3 Tips to Increase Your Wholesale Product Sales with Alibaba

If you have an e-commerce website, keyword research is frustrating. Search engines fill their first page results with retail websites like Amazon, E-bay, Alibaba, Etsy or Aliexpress dependent on your product category.  Trying to compete for broad keywords is nearly impossible. So, instead of trying to compete against the large retailers, join them!

These websites are search engines themselves. In fact, by placing your product on these websites, your audience has already been narrowed to people who want to BUY.  For example, Alibaba is a Chinese online retail giant that specializes in B2B sales services through their web portal. It resembles Amazon but on a B2B level. Suppliers looking to expand their services overseas can market their product on Alibaba to manufactures looking for wholesales, or better yet, business relationships.

It still is a highly competitive environment for “ranking”, but at least we narrowed our consumers down to overseas B2B sales. Now, let’s see how we can rank high in Alibaba by leveraging SEO and PPC techniques.

Keyword Research

Keyword research will set the base for Alibaba success. It is important to understand what your buyers are searching for. It will be necessary to optimize your keywords for both Alibaba and Google. Remember, Alibaba ranks high in Google and it could be your product being showcased based on your keywords. Follow these steps when conducting keyword research:

Step 1: Try plugging in your keywords to the Google Keyword Planner or a tool like SEMRush. This will give you a good idea to what buyers are specifically searching for along with alternative product terms.

Step 2:  See what keywords your top competitors are using. Browse through their websites and detect the differences in product names and features. Also, analyze product listings on Alibaba that rank high for your desired keyword.

Step 3: Utilize Alibaba’s suggestions. “Smart keywords” and “popular search keywords” appear as you enter your keywords. Also, if you start typing the beginning of your keyword phrase in Alibaba’s search bar, it will provide you with suggested searches based on previous entries.

Once you have a set of keywords for each one of your products, be sure to monitor and analyze their performance. Similar to Google AdWords, Alibaba has a My Keywords tool that displays the number of suppliers that have used the keyword, search frequency of the keyword, and frequency of relative keywords that you are not using.

Product Name

“Your product name is shown to buyers in search results. Statistics show that effective product names with accurate and relevant keywords have a 15% higher click-through-rate than poorly named products on Alibaba” via Alibaba.

This is familiar language. The product name is similar to meta titles – it is the first words that the consumer reads when searching for products and likely the most persuading. Good product names need to be specific, relevant, appealing, and not spammy. “Keyword stuffing” does more harm than good, much like Google’s results. Here is an example of what a product name should look like:

(Specific Keyword) – (Best Feature) – Wholesale

More specifically, if I were selling Christmas gift bags, I might title it like:

Christmas Gift Bags – Customizable – Wholesale

This gives the buyer an exact description of what your product is, adds a feature, and optimizes results on Google.

Detailed Description

The detailed description allows for suppliers to provide more product information, packaging & shipping options, services, company information, and FAQ. Here is where a supplier can really convert. Content writing skills are essential because the description is your sales pitch to the buyer. On Alibaba, it must fit within 50,000 characters.

There should be one goal in mind when writing this description – get the buyer to your website. This would be your goal on Google, so why not in Alibaba? Include a landing page URL that directs the buyer straight to their specific interest.  And then you can track the performance of these pages in analytics.

Optimizing these three key factors in Alibaba can increase both how high your products can appear in both Alibaba and Google searches. Although this platform may be unfamiliar territory for American PPC and SEO experts, some of our skills can be the best practices. Keyword research, keyword optimization, and content creation are valuable for Alibaba suppliers.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.