Broadening its online marketing focus beyond pay-per-click and comparison shopping engine venues to include search optimization has helped to produce a 35% increase in sales from natural search since last year at Officefurniture.com, director of e-commerce Eric Nebbia tells Internet Retailer.
Nebbia, working with search marketing services vendor iProspect, boosted efforts to optimize the site for natural search out of concern over the rising costs of pay-per-click advertising. Research also suggests that some consumers pay attention only to natural search listings, Nebbia notes. Online marketing that leans exclusively on paid search could potentially be missing out on a large part of the audience, he figured, so now Officefurniture.com's search strategy integrates both kinds of search.
Insights from one side are used to inform action on the other, he adds. “If a keyword works well from a paid perspective we will try to add that content to our web site to get more traffic from an organic perspective,” he says. For example, keyword analysis showed that in its paid campaigns, singular terms in some cases performed better than did plurals of the same term – “computer desk,” for instance, versus “computer desks.”
That intelligence went into writing copy for the web site, with an eye toward creating content that would rank high in natural search. And Officefurniture.com has now added many of the terms that have become successful in organic search to its paid search program.
“SEO is one of those things you can’t do just once and then walk away from,” Nebbia says. “It’s something you need to keep on top of because things change so quickly.”
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