SEO is crucial, but don’t rush it

When Anya Cheng decided to launch an e-commerce company, she had a distinct advantage over most other entrepreneurs: she knew her way around digital marketing having held senior e-commerce roles at Facebook, eBay, McDonald’s and Target.

And one thing she knew was not to rush into search engine optimization. Taking a slow approach to SEO is something she recommends to anyone launching an online store.

“Forget searching for now. You should go back to your consumer journey,” said Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Taelor, in an interview with Digital Commerce 360. Taelor is a clothing subscription service for men that uses stylists and artificial intelligence to select clothes for individual customers.

Cheng, who is also an adjunct lecturer in product management, marketing and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University, likes to tell a story from her days on the world’s largest social network.

“When I was at Facebook, we sold Facebook Wi-Fi in different countries,” Cheng said. “We discovered that people are not looking for ‘Wi-Fi’ right away. They’re looking for ‘free NBA games’ or ‘free cricket’ or ‘Netflix shows.’ When they find what they’re looking for, they realize they need good, fast internet, so they start looking for ‘fast internet.’ realize that Wi-Fi is faster than the internet where they are. So they’re looking for “free Wi-Fi” and they realized they couldn’t get free Wi-Fi at high speed, and they start looking at paid Wi-Fi and they heard about Facebook Wi-Fi. “

SEO is about searching for searchers

Anya Cheng from Taylor. (Photo Credit: Candice)

For a flat fee of $88 per month, Taelor customers receive up to two boxes of clothing per month. Each box contains four items: dress shirts, jackets, polo shirts, henley shirts and more. Dry cleaning and shipping are free both ways, making renting and returning clothes effortless.

In 2021 when Cheng launched Taelor, she knew she needed to understand the buyer’s journey before she could understand how potential customers could find Taelor through search. And to do that, she needed to understand the potential buyers.

“The first thing to do is to know your personas,” says Cheng. “If you’re a small company, you can do this on your own” by researching and talking to industry leaders until you get a sense of where the industry is going, where the opportunity is. “

Next, Cheng suggests that entrepreneurs interview about 20 people to understand their pain points. Then, create a survey of a few hundred people to get a sense of how broad the audience is experiencing those pain points.

Typically, this process will generate about 20 pain points and a handful of personas. Cheng advises that startups market to two people at first and ignore the rest.

From there, an entrepreneur can begin creating messaging and positioning aimed at reaching those select personas.

Don’t get confused

At this point, the new e-commerce company is ready to optimize search. But be careful, Cheng advises, because it’s common for entrepreneurs to confuse their company’s value proposition with the target personas. And that will be a disaster when searching.

A model poses with a Taelor subscription box. (Photo Credit: Jabbar Luo)

Taelor’s customer base is men aged 25 to 35. About 60% of them are single. They are heavily represented by engineers and salespeople, Cheng said and “we know they are not in fashion.”

That’s where things got difficult.

“When I first started Taelor, we realized that a lot of our customers were guys who were very ambitious and ambitious, meaning they were like, ‘I want to get a date.’ ‘I want to close a deal.’ ‘I want to get a better job.’ They wanted better things. They want to deliver.”

So Taelor’s first marketing campaign told potential customers that they could “look good and be confident” by using the service.

“We thought it was great,” Cheng said. “It was perfect. But it didn’t work.”

It turned out that improving your appearance and boosting your confidence were the perceived needs of the target personas. But they were not value propositions that would convince them to subscribe to Taelor’s service.

After a little more experimentation—using paid search to learn which terms led to conversions faster than he could using organic search—Cheng found a proposition that the personas valued enough to make them buy: “No shopping. No laundry.”

Personas and the women who love them

Cheng calls herself a “mini influencer” with more than 70,000 followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Clubhouse and more. She is also a regular presence at events for Asian-American entrepreneurs, women-led companies and computer engineers.

By talking to people online and at events, Cheng found a key piece of information to perfect his SEO strategy for reaching men who need a better wardrobe: women.

“Many women have tried a subscription service. So most of our men were influenced by their female counterparts,” Cheng said.

Those potential subscribers, driven by the women in their lives, do a Google search and find Taelor’s content marketing, newscasts and website.

SEO tips from a search marketer

If you already have an SEO plan in place, it’s not time to rest. There is always more work to do with SEO.

“The first piece of advice for any small to medium-sized e-commerce company looking to improve its SEO strategy is to start with keyword research to successfully lay the foundation for your digital strategy and better understand how users search for your products. A great trick is to use Amazon or Google Suggest,” said Eric Ritter, CEO of search agency Digital Neighbor, to Digital Commerce 360. “Once you’ve clearly defined your keyword goals, set a practice to follow the 2022 website best practices through under – the technical SEO tools of the hood built into your CMS – whether that’s WordPress, Shopify, or something else. “

Additionally, Ritter reminds entrepreneurs that “being specific in your product descriptions is a practice that can set your business apart from the competition. There may be many other websites selling similar products, but if your descriptions connect with potential customers, they will be more likely to buy from you. Also, as a bonus, if you pay close attention to creating detailed product descriptions, you will see an improvement in your website’s SEO. “

Ecommerce companies see the value in SEO

Retailers know that optimizing well for search pays dividends.

That’s why, as the following two graphics show, search gets a large share of marketers’ budgets.

Search never sleeps

In June 2021, Google unveiled what it called Core Web Vitals: three activities measured by how long they take to complete on a page, and the search engine said whether they would have an impact intensive on the way it ranks pages:

A year later, Search Engine Land, citing SEO platform provider BrightEdge, reported that retail scores had improved by 58%. That’s especially impressive given that retail websites had poor ratings when Google announced the initiative, according to Search Engine Land.

Search brings success

Today, Taelor uses a search marketing consultant who once reported to Cheng at Facebook, as well as a small team in India to optimize pages.

Her company also has a new line of business where companies provide a Taelor subscription as a benefit to employees (Google is a customer). Taelor is also now a data analytics company that allows apparel brands and retailers to test products and predict trends based on how a product performs among subscribers.

And the finance community has noticed Taelor too. In April, the company closed a $2.3 million pre-seed funding round led by Bling Capital. Bling is a venture capital firm founded by Ben Ling, an early executive at Google and Meta (formerly Facebook). He has previously invested in more than 10 unicorn companies, including Lyft, Instacart and Square.

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