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Search Marketing for eCommerce
Marketing Strategies:
Google is Changing How People Buy
Aftermarket Parts
Search
Marketing
for eCommerce
Visiture.com
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Search Marketing for eCommerce
Introduction
This guide will explain how consumers are using Google, Bing, and Yahoo to purchase aftermarket parts.
In addition, this guide will show retailers how to optimize their search marketing efforts to capture
more of this market share in order to grow their business.
Learn new modern
organic search strategies
and changes in Google
search.
Learn new paid search
strategies and achieve
higher ROAS.
Understand what
strategies retailers are
using for success with
search marketing.
Search Engines
How Automotive Consumers Are Using Google,
Bing, and Yahoo
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Search Engines
Search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, crawl the Internet with bots called spiders.
These bots look for signals from web pages, which include everything from content and
backlinks to more. Then, depending on the quality of these signals, they decide where to
rank them in the search results (SERPs).
While most search engines are very similar, Google is the most advanced search engine
currently on the market. Google has stated that the three main signals for their SERPs are
content, or the words on your website; hyperlinks, or links from other web pages that point
toward your site; and then how humans, or searchers, interact with your content.
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Types of Listings
There are two types of listings on the search results of Google: Organic Listings and Paid Ads.
At the top of the SERPs are paid ads - both shopping ads and then traditional text ads. There are generally 4 ads before
you then get to the organic listings.
Organic listings are the listings that Google displays after crawling the Internet for signals. These results are not paid
and are purely organic through SEO, or search engine optimization. So, how are these listings generated? Google crawls
individual web pages and finds the title and description of the page. This is then displayed in the search results.
You can optimize your title and description in order to help your rankings. You can put the keywords that you want to
rank for into the title and description on each of your pages. By doing this, you can help control what you rank for.
The second type of listing on the SERPs are ads. Google offers advertising where you can bid on very specific search
phrases within your AdWords account. Inside AdWords, you can optimize on a very granular level with what keywords
you buy, when you bid, where you place your ads, and what ad text you use.
With these ads, you bid in real time against other bidders for the trillions of different keyword phrases that people could
be searching for. If you win the auction with your bid, your ad will be served on their SERPs. Each time that someone
clicks on your ad, then you pay Google with AdWords.
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Mobile Shift
Previously, Google’s search results were very desktop centric, very cluttered, and somewhat underwhelming.
However, when you look at it on a technical level, it does the same thing as Google’s new search results.
It shows users what web pages they are searching for. So, if they search for “F150 lift kits,” they will receive “F150 lift
kit”-centric web pages. However, Google is moving away from this. Consumers are using more mobile devices to find
products, and Google is optimizing for this with more mobile-focused results and advertising.
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Why Consumers Use Google
So, why are consumers using Google? Consumers use Google because it is an easy and great way to find products
and information online. This is especially true for younger audiences, who have Google built into their DNA.
There are two main ways that consumers use Google for the aftermarket automotive industry. The first is to do
research, or find more information, and then second, to find physical products to buy online.
As the target market become younger, more and more consumers will move to Google. As of 2013, Chain Store Age
Today conducted a study which found that 81% of consumers search online before they buy a product. This
number will just continue to rise, as the younger generation increases their disposable income and becomes the
target market for the aftermarket automotive industry.
Also, eCommerce is growing more and more. As consumers move toward online purchasing, more retailers and
brand manufacturers will have to move to an online sales focus. Right now, online sales are at $335 billion and are
projected to increase to $523 billion by 2020. This data, provided by Forrester, shows that one of the biggest
reasons for this is the increase in mobile usage among consumers.
As the revenue for online sales grows, and more and more people search online, Google will be deciding where
consumers do business in the aftermarket automotive industry more than ever before.
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Why You Need to Focus on Google
Data suggests that retailers and brand manufacturers need to focus on online sales and focus on search engines
to help connect with consumers, but the truth of this is that you need to be focusing on Google.
Currently, Google has the largest market share and is by far the most innovative search engine. All of their
competitors are way behind them in almost every, if not each, aspect. Google holds 74% of the market; it has
proven it is the king of search.
Because Google is the most innovative search engine, you have to optimize for it, not other search engines. If you
optimize for Bing or Yahoo, there is a very high chance that you will un-optimize yourself for Google. However, in
return, as you optimize for Google, after some time your web pages will become optimized for Bing and Yahoo.
So, for automotive retailers, brand manufacturers, and anyone else selling aftermarket automotive parts, it is
imperative that you use this channel to sell your products online and find new consumers trying to find you
locally unless you want to be lost in the dust.
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Google Trends
The Current and Future Trends of the
Search Engine
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Basic Consumer Behavior Trends
Google is by far the most innovative search engine on the market and, in order to keep this title, they are
constantly updating their algorithms and factors. The future of Google is exciting, and you need to be aware of
it for the aftermarket automotive industry.
Not only is Google constantly improving their search engine through algorithm updates, consumers are also
getting better about using Google. Consumers are more savvy with their searches, and they are searching more
specific queries than ever before. First, they research what they are looking for, and then they make specific
searches to find the product with the best value.
Consumers also are searching for a wider variety of queries. If you are optimizing your website for just 1 or 2
phrases, that is not going to be adequate with Google, especially moving forward. For example, short-tailed
phrases like “lift kits” could only be 1-2% of the search queries that you cover.
In addition, consumers are also more trusting of advertising than they have ever been. In the past, consumers did
not trust ads in the SERPs. However, thanks to the changes that Google has made within their advertising program,
which promotes quality clicks, consumers are trusting the ad results more and more. Also, Google’s shopping
channel has restored faith with searchers, due to its ability to match the search intent perfectly for Google and the
consumer.
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Consumers Are Deciding Search Results
Before 2015, companies and algorithms alone controlled the search results. Companies could wield their monetary
might and decide the search results through great on-page optimization, advanced skill sets, link building, etc.
However, now Google uses human behavior to help decide their search results.
Google can see how people interact with their search results. If people click on your listings in the search results,
Google will push you up in the rankings because it is a signal that you are popular for that particular query.
Therefore, having good meta information with calls to action is very important.
To illustrate this, an SEO thought leader wrote this great piece of content and wanted to rank it for “IMEC Lab.” He
wrote the piece, made it well optimized, and then posted it to his website. It was on page 2 for a few days, and
then he decided to tweet about it. He sent a tweet out to his followers to Google “IMEC Lab,” and then click on
his listing—and they did.
Sure enough, hours later, he went to the first page of the SERPs—and he had reached the #1 position. This is
because Google cares about what people are searching for and click on, and it will reward you in the search results.
Another great example: A different SEO thought leader made this amazing blog post, “How to Get High Quality
Backlinks.” It did very well and received a ton of traffic, but it also had a very high bounce rate—almost 57% higher.
Any guesses why?
Because it ranked for “How to Get High.” If you are a searcher for “How to Get High,” this would be a terrible piece of
content for you. Google recognized that this piece of content was bad for “How to Get High,” and he dropped for that
phrase after a couple of days. But then he rose for the phrase, “How to Get High Quality Backlinks.” Therefore, you can
see that focusing on the searching and giving them a positive experience is paramount.
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Focus on the Searchers’ Intent
In order to focus on the searchers’ intent, you need to think about what searchers are searching for and how you can
reach them. You want to match your web page’s content and meta information to match the searchers’ intent.
Are they searching for products?
Are they searching for a local store?
Are they searching for information?
You want to solve one of these three questions with either your products/categories, a local store optimized page, or
blog content that solves their questions when searching for information.
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Search Integrates with the Purchasing Cycle
Consumers are getting more sophisticated with their searches, and there are steps in between the start of the
purchasing cycle and of buying a product. Usually, it starts with research, finding the product, and then finding
the best value, not price.
Not just the price of the product is important, it’s also the value that they are getting out of it. Also, value can
help to build trust. Trust is very important to achieve a sale—more so than price.
You want to make sure that you match yourself in their purchasing cycle by optimizing for their intent.
For example, if they are looking online for products to buy locally, you want to be able to let them know
about your local stores or where they can buy your products.
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Automotive Gives Up on PPC
Another trend that we see in aftermarket automotive is that of players giving up on paid search due to their
frustration. If you aren’t getting a positive ROI in Google AdWords, does that mean that Google AdWords doesn’t
work for you, or does it mean that maybe you don’t know what you are doing?
Remember—81% of consumers research before they buy anything; therefore we can waste a lot of our budget on
research questions, which do not have a high conversion rate.
Yes, PPC can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Many companies out there are doing their PPC all wrong. They jump
in the “short-tailed” keyword phrase buying pool, get frustrated, and then give up. Competitors have been doing
this for decades, now, and have more data. You have to be patient and get a hold of the 19% of consumers who
are looking to buy. Not all traffic is equal.
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Google Shopping and Focus on Paid Ads
Another trend inside the paid search world is Google Shopping. It is growing in popularity and importance.
Consumers love the comparison shopping that Google Shopping offers. This is becoming huge in Google search
for aftermarket automotive parts. You can take your product feed, upload it to Google, and then Google will put
your products in individual searches based on what the product is.
Today, Google Shopping provides the highest return on advertising expenditures and the most value in search.
Google is also moving to more paid ads, as you can see. There are now up to 4 paid ads in the SERPs, and then
there’s the Google Shopping carousel at the top of the search query involving products or close-to-product search
queries.
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Organic Search Is Still VERY Important
Let’s not forget organic search – it is still very important in today’s industry. Consumers still very much value the
organic listings, and it is paramount that retailers optimize for this. Even though Google has more ads in the listings,
organic search has been effected very minimally.
For more information, see this study that Visiture put together which discusses it more in depth and shows that
click-through rates were not affected that much from the 4 top ads.
From this study, we wanted to see if the four ads at the top of the SERPs affected organic search traffic. We tested for
28 days after the release of the update and then compared it to the 28 days before the release of the 4 ads update.
We were able to see that 5 out of the 12 examples that we looked at had increased their click-through rate when it
came to organic search. Therefore, we can infer that this means the 4 ads update did not have a large impact on
organic search traffic and revenue.
To complete this study, we looked at three different types of search traffic. The first was branded search, which
meant someone who was searching for a brand name.
The second was looking solely at high volume keywords. This would refer to keywords like “lift kits” or “fuel injectors.”
The third type of search traffic was the overall search traffic.
Overall, the test showed that the 4 ads update did have some impact, here and there, but nothing at all substantial f
or us to infer it hurt organic search traffic.
Optimizing for Organic
Search Listings
Modern SEO practices and trends for 2016
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100s of Ranking Factors in Organic Algorithm
There are 100s of ranking factors in Google. To see this complete list, this is a good source.
Google uses all of these factors to decide where to place your website in the search results for the trillions of
different combinations of search queries that someone could use. Some of these factors matter more than
others—some might have a very poor score, but others have amazing scores; they are all weighted together to
give you a score per each query.
All of these factors can make SEO very hard and confusing, but, as a retailer or a marketer, you want to focus
on the three main factors which account for the largest amount of effectiveness when trying to rank in Google.
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3 Most Important Factors
The three most important factors for Google are content, backlinks, and RankBrain. RankBrain is a new
algorithm update that uses human behavior and assimilates keywords together.
One Google engineer and Senior Search Strategist said that the first two most important pieces in Google’s
algorithm are content and links. He went on to say that the third most important factor was RankBrain or
human behavior. Therefore, we can assume that these three elements of the search engine are the most
powerful and impactful.
Source 1
Source 2
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RankBrain: Content and Human Behavior
One of the most factors for SEO is content. Google crawls your website and uses the content there to understand more
about the site. However, Google cannot crawl images or other types of elements. It relies solely on the content.
A 2015 study by SearchMetrics, which used their entire database of search engine rankings, correlated what were the
most common elements for web pages that rank in the top position. They found that pages with the most words, on
average of over 1,500, ranked higher in Google. Of course, there might be a correlation with longer content and more
in-depth answers which Google wants, but we know that having more content and answering questions that are
comprehensive is better for Google’s search.
Remember when we discussed how Google takes into consideration if people click on our listing or if they stay on our
page when they are ranking our site? This is RankBrain in action. In short, RankBrain is the new artificial intelligence or
machine learning component of Google that deals with human interaction.
There are two main things that you need to know about RankBrain—dwell time and click-through rates in meta
information. Dwell time refers to how long a user stays on your page after clicking on it in the SERPs. Click-through
rate—or CTR—refers to the number of clicks that your listing received per the number of impressions.
A high CTR, or a lot of people clicking on your listing, means that people find your link relevant to the query they
searched. Having a high dwell time means that, when they reach your site, it has the information for which they are
looking . Both of these things are important to Google because they equal a superior user experience.
Going back to the previous example of “How to Get High Quality Backlinks,” Google saw that when people searched
“How to Get High” they would click on the link because they thought it was relevant to their query, but quickly left the
page. This showed Google that this wasn’t a good listing for the query “How to Get High.” We want to make sure we
optimize our content so that we can keep them on our website and make them want to stay longer.
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Optimizing Your Site
So, how do you optimize your content for the user experience? The first thing that you want to do is optimize the
content on your site. Some great ways that you can do this are:
1.Fully explain all of your content.
2.Make sure you have links that go to authority sites and other pieces of information for the user.
3.Have great design elements, like images or custom designs.
4.Source all of your information, if you use any.
This will help your dwell rate and make sure that people stay on your page longer and interact with your content
further, which Google will reward for.
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Optimizing Your Site
Another way that you can optimize your user experience is through calls to action. Including a strong call to action in
your meta information will help tremendously for your CTR. Remember, if Google sees that fewer people click on other listings over yours, they will drop you in the rankings. However, if you continue to have powerful CTAs and entice
the searchers to click on your listing, you will have positive results.
Here are some examples of CTR optimization in meta information:
[Main Keyword Phrase Here] [Insert Product/Brand Differentiators]
[Understand | Shop | See | Visit] [Main Keyword Phrase Here]
[Main Keyword Phrase Here] – Free Shipping
Get the Best [Main Keyword Phrase Here]
#1 [Insert Title Here] (If Applicable/True)
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Optimizing for User Intent
When talking about the aftermarket automotive industry, there are two main types of search intent: research and
buying.
1. For research searches, you want to make sure your blog content answers research questions and that you have good category pages that rank for “short-tailed” phrases, which can be people researching
products to buy.
2. For buying intent, you want to focus on your product pages and category pages in order for them to match
the searcher intent.
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Optimizing for User Intent
Here are the four main pages to optimize for:
1. Blog Content
Your blog is a great place to answer in-depth questions for which people who are researching are looking. You want long
in-depth content that can thoroughly answer questions. These questions can be things like: “Which Lift Kit Is Best for
F150?” or “Best Aftermarket Suspension for 2013 Challenger.”
You can use a CMS like WordPress to create this content and answer questions for searchers. You should also make sure
that this content links to your products or a physical store where the user can go to buy the product.
Make sure you optimize these different items with the keywords that you want to rank for:
•Meta Title
•Meta Description
•H1 Tag
•Body Content
•URL
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Optimizing for User Intent
2. Category Content
For your category content, you want to focus on what someone would search. Generally, category content can solve
both intent of researching, “F150 Lift Kits,” and specific buying intent, “Best F150 Lift Kits.” Both of these searchers
could be searching to look at “F150 Lift Kits” and also buy an “F150 Lift Kit.” Therefore, you want to optimize for both.
You want to make sure that your category pages are linked to and from the navigation bar, and have great products
populated that will solve the searcher intent. For instance, if you have an “F150 Lift Kits” category page, you want only
F150 Lift Kits on the page. You want to match what they are searching for.
After you finish that, again make sure you optimize the following elements:
•Meta Title
•Meta Description
•H1 Tag
•Body Content
•URL
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Optimizing for User Intent
3.Product Content
Product content is very similar to category content, and you want to optimize it for very specific searchers looking to
buy a product. If you are a retailer of aftermarket automotive parts, you can change the descriptions and information
to make it unique.
While having unique content is ideal, it is not a deal breaker for retailers. Changing the content can help to match the
searcher intent. Make sure, once again, that you optimize the same elements for the product’s name:
•Meta Title
•Meta Description
•H1 Tag
•Body Content
•URL
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Optimizing for User Intent
4. Local Store Web pages
If you have a local store, you want to optimize for local search. Using local keywords such as
“City + [Automotive Parts] can help local searchers find your store. You also want to create unique URL pages,
like the blog content, link from the navigation bar or footer bar, and then have it index as a separate page, so that it
can show up in Google search for local searchers. You still want to optimize for keywords in these elements,
including a new one:
•Meta Title
•Meta Description
•H1 Tag
•Body Content
•URL
•Local Citations
You can also create Google local pages and local directories, called local citations, to help Google understand where
this page is localized.
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Keywords
How do you know what keywords to target? There are several ways that you can find the specific keywords that you
want to rank for and optimize for. You can use your PPC data to understand what keywords work for your business. You
can also do keyword research using the Google AdWords tool to find out what people are searching for.
Then, once you know what people are searching for, you can create a web page for those specific groups of phrases.
You can also use your existing pages to target them.
You should continuously update your keyword research because people continuously change what they are
searching for.
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Links
Since we have talked about the other top two Google factors, RankBrain and content, you also need to understand
links and the role that they play in your organic listings. Links refer to other websites that hyperlink to your products,
categories, landing pages, service pages, etc. The more links that you have pointing to your site, the more “popular”
Google sees you. Google has continuously used this popularity measure to judge websites.
However, there are people who have gamed the search engine through links, which is why Google has put in updates
to their search algorithm to adjust for people who are building links just to game the system. Therefore, in today’s
Google, link building is more natural, and those who use ethical link building practices will be rewarded over those
who do not.
You can use a variety of tactics to build natural links, including these most prominent tactics:
•Editorial Links
Editorial links are the most popular and powerful type of links. In order to get editorial links, you create really great
content, and then get it featured on other people’s websites. Then Google will see that other people are linking to
your site and will reward you with a higher organic search ranking. This is very similar to PR and, if done correctly, can
be very beneficial.
•Resource Links
Examples of resource links are “Top Ten” lists or other various lists of places of where to buy products. These can be
very hard to replicate, but they generally come naturally. If you do find one of these links, you can reach out to the site
and ask them to link to your categories/products.
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Links
•Product Mentions
Product mentions are also natural links, but they usually happen with a lot of affiliate marketing. People link to your
products and categories mentioning them. You can reach out to content editors about placing links to your products/
categories, but it generally has a low success rate.
•Forum Links
Forum links are extremely popular in the automotive industry. Forums are still a great source of information, and your
being in the conversation with customers can be great for driving traffic from the links.
•Blog Comments
•Content Mentions
Having great content being shared on social media and linked to can help your site. Create good content and promote the content to the right people to get great social media shares and links.
Automotive Consumers and
Paid Search
Reaching the 19%
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Overview
We want our ads in AdWords to reach the 19% of people who are looking to buy. Otherwise, we will spend our money on the 81% of those who are just researching, and we will get a low ROAS. This can be extremely frustrating, and
many people will then write PPC off as something that just doesn’t work for them.
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Traditional Text Ads
Using traditional text ads is critical in the paid search industry. It can help you get extremely qualified traffic to your
site to convert into customers. However, it can also be very frustrating. When using traditional text ads, you have to be
smart about your budget and the keyword phrases that you buy.
When buying keywords, you want to be very specific about the people who are searching. Generally, you want to
buy keywords that are long-tailed phrases. When you buy long-tailed keyword phrases, you are more likely to
reach that 19 % of searchers who are looking to purchase, and you have a much better chance to turn that visitor
into a customer.
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Traditional Text Ads
Here are some of the best practices for optimizing your AdWords Account:
• You want to eliminate useless keywords and only buy quality keywords. This should help increase your ROAS
(Return on Ad Spend). A good way to do this is to put in negative keywords that are not producing. This way your
ads will not show up for those negative keywords.
• Try to test out geographical areas and create your bids around them. Not all locations are equal, and a great deal of
them can be wasting your budget.
• Depending on your site, it might not make sense to bid more on mobile or bid less on desktop. Continuously
optimize for mobile bid adjustments.
• All time periods are not equal, either. You want to make sure you really get into your bids and optimize based on
time.
• You want to make sure that you are only buying keyword phrases that are specific for your products or categories.
You want your keywords to target the searcher intent.
• Your ad extensions—call extensions, review extensions, locations extensions, etc.—need to show more information
about you. You can also include a call to action in your ad copy, but make sure you are continuously optimizing it.
• If your pages are not converting on a high level, you can build your own custom landing pages, but make sure you
continuously test it.
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Inventory Driven Search
A great way to combat spending portions of your ad budget on research queries is to advertise your products by
using your feed. Using your product feed enables you to advertise your products to consumers searching for specific
products, similar to Google Shopping.
You can take your product feed and, with the right scripts or software, you can create automatic AdWords groups for
each of your products to target specific search queries.
This way, when people search for a product, your ad of your exact product will show up for them. It can contain the
price, and, with the right software, you can even control the inventory so, if you go out of stock, the Ad Group will
stop.
With this type of advertising, your ads are much more specific to the consumer and more likely to target those in the
buy phase. IDS campaigns generally produce higher ROAS: on average 96% higher, compared to traditional search
campaigns (data provided by Visiture.) IDS also allows for a very high customization/segmentation of campaigns.
This higher ROAS is due to the fact that customers in the buying decision phase use more specific, product-oriented
searches with individual products in mind. If you use your product feed for advertising, it enables you to capture
consumers at a time in the buying cycle when purchase intent is highest, which enables you to achieve higher
returns.
These consumers can be looking for exact models, colors, or parts for a product, for which IDS is perfect. Using IDS,
you can create specific ads using the different attributes and create strong calls to action. For instance, if someone
searches for a [Product Name] + [Modifier] + [Modifier], we can have an ad show up specifically for that search phrase
and have the [Product Name] and as many [Modifiers] in the ad to show up. This gives us a better chance for success
with that particular search query.
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Inventory Driven Search
IDS is not a new science, but it is a widely underutilized tactic because of the complications. The software or scripts
can be difficult to use, and product data can be complicated. In the past few years, with the emergence of the Google
Shopping channel and the correlating necessity for businesses to have an established high-quality product feed, IDS
campaigns have become easier to create and manage.
Having a strong product feed and good product data enables an easier transition to PFA, and advancements with
software enable fewer resources for IDS implementation and maintenance.
Using modifiers in IDS ads for the specific product and its important attributes, such as price, model number, brand,
color, etc., can provide very specific messaging, which qualifies shoppers’ pre-clicks and yields extremely high ROAS.
One thing to keep in mind is that using “exact match” or “phrase match” can make your IDS keywords too specific to
capture search queries. Using “modified broad match,” and, in some cases, “straight broad match,” enables us to have
our IDS show up for more search queries and still maintain a higher ROAS than traditional search campaigns. For
broad match types, you’ll want to check search queries regularly and add negative keywords to prevent wasted
expenditures on less relevant searches.
Overall, using IDS can take a lot of resources, but, when done correctly, can provide a very high ROAS.
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Dynamic Remarketing
Dynamic remarketing allows you to show your ads to visitors who have visited your site on other websites within the
Google network. This can be very effective, as most searchers do not convert on the first visit, but, by continuously
showing them your products, you can push yourself to the front of their minds when it comes to purchasing.
You can use both Google and Facebook to utilize dynamic remarketing. Google is a very simple tool when it comes to
dynamic remarketing. You create a script for a custom audience, and then you connect it to your website. Next, you
create a dynamic remarketing campaign and select it for your audience of website visitors. From there, they will see
your products when going to new sites.
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Google/Bing Shopping
Google Shopping is one of the most impactful channels for PPC, but it is also one of the more difficult segments of
paid search. In reality, Google Shopping is somewhat of a mix of SEO and PPC combined together. Google will crawl
your product feed and determine which product listing ads to serve, based on attributes and other algorithm factors.
Basically, this means if you have the right keyword correlation, the right attributes, the right data, strong review, and
more, you have a much better chance of your product(s) showing up for a relevant search query.
These are the primary attributes in order of importance to Google. Therefore, this is how you should prioritize
optimization:
• Unique Product Identifiers (GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN, also brand and MPN)
• Title
• Google Product Category
•Description
Optimizing titles and descriptions are very important for optimal Google Shopping performance. The first 45
characters in your title and description are most important, with descending weight applied to characters/words
from left to right. Therefore, you want to make sure you pay close attention to how your product titles and
descriptions are written in the feed for query parsing.
Typically, an online retailer will send Google a feed containing all of their products with product titles reflecting the
product titles on the website. Google looks at these product titles as it crawls the feed, and then it will decide
whether or not to serve a Google Shopping ad for a given search query. So, if you can manipulate the product titles
in the feed, you can make an impact on your Google Shopping exposure.
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Google/Bing Shopping
Taking your products and adding modifiers to the titles is one way that you can enhance your Google and Bing
Shopping performance. You can also add brand names, modifiers like colors, MNPs, or more to increase potential
search phrases you show up for. Adding identifying product numbers to the title can also be helpful if you are in
specific industries where SKUs, model numbers, applicable part numbers, etc., are known and searched online. You
can add these product numbers at the beginning of the title.
The most important modifiers or the main phrases should be at the beginning of the title, and they should work left
to right. So, if you want a product number such as a model number to be the most important keyword phrase, then
that should precede the main product title, followed by modifiers like color, make, and model.
You can also add more general search phrases if you have product titles that aren’t search-friendly. For example, we
commonly come across product titles that don’t state what type of product it is. Or it might be that they mostly
contain uniquely descriptive terms that are very rarely searched, if ever.
In this instance, it would make sense to decide on a more generally descriptive phrase to include in the title. For
example, “New Damask Greystone 18in Pillow” could be edited to read “Outdoor Pillow – New Damask Greystone 18in
Pillow.” This will create a much higher probability for this product to serve a Google Shopping ad to a shopper
searching for “Outdoor Pillows.”
This type of optimization can be applied to descriptions in the same manner. Although Google applies less weight to
descriptions, having modifiers in the description further enables you to show up for more searches because Google
can match your products to more search queries. However, the further down the description, the less these keywords
will count with Google. Having them in the first 45 characters produces the best results.
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Phantom SKUs
To take it a step further, one of the more advanced strategies that we employ at Visiture to increase Google Shopping
traffic is something that we call “Phantom SKUs.” This is another type of feed data manipulation, but it involves
creating additional SKUs within a shopping feed to boost exposure. Basically, we take SKUs and make similar SKUs
to capture more search volume.
This strategy also focuses on product titles within the feed. The original feed does remain, but additional SKUs are
created within the feed, containing product titles that consist of keywords and phrases that are different from the
original title but which are still relevant to the product. These phantom SKUs will have a different product ID than
the actual SKU, and a different title, but all the other information will remain the same.
You can choose which terms to include in your title by referring to other data. If there are some general searches
that have proven to produce sales on your site, you can use those phrases in the title of the phantom SKU.
If a department or domain has a small product offering and rarely needs to update product information, this can
be done rather easily using Google Sheets to manually create a product feed with phantom SKUs. However, for
retailers with thousands of SKUs who are constantly updating inventory, prices, or product offerings, it becomes
much more complicated. In this case, creating phantom SKUs in a static environment won’t do much good. You
need to be able to create these phantom SKUs and still have them react to product updates automatically, just like
the original SKUs do.
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Phantom SKUs
To make phantom SKUs work dynamically, you need the right feed management software. If you have access to
the right software, you can clone your Google feed and then write rules to duplicate products, but with altered
IDs, titles, and descriptions. This way, the new SKUs that you have created will automatically update with inventory
and price changes.
There are many ways to use phantom SKUs to your benefit. You can take one product and create ten unique titles
using different combinations of keywords. Really, you can technically create as many as can be properly managed
within the Shopping engines. This strategy is one of the few ways that you can force more control over the Shopping
channel and garner significantly more search volume than you would have received otherwise.
You can also create higher CTRs with more relevant titles to the particular searcher (query parsing) or add calls to
action to your titles to entice more clicks and have searchers choose you over the competitive shopping landscape.
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Negative Funneling
Google Shopping is not like traditional search where you can readily and easily choose exactly which keywords for
which you want your products to show up. With Google Shopping, you can only select which queries for which you
do not want to show up. This is why segmenting your products is more important in Google Shopping—so that you
can have negative funneling and stop showing up for search phrases that are not specific to your products, are not
converting, or are not in the research phase.
Using a script or manually inputting negative keywords is important to eliminate wasted ad expenditures and make
your budget go farther. In each of your “product buckets” or “product categories” you want to be continuously
negative keyword funneling and eliminating keywords that are wasting your ad money or triggering searches that
are better suited for other products in your offering.
Conclusion
This concludes the guide from my 2016 SEMA Show speech.
Thank you for downloading our guide, Marketing Strategies: Google Is
Changing How People Buy Aftermarket Parts I hope you found this guide
insightful and thorough.
If you ever need help or have a question, please contact me at ron@visiture.
com.