Brand vs Sales Site

Around 2000 The Home Depot sent a letter to their vendors stating that if they were selling to consumers on the web then Home Depot might find it difficult to partner with them to sell their products in the Home Depot retail outlets.  As you can imagine this caused many of the traditional hardware manufacturers to spurn Internet sales.
The web,either through research or direct selling,impacted over 50% of all sales in 2011;and the trend is continuing.  The last article started the conversation of balancing the question of selling on your brand site.

One of the topics introduced in the last article was the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) advantage to two different sites,a brand site and a selling site or webstore.  The real advantage of separating these two sites is evident when you consider the
traditional buying cycle.

The words and techniques used to drive traffic to a site are very different if the consumer is trying to learn about the products vs purchase the products.  The “Learn” category is typically more brand oriented,focusing on engaging the consumer and exposing them to the broad range of products that a manufacturer has to solve their problem.  As a consumer begins to narrow their preferences they typically move more toward the buy side of the cycle.  Here the keywords are more specific,often times leveraging the SKU name/number as well as call to action words to help close the sale.
While one site can rank for both learning and purchasing,the consumer that converts into a sale is often very different than one just doing the research.  Great online retailers understand the difference between browsing and shopping and optimize their site for the purchase.  This means different keywords,thus different content.  Over time sites get ranked by the search engines,this ranking reduces their pay-per-click costs for relevant keywords.

Note:  It is not a pure auction for online traffic.  A site with great content that is ranked high by the search engines will be charged less by the search engine for the same traffic.  The engines don’t want bad sites to be able to win just on cost,they want the sites to win on quality.

There is one other key aspect to Search that can be a major benefit for the argument that two sites are better than one;the opportunity to own more of the top page ranks.  With two primary URLs that are controlled by the brand,the brand gets more opportunity to end up in the first page rankings displayed by the search engine.
This is harder than it looks,as you can’t simply duplicate content across both sites (the engines will negatively rank both sites if this happens).  If the sites remain true to their purpose,educate vs sell,this is a straightforward process.  But with a clear story the brand gets the opportunity to own a broader footprint,thus covering more types of search.  And each site still has the opportunity to potentially show even on the cross purpose – brand site can appear in sales search and vice versa.


www.etailvelocity.com