Optimising your Off-Amazon Store

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Dan Shure joins for the second part and optimising your off-Amazon Store

Consider a seller moving Amazon products off-Amazon with 30 products and in the baby space.

Categories

• Biggest mistake is not categorizing well when optimising your off-Amazon store
• Huge opportunity to attract extra traffic
• Age of baby, gender are categories
• Research in Google Adwords keyword tool to see the search volume for these categories
• Boys Strollers – this could be a category
• Focus on the right terminology in keywords or aim for the user with navigation
• Keep is ‘user navigation’ focussed
• 95% of keyword targeting is giving them the page they need
• Spend some time on Google search and see what competitors are displaying
• Try to work out what is good, bad, helpful, not-helpful
• Myth – just throwing text on the category page is not that helpful, not a great search engine help any more

Structure the Page

• Nice images, 7-8 images most being lifestyle are good when optimising your off-Amazon store
• White background, 2000×2000 pixels or above
• Keywords – main target (Title and URL)
• Products and category pages
• Product page (Boy Stroller)
  • SKU number
  • Brand name
  • What is being said in Amazon about this product
  • What long-tail searches might fit
  • Full breadth of what you need to describe the product
• Selling
  • Title tag in your meta description
  • Optimize for click-through rate too

Framework for Optimising your off-Amazon store

• Meta-description examples
• Problem > Solution > Outcome is the model approach
• Show you understand their problem
• Tell them your solution is the solution for them
• Tell them the outcome for them of using your solution
• Marketing things could be key to your market, is it price, value, features…
• If you can improve your click-through rate per page
• Sumo.com has a ‘power words’ post that categorises words by the emotion you are trying to convey
• Code Schedule have a ‘title tag’ tool that gives feedback on your clickthrough rate potential
• Use tools to get feedback on your titles and descriptions too

Title Lengths standards

• Length of title and meta-description
• Google give standards for these
• Title is 60 characters (by pixel width)
• Meta descriptions are a bit abstract
• Make it 150 chars (make sense) or less but Google may display upto 300
• Add a keyword or two into the meta description – google will bold those in the results
• Use ‘product schema’ – gives you stars in Google when you’re searching (WordPress has a plugin)
• Meta-description is where you can have a call to action – click here now for information
• You are crafting interest for people and generating emotion with people

Website Links

• Cross-linking from your product marketing across to your Amazon products where it relates is good for optimising your off-Amazon store content linking
• Optimize the anchor text in the link in your article for click-through rate
• Make it a call to action – send them there to check out your baby-stroller

Stable Structure

• From day 1 you want to get your structure right
• Changing it later can cause lots of problems for Google and URLs
• Broken links and missing pages

Dropdown / Mega menus

• Clients with these – their rankings are doing really well
• Buyers can jump to what they want from any page
• Short words to explain the navigation are good
• Not too many options at the top level
• Keep the naming simple – call the Product page the Product page
• Don’t be clever at the expense of clarity

Canonical URLs

• Canonical URLs – Put a canonical tag on page A and get the Google love from page B, C to all go to Page A
• If you sort a page then it’s the same page but in a different order, so canonical tags can help
• It’s got to make sense
• Domain.com/category/name of category
• Any filtering or sorting that comes should be after that so it’s the same page but you changing the parameters on the page
• Category URL should be clear and concise as well

Home Page

• User experience as well
• Deathly sliders that are heavy but pretty – CONVERSION KILLERS
• Do not use sliders (were good in 2011)
• Slow down your page
• Annoy users
• Not a great job at conveying a message you want to convey
• Takes up a lot of real estate too
• Have some of your categories on the Home page and infinite scroll too (Dan’s not a big fan on Desktop)
• Infinite scroll on mobile is GREAT
• Highlight top sellers on Home page
• What are the most important messages you need to convey? (Video, testimonials)

Pagination

• Category pages with more than 20 products
• When you get to the bottom of the page you can choose page 1,2,3 etc
• And technically using rel-prev and next tabs tells Google that these are joined pages

Page Load

• webpagetest.org
• google page speed insight tool
• chrome dev tools
• Decent load time is 7 secs on webpagetest.org
• Image file size is the in the top 3 most critical load factors
• Images should be 200k or less
• Optimize javascript and page load scripts
• Using browser caching saves a huge amount
• Setting the expiration date for your pages/content helps with cacheing

Contact

• dan_shure – twitter.com
• expertsonthewire podcast
• MOZ – the meta descriptions example
• MOZ – prop word