As digital marketers and online retailers have realized, the manner in which people buy products has completely shifted over the last 10 years. We used to shop online for basic items sold from a commodity-positioned e-commerce site. Nowadays, those generic domains are being downgraded as authority sites due to Amazon introducing Branded Storefronts and Google Rankings which prefer brand domains over generic domains. This is similar to Google’s Rankings in regards to website searches. These powerhouses of the Internet are the #1 forces affecting the growing importance of developing a branded online shopping experience for your customers.
Amazon brought branded stores onto their site in 2017, marking a change in thinking for the leader in e-commerce. Amazon is now making it possible for consumers to search based on brands, not just product types alone. There are also many opportunities for consumers to use an amazon promo code when placing an order, coaxing them to use the Amazon platform rather than purchasing straight from the brand, making brands more popular on Amazon. There is evidence that branded stores on Amazon are being organically ranked higher than generic product listings.
Google has been favoriting branded website domains over generic names for quite a few years now. Exact match domains (EMDs) seem to be given a lower authority ranking by Google, whereas branded domains usually come out on top. Consumers who are typing “auto products” into their search bar will be given websites of brand domains that are specific and established long before they are presented with autopartproducts.com, for example. Google’s algorithm for deciding rankings is very complicated, which is why perfecting SEO is not an easy task. Because of this, many businesses opt to use things like Bigfoot Digital SEO Services to make sure that their site will receive the highest possible rankings on Google.
In a recent article from WordStream, the author articulates that EMDs dropped in value on online search engines when customers started to become conditioned to distrust generic web domains.
Using these market forces as indications of future trends, it is clear to see that brands are going to stick around. Creating a powerful online brand presence is still necessary to selling online and in retail. While digital development is advancing at a blinding pace, the impact of a strong brand remains the same. So the question is, are you forming a brand line of products and services, or just selling products and services alone like so many others?