We had an opportunity to chat with Björn Darko, Director Digital Strategies Group at Searchmetrics! He shared with us some insights on SEO and content marketing for e-commerce.
What are your main responsibilities as a Director Digital Strategies Group at Searchmetrics?
I am leading the professional services department at Searchmetrics, a SaaS Company, headquartered in Berlin.
The Digital Strategies Group is offering Strategic, SEO & Content Consulting. You can find companies from all industries in our client base.
My responsibility in this is to develop our consultancy in terms of our offering, the team, customer centricity and the way our work is perceived by our clients.
Just last quarter we scored a Net Promoter Score of 94. This is an amazing achievement!!! I am also a part of the global leadership team, speak on conferences, publish articles and do webinars.
Can you tell us more about your team?
The Digital Strategies Group is currently containing 8 consultants, specialized in different SEO & Content topics. This goes from pure technical SEO projects (Site Speed improvements, JavaScript SEO) over to international SEO (Websites expanding to other countries) & strategic SEO (Audits, Relaunch concepts, 2nd Opinion), Content Audits (Content inventory, gap analysis etc.) & Content Strategies (what to publish, how to publish, where to publish based on brand and goals)
By the way, I am extremely proud of having gender equality of 4 male & 4 female consultants!
How e-commerce businesses can benefit from the Searchmetrics solution?
E-commerce business can benefit from our superb data. The Data we provide, through our software, helps for example:
- To make smarter decisions, by knowing user intent, search volume and seasonality of searches
- How a business is performing in terms of visibility, market share, from infrastructure & technical point of view in Search Engines.
- To use this data to create smarter and data-based content.
What is the role of content marketing in enhancing online stores?
Content Marketing plays a huge role for online stores nowadays. If you look at a typical Journey of a user from “Getting inspired” until “purchasing” a product and then keeping up with your customer “Loyalty”, content is essential in each of the stages. A dedicated Content Strategy can help online stores to be present in every step where a user currently is.
Let`s take an Espresso Machine as an example. A user wants to have one but is not sure if a portafilter or a fully automated machine is the best choice. She does some research at Google and reads about the pros & cons of both. As soon as she has made up her mind, she decides to go with a traditional machine and tries to find which brand and then model might be the right one. She decided to go with the brand and model and is looking for a great deal. She purchases it, using it and is researching how she can make nice toppings.
This entire journey as described should ideally be covered by an online store selling espresso machines. This means you need different content types for each stage. This also pays into Googles Idea of Expertise, Authority & Trust and goes perfectly into the idea of Brand Building.
A typical Online Store is (mostly) optimized for Product Evaluation (Category Pages) & Purchasing a Product (Product Detail Pages).
What do you think brands can do for increasing CLV / AOV?
Customer-Life-Time-Value: Besides having a great product and service around it (fast delivery, customer care, returns etc.) I believe what is also really important as described above as the loyalty stage. Helping your user to do better things with your products and services by educating them with quality content. Send personalized newsletters with new ideas, innovations, invite users to a video platform where your client community is sharing “how-to” videos.
Average-Order-Value: I believe bundling products can be an Idea, where you say “users who bought this also bought this. Do you want to buy both for xEuro, Amazon does a great job in this. Or making users aware of secondary products or elements which belong to the main product in the purchasing process, like Zalando does. Product, where you can buy complete outfits, or sets will help.
If we take a look into the near future, I believe Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality will change it as well. Brands can do amazing stuff with gamification elements for example or an entertaining and very convincing virtual salesperson. This will change the way we shop today.
Your presentation is titled “From Market to Insights to Strategy”. Can you share a little sneak peek with us?
Looking at Keywords does help SEOs & Content Marketers in e-commerce Companies to figure out how to target a user to a landing page and defines how to create content for it. But using Keyword Data to define an entire market incl. insight on Market Trends, Market Demand Structure & Share of Voice is very rare. This will also lead decision-makers beyond SEO & Content Marketing to greater business decisions and applications. In this talk I am going to show how a „Market-Insights-Report“ can define your entire market & industry. I am going to show how to get meaningful insights out of it, which let you create impactful strategies on advertising, inventory & category management, with whom to partner for example. Really excited about it!!!!!
What are the current trends in SEO and content marketing for the e-commerce industry?
Visual Search is definitely a trend in SEO for ecommerce, especially for fashion. Platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat & Instagram are turning into product discovery platforms already. There are also brands like Zalando or Argos who are already integrated the technology into their apps.
Voice Search is a trend which will for some product groups be very interesting. Products which you buy in a regular cadence (diapers, toilet paper, coffee beans etc.) but also for products which are not that invest heavy or you already kind of know (Sneakers, Birthday Gifts, Home Deco etc.). Especially for the second example I believe voice shopping will work better with a visual output. Apart from this Flight, Train Tickets, Hotel bookings etc. will be big as well.
Thanks for your insights, Björn!
Hungry for more e-commerce tips?
