£60k/month steak stones business is struggling with Google Ads

For ecommerce businesses looking to scale, finding the right balance between organic search visibility and paid advertising is crucial.

Here’s a brief overview of what we got into!

Understanding your digital marketing backbone

Before diving into specific tactics, it’s essential to understand your digital marketing backbone:

• Direct traffic: Visitors who search for your brand directly or return to your site.
• Nurtured traffic: Visitors from social media and email marketing efforts.
• Earned traffic: Organic search visibility (SEO).
• Paid traffic: Visitors from paid advertising campaigns.

Analysing these components helps you understand your reliance on each channel and identify areas for improvement.

Optimising paid advertising

If you’re struggling to scale your paid advertising efforts, consider these strategies:

• Reassess campaign structure: Too many campaigns can spread your budget thin. Consider consolidating campaigns for more efficient spending.
• Review bidding strategies: Max Conversions may not always be the best choice, especially for newer campaigns. Consider manual CPC or Target Impression Share to kickstart underperforming campaigns.
• Analyse search terms: Use your Google Search Console data to understand how people search for your products and align your paid campaigns accordingly.
• Set clear goals: Communicate clear revenue targets with your marketing team or agency to ensure campaigns are optimised for growth, not just ROAS.
• Expand your reach: Don’t be afraid to target broader terms related to your product category, adjusting bids based on commercial intent.

Strengthening your SEO strategy

To reduce reliance on paid advertising and improve organic visibility:

• Create evergreen content: Develop comprehensive guides and resources about your product category. For example, “Everything You Need to Know About Hot Stone Cooking.”
• Answer customer questions: Use tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” to identify common questions in your niche and create content addressing these queries.
• Showcase expertise: Transform your website from a mere product catalogue into an information resource. This helps establish authority in your niche and can improve organic rankings.
• Optimise existing content: Review and enhance your current blog posts or product descriptions to provide more value and target relevant keywords.
• Incorporate rich media: Use videos, high-quality images, and infographics to make your content more engaging and comprehensive.

Balancing paid and organic strategies

While scaling, aim for a balanced approach:

• Set realistic goals: If you’re aiming to double your revenue, consider how much should come from paid vs. organic channels.
• Invest in both channels: While paid ads can drive immediate results, investing in SEO provides long-term benefits and can reduce your reliance on paid traffic.
• Use paid insights for SEO: Leverage data from your paid campaigns to inform your SEO strategy, identifying high-performing keywords and content topics.
• Create a cohesive user journey: Ensure your paid ads and organic content work together to guide users through the buying process.

By implementing these strategies you can create a more sustainable and scalable ecommerce business. Remember, the goal is not just to drive traffic, but to provide value to your potential customers at every stage of their journey.

If you’ve enjoyed this have a look at some of our other content and episodes!

___

👋 Never miss an update. Sign up to T.E.A Break, our weekly newsletter.

👉 See our case studies to discover how we grow brands online.

👉 Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

👉 Follow our Grow with Evergreen podcast on Spotify, YouTube & Apple Podcasts.

👉 Download our new Home and Garden sector paid media report