Electronics SEO – Digital Marketing for Consumer Electronics

Electronics SEO – Digital Marketing for Consumer Electronics

Digital marketing for consumer electronics is important as this segment represents one of the largest parts of all internet retail. For companies that are trying to pull ahead of competitors, a professional digital marketing strategy is crucial for continued growth.

A marketing method like search engine optimization is one of the most popular options, and one of the most effective – but the path forward isn’t always obvious.

So how can companies do consumer electronics SEO?

Online electronics retail is an industry that responds very well to professional SEO strategy because it’s an area of retail where shoppers are likely to do a lot of research and where the barrier to conversion is greater. Large purchases and expensive items like computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, audio equipment and more, differ from other sorts of online purchases because shoppers want to know that they are getting high-quality items from reliable brands.

This is why differentiating your brand from your competitors, and boosting your brand’s trustworthiness is a key part of search management.

Fortunately a bunch of classic SEO strategies are well suited to electronics industry SEO – particularly for eCommerce brands. As this category of online retail continues to grow it will become more and more important for businesses to grow their marketing strategies with it.

Electronics online purchases are one of the largest categories of eCommerce. By 2018 consumers electronics was ranking 3^rd in popularity, with 40% of total internet users claiming to have purchased something in this segment during the previous 12 months. Now, in 2020 revenue for consumer electronics online is expected to be about $375 billion, a 16.65% increase year-over-year, and could reach $443 billion by 2024. This business is one of the single largest segments in eCommerce, next to apparel, footwear, and accessories.

Read the rest of our guide to learn more about:

• Keyword research in digital marketing for consumer electronics
• On-page electronics industry SEO
• Meta descriptions & structured data details
• Google Shopping for search product listings
• How to take advantage of content
• Site hierarchy and design
• Related product listings
• Technical SEO ranking factors
• SEO based on user experience
• Leveraging site analytics data and search performance
• Outsourcing your SEO marketing

So does SEO actually work?

It definitely does. SEO has changed a lot over the years to evolve with the growing set of search engine ranking signals and algorithms. Search engine optimization often beats out pay-per-click ad strategies and social media as the most effective long-term form of digital marketing, with the best ROI.

SEO’s return on investment stems from being relatively affordable, without the requisite ad budget to improve search engine visibility. One survey had 48% of respondents claiming that SEO offered them the highest ROI, and data from Statista put it on top with 32% of marketers worldwide saying it offers them the best returns.

Traffic from search engines accounts for more than 53% of all web traffic, and with the #1 spot on search results pages (SERPs) claiming more than 30% of clicks, it’s easy to see why search optimization is a huge part of online growth.

SEO in conjunction with push-focused marketing and content is ideal as a method of digital marketing for consumer electronics:

• It can help ensure long-term business growth
• It helps companies maintain dominance in consumer electronics niches or segments
• It helps connect with customers before they decide on a final purchase, engaging with them at every stop in the shopping funnel
• It can help promote brand recognition and improve brand reputation with high-quality content
• It can improve traffic and increase natural backlink growth for exponential results
• It lets businesses engage with data for better audience targeting

Keyword research in digital marketing for consumer electronics

With SEO as a strategy for business growth, keywords are fundamental to engaging with search behaviors.

Keyword research is critical to electronics SEO and is an important part of letting businesses find the best audiences for better product conversion. Plus, consumer electronics are unique in that proprietary sellers and retailers alike have to compete to put their products in front of shoppers with specific search queries.

Search habits can be divided into three main categories:

• Navigational search queries
• Informational search queries
• Transactional search queries

Retailers who are beginning keyword research for consumer electronics SEO strategies should think about what types of keywords they’ll be using along with what sort of content they will have. Good content is at the core of SEO, and building out content means knowing your target keywords first and going from there.

Blogs, and guides are a great way of targeting “informational” search queries. Think about how your shoppers might begin their research with queries containing “how,” “what,” “where,” “why,” etc. Pages like blogs, how-to-guides, FAQ pages, and instructional articles are great ways to engage shoppers here.

“Navigational” search queries usually involve shoppers that are using a shortcut to get to where they want to go. Taking advantage of high-value head keywords here can help brands in electronics industry SEO buy engaging with shoppers at the very top of their shopping journey (for example: think about people just searching “TVs” or “smartphones.”)

And then finally, there’s “transactional” queries, where searchers are typing in phrase into Google or Bing where their ultimate goal is to buy something. The best strategy here for electronics SEO is to focus on “longtail” keywords – search queries of 3+ words that are much more descriptive/specific, have much lower average traffic, but represent people that know what they want and are just about ready to buy.

Think about these keyword examples below. These keywords are longtail but represent the main way that shoppers find their purchases:

How do you find these keywords?

Professional digital marketing for consumer electronics usually involves using popular SEO keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Search Console, Google auto complete query data, and other 3^rd party applications.

The Google Ads Keyword Planner is used for finding keywords for both SEO and paid ads – plus it’s free. Google Ads Keyword Planner allows electronics SEO marketers to:

• Find new search keywords, including both head keywords, and long-tail product keywords.
• See average monthly search numbers for all keywords
• Estimate ad keyword biddings to help align SEO and PPC efforts
• Filter keywords searches for certain text, traffic amount, brand info, and more

Google Search Console is another invaluable tool that helps marketers understand their existing keyword performance. Use Search Console’s “Performance” report to see which URLs and which search queries are driving the most clicks, impressions, and highest click-through-rate (CTR).

This free resource helps users measure their site’s traffic, see keyword performance, fix issues, and receive messages from Google about their website. Best practice with these keywords is to find new keywords and high-value existing keywords and incorporate them into your on-page electronics SEO.

On-page electronics industry SEO

What is on-page SEO. This style of SEO refers to how marketers influence their search engine performance by optimizing parts of the actual site that are used by search engine ranking algorithms.

Basically things that are directly in the brand’s control, that play a huge role in electronics SEO.

So what is special about SEO strategy for selling consumer electronics products like televisions, laptops, smartphones, consoles, IT hardware, etc.?

Meta title-tags are snippets of HTML that signal to search engines what each page is about and act as one of the most important SEO ranking factors. Likewise meta descriptions appear in search results and are critical to selling the product, and describing the page – meta descriptions are a great way to drive better clicks (CTR).

In order to drive greater organic traffic to consumer electronic products, the best strategy is to write and create title-tags that optimize the eCommerce site for individual consumer search queries. This means avoiding vague, short, inaccurate, and duplicate meta title tags and instead writing ones that include long-tail, target keywords from your original keyword research.

Optimizing title-tags is important, but there’s no exact wrong way or write way to do them. Instead businesses should focus on formatting them correctly and making sure that they are no longer than 60 characters (any longer and they may appear truncated, like in the image above).

Title-tag examples might look like:

• Target Keyword 1 | Target Keyword 2 | Branding
• Target Keywords 1 & 2 – Branding!
• Target Keyword 1 (and Target Keyword 2)
• Target Keywords 1, 2, 3 & 4 | For Sale
• Target Keywords In a Sentence Like This | Branding

Characters like hyphens (-), ampersands (&), plus signs, straight-pipes (|), commas, periods, and parentheticals can all be used in title tags – and they are a great way of providing extra technical information for consumer electronics SEO.

Think about how users might be interested in product details like screen size, processing power, RAM capacity, weight, brand, battery performance, etc. In fact, with long-tail keywords, there’s a chance that shoppers are searching specifically for these specs!

Meta descriptions & structured data details

Meta descriptions are a key part of electronics industry SEO in that they act as a sort of advert for the human readers, not search engines. Meta descriptions are not used as a ranking signal but they’re still very important because they have the ability to drive clicks.

By extension, even though structured data (also called schema markup) is not a part of the page’s “meta description” (an also not a ranking signal) it often appears next to the meta description in the result snippet.

In the world of digital marketing for consumer electronics both of these elements give you extra opportunities to appeal to searchers with extra information about your products. Good meta descriptions should be no longer than roughly 159 characters in length (so that they don’t get cut off) and should feature useful information about the product.

Here is another opportunity to include keywords – which appear as bolded letters in the SERP – as well as to provide details like product specifications (screen size, product size, performance, RAM, processing power, etc.)

Likewise, structured data can also boost CTR.

Schema.org offers insight on the types of product details available. Sites can use JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa for Google supported structured data. Adding these details to product listings (using Google’s recommendations) can help search engines better understand what sort of information is being presented.

For electronics SEO you can use details like:

• aggregateRating
• brand
• SKU
• weight
• width
• gtin numbers
• isAccessoryOrSparePartFor
• model
• review
• Plus many other details

These sort of product listing details can be useful for other eCommerce channels as well.

Google Shopping for search product listings

This is a relatively new option in SEO based digital marketing for consumer electronics. Google has opened up its Shopping tab to include unpaid, organically ranked listings as well. This means that directly-in-search product listing represent an opportunity for electronics SEO as well.

With a Google Merchant Center account businesses can set up an unpaid Shopping campaign (similar to how Google Shopping is used for paid listings, but once product details have been imported to Merchant Center then they can appear naturally without having to set up a PPC campaign).

Shopping results can appear:

• In the primary “Shopping” tab where they can feature photos, pricing, product descriptions and other details.
• As carousel ads on the main SERP as well.

Google Shopping results are now primarily free results, which means this segment of the Google search platform represents a huge opportunity for product retailers. It’s unclear what sort of algorithm is used for ranking here, but good on-page product SEO for products, along with quality content likely plays a role.

Learn more about how Google Shopping SEO works and see how it can be important for consumer electronics marketing.

How to take advantage of content

Content is one of the most important parts of SEO.

Many marketers understand this but don’t see how to incorporate an inbound, content-based strategy for eCommerce marketing. This is largely because product pages usually have sparce content, or even duplicate content.

Duplicate content can reduce a page’s ability to rank in Google/Bing, and it’s less helpful for shoppers. Create high-quality content that includes your target keywords and adds value to the page by demonstrating expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT).

Google’s EAT concept comes from their search quality evaluator guidelines and provides some clues about what sort of content is considered quality by Google.

Search engine ranking algorithms like Google’s are designed to suppress pages with “thin content” so marketers focusing on electronics industry SEO should make sure that their on-site content is designed to be high quality and to ultimately satisfy their visitors.

These tips for webmasters outline a good approach for content:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Likewise creating high-quality content is best for establishing an eCommerce site that appears to have very high EAT value. Around 2019 Google introduced the concept of EAT to search marketers along with the concept of “needs met”. EAT reflects the 3 main qualities that people should be able to find in your content. The guidelines outline good high EAT sites as ones that feature content/pages designed to help users – this means that pages like contact pages, about pages, and FAQ pages – which can help visitors understand who is running the site, and who is behind creating their contact. Knowing these things can help them trust your brand.

“Needs met” is self-explanatory. Ask yourself if a reasonable shopper would find the content on your site sufficiently useful and if they’d leave your site satisfied that their needs were actually met.

For electronics SEO this means demonstrating your trustworthiness with accurate and honest product information. It might also mean gaining shopper trust with things like:

• Good customer rating information.
• Customer support, contact info, and chat boxes where shoppers can have questions and concerns addressed.
• NAP (name, address, phone number) that helps make your business appear concrete.
• Detailed warranty info, return info, and repair info on expensive electronics.

Site hierarchy and design

SEO for consumer electronics is also dependent on intuitive design that helps not just users, but also search engines understand the site.

Site structure is a complex topic, but a few key strategies (like site-maps, nav-bar design, URL canonicalization, category-pages, etc.) can vastly improve your site performance. This is also important to think about when setting up new websites.

Product variants can be listed under the same root URL with URL strings as options for filter selections.

Site structure can help shoppers easily find what they want and navigate around your store. Most websites have a pyramid structure which starts with the homepage at the top, category pages below that, and product pages afterward. As search engines index the site, they will use this structure to understand which of your pages include cornerstone content and which don’t.

A solid, logical structure helps Google understand where the most valuable cornerstone content lives on the site. Likewise if a site has pages with multiple URLs (say the same product is listed in separate categories), good hierarchy and canonicalization practices will help search engines understand the site.

Via SEObility

Related product listings

Many eCommerce sites opt to include “related products” suggestions on parts of their websites. Related product lists can improve CTR through to other pages and can also help improve electronic SEO efficiency by allowing search engine crawlers to more regularly index the site, and to understand how products are related.

This strategy can also help improve other metrics like time-on-site, pages per session, and the can potentially help move shoppers along the purchase funnel.

Finally, related products can sometimes help improve algorithmic based SEO by passing a small amount of page authority to other product pages – improving their ranking for target long-tail keywords.

Variations on this strategy include:

• Shoppers also bought
• Items commonly bought together
• Recently viewed
• Best selling items

Technical SEO ranking factors

Technical SEO can often seem complex, but there are a few main priorities eCommerce sites should have in mind – especially brands or businesses that want to improve consumer electronics SEO traffic performance by helping their site gain legitimacy and a better reputation.

Technical SEO still falls under the umbrella of on-page search optimization but can involve behind-the-scenes elements like website coding and development.

By default, your website should be HTTPS. Search engines verify secure protocol status (like HTTPS security) and use it as a ranking factor. For years now Google has been pushing the world to a more secure internet by encouraging webmasters to incorporate TLS security for encryption, data integrity, and authentication. This also has the benefit of helping shoppers feel more secure when making purchases, inputting personal shipping info, filling out payment info, and more.

HTTPS security as an SEO ranking signal (albeit a soft one) also includes “mixed content” where additional page elements like CSS stylesheets, image files, JavaScript files, etc. – are sent over non-secure connections.

Next, marketers can double-check by auditing their site for security issues in Google’s Search Console.

Finally there’s mobile friendliness. This is a complex topic with too many variables to go into here, but with Google’s mobile first indexing becoming the search engine’s primary system for indexing, having a mobile-SEO competitive website is now more important than ever.

eCommerce sites for electronics and consumer goods should make sure they have:

• Has reflexive formatting (with the meta viewport tag)
• Loads quickly enough on mobile devices
• Does not have buttons that are too close together for finger touch
• Features text that is easy enough to read for smaller screens

Google provides marketers with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool to verify and diagnose potential issues with their mobile site. For better electronics SEO performance and better mobile businesses can coordinate with their developers to improve mobile performance.

Google’s Lighthouse browser plugin/app can be used to verify aspects of mobile friendliness, along with the mobile performance report in Search Console. There are lots of tools available for mobile auditing.

Google claims that mobile sites do not have a ranking advantage over non-mobile sites, but specifically that the quality of mobile sites will affect ranking in mobile search. But it should still be something to pay attention to.

SEO based on user experience

Earlier this year Google announced its intention to focus more on good user experience as an element of search. It’s “core web vitals” are designed to measure things like how long it takes for a page to load, how long it takes for a page to respond to input, and how much the page-layout shifts while loading.

Since these metrics will be part of the ranking algorithm, websites will have to focus on page speed and loading improvements for better consumer electronics SEO rankings. The beneficial side-effect of this is that it also improves UX.

Google claims longer page load times have negative effects on bounce-rate as well as retention – important metrics for eCommerce. This means that: As page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%. As page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%.

These aren’t concrete bench markets for the algorithm, but they represent good goals for page speed and UX.

Leveraging site analytics data and search performance

Finally there’s one last important strategy for improving consumer electronics marketing and for building out better electronics SEO. Data.

Google Analytics allows marketers to track how users navigate their site and how visitors come to their site across traffic segments like referral, organic (search), paid, and direct.

The big advantage here is that electronics industry SEO marketers can query their Analytics data to monitor campaign results and inform their marketing strategy. Google Analytics year-over-year (YOY) and period-over-period (POP) data can help businesses understand which landing pages are growing and which need more optimization.

The Google Analytics Landing Page report is useful for search engine marketing because it shows important data including sessions, bounce rates, pages per session and more. It also tracks KPIs like conversions and revenue.

Likewise Google offers the ability to get enhanced data for eCommerce sites with Ecommerce Tracking. This means that having a properly set-up Analytics account is crucial for a well-informed electronics SEO strategy, since this can help businesses ensure that their efforts are paying off. To see Ecommerce data in your Analytics reports, you need to enable Ecommerce for each view in which you want to see data.

Next, add code to your site to collect the ecommerce data and send it to Analytics. To complete this task, you need to be comfortable editing HTML and coding in JavaScript, or have help from an experienced web developer.

Ecommerce metrics (e.g. Transactions, Revenue, Ecommerce Conversion Rate) are available in the Ecommerce section of the Analytics console. Ecommerce tracking comes with standard reports for:

• An overview summary of revenue, product conversion rate, transactions, etc.
• Product performance
• Sales performance
• Transaction data including revenue, tax, shipping, quantity, etc.
• Time to purchase based on sessions

Google Search Console can also be used for SEO. The Search Console Performance report provide businesses feedback on their electronic SEO strategy including how well pages are performing and which keywords they are performing best for.

It gives details about clicks, impressions, click-through-rate, and average keyword rankings:

• Clicks include the calculated amount of times searcher click on the site link from a search.
• Impressions represent how many links to your site a user saw in search results.
• Click through rate (CTR) is a measurement of how many clicks the page/keyword receive divided by the amount of impressions.
• Average position is the average of the topmost results in search results for a page/keyword over a certain time period.

Outsourcing your SEO marketing

For businesses that don’t want to (or don’t know how to) keep up with an effective eCommerce electronics SEO campaign, many choose to hire a service or a 3^rd party.

So why hire an SEO agency/company to handle on-page elements and content optimizations?

Because so many businesses have to focus on other issues, marketing and SEO often get pushed to the back burner. Businesses growth, budgeting, employee management, shipping/handling, etc. – all make managing SEO a bit of a chore. Especially since SEO often takes lots of time, effort, and maintenance before results begin to show.

SEO agencies also are able to work based off of strategies with proven results and can professionally read reporting/Analytics data to help adjust campaigns on an as-needed basis. Lots of companies just find it easier to get a agency services for their SEO.

72% of marketers claim SEO is their most effective marketing tactic. And it famously has a great ROI, outpacing paid advertising, email marketing, social media, and more. Plus agency services offer custom report, important KPI tracking, professional keyword research strategy, and expert account management – something many businesses find worth it.

Learn More

Contact us to learn more about electronics SEO and how to grow your digital marketing strategies for consumer electronics. Our team can help your business succeed online.