An exciting guest post by Marion Halter:
How are the visibility and ranking of Swiss online shops developing within their most important traffic source, the search engine? We investigated this question and, in collaboration with Searchmetrics, a leading tool provider for search and content performance, analyzed the search data of Swiss e-commerce platforms from various industries.
Data basis for e-commerce analysis
The analysis considered the 100 highest-grossing online shops (according to the Carpathia study). Searchmetrics provided data on SEO and paid visibility on Google.ch for the past 2.5 years. This allows us to perform the necessary analyses and identify trends for the coming years. To determine organic and paid visibility, the Google index is searched weekly for more than two million keywords.
SEO Visibility: SEO Visibility shows the general visibility of the corresponding domain in the organic search results of www.google.ch.
Paid Visibility: Paid Visibility aggregates the results found for the examined page in the AdWords ads into an index value.
From BlueGlass Interactive ☐ Digital Marketing Agency
Distribution of SEO vs. Paid Visibility across individual e-commerce sectors
The same trend is evident across the entire Swiss e-commerce sector. Over the past two years, organic visibility has shown a clear growth trend, while paid visibility has declined. This suggests that, compared to previous years, higher investments and efforts are being made in search engine optimization (SEO) at the expense of paid placements. The charts clearly show that the two traffic channels are generally negatively correlated. As soon as paid visibility begins to decline, organic visibility starts to improve accordingly. In other words, as soon as organic visibility increases, less is invested in paid advertising.
In this context, I would like to mention the example of Zalando.ch. This platform has masterfully managed the balancing act between high paid investments (for branding and awareness purposes) at its market launch in 2011 and a sustainable online strategy. AdWords spending was steadily reduced, allowing the organic channel to develop into a strong and sustainable traffic source during this period. Nevertheless, AdWords is still used as a traffic source.
