It’s long been known that eCommerce SEO services offer the highest ROI of all marketing channels, and that, on top of that, it’s superior to channels like PPC in other ways, too.
Consider that even with the best minds in the business working on an eCommerce PPC management strategy, ads typically get 2% click-through or less. And, on top of that, if you cancel a PPC campaign, results will drop off immediately.
While it takes a great deal of time and effort to get a search engine optimization campaign off the ground and produce results, the truth is that you get to keep a lot of the equity you produce. Even if it takes 6 months to generate results with SEO, if you cancel after a year, you will often see results continue to accrue even after another 6 months, if not longer. And, with really high-quality evergreen content, results may continue to build for years and years afterwards.
So eCommerce SEO services really are an investment in a business model, and it is one that pays dividends long into the future.
That being the case, that is exactly the channel we recommended for one of our clients that sells hunting and shooting accessories, specifically thermal optics used by night hunters.
Here are some of the challenges we faced, how our process overcame them, and what the results looked like.
The Issues of PPC Restriction
The client in question sells not just thermal optics, such as thermal scopes and monoculars, but also a wide variety of shooting accessories, including hunting calls, trigger locks, red dot sights, and Picatinny attachments.
There’s a bit of gray area here with respect to restrictions. Guns and gun parts are restricted by Google and other platforms, which makes it difficult to market them through PPC. Actually it is effectively impossible.
The issue is that when you sell items that are seen by Google and other platforms as related to, or accessorial to, items that are restricted, sometimes an account gets flagged. This happens sometimes with retailers that sell gun holsters, despite the fact that holsters themselves are patently harmless.
There’s a similar situation surrounding the industry for optics, which includes both conventional optics and the thermal optics that this client sells.
That made PPC a risky move, and one that would be too likely to run the risk of wasting money, positioning SEO as a much more lucrative digital marketing channel despite the length of time it would likely take.
Broadening the Organic Footprint with SEO
To a degree, you’re always going to be up against it when you commit to engaging in SEO, regardless of the industry in which you operate. There are the challenges of competition and the fact that rankings cannot be bought and must be earned.
Largely this comes down to how effective the copy on a website is. This is the main manner in which eCommerce merchants (and other websites) differentiate themselves. Product listings and meta data only go so far. They help with SEO but what really makes a business shine is content marketing level quality copy.
With companies that sell products in the outdoor space, effective content that reviews products, answers product queries, and offers real-life insights into the sports users pursue is the sort of stuff that gets results, and it just so helps that the line between SEO and content marketing is not just blurring, but that high-quality SEO copy also improves visibility in AI engines.
That is the bulk of what our process is built on, and it is the sort of thing we delivered on for this client.
What the Process Looks Like
As with any eCommerce SEO client, we started with a website and industry audit so we could see where the current domain stood and who the other big players in the field were.
From there, we identified a cohort of target keywords that were relevant to the products and categories in thermal optics that this company sells, and in fact, many were branded keywords representing his top brands. In a few select instances we targeted product-specific keywords.
From there we made specific optimizations to the client’s key target pages with metadata and on-page copy, along with a select technical optimizations, where needed. From there our content team started pounding the pavement.
We researched the industry, found similar domains and pages that were ranking for this campaign’s keywords, and modeled our optimizations after what was performing. We created offsite copy used for building links filled with information that answered questions about the products and which offered tips and insight into outdoor sports, shooting, and night hunting.
We also created a variety of onsite copy in the form of blogs that answered FAQs, served as buyers guides, and which was overall filled with rich content that was not just designed to attract the attention of search engines, but which was designed to attract the interest of AI engines.
The process has been ongoing, and results were challenging to come by, but in time, we started to see those organic increases.
The Results
There are lots of things you can look for if you want to evaluate the health and performance of an eCommerce SEO campaign.
You can look at keyword movement, but that doesn’t often tell the whole picture because even if keyword rankings improve, without clicks, it’s all moot.
So we prefer to look at impressions and clicks. The screenshot below covers roughly the past year of our service to this client.
You can see results took their sweet time to build but ultimately, they started to grow. I didn’t even bother to compare because you can see the growth quite clearly in the picture.
Of course, impressions and clicks are only good for SEO if they result in conversions, so I grabbed a screenshot of this client’s analytics comparing the past month to the same month last year, and can see for yourself what 117% growth in revenue looks like.
When you have these two things together – growth in impressions and clicks corroborated by growth in revenue (and higher views and engagement, too) you can tell that SEO is doing its job.
Kickstart Your Organic Growth Today
It might take some time, but now is better than never. If you want to see more examples of work we’ve done for our clients, check out our full collection of eCommerce case studies, and if you’re curious what marketing channel (or channels) will work best for your business model, get in touch with us and we will help you out.