Ecommerce site owners probably already know the value of SEO. After all, what’s the point of investing time and effort into sourcing and selling products if no one can find your store?
Having a website that’s optimised for SEO means ranking high in search engines, attracting more organic traffic to your site and making more conversions.
There are various options available if you’re looking to improve your eCommerce sites SEO; you can improve your site’s SEO yourself; a high quality, reputable eCommerce SEO agency can do the heavy lifting for you and help with your online visibility.
What can SEO do for your business?
Boost your organic traffic
One of the most important metrics when measuring a website’s SEO is its organic traffic, and it’s a metric that’s the cornerstone of SEO success, particularly for eCommerce sites.
Research by Moz has shown that SEO has 20x more traffic opportunities than PPC on both mobile and desktop. Despite this fact, many online stores are put together with little consideration for search engines and rely heavily on paid advertising or social media to drive traffic to their store.
According to Search Engine Land, marketers who use a combination of SEO and paid advertising in their marketing see an average of 25% more clicks and 27% more profits compared to marketers who rely on one singular search engine marketing tactic.
So, if you are reliant on other marketing methods at the moment, don’t sweat; SEO doesn’t need to replace these methods; instead, it can complement them and bring more traffic to your store.
Build brand authority
Improving your SEO will improve the domain authority of your site. This boost to your brand authority will mainly come from acquiring high-quality backlinks from other websites that link or refer their audience to your website.
Because building backlinks is considered an ‘off-page’ SEO tactic, it can take a considerable amount of time and involves collaborating with other bloggers and website owners to acquire links gradually. Some successful link building tactics you can use include:
- Reaching out to other website owners within your industry and offering to write a blog post on a relevant topic.
- Partner with influencers within your niche to gain backlinks on their website.
- Use a browser extension to search websites in your niche for broken links. If you identify a broken link and have a relevant link that can replace a broken link on a website, you can reach out to the website owner to see if they would be willing to place your link on their site.
Gaining authoritative backlinks and building your website’s backlink profile will increase it’s domain authority and it’s ranking within organic search results.
Increase your sales
With organic search making up 51% of all website traffic, boosting your website’s visibility will inevitably lead to an uptick in sales and revenue for your store.
Investing in SEO for your eCommerce store is also a cost-effective long term approach to building your business. Typically, when you invest in SEO, it will take around six to twelve months to start seeing consistent results, but it’s well worth the wait. While paid advertising is an effective short term solution and can bring you immediate results, it’s less effective as a long term marketing strategy.
Once you’ve optimised your website’s SEO, either you or an agency will be able to keep your website maintained to ensure your SEO investment turns into a profitable long term marketing channel for your business. Proper SEO implementation will continue to serve as a reliable source of traffic for your store for years after it’s set up and you start seeing results.
Improves your websites user experience
While the primary goal for SEO is to improve the organic traffic to your site and boost your sales, search engines have become sophisticated and factor the user experience of a website into their ranking factors.
Search engines know that their primary job is to help users find what they’re looking for, so if a website’s experience is a barrier to that goal, then the website will suffer in rankings.
Site speed and the security of a website also factor into search engine rankings; investing in SEO will not only boost your rankings but also give visitors a better experience when they’re on your website, which can further increase your conversions.
Builds trust and credibility
When your eCommerce site is optimised for search engines, visitors can find your site. When you prioritise user experience, you build trust and credibility with your visitors and customers and with search engines.
This growth in trust and authority arguably makes SEO the most profitable long term digital marketing strategy. It’s important to note, though, that SEO is an ongoing commitment.
Search engines will periodically change the ranking factors they prioritise in their search engine, so don’t be surprised if you or an agency you’re working with have to make some periodic changes to your website, particularly if you notice your website traffic dropping off.
Final thoughts
Implementing and seeing results from a well-planned SEO strategy can take time, but it’s a marketing strategy that eCommerce retailers shouldn’t neglect.
With the amount of traffic an eCommerce website can attract with a well-executed SEO strategy, brands are leaving money on the table if they don’t prioritise SEO as a key part of their growth strategy.
When more and more retail is being conducted online, any eCommerce website owner needs to ensure that their website visibility is maximised to ensure their business is as successful as possible.
