How to Win Against Amazon.

Mom & Pop, online sellers can compete against Amazon, by using better software.

Amazon may be crushing your local, department store, but smaller sellers can kick their ass online. Amazon is a multi-product behemoth. But that's also their weakness. Have you noticed how Amazon search sucks. And I mean really sucks. They have soooooo many products, that a lot of searches fail.

Try searching for "oil free" salad dressing, or "sugar free" anything. You get "oil based" salad dressing and lots of products with sugar.

Armed with that knowledge, smart, online stores can win customers. They do so by:

A) Specializing in one product category that frustrates Amazon customers.

B) Using software to make their site auto generate pages of fresh content.

Using wordpress sites; or listings on eBay, Etsy, and Shopify won't cut it. These sites create static listings. And static sites can't compete against Amazon in Google search.

Sites that employ automation, like auto content generation, gain Google rank while the owner sleeps.

For one client, I wrote software that auto generated t-shirt slogans based on their theme. Every day, the website generates 20 new t-shirt pages, including content relevant to each shirt. This caused Google to see fresh content every day. Soon, people doing a search for that theme, saw the client site above Amazon on Google search pages. For many online sellers, the goal is to beat Amazon by being above them in Google search – without having to pay for Google ads.

Another competitive strategy is based on people leaving Amazon in frustration. For example, people looking for no-sugar added products, or oil-free dressing. These searches frustrated me so much so, that I left Amazon, and went back to do a Google search for products. You read that right. I left Amazon to search for products on Google.

Once on Google, online retailers need a way to be in the upper listing. If people bail on Amazon search, then the online retailer needs to be found in the Google search. People may still start on Amazon, but they can leave in frustration.

So how does automated software help with rankings?

The basic idea is that Google likes sites that have focus, and have a lot of pages about that focus. Amazon lists a lot of products, and has many pages about products in that category. To beat Amazon, sites like ThinkGeek.com (until they were bought out), focused on a customer experience. Then, they curated products that geeks, their customer base, would like. With a site, and print catalog, they dominated the geek, gift market.

That was then, this is now.

The way to compete today, is to have a site that generates content so that Google thinks there are constant updates to the online, retailer's site. And that turns out to be somewhat simple. For example, a site with just ten products, let's say specialty jellies, would have a lot more detail about their product per page. Then, the site would spin the text into combinations to create more pages based on the master, product page.

Just ten products times 12 stories (one for each month) would generate 10 * 12 = 120 pages. The New York Times reported in "The Rise of the Robot Reporter, " that "Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter."

Online shops can use a customized application to generate multiple pages of content for each product.

The goal is to make the site generate, human sounding content, fast. And a lot of it, dripped over time. When a site, with just ten products, can produce 30 pages of content per month, Google takes notice.

Sites that have over 30 pages of content on a very niche product, tend to gain Google rank. But who wants to write 30 – 3,000 word blog posts? A programmed site can take a three, long content pieces, with some bulk paragraphs, and generate 30 posts. And do that monthly.

By focusing on one, frustrating category in Amazon, online sellers can out content the retailer with automated software.

https://lightbolt.com/how-to-win-against-amazon/