targeted buyer.
The other type of buyer, the one who is
often ignored by Internet marketers, is the person who is looking for
a resource for multiple purchases over time. This person is
essentially looking for a partner – a site that can be bookmarked
and returned to over and over again. You can tell this type of buyer
by the phrases that she uses. For example, she may be an HR manager
who needs to buy books every few months to train new employees, or
the CEO of a new company who wants to stay on top of the latest
trends. And so, she won’t search for a particular book title or
author, she’ll search for a general phrase – one like “business
books.”
To catch this type of buyer, you need
to not only optimize for manufacturer names and model numbers but
also for these general types of phrases. You can then take this
strategy a crucial step further, by building pages for your site that
have essential, relevant information for someone who might become a
lifetime buyer. Google “business books” and you find that Amazon
has embraced this strategy by creating a page with a sampling of the
business books offered at the site, clearly intended to reach the
lifetime buyer.
For your company, this type of page
might list benefits you provide to your customers, describe awards
your site has won, or feature specific products that meet the needs
of the searcher. Basically, when trying to reach a potential lifetime
buyer, you need to have a page or pages that explain why one should
buy from your business today, tomorrow, and well into the future.
These buyers are, clearly, the ones who provide a greater value over
the long term than the shopper looking for one, and only one,
specific product.
Now of course, there are caveats to
these rules. Are there buyers who will search on a specific product
and then revisit a site many times in the future for additional
purchases? Of course. Are there people who are searching on general
phrases because they’re not sure what to buy who will then make a
single purchase and never return? Naturally. But these are largely
exceptions.
The fact remains that if a searcher types a general phrase into a search engine, finds you in the results, makes a single purchase, and never returns to your site, that person is still a customer who is spending money with your business. And undecided searchers using your site for research purposes about specific products are more likely to bookmark and return to your site if they have a positive experience, so it’s still important that you make sure to cater to the potential lifetime shoppers at all times. While the trend with e-commerce sites in general is to optimize for the specifics, savvy marketers can expand this strategy to target the lifetime buyers as well. Such an approach can be a simple way to increase both an e-commerce site’s traffic as well as the site’s business.