E-Commerce Search Marketing: 3 Cornerstones for Success in Asia
E-Commerce Search Marketing in Asia – APAC in 3 – Episode 07
$3.5 trillion US dollars! That’s the projected value of worldwide e-commerce sales in 2021. And Asia alone will account for over 62% of that massive online spending!
And as e-commerce booms, online sellers must sharpen their search marketing edge to standout in Asia’s hyper-lucrative but also ultra-competitive digital marketplace.
Check out APAC in 3 (EP 07) to discover the three cornerstones of e-commerce search marketing in Asia, home to the world’s biggest e-commerce scene.
Asia E-Commerce Cornerstone #1: LOCALIZE across organic and paid search
Across the diversity of Asia, e-commerce brands must localize to win customer trust.
This goes far beyond simply translating keywords. E-commerce sellers must create content and ads that resonate with local context and culture. This is critical because search languages, platforms, and habits are so unique to each individual market. For instance:
- In China, there are seven main dialects, and Baidu dominates with 558 million active users.
- In Japan, there are four written scripts, and Yahoo! rivals Google for a share of Japan’s 119 million internet users.
- In Korea, searches are made in the Korean alphabet Hangul, and Naver dominates with a 42 million-strong userbase.
- And the rest of APAC favors Google but across vastly distinct multilingual markets.
Pro Tip: To optimize across such variance, leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner and Dragon Metrics to curate a list of high-volume, low-competition keywords. Then, localize that list for each market to capture the nuances of how native users actually search for your products.
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Asia E-Commerce Cornerstone #2: optimize for organic search
E-commerce search marketing is a marathon, not a sprint—and the starting line is generating visibility on your target market’s preferred search engine.
So, once you’ve got your localized list of keywords for each market, you can use it to optimize your product pages and structured data.
These areas are especially critical for e-commerce SEO where SERP featured snippets and rich results display valuable product information like descriptions, ratings, reviews, and price. And Asia’s search engines all have unique formats for which you can optimize to showcase your products on their SERPs.
Another critical part of e-commerce SEO in Asia is uploading a sitemap to help local search engines correctly index your product pages, which you can do through your domain account on the particular search engine.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a list of all the URLs on your site. It helps crawlers decipher your site structure.
But note that your sitemap should only include live, indexable URLs regardless of which search engine you’re submitting to.
Asia E-Commerce Cornerstone #3: customize for paid search
73% of consumers say a good experience influences their brand loyalties. So once you’ve localized and optimized, you can customize your paid search strategies to meet local preferences.
A/B testing is a tried-and-true e-commerce paid search strategy to understand what actions your customers take and why they might not be converting.
In A/B testing, you’ll create two different versions of the same product ad and observe them over time. Then implement those learnings across your ads and product pages to boost your customer experience and in turn your conversion rate.
Pro Tip: Tools like Google Optimize, Adobe Target, and Optimizely can help you conduct and track A/B testing.
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Localizing across markets, optimizing across organic search, and customizing the paid search experience can help you not only truly understand your target customers, but increase your online sales across the diversity of Asia.
