By Swati Maheshwari, Radix
If you are looking for innovative ways to increase the traffic and visibility of your online store, then this post is for you. The simple tactics that we have listed here offer a unique opportunity for you to promote your eCommerce business with a .STORE domain name. The key idea that we will be addressing in this post is creating domain redirects for specific product pages or product category pages on your website in order to get more traffic and visibility on those pages. Let’s dive in!
Please note that we have used Amazon as an example throughout this post for the sake of simplicity.
To begin with, let’s understand what are domain redirects
Did you know that your product and category page will get higher organic search rankings through on-topic backlinks from credible websites? This basically means that if you have a product page for “baby shoes” and you get backlinks to this page for anchor text “baby shoes” and your page URL has the keywords “baby-shoes”, search engines will know that this page is a relevant result when someone searches for baby shoes, assuming that the page has relevant content about this product category. Let’s understand this with an example.
If you search for “baby shoes” on Amazon, the link that shows up in the browser is:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=baby+shoes
This is a complicated link for Amazon to promote for backlinks. The link is so long and complicated that there’s a good chance that it might get broken while backlinking. As a result, most people would just give a backlink to Amazon’s home page even while they are referring to a particular product category. This is not a good news for your product-page’s traffic. At the same time, the customer, too, can never remember the link and would always have to get there through a search query.
Instead, Amazon could simplify this by creating a short, memorable custom link such as amazon.store/baby-shoes and redirect it to the above mentioned long and clunky deep-link. Before we proceed further, type in www.kindle.store in your browser right away to see what happens!
The benefits of custom domain redirects in this scenario are:
● Easier for Amazon’s marketing team to promote this link
● Easier for Amazon’s customers to remember this link
● More impactful for search engines to relate to this link for anchor text “baby shoes”
Domain redirects can greatly improve the effectiveness of the following 5 common marketing tactics that you might be undertaking regularly for your eCommerce store:
1) Affiliate Marketing / Product Reviews
An affiliate can put backlink to amazon.store/baby-shoes for anchor text “baby shoes” and this will improve the organic traffic you get on that page. This is so because the search engines will establish that the link is a relevant destination for the corresponding keywords. On the other hand, bloggers and influencers, when reviewing a product from the baby shoes category, can use the same combination of anchor text and keyword URL to let search engines know that this is a relevant and trusted link for those keywords (“baby shoes”, in this case). This will again drive more traffic on the page.
2) Offers and Promotions
Did you know that more permanent the link, the more SEO value it creates for the website? Therefore, it’s a smart idea to create a memorable, permanent link for your customers to check out your current offers. You can change the offers whenever you need to but customers only need to remember the offer link at any given time to see the most recent promotions that you are running.
So, Amazon could create a permanent offer page such as:
● amazon.store/promos
● amazon.store/shoes-offers
● amazon.store/discounts
● amazon.store/tshirt-off
3) Content Marketing
Content promotion can also drive more traffic to your product and category pages. Let’s say you have a blog on your eCommerce store where you publish content about the products you sell, the latest trends etc. This is a great opportunity for you to promote your domain redirects within the content.
For example, you can draft a blogpost on “5 latest trends for baby shoes”. Within this blogpost, you can backlink to your page amazon.store/baby-shoes to the keywords “baby shoes”. The more authentic content you have, the more valuable your backlink will be to your product page. By choosing a keyword-rich page URL and the specific anchor text, you can increase the organic search rankings of your pages through content marketing.
4) Connect offline marketing to online
By using short, memorable domain redirects for your product pages, you can connect your offline marketing to your website. For example, if you are at an event for baby products and would like to promote your “baby products” page, it would be difficult to share the long and awkward deep-link to that page in a flyer or a visiting card. However, you can share a URL such as amazon.store/baby on all of your marketing collateral. When users type in this link, they will be taken to the specific category on the store. This technique works well for putting links on packaging material too.
5) Geo Locations
Domain redirects are a great way to promote geo-specific promotions for stores that have multiple locations. For example, Amazon delivers all over Germany but would like to run unique promos for Berlin and Munich. All it has to to do is create special URLs for these cities such as amazon.store/munich or create sub-domains on munich.amazon.store. This way, the brand can offer a distinct discount, product or promotion to its customers divided by their geolocation.
Now think of your online store and how you could use a .STORE domain creatively to promote your store for driving more customers to your website. These tactics will also help you build more brand visibility and also simplify your customer’s interaction with your brand.
