As a small online retailer your life can be pretty tough, especially when you are just starting out. SEO is a tough game to play for anyone, but if you happen to be in a space already covered by a larger retailer (such as the various Amazons of the world) it can be hard to get off the ground.

The first step to success is learning to understand your disadvantages. Just as David didn’t attempt to out-muscle Goliath, you shouldn’t try to beat Amazon at their own game (unless you have a few million to invest into the process).

So what are your main disadvantages?

Authority

Amazon sells absolutely everything, and they get referenced and linked to all over the place, from completely irrelevant blog posts (like this one) to mentions in forums and comment threads, to massive sites like the Wall Street Journal.

They certainly have a few fairly impressive links and they also have a plethora of awful ones. But the point is that they are so ubiquitous that their site’s authority pretty much gives them the edge on any product that they care to sell.

Reach

Again, they sell everything already; and thanks to their marketplace platform, anything they don’t sell is being sold by one of their merchants. In other words; they’re a one stop shop and they probably already sell what you want to buy.

Price

In most categories they are pretty cheap because they have some awesome buying power. On top of that, their market place has low barriers to entry (just like eBay) which results in lots of competition and more rock-bottom prices.

So How Can You Compete?

Don’t worry though, all is not lost and you can definitely still compete. You just need to be creative and a little bit different... For the rest of this post I will be using an example.

I have randomly selected “saucepans” as my keyword and as you might expect, Amazon are ranking in position number 1:

I have also selected a small retailer: beka-cookware.com purely because their saucepans category page is ranking on page 4. So how could these guys try to compete with the giant that is Amazon.com?

Note:
This company is not a client of ours, I just picked them because they seemed like a fun case study and I like cooking (even if I'm not great at it!)

Don't Be Boring

Amazon sell saucepans, but the big advantage that we do have is that Amazon have billions (well... maybe thousands) of other products and they probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cookware.

Our example website on the other hand is dedicated to cookware and that gives them a big opportunity to do something a little bit different. Rather than just laying out all of their saucepans in a fairly uninspiring category page...

Example Idea

What if, they made their category page a little more interactive? They could present a glossy image of a chef in a kitchen, with different shelves labeled “Saucepots”, “Milk Pans”, “Large Saucepans” etc...

They could have tooltips fade in with a description about each subcategory. So when you hover over milk pans it might say “ideal for cold winter nights when you want nothing more than a perfectly prepared hot chocolate, with our milk pans you will never burn the milk”.

This isn’t a finished concept and I’m sure you could improve it massively, but you can see how this would inspire more interest and get the customer browsing. Rather than having the same generic category page as every other cookware retailer on the net, they would have something a little more unique.

Be More Niche

Amazon already has a pretty decent range of things in their cookware category, enough to rival many small specialist e-shops. But they certainly don’t sell every possible product.

Fortunately, our retailer has already set themselves apart. The look and feel of the site clearly conveys that they sell high quality supplies for serious chefs and their about page repeats that message.

Amazon sell everything from expensive to cheap and by being more specialist our retailer sends out the message that they are the place to go for the best items... This also means that they don’t have to compete on price!

Adding Unique Products

Our retailer could probably also add some even more niche products that Amazon doesn’t have, although the profitability of such items could turn out to be limited. There is another option though;

What if they were to write an instruction manual or an advanced guide to cooking with saucepans? It’s not expensive to get glossy books/pamphlets printed and by adding a tangible but cheap to produce extra, they could easily make their product offering stand out.

Unique Descriptions

There are some things that make your pages unique and there are others that you have-to cover just to keep up. One really important aspect is the product descriptions.

With as many products as they do have, Amazon really struggle to use unique descriptions for every product, often they do just have to rely on a standard manufacturers description (although they do make up for it with some pretty awesome user generated content such as reviews, recommended items etc...)

To pick on a random product; this 'Cook n Stir' can be found on both the Beka Cookware site and on Amazon, but you will notice that the same product description is not used on both sites. This is good to see.

Unfortunately the product description used on their actual website is a bit lacking and doesn't exactly inspire (in my opinion at least), but we'll see how they can fix that in a moment.

Rich Product Snippets

Rich snippets are all over the place at the moment and if you have an e-commerce site and are not using them, you are missing out on a big opportunity.

Unfortunately, our example site Beka Cookware doesn't seem to be utilizing any form of microdata, which is a shame because it can give you a big edge (and before long will be a necessary requirement just to compete). But I won't get into all of that in this post... If you don't already know the ins and outs check out this post on rich snippets and how to use them.

Test Everything!

Conversion testing is important for any website, but an e-commerce website absolutely has to do it, and do it well. Amazon is known for relentlessly testing their sales process to get the most sales possible. Of course, with the amount of traffic that they get, they can test even tiny details. But, that doesn't mean that our example retailer can't use conversion testing to stay ahead of the game too.

They could test their 'add to cart buttons' where their product images are and all the rest. However, because they are a smaller site than Amazon, they can also test things that Amazon cannot test:

They could test using a slightly different call to action for different products for instance how about saying 'buy this saucepan' or 'get frying with this wok'... Instead of just the plain old 'add to basket'. Amazon can track user-behavior on a very large scale of course, but probably don't have the time or man-power to monitor traffic on individual pages, but with a strong conversion rate optimization strategy, a smaller retailer can.

Here's a post from the ThinkTraffic.co.uk blog about some recent testing we have done, it's not relevant to e-commerce per-se, but it should serve as a good introduction to anyone who hasn't done a split test before: Case Study: Increasing Traffic By 37% Using Split Testing

A Bit About Link Building

We all know that link building is a big part of SEO, but don’t make the same mistake that so many small retailers make by trying to build links directly to their product or category pages!

Amazon has loads of links, and loads of authority, we’ve already covered that. Their cookware categories rank very easily, partly because of the thousands of other categories drawing in links and authority; this isn’t something that our retailer can easily compete with.

Aside from that, building links to these types of pages is hard because bloggers and resource websites like to link to valuable resources, not generic shop pages. If this is your strategy, you’re in for an uphill struggle.

Example Idea

Category pages and product pages are functional, but pretty boring and generic really; they are not link worthy. So what can our cookware site do?

Well let’s take a typical product page like this one; Instead of showing boring specs (Volume; 1.9. Yay!) they could have a section labeled: “Things we have made with this product!” and show an extravagant recipe to make that delicious hot chocolate we were talking about earlier (along with shots of the pan in use). (editor's note: since this post was submitted, the milkpan page isn't displaying properly. The link here is to a saucepan that has the same product template as the milkpan.)

They could have a featured recipe for each of their cookware items and even link to other products that they used (a novel twist on the ‘related products’ widget right?). The whole page would still be a product page with a shiny “add to basket” button, but it would also be a mouth-watering recipe resource page... Yummy.

Building Links

The beauty of jazzing up the products pages like this is that you would have some much more link-worthy pages and you might even get some links for free. At the very least, you would have a range of pages which you would be able to build links to much more easily, you would probably still need to get out there and build some links, but with higher quality pages you won't be facing such an uphill struggle.

You could also add a blog and show some really creative recipe ideas or advanced cooking guides. Each of these blog posts would of course use your products (and plenty of photos of them being used) and therefore you could legitimately link to them.

Pretty soon you would end up with a resource site all about cooking. People might even come to your site to learn and take in the great advice, and you can bet that when they next wanted to buy cookware, your site would be the first port of call.

Oh And Another Thing

Being an e-commerce site, this company could probably get some good results by sending out sample products to carefully selected blogs and thought leaders in their industry. Of course, this is an example of when having a really great product will go a long way... The last thing you want is Gordon Ramsay telling the world that he found your saucepan was disappointing (and let's face it, Ramsay wouldn't be that delicate with the wording either!)

Ok, actually getting a review from someone like that might be a challenge, but there are certainly plenty of very popular blogs that our example site could contact.

If they do a good job of making their product pages interesting, it should make it easier to attract the attention of such bloggers and it may also give them a better chance of getting extra traction from the traffic generated (by gaining even more links!)

Summary

Hopefully this post demonstrates a point. Most e-commerce sites are pretty boring. Unless you sell something really special, your site won’t easily stand out from any other e-commerce site.

But in this case, whilst a page full of saucepans isn’t exciting, seeing the product in action can be. With a little creativity you can bring most seemingly-boring products to life, and that touch of personality is something that the Amazons of the world can’t easily compete with!