The word is out: Offsite traffic is the secret to success for Amazon sellers.
Conveniently enough, many offsite strategies are also things you would do for a generalized marketing plan. That said, a marketing plan can encompass a lot of different pieces, and some paths are more or less effective. Especially if your background isn’t in marketing or you’re short-staffed, this can be stressful to think about. In this post, we’re going to break it down for you and discuss the best and worst ways to drive offsite traffic to your Amazon listings.
To start, we’ll give a refresher on what offsite traffic is and how it’s useful. Once we’re synced on those definitions, we break down the best and worst strategies. Let’s get started!
Article Contents
Offsite traffic is any traffic that comes to Amazon from outside sources, such as Google, social media, paid advertising, and direct traffic to your website. Paired with attribution tags, this type of traffic can increase your sales and help you gain insights into who your customers are.
To measure offsite traffic, you can use Amazon Attribution tags and/or additional tracking software to measure the number of visitors coming from outside sources. This will allow you to see which sources are bringing the most visitors and where you should focus your efforts.
And how does this help you? It’s pretty simple: by driving offsite traffic, you can leverage more platforms and have more options to stay on-trend and attractive to a larger number of demographics. This increased awareness and attractiveness will in turn increase your sales and profit.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to drive offsite traffic to Amazon. To use SEO effectively, you need to optimize your website content with relevant keywords, write helpful and authoritative pages, and create a good user experience. This will include site optimizations like fast site speed, an easy-to-follow template, and a good code structure. Google is one of the most profitable and consumer-favored search engines, but Bing is also a place where content can rank.
Paid advertising, such as Google Ads, drives targeted visitors directly to your website or storefront page on Amazon. By setting up campaigns with specific keywords and targeting certain demographics, you can increase your chances of getting visitors who are more likely to convert into customers and make a purchase on Amazon. There are many factors to take into consideration, such as consumer trends and seasonality, to make sure you are putting your money where it will make a difference. Tracking software is also crucial if you want to have these campaigns, as it will help you easily spot which ads are and are not working.
Social media is another great medium to promote your business and products. You can do this through paid advertising on these platforms, organic posting on a brand account, or through influencers. With social media, you have the opportunity to hop on trends that will help you connect with younger demographics, and especially platforms like TikTok make it possible to go viral quickly. Posting often and creating content you know will connect with your audience is the best way to drive traffic back to Amazon.
Content marketing involves creating valuable content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc., that can be used to introduce customers to you and your brand identity via learning about a topic related to your business. The key here is creating content that is informative and interesting–this might even pay off with Google in the long run, as the content can serve to build your authority.
Buying links from other websites to boost your rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs) was a common practice a long time ago. However, it’s against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in huge drops in rankings if caught by Google’s algorithm bots or manual reviewers. The short-term increase in rankings isn’t worth the long-term consequences, and Google has progressively gotten better at identifying this.
Spamming social media platforms with links back to Amazon or sharing unwanted messages with followers goes against the terms of service on most social networks and could lead to limited access or being permanently banned. Instead, focus on providing interesting content that people want to engage with rather than just mass posting uninteresting content. It can be hard to keep up with creating enough content, but like with buying links, the long-term consequences are too influential to make it worth taking the shortcut.
Cloaking involves using technologies such as JavaScript or image tags that “cloak” links within webpages so they appear different than what they’re linking out to. In this case, a page on Amazon. Since this is a misleading practice (and annoying to the consumer), Google won’t reward any pages that do this, and you could see a hit to offsite traffic.
Keyword stuffing is another common tactic used by spammers looking to boost their rankings by stuffing as many relevant keywords as possible into their website or blog posts. Seeing how it led to strange and unhelpful content, Google made a rule against this and will not rank pages that demonstrate this as highly.
As a general rule of thumb, any sneaky or lazy behavior will not be rewarded by any platform, whether that be a search engine or social media. The companies who own these platforms have to make sure the user has a good experience if they want to be successful, so any behavior from you that hurts the user experience will hurt your chance to surface. Likewise, if you’re making a better user experience, the platform will reward that.