Does Seo Work? Amazon and Etsy’s Content Strategy

Search engines are used globally, almost every second millions are searching for something – a service, a product, an answer on how to do something etc. These search engines are used when people have a query and are searching on the internet for the answer. They work on algorithms and are computer programmes that look for clues to offer searchers the exact results they seek.

When we look at search engines, they are relying on algorithms to find the web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. It is a vital and valuable marketing tool that helps to drive organic traffic, meaningful potential clients – to your website. SEO quickly became a must for brands to work on and more so for small brands and business owners with their majority or entire income based on e-commerce. While SEO is a concept done to death by almost all brands, and many variations of it like – voice SEO and vernacular SEO are also increasingly becoming common – the prime question many brands and business entrepreneurs deal with is Does SEO really work?

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There is no simple answer to this. It’s a game of knowing what your users want and giving them the exact content so they do not miss your brand on search engines. SEO professionals and firms are for this a high in demand profile since they are clever at making these keywords that bring your brand to the forefront when a user is searching for something you offer. Amazon and Etsy are two global brands that made great strides in the SEO market segment and gave us a clear hint on how they made SEO work. Not only are they working with so many different languages, cities, tiers and needs – they are also making sure each one has its own SEO space and that keyword is king!

These two giants work essentially on selling products via their e-commerce platforms and the entire digital business world looks up to them for their SEO strategies. What exactly did they do right in terms of SEO? How did it work for them? And how did they really achieve this?

Etsy’s winning SEO content strategy

SEO is all about content – what you write is what consumers read and this is a major way on how they understand your brand. Content is thus king in SEO and with recent addition in the SEO space, this is becoming increasing the hard fact line. All websites need content, e-commerce ones more so – they need a solid content strategy to bring targeted organic traffic.

Etsy is a hand-made goods focused global marketplace. They are known for their content – what makes people come back to their site. It’s not simply the product, it’s also the concept, the story and the people behind it they sell. Their content is what works for them on a global scale – more than SEO.

What a brand would usually miss out on as key for SEO search is what Etsy picked upon.

User generated content: Their winning SEO strategy is their user-generated content – it in simple words – rocks. For products they sell, they are deeply focused on a large number of reviews. They use these as appealing anchors to help their users navigate to deep pages.

Blog Content: Another thing that helps them with their SEO is their blog. Updated daily, it consists of awe-inspiring stories about Etsy’s merchants – the artisans and craftsmen/ women. Their blog also covers many types of goods sold on Etsy and whatever they write – they bring the user to the spotlight. This makes them a star e-commerce brand who knows how to retain their customers and make their content go viral.

Product Story: Not only is Etsy selling you a product, they are selling you a story – and since eon’s, humans have been fascinated and in love with story-telling that helps them connect with something. Now when a user is searching for hand-made products, craft products, DIY crafts – Etsy is bound to show up in the results. Now this is happening simply because their product has a story as part of its description. The content there is curated- more keywords can be inserted into to attract organic traffic via various search engines.

Amazon’s application of user-generated content

While amazon helps brands on its own platform to master Amazon SEO, they are a global brand that is one of the first few options every time a user is searching to buy a household product to a DIY one. Now how can a brand be globally successful in this? Here is how:

A. User generated content:

They are focused on making sure each product user leaves a review – this is new content added and helps the SEO professionals to get more updated insights and keep the SEO algorithm updated so as Amazon products are number one all search engine sites.

B. Product descriptions:

While product descriptions can sometimes be overlooked as valuable SEO content – Amazon knows that it’s one of the easiest things to get right for their site. They build a unique product description for each item and their pre-upload sheets- makes sure that no relevant data is missing. Their product names are popular to offer as much about a product as possible. This helps in building keywords that SEO professionals plug in for bringing organic traffic to Amazon websites.

C. Voice SEO:

Voice searches today are slowly accounting for the majority of searches in the GenZ population and are taking over the way people do their search on various search engines. Amazon has been a pioneer to make sure it already a) has voice SEO in place on its own website to make user experience easy and also b) making sure their keywords are at par for not only basic typed search but also voice commands. Alexa from Amazon is a fine example on how the brand is building its legacy in voice based SEO and AI SEO.

D. Vernacular SEO:

A brand present in many countries, and many regions cannot be successful without being inclusive of regions, their languages and preference. Bringing organic traffic via SEO involves making sure your entire website, search commands via voice and typed can accept the language of a region and hence connect with people. This also aids the brands to decide which content to show first via their keyword selection that has a higher chance of sell-through with a customer in Chennai vs a customer in Kent, UK or say North-east part of India.

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When we look at both of these e-commerce giants, we understand how in terms of ecommerce SEO – they both make use of structured data and how important that is. A great SEO strategy will help you stand out. When the rating, price, availability and other information appears in the search engine and say the product is a laptop, now while the Amazon price may be the same as other brands – the SEO search can help place a Special Price tag below the Amazon product to attract the consumer to their page. Such rich snippets is what sets these brands apart from others in the SEO game.

Both Etsy and Amazon have the following in common for their SEO strategy-

Users – how they can be part of the storyline and generate content. Not just a few users, hundreds and thousands who are participating in reviews and building more content.

Products – defining the product, adding story lines and building narratives consumers find attractive to click on.

Options – when a user searches for a jacket – Amazon with help of SEO can showcase many types of jackets and take over the majority of search results in top 10 – this further makes a customer confident to check one website with most options.

If you aim to become a success with SEO, set your organic search baselines, do research on keywords and relevant search queries to understand your users, their searches and how to entice them to buy from you with incentives and further publish optimized content.

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