E-commerce sites, especially those in the home improvement and DIY sector, often have thousands if not tens of thousand stock-keeping units (SKUs) in their inventory. When every item has its own page, optimising your products can become an arduous task.
We understand that few, if any, companies have the team, the time or the budget to optimise for everything. So given limited resources, where do you begin and how do you plan your priorities for product optimisation?
The most common place to begin is to look at your existing analytics data and sales data to prioritise products with good conversion rates and revenue. Selecting pages based upon session volume and or keyword search volume, relevancy and difficulty as shown in keyword research.
However, if you are running a paid search or shopping campaign, you have a secret weapon: Real user data.
Real user data can provide all the information you need to know to make informed decisions on how to best optimise your organic strategy and performance! So if you have paid campaigns running, what can you use?
At Reflect Digital, we are dedicated to supporting businesses in the home improvement and DIY sector to stay ahead of the competition and move the game on, which is why we’ve put together a list of the useful tools you have at your disposal to inspire you to elevate your organic performance using paid media data.
SQR reports
Search query reports should be your first port of call. They allow you to see what your users are actually searching for.
It’s important to note that Google no longer provides detailed information on what a user has typed in as a search query for organic traffic in Google Analytics. So if you are not using separate 3rd party paid-for tools to access this data, you are out of luck.
Fortunately, this is not the case for Google Ads. Since you paid for this traffic, google provides plenty of insight on how your user arrived at your advert before clicking it.
By pulling an SQR report you can see the exact language your potential customers are using to find a solution to their query. These results can often be quite surprising - especially given Google’s recent improvements in recognising similar intents and meanings for different words and phrases through their natural language AI.
If you haven’t done so already - run an SQR report and order the results by impressions to find topics your users are searching for that trigger your ads. Does your website Address these needs? If not - this is a great place to start.
Exclusive top tip: If your paid campaigns are set up with very tight targeting with exact match only keywords, try testing a short term broad match campaign. This will allow you to trawl for keyword inspiration from your users. This is also a healthy tactic for keeping your paid campaigns fresh by expanding your target keywords and keeping on top of search trends.
Shopping campaigns
If you have an active shopping feed, this data can be a gold mine. You can use your shopping data to showcase specific products that have high search volumes. Looking at conversion rate and CTR data will help identify key products. If you can improve your organic presence on these products you will have a strong grip on the share of voice at the top of the SERP.
Demographic data
Understanding the demographic that is clicking and converting through your paid media activity will help you tailor your site messaging to cater for this audience. If a particular demographic dominates your traffic for a particular set of products, identify pages that don’t “speak” to this audience and earmark them for testing or updating.
Alternatively, if a key age or gender demographic for your business is not performing as well as you would expect, this could inform you that a change in tone for your existing content may be required.
Competitor depth
The search query tool is a staple of organic keyword research. Keyword volumes and monthly seasonality are used daily by SEO professionals. However, there are other columns of data in here aimed at paid media users that are often overlooked and can be powerful for an organic strategy too.
The key here is to look at paid media competition data, specifically the “Competition (indexed value)” column.
This data is standardised to a scale from 1-100 for your selected keywords. For paid media, this is important for assessing ad depth in the SERP and forecasting cost per click. However, for SEO’s this data can also help pick out keywords that have high “low funnel” conversion power. Paid search campaigns focus on ROI and a key component is bidding on keywords that drive sales. You can use this competition rating as a good rule of thumb to identify product keywords that will drive sales and should be prioritised in your optimisations. Any keyword with a competition value over 85 can be considered hot property from a paid perspective!
If you combine this competition value with the estimated CPC data, you can find areas to optimise organically that could otherwise be very costly for a paid campaign. Over time, by improving organic performance, you can unburden a paid campaigns budget, allowing the business to target new and alternative keywords.
Device data
Is your audience coming through predominantly on mobile?
This data is not exclusive to paid media - similar information can be found in Google Analytics easily. The difference here is you can see the volume at which specific keywords drive users to your site on each device type.
If you have identified high-value products or keywords and they have a high proportion of mobile users, have you checked if your landing pages are mobile-friendly in their layout? Are your pages optimised for mobile load times? If the answer to either of these questions is no - this is another way for you to prioritise your efforts.
Key Takeaways
There is a lot of data at your fingertips if you have an active paid media campaign running for your business that will help you make decisions to optimise your organic strategy and performance.
We understand that having access to this amount of data and insights can seem daunting, but the good news is that you don’t need to try and use all the tools and methods at once! Take a look at your business goals and see which methods could help drive you towards achieving them. Regardless of which you choose, your first step is to make sure that your SEO & Paid teams/agencies are collaborating. This will give you the best data to make your optimisation planning easier and more effective.
Want to level up your SEO or Paid Media performance and stand out from your competition? Please get in touch today and one of our specialists will be happy to help you take the first steps towards moving the home improvement game on.
