When Anya Cheng decided to launch an e-commerce company, she had a distinct advantage over most entrepreneurs: she knew her way around digital marketing after holding senior e-commerce roles at Facebook, eBay, McDonald’s and Target.
And one thing he knew was not to rush into search engine optimization. Taking a slow approach to SEO is something he recommends to anyone launching an online store.
“Forget about search for now. You should go back to your user journey,” Cheng, Taelor co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with Digital Commerce 360. Taelor is a men’s clothing subscription service that uses stylists and artificial intelligence to curate clothing for individual customers.
Cheng, also an assistant professor of product management, marketing and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University, likes to tell a story about her days on the world’s largest social network.
“When I was at Facebook, we sold Facebook Wi-Fi to different countries,” Cheng said. “We found that people don’t immediately search for ‘Wi-Fi.’ They search for ‘free NBA games’ or ‘free cricket’ or ‘Netflix shows.’ When they find what they’re looking for, they realize they need an internet fast and good, so they start searching for “fast internet”. Then they realize that the Wi-Fi is faster than the internet where they are. So they search for “free Wi-Fi” and realize that they can’t get Free high-speed Wi-Fi, and they started looking at paid Wi-Fi and heard about Facebook Wi-Fi.”
SEO is all about finding search engines
Anya Cheng from Taelor. (Photo credit: Candice)
For a flat fee of $88 per month, Taelor customers receive up to two boxes of clothing per month. Each box contains four items: dress shirts, jackets, polo shirts, t-shirts and more. Dry cleaning and shipping are free both ways, so renting and returning clothes is easy.
In 2021, when Cheng launched Taelor, he knew he needed to understand the buyer’s journey before he could understand how potential customers might find Taelor in search. And to do that, he needed to understand potential buyers.
“The first thing to do is identify your characters,” Cheng said. “If you’re a small business, you can do it on your own” by researching and talking to industry leaders until you “have a sense of where the industry is going, where the opportunity is.”
Next, Cheng suggests employers interview about 20 people to understand their pain points. Then create a survey of a few hundred people to get a sense of the broad audience that experiences these pain points.
Generally, this process will produce about 20 pain points and a handful of people. Cheng advises startups to initially market to two people at first and ignore the rest.
From there, an entrepreneur can start creating messages and positioning aimed at reaching those selected people.
Don’t get confused
At this point, the new e-commerce company is ready to optimize for search. But be careful, Cheng advises, because it’s common for entrepreneurs to confuse their company’s value proposition with target people. And that will be a disaster in the search.
A model poses with a Taelor subscription box. (Photo credit: Jabbar Luo)
Taelor’s customer base is men aged 25 to 35. 60% of them are single. They’re heavily represented by engineers and marketers, Cheng says, and “we know they’re not trendy.”
That’s where things got complicated.
“When I started Taelor, we realized that a lot of our clients were very ambitious and aspirational guys, meaning they were saying, ‘I want to date.’ ‘I want to close a deal.’ ‘I want to get a better job.’ They wanted better things. They want to get it.”
Thus, Taelor’s first marketing campaign told potential customers that they could “feel good and be confident” by using the service.
“We thought it was great,” Cheng said. “It was perfect. But it didn’t work.”
It turned out that improving your appearance and increasing your confidence were the perceived needs of the target people. But it wasn’t value propositions that convinced them to subscribe to Taelor’s service.
After a little more experimentation (using paid search to learn which terms led to conversions faster than organic search), Cheng found a proposition that characters valued enough to make them buy: “No shopping. No laundry.”
People and the women who love them
Cheng calls herself a “mini-influencer” with over 70,000 followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Clubhouse and more. She is also a constant presence at events for Asian-American entrepreneurs, women-led businesses and computer engineers.
Talking to people online and at events, Cheng found a key piece of information to refine his SEO strategy to reach the men who need better wardrobes: women.
“Many women have tried a subscription service. So most of our boys were influenced by their female counterparts,” Cheng said.
Those potential subscribers, prompted by the women in their lives, do a Google search and find Taelor’s content marketing, news coverage, and website.
SEO tips from a search marketer
If you already have an SEO plan in place, it’s not time to rest. There is always more work to be done with SEO.
“The first tip for any small to medium-sized e-commerce business looking to improve their SEO strategy is to start with keyword research to successfully lay the foundation for your digital strategy and better understand how consumers search your products. A great trick is to use Amazon or Google Suggest,” Eric Ritter, CEO of search agency Digital Neighbor, told Digital Commerce 360. “Once you’ve clearly defined your keyword goals, set a practice for following 2022 website best practices through sub- technical SEO tools built into your CMS, be it WordPress, Shopify, or something else.
In addition, Ritter reminds entrepreneurs that “being specific in your product descriptions is a practice that can set your business apart from the competition. Many other sites may sell similar products, but if your descriptions connect with potential customers, they are more likely to buy from you. Also, as a bonus, if you pay close attention to creating detailed product descriptions, you will see an improvement in your website’s SEO.
E-commerce companies see the value of SEO
Retailers know that optimizing search well pays dividends.
That’s why, as the two charts below illustrate, search gets a big chunk of marketers’ budgets.
Search never sleeps
In June 2021, Google unveiled what it called Core Web Vitals: three activities measured by how long it takes to complete on a page, which the search engine said would have a profound effect on page rankings. pages:
Larger Content Paint (LCP): Load, target 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID): Interactivity, target 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative design change (CLS): visual stability, target 0.1.
A year later, Search Engine Land, citing SEO platform provider BrightEdge, said retail scores have improved by 58%. This is especially impressive considering that retail sites had low ratings when Google announced the initiative, according to Search Engine Land.
Search brings success
Today, Taelor uses a search marketing consultant that once reported to Cheng at Facebook, as well as a small team in India to optimize the pages.
His company also has a new line of business where companies offer a Taelor subscription as an employee benefit (Google is a client). Taelor is also now a data analytics company that allows apparel brands and retailers to test products and predict trends based on how a product is performing among subscribers.
And the financial community has taken notice of Taelor, too. In April, the company closed a $2.3 million pre-seed funding round led by Bling Capital. Bling is a venture capital firm founded by Ben Ling, an early executive at Google and Meta (formerly Facebook). He has previously invested in more than 10 unicorn companies, including Lyft, Instacart and Square.
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