Combining eCommerce SEO and PPC Management to Capture New Business

Eloquence serves a unique, highly targeted niche market in a segment of the home furnishings industry. They specialize in the sourcing of high-end, authentic antique furniture from all over Europe. They are not, however, simply a broker of genuine vintage and antique furniture. They are true connoisseurs of their field, specializing in the production of highly sophisticated, ornate re-editions of artisanal originals. Like most online merchants, they stood to benefit from both organic and paid growth, through eCommerce SEO and PPC, respectively.

Eloquence takes its inspiration from a wide pool of antique elements, including French Country influences, and many others. Their team of creatives and innovators distills these elements into a catalog of exquisite, completely unique reproductions and re-editions that, though not categorically antiques, stand in a class of their own. All of their reproductions are handmade and hand-finished by skilled artisans, produced to a strict standard of quality and with the keenest attention to fine details.

With such a strong value proposition, it might seem as though their products sell themselves; but the truth is, in the digital marketplace, a product can be unique, irreplaceable, even priceless – but without populating an interested user’s searches or media, potential is left on the table.

Eloquence is uniquely positioned to deliver value to its customers, but what their team needed was a digital marketing agency partner to craft custom solutions for their organization that would connect their digital presence with their interested queries of potential customers in their target market. 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency, with years of experience in the fold, crafted bespoke eCommerce SEO services and eCommerce PPC management solutions for Eloquence to help them attain their goals for online growth.

Addressing Challenges in the Industry

1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s strategic partnership with Eloquence began roughly concurrently with the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Early on in our partnership with them, concerns regarding digital marketing were high. Our ability to deliver creative solutions to a rapidly changing landscape would come into sharp focus.

One of our partners at Eloquence reflected, “When COVID hit, we had concerns like many others in a nonessential industry.”

Ironically, the exact opposite circumstances befell Eloquence. What they experienced was an issue of supply as demand steadily surged. “Demand in the home furnishings industry went up 200% last year because everyone was staying at home,” our contact remarked.

What actually occurred was a dilemma in the client’s mind about where and how much to allocate to digital marketing spending, and what strategies to pursue. Our client reflected that “We had the demand for our products, it was just difficult to get them out. We were apprehensive to push marketing because we were afraid of increasing backorders.” It became, for the client, a matter of reaching the right customers and not simply putting money into spreading general brand awareness.

We began in early 2020 with a custom eCommerce SEO strategy to start slowly building their organic rankings in order to get their website ranking for keywords closely associated with searches performed by the most qualified members of their target market.

eCommerce SEO: A Long Term Game

Any eCommerce SEO agency will tell you that SEO, including eCommerce SEO, is a long-term game, and that its effects can’t really be evaluated in the short term. It takes an appreciable amount of time to develop domain authority and higher organic rankings, especially for highly competitive search terms and targeted short tail keywords with high search volume.

As a result, drawing conclusions from the apparent results of an SEO campaign that has only stood for a few months is typically considered specious. It’s best to give an SEO campaign time to develop before conclusive statements can be made.

Regardless, our eCommerce SEO company started out with Eloquence as we do with all of our SEO clients: with a deep dive into their competitive landscape and a discovery process during which we uncovered the most lucrative keywords to target. The challenge was to identify the keywords and search terms that were balanced so far as competition and opportunity were concerned.

Highly competitive search terms with high search volume are attractive, and every eCommerce business wants to rank effectively for them, but this is not always an attainable goal. Instead, developing a balance of competitive and opportunity keywords is the best approach; this is the strategy we adopted for Eloquence.

With a list of effective target keywords, we were able to perform a suite of on-page optimizations for their website, Eloquence.com, scanning for duplicate content, optimizing their metadata, and on-page content, such as category and product page content. We have also addressed certain issues associated with technical SEO, such as the disavowal of toxic links and the removal of broken links, in order to boost their website’s overall SEO score.

A content publication strategy is also a large component of our SEO process and involves the drafting and publication of original, optimized content to our clients’ blogs and strategic pages on their websites, as well as an offsite content publication strategy that involves posting content to a variety of third-party locations for the value of the backlinks directed back to our clients’ websites, indicating them as authorities for key, competitive search terms.

There are several ways to evaluate the performance of an SEO campaign, with many, many metrics that will tell a part of the tale of success. Two of the biggest key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with the success of an SEO campaign are organic traffic figures and sessions associated with organic traffic.

When comparing the period from March 2020 to the present (July 2021), which corresponds roughly to the start of their SEO campaign, alongside the previous period (March 2019 to July 2020) it is abundantly clear that both of these KPIs have trended upward significantly.

Figures associated with both all users and organic traffic increased significantly during this period, with particularly remarkable increases among new organic users. Sessions also increased, which typically indicates that the new traffic making its way to the client’s website is better targeted and has either intent to buy or interest in the subject matter.

Speaking of intent to buy, the goal of an eCommerce SEO project is not simply to increase brand awareness and get more users to find the client’s website organically. Those are goals, but they are precursors to the endgame of higher sales and conversion figures. When assessing the same period of time as compared to the preceding period, several additional key factors increased significantly for Eloquence.

To gather a more concrete impression of the reasons behind these positive shifts in organic traffic, consider the following representation of the keyword increases we authored for Eloquence. These target keywords range in volume, but you can see that many of them have several thousand global searches per month. Also, despite the random distribution of these keywords, they’ve all experienced positive – and recent – movements.

While the insight and experience of our eCommerce SEO experts are behind the reasons for this organic growth, it is helpful that we have the benefit of more than a year’s time to show the steady growth associated with eCommerce SEO.

At the same time, organic growth is not the only way to reach interested buyers online. Many savvy online merchants capitalize on the value of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing in order to gain higher visibility at the tops of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This helps to prevent competitors from simply outbidding for a space at the top of the page – and this digital real estate generates the highest number of clicks anyway.

eCommerce PPC Management for Increased Brand Exposure

Just about a year into their SEO partnership with 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency, Eloquence expanded their digital marketing efforts by partnering with us for eCommerce PPC management services to increase their brand exposure and generate additional revenue through paid search, to supplement the organic results of their SEO campaign.

Eloquence’s confidence in 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency’s competency as an eCommerce SEO agency influenced their decision to partner with us for PPC advertising, remarking that “It’s been helpful that [1Digital^Ⓡ] understands our processes, handles our SEO and understands the general functionality of our website. The overall, encompassing view, with a strategy, is helpful for us – we’re all on the same page.”

Of course, the easy way to determine the efficacy of a PPC campaign is if it generates money not only sufficient to fund itself, but also to substantially turn a profit. This, however, does not paint the entire picture.

By targeting ads towards the right ad groups, focusing on the right keywords and delivering on user’s expectations, clicks, conversions and revenue can all be increased with a PPC campaign. What’s different about our approach and the approach of other eCommerce PPC service providers is that we avoid the tendency to “set and forget” a campaign. For us and our customers, profit alone is not satisfactory. Our goal is to continuously improve the performance of each campaign, driving down cost-per-click associated with it and improving not only raw revenue figures but also return-on-ad-spend, or ROAS.

The picture below shows some of our cumulative efforts during the period from April to July 2021 compared to the period previous, from December 2020 through February 2021.

Our efforts not only brought in new visitors that converted and increased revenue but there were substantial increases during the period that we were running the campaigns. That is to say, our efforts improved on themselves, and we generated nearly 20% more paid visitors and increased revenue by over 41% as compared to the previous period, during which we were also running a PPC campaign for Eloquence.

In particular, this client’s shopping feed and remarketing efforts have both served as key elements to the success of our PPC strategy. The pictographic element of a Google Shopping Feed helps to deliver on customers’ expectations in ways that text alone cannot, and by serving ads to previous visitors of the website, we’ve been able to convert what might otherwise have been distant one-time visitors into engaged, paying customers.

By continuously addressing the performance of our client’s most lucrative groups and adjusting the performance of ad campaigns that were not performing optimally, we created a lean, self-improving campaign that is optimized on an ongoing basis for performance and profitability. The job is never done; our goal is to make adjustments to ad groups, target, and negative keywords, and even geographic, device, and time-of-day targeting to ensure higher conversions and more revenue for lower associated ad spend.

Uniting the Efforts of Both eCommerce SEO and PPC

Our digital marketing strategists on both the PPC and SEO sides of our operations work hand in hand to develop campaigns that work the best for our clients – and implement them. In this instance, we have steadily improved our client’s organic rankings for select target keywords, thus bringing in not only better qualified but better-interested customers that are more likely to convert. The proof of this is in the commensurately higher conversion, sales, and revenue figures associated with this client’s increases in organic traffic.

At the same time, our PPC experts have worked tirelessly to play the other side of the digital marketing strategy by ensuring that the organic efforts of our SEO team have been supplemented by a steady, increasing flow of traffic and revenue from a paid search campaign that is continuously optimized for performance.

Both of these strategies, eCommerce SEO and PPC, improve brand awareness, bring in new customers, and result in higher conversion and sales. They just follow different avenues to do so – but by uniting our efforts we have enabled our client to enjoy increased brand exposure online and to drive sales higher and higher – and our efforts only promise to improve from here.

Serving Your Industry

Our SEO and PPC strategists built custom campaigns for Eloquence, but their success is not an outlier. We have served countless clients in diverse industries, providing services in eCommerce design, custom development, SEO, PPC, and others, solving complex problems in eCommerce, and reinforcing our clients’ online presences with digital marketing strategies that build a business and increase sales. You can learn more about many of these success stories in our collection of eCommerce case studies.

If you’re interested in learning about how our eCommerce specialists can help you grow business strategies to position your organization for higher traffic and sales, get in touch with one of our eCommerce SEO experts today at 888-988-8269 or at info@1digitalagency.com.

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