Imagine if you could get more targeted traffic to your store and generate more sales without spending a fortune on ads.
The good news is…you can!
In this blog post, I’ll explain why SEO is important for eCommerce.
Before we get started if you’re an e-commerce store owner who needs to climb up the rankings on Google FAST – let’s chat!
If not, keep reading? Approximately 90% of online business starts with a search conducted through a search engine.
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To capitalise on this vast number of hungry consumers, ensuring your eCommerce site is optimised for organic search essential.
But what does this entail? Let’s take a look in more detail…
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is a practice used by website owners and content creators to increase both the quality and quantity of traffic directed to your website through organic (rather than paid-for) search results.
Ensuring that you’re attracting visitors to your website for the right reasons is important, and one way of doing that is optimising how you appear in search engines through SEO.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce?
Put simply, If you rank highly in the search engine results pages for relevant keywords, you’ll receive more targeted, high-quality traffic.
Furthermore, a site that is fully optimised for SEO will boost your user’s experience.
More search traffic, coupled with great user experience, can increase your conversion rate. Business owners who optimise their sites for search engines increase the amount of organic traffic they receive. And, crucially, organic traffic is associated with engaged customers who have a genuine need for your product, which in turn means they could represent more repeat business.
Because of the increased emphasis placed on the importance of SEO, business owners no longer need a large marketing team behind them. By ensuring that you understand the basics of SEO, you can optimise your eCommerce website to be targeted towards specific keywords without difficulty.
How can I improve my eCommerce SEO, and how will it benefit my business?
Establishing what your potential clients are looking for when they come across your website is key to understanding how best to use SEO within your eCommerce site.
Developing a strategy as far as keywords are concerned is particularly important. Thankfully, there are a number of generators such as Spyfu and Google Adwords Keyword Planner on the internet that help users to appropriately establish which keywords are worth targeting.
Websites such as these are there to give you insight into the types of things your potential customers are searching for. They can inform your keyword strategy to ensure that the time you spend optimising your website doesn’t ultimately go to waste.
Using only short tail keywords within the content of your website – that is, words that are single terms, such as ‘bags’ or ‘sunglasses’ – will prove more difficult to rank highly due to the increased competition.
More descriptive long-tail keywords, specially formulated to target the ways in which potential customers search for results, typically convert much better. That’s because people who are looking to buy a very particular product are the ones doing the search.
By discovering which search terms are used by your target audience, you are able to optimise your online store’s pages accordingly and ensure that your store is top of the results page.
At the same time, you need to avoid using terms that are too general or broad. Whilst ranking for a single keyword will give you some returns, targeting a whole field of keywords increases your chances of benefiting from increased organic traffic and ultimately increases the chance of your business making a sale.
Generally speaking, increased traffic correlates with an increase in sales, so optimising your website to increase the number of people who access it can only have its benefits. In fact, some small businesses argue that by improving and optimising their SEO, they reduce the costs of other traditional marketing activities.
SEO consequently increases the bottom-line of a business, and because it is done simply by optimising existing website content with appropriate keywords, it requires minimal financial outlay. There is no cost per click or conversion, as is the case with PPC marketing, and ultimately you can attract large volumes of traffic without directly paying for the privilege – if it is put into practice successfully.
The effect that improving your eCommerce SEO has is a longstanding one, and you can see improvement in the rankings as time goes on. Focusing your attention elsewhere does not reduce its effectiveness, either, meaning that if you wanted to take a break from growing your website organically, then it would carry on converting hits into business without intervention.
Once you have optimised your website to a significant degree, then you need to make sure that you’re watching the keywords that you use and measuring how successfully they are converting into sales. If a particular keyword is performing better than others, then producing additional content that uses this keyword within it can benefit you. That said, you should make sure that you don’t ‘stuff’ keywords onto a page as this can reduce its effectiveness and may cause the search engine to penalise your site.
You will also be able to establish which keywords don’t convert well and make sure that you aren’t wasting your time inserting these into your pages. All of the information you need to observe your optimisation and how well keywords are performing can be found using an analytics provider such as Google Analytics.
I don’t have time to invest in SEO… what should I do?
Often, as a business owner, time is of the essence and delegating smaller jobs can only benefit your growth. If you find that you’re quite short on time but know that your business could seriously benefit from professional SEO services, then getting in touch with a specialist SEO agency could be the answer.
If you’re looking for an SEO company London based, then the team here at Pearl Lemon can help you ensure that your eCommerce store is optimised to put you at the top of the search engine rankings. Which, of course, is right where you deserve to be.
