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Hi there, Ezra here from SmartMarketer.com, back with you for another video
in this series for Shopify Ecommerce University. Now we're talking about
ecommerce SEO, as I mentioned in the last video. Now, it's important to
understand the state of search, where we are in query-based advertising and
query-based retailing; and what query-based retailing is basically when
someone goes to a search engine, or a buyer engine like Amazon or EBay or
Etsy. The difference between a search engine and a buyer engine is a buyer
engine is a place that displays only products, right? Amazon only displays
physical products or other types of products; they do information products,
but it's a sales-driven engine. People aren't querying for information,
they're querying for things to buy; same thing with EBay, and Etsy, and
product listing ads, Google Shopping, and some of these different
comparison shopping engines.
And search engines, you can query for things to buy, but you can also query
for information. So as I mentioned in the last video, a search engine
result page is just a collection of channels. And I wanted to show you a
visual representation of this, because it's a lot easier to grasp when you
can actually look at it. So I'm going to show you a couple search results
in a second here, but I want you to understand this concept of channels,
right? As a physical product retailer, we have channels that we can plug
into, that we can generate visibility for our products or services by
using, right? Because remember, you need to generate visibility for your
product, and you need to get people to buy it, and then you need to provide
a good enough experience and do good enough follow-up marketing that they
come back and buy from you again, or do business with you again, in
whatever way that you request from them; and so I want you to understand
the different channels that you have access to.
So organic, right? That's like search engine optimization showing up on
Google when people query for different things. There's paid advertising,
like Google Ad Words and Facebook ads; there's comparison shopping engines
and product listing ads, that's like Price Grabber and Defined and Google
Shopping; there's your own email list.; and then there's social, Social
networking, like Pinterest and Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn and
Facebook; and so this course covers all those. And it's just good to
understand what we're trying to do with our marketing, which is occupy
different channels that are available to us; and one of the ways that you
can do that is by creating and marketing content and doing advertising,
which is what I'm teaching you in this course.
This is really just to give you an idea and understanding of search engine
optimization; so when we look at a product-specific query, right? A query
where people have buyer intent like snorkel mask, for example. What we're
going to see on a Google search engine result page is Google AdWords
listings; that's Google's paid advertising platform. Google product listing
ads, or PLAs; that's another part of Google's paid advertising platform; it
allows you to show images of your product. You're going to see channels in
comparison shopping engines, ranking for any given product-specific query,
like Amazon and EBay and Price Grabber. You're going to see niche-specific
websites, which'd be like your ecommerce website, or review websites, or
coupon websites, or blogs. You'll also see images ranking, like Pinterest
images, and there'll be a list of images with the products. You'll see
videos ranking, right? Different videos; which is why I highly recommend
creating videos for each one of your products, which I'll talk about in the
conversion module later; but you'll also see social profiles and things
like that ranking. So it's just good to understand the different types of
channels, the different media formats that are most common for a product-
specific query.
So here's an example, like I said with "snorkel mask." This is above the
fold; so above the fold for this query, we've got Google Ad Words, right,
which is surrounded in the green box. Then we've got some organic results,
which happen to be two channel listings, Amazon, right? And then over to
the right of that, we've got the Google product listing ads. Now, this is
on my Mac Book Air, this is what's above the fold. Now, down below the
fold, we've got some image results; we've got a social result in Wikipedia;
we've got another niche URL in ***'s Sporting Goods and Swim Outlet, and
we've got some more ads down on the right-hand side.
Now, if you have a look at this query here, this is "red bar stools." And
what we can see is we've got an Ad Words ad up at the top, we've got
product listing ads to the right, or right below that, and then we've got
an organic listing, we've got a video listing, and some image listing. What
you'll notice is that Overstock has an Ad Words ad, Overstock also has a
product listing ad, right? If you look at the orange arrow, Overstock has a
ranking; if you look right below, the purple arrow, there's a ranking for
Overstock, and Overstock also has a video and an image.
So this is what I mean by understanding these different media formats you
can take over, and for any given query, you can rank multiple different
media formats. You can have Google pay-per-click ad, you can have a Google
product listing ad, you can have your website ranked, you can have video
ranked, you can have your image ranked, you can have your social profiles
ranked. And if you follow the process that I'm teaching you in this course
for how to create and syndicate your content, you do that for each one of
your product pages as well; you will end up with this sort of a search
result page for any one of your queries.
And we also see here that this is just another example of a query where
we've got, you know, a text ad, an image ad, a channel result, and some ads
in the right-hand side. And it's important to know that you can run
advertising, right? You can have a product listing ad and a text ad if you
look here, Zippos has both a text ad and a product listing ad.
Now, this isn't specifically focused on advertising. I'm not teaching you
Google Advertising in this course. I'm teaching you how to actually build
your business without advertising, if you don't want to do advertising. But
I am going to teach you Facebook advertising, because I believe that that
is the biggest and most powerful advertising platform on the planet, and
it's only growing, and it works super well for physical product brands. So
I'm going to be teaching that, but I do want you to have an understanding
of the different channels that you have access to as a physical product
retailer.
And the other thing is, look, you can thrive without query-based traffic;
when I started in Ecommerce, there was only query-based traffic; we only
had Google Search we didn't even have Google Shopping at the time; we
didn't have Amazon ads. Like, we didn't have... we only had query-based
traffic. And now, we have contextual traffic, and social traffic, and
comparison shopping engines, like, we have the ability to generate
visibility for our businesses without ever having to worry about people
searching for them. We can generate visibility for our businesses by
creating content that is relevant to the topics and conversations and lives
of our community, and syndicating that content across all the social
networks, and marketing that content on the social networks can generate
visibility for our brands without query-based traffic.
So don't worry if you're freaked out by query-based traffic and search
engine optimization. Using the process in this course, you will learn all
that stuff, but you'll also learn that you don't actually need it.
So *** is a great example of that. Our company, we spent our first two
years without ever doing query-based traffic without ever doing traditional
search marketing. We've now integrated that a little bit down the road in
our business, but we started with traditional press, and traditional
content creation, and syndication, and social media. We didn't start with
query-based traffic.
So you're in for a treat. Let's move on to the next video, this is Ezra
Firestone from Smart Marketer for Shopify Ecommerce University, and let's
dig into the plan.