Is your e-commerce ignoring SEO?
Want to know the reasons why you shouldn’t ignore SEO?
You’ve designed an incredible e-commerce site, you offer outstanding products, and people are visiting and placing orders! You currently invest in paid traffic of various types like Pay Per Click, Pay Per View, Banner Ads, and Facebook Ads, and your investment is really paying off.
Paid traffic is an excellent source of targeted traffic for an e-commerce website. In fact, some of the biggest e-commerce sites rely on it such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart. However, while paid traffic may be great, there’s something else that you should be using for your e-commerce site that will help you get even more traffic, clicks, and conversions. What is it? – search engine optimization!
An effective, reliable, and solid SEO strategy is absolutely vital for the success of any e-commerce site with any hope of fending off the big dogs for a sustained amount of time. Not only does it help your site get noticed by a broader audience, but it helps boost your search engine rankings, establishes your brand as an authority, and makes you the go-to source for people who are looking for the type of products that you sell. It also boosts the profitability of your site, which means more money in your pocket. And, that’s your primary goal, isn’t it?
Here are 5 powerful Reasons Your E-Commerce Business Shouldn’t Ignore SEO, and why it is so crucial for the success of your e-commerce site.
SEO Helps Your Customers Find You
If you aren’t optimizing your e-commerce site for search, you are missing out on revenue and profit.
While paid traffic can certainly help to bring in revenue, organic traffic is one of the top sources of traffic and revenue websites of all types, such as affiliate sites, news sites, and yes, e-commerce sites.
Search engines have become a vital part of the decision making process when it comes to purchasing products. In fact, many people that start their online shopping journey for a product of service rely on search engines to find what they’re looking for and make the most informed decisions instead of directly visiting businesses’ websites.
Since SEO helps to boost your search engine rankings and helps make your website more visible to users, if you aren’t using SEO for your e-commerce site, you are missing out on having your targeted audience find you.
SEO Leads to More Traffic
Getting conversion is a numbers game. Sure, you want to spend resources on conversion optimization or CRO, but the more traffic your website has, the more sales you’re going to make.
Quality search engine optimization can drive more traffic to your e-commerce site, which in turn can lead to more sales and more money. By implementing an effective and reliable search engine optimization strategy that incorporates high-quality tactics, you can drive even more visitors to your site.
When combined with paid search, you can see a huge surge in the amount of traffic to your website. So, instead of taking an either-or approach to paid traffic and SEO, it is wise to consider including both traffic channels in your marketing strategy.
SEO is Cost Effective
We’ve already said it, but we’ll say it again: paid search is great. It has been proven to yield excellent results for e-commerce sites, and you’re seeing those results yourself. However, the problem with paid search is that it costs money. And, considering the fact that the costs are constantly rising, you’re going to end up spending a good chunk of change to get visitors to your site if you are relying on paid search alone.
SEO, on the other hand, can be much more cost-effective over time. In fact, if you combine SEO best practices into your website’s design from the beginning, you can have an optimized website for a fraction of the cost of having an expert come in and SEO your site after the fact.
If your site is already live and your aren’t an expert in SEO, you will need to spend some time to learn the basics or rely on someone else to implement strategies for your e-commerce site. However, it can still be a worthwhile investment due to the fact that your SEO work stacks on itself and doesn’t vanish like your paid traffic budget.
SEO is an Industry Standard
In the online world, search engine optimization is becoming an industry standard. That goes for all types of websites, including e-commerce.
E-commerce sites that forego SEO aren’t able to compete with those who use it. That’s because of the fact that sites that aren’t optimized are missing out on an entire channel of online traffic.
The majority of web users rarely look past the first page of search engine results. Since it’s practically impossible for e-commerce sites to attain high search engine rankings without adhering to the strict rules set forth by Google and other search engines (which are largely based on search engine optimization strategies), it’s safe to say that if you aren’t using SEO for your e-commerce site, your online business will miss out on a lot of potential traffic.
Search Engine Optimization Enhances Every Aspect of the E-Commerce Experience
Mobile-friendly browsing, page load times, and web design are all important parts of search engine optimization. Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo take user-friendliness into consideration when they rank websites.
That means that if your page load times are slow, your site isn’t optimized for mobile viewing, and if your layout is difficult to navigate, you aren’t going to be viewed as a reputable source by search engines. In other words, the design of your site needs to be top-notch in order to receive a higher ranking.
Plus, a more appealing and easier to use e-commerce site makes for happier customers who are more likely to purchase.
The Bottom Line
While paid search might be doing great things for your e-commerce site, if you want to take your success to the next level, you really need to incorporate search engine optimization into your online business’s marketing strategy.
About the author
Amy Chen is a digital marketing specialist for ClickMinded where she
has been helping the company grow for the past two years. She is
primarily involved in the SEO space, but loves everything and
anything related to digital.
