Nowadays, online shopping has now become a regular shopping activity when it comes to using internet. We know that online retailers churn revenue by investing heavily on online marketing campaigns to attract targeted users to their products/services. As social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter contain millions of active user traffic, even many small or start-up retailers focus on these sites to get enough ‘like’s and ‘share’s for improving social media visibility of their website. But according to a survey conducted by Shop.org and Forrester, more than 85% of the online retailers they surveyed prefer search engine marketing or SEO as their primary marketing strategy. Here are the few important data we taken from the recently conducted survey.

  • According to Forrester and Shop.org, about 85 percent of online retailers prefer SEO and other related tactics such as paid keyword placement, performance search and mobile for generating targeted user traffic for their website.
  • 4 percent of surveyed retailers prefer Facebook marketing, Pinterest and Twitter are major online marketing platforms for 3 percent and one percent of surveyed retailers respectively. The popular video sharing site Youtube is also not behind and has got about 3 percent of followers.
  • Traditional or offline marketing tactics such as TV and print media is still preferred by 8% of the retailers. Another 4% prefer text ads displayed on other websites such as AdSense and contextual placement.
  • About 41% of the surveyed retailers want organic SEO traffic and another 40% prefer affiliate programs for creating more sale conversions for their online shopping portal.
  • For re-introducing products/services that were unpopular in the past, approximately 29% of the surveyed retailers prefer remarketing or retargeting tactics to achieve their marketing goals.

Mobile and Social Search Marketing Still in Demand

Forrester and Shop.org are of the view that even though majority retailers choose SEO as their primary marketing campaign, they didn’t drop mobile and in fact most of them have invested heavily on mobile marketing in 2014. Majority of the surveyed retailers say that even though Facebook may not be the direct revenue inducing platform but it is highly effective when it comes to customer engagement. According to their survey, nearly 62% of online retailers are planning to spend more on Facebook marketing this year when compared to 2013. In addition, nearly half of the surveyed retailers give more importance on other popular social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest in the coming year.

Make Your Shopping Portal more Search Engine Friendly

If you own an online shopping portal and want to gain upper hand over your competitors, then you can utilize SEO tools provided by Google such as Webmaster tools, Google My Business and Google Shopping Campaigns. If you need proper assistance for carrying out your SEO objectives, you can hire an expert who is well-qualified and having years of experience in providing client-specific and cost-effective SEO solutions. The expert can ensure that you get all the benefits such as more ROI and more conversions.