If you have decided to set up an online business, you will probably be wondering how to draw more traffic to your website. There are endless options to choose from, like purchasing advertising spaces that have high visibility, pay-per-click option, and search engine optimization to boost your marketing campaigns. However, concentrating on SEO strategies can be most beneficial for the success of your online store.
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Understanding Ecommerce
Ecommerce refers to the online purchase and sale of goods and services. The process is conducted through smart devices. E-commerce allows people to buy almost anything nowadays. It can be used in place of physical stores, though some companies prefer to keep both. E-commerce contributes significantly to global economic growth.
What Does “SEO” Mean?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps people find your business online by making sure your website appears high up in the list of results for relevant searches. If you build your site with relevant content and target keyword you'll attract more visitors who will then convert into leads and eventually sales.
What Is Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization?
In simple terms eCommerce, search engine optimization is the method to increase the visibility of your website in search engine results. It helps increase your search engine rankings to grab the attention of your potential customers.
Optimizing your eCommerce website generates high-quality traffic, benefiting business owners in terms of profitability. If you are still wondering do eCommerce sites need SEO and PPC, let's dive into the benefits to learn why is SEO important for eCommerce.
Benefits of Ecommerce SEO
The eCommerce industry is growing at a rapid pace, and it’s easy to see why. With the rise in popularity of online shopping, more people are looking for ways to buy products or services online. The good news is that eCommerce SEO is one of the most effective ways to boost your business. Ecommerce SEO offers many benefits for business owners.
Enhanced Branding
Brands that focus on their customers are more likely to succeed. An optimized website allows your brand to connect with its audience and provide value, thus increasing brand awareness. Adding Google's Answer Box to your website can increase your SEO rankings and is a cost-effective way to create brand awareness.
More Traffic & Sales
Optimized websites tend to rank higher than non-optimized ones when it comes to search engines. This results in more visitors to your online store. With optimized e-commerce websites, you can attract more customers and increase sales. It also helps brands get
- Organic traffic is free and it works! However, organic traffic isn’t just about getting more visitors from Google search results. You can also get organic traffic from other websites that link back to your website.
Your organic search rankings can also increase if you are using target keywords and user-generated content for products and services offered by your business.
- Targeted traffic is a high-quality traffic generator through visitors actively searching for the products and services that your website offers.
Increased Conversion Rate
A well-designed website encourages users to make purchases. It makes the process easier by helping them navigate through the checkout process without having to leave the site. SEO helps fill the marketing funnel. It plays an important role in all stages of the funnel, such as
- Awareness
- Research
- Action (purchase)
It enables you to track shopper movement through keywords used by visitors and helps target the intent of the shopper. The content marketing strategy also plays a vital role through all stages of the funnel. A fully optimized web page serves as bottom-of-the-funnel content which is the action stage for conversion.
Better Credibility
Having a high-quality website helps establish trust between consumers and brands. Consumers feel comfortable buying from businesses that have been around for years. Having an eCommerce SEO strategy helps businesses become more responsive, publish quality content on the website, check for spam links, and use other social media platforms to promote their products and services.
All these activities result in gaining the customer's trust and becoming credible.
Better Search Rankings
If you want to be found quickly on search engines, you should optimize your website. Your website needs to be optimized to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher ranking of your web pages translates into more clicks and increased search traffic.
Increased Customer Engagement
The most important factor in the success of a customer engagement program is that it should be designed to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. The most effective way to do this is by providing customers with an experience they will remember, which can only happen if your website is optimized.
Websites with clear navigation and engaging type of content encourage customers to visit again and again. As a result, they become loyal customers.
High-Value Content
Businesses invest a considerable amount of time in keyword research for their target audience. However, content relevancy does not guarantee visitors to the website. Content marketing is required, a well-written SEO content helps attract potential customers and keep them engaged resulting in a sale.
Using the SEO strategy the content of your website can be organized topic-wise to appear in search engine results. This process helps to get organic traffic from search engines. Creating helpful content is yet another technique for content optimization as it will keep the visitors coming back for more.
Let's look into the type of content required for an eCommerce website
Blogs
These are long-form content of a minimum of 2,000 words. It is ideal for occupying a higher search engine ranking. Blogs provide in-depth product analysis and give solutions to customers' needs and queries. To create valuable content use a long-tail keyword for your website blogs.
eCommerce SEO also increases your chances of getting featured in popular publications. For example, if you're selling yoga mats, you could write an article about the health benefits of yoga or share a picture of your favorite mat.
Reviews
Customer reviews help to increase business credibility. Sharing positive reviews encourage sales while responding to negative reviews tells customers that you care. Nowadays, reviews play an important role in making a purchase decision.
Social Media Interaction
The fact that a business is reachable and contact can be established make it a preferred choice for customers. They can interact directly and ask questions translating to good customer service and encouraging sales.
Product Demo Videos
These are critical for eCommerce content strategy as online buyers can get a realistic view of the product or service, enabling customers to set expectations and develop confidence before they order or purchase.
FAQs
This provides answers to the common questions the search engine users have before buying a product. These are in-depth and try to cover all aspects of the functionality of a product.
A systemic SEO content marketing can make to reach your target audience and get you brand loyalty.
- User-Generated Content (UGC)
This type of content includes customer photos, videos from customers telling their stories, or positive reviews. It is the fastest way to achieve search engine optimization for your eCommerce website.
Improved User Experience
The world of eCommerce is changing rapidly. The days when you could buy a product and have it delivered to your door are long gone. Today, the customer can browse an online catalog of products from all over the world and make their choice based on price, quality, and convenience. If they like what they see, they can place an order directly from the website.
With this change in buying behavior, your website must provide the best possible experience for your customers. Your website needs to be user-friendly, fast-loading, and responsive so that your customers don’t abandon the site before making a purchase.
Choosing the right keywords and answering visitors' queries helps customers have a positive user experience.
Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost
The customer acquisition cost is calculated for different timeframes like monthly, quarterly, and yearly. It gives a clear picture of which marketing strategy is working and which one is not. It is a constant tug of war to keep the CAC low. SEO helps get visitors organically, thus reducing the cost incurred for Google Ads and social media advertising.
The basis of SEO is to create helpful content and positive user experiences to make customers take the desired action.
Digital Growth
The best advantage of SEO is that the traffic generated can be used to power other marketing efforts. By placing cookies on the landing page products can be remarketed. The information captured through the cookies enables showing ads to the visitors even when they leave the website. Hence SEO enables digital growth without the need for paid advertising and a huge marketing budget; by just diverting the SEO-generated traffic to other marketing channels.
High Return on Investment
If you are still uncertain about the contribution of eCommerce SEO for your website, let me tell you that it has a high return on investment and that too for the long-term. Paid advertisement stops the traffic flow once the budget is over. But SEO gives lasting results, as the traffic in-flow continues year after year.
Best Ecommerce SEO Strategies
Here are things to consider when planning out an effective e-commerce SEO strategy. You need to ensure that each page contains targeted keywords. Building quality backlinks should also be a part of your strategy.
Keyword Research
The first step in optimizing your e-commerce website is to conduct thorough keyword research. You need to know exactly what words your audience uses to search for your products. Once you have this information, you can start writing content for your website.
Keywords are the foundation of any successful search engine optimization campaign and should be a major part of your overall marketing plan. If you’re not using a relevant keyword, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reach new audiences.
Establish an Easy Website Architecture
The website's architecture is its foundation for everyday browsing experiences. It involves entering a website address and interacting with it. The first step to a successful website is architecture. It’s important to have a solid foundation before you start building on your site. This will help prevent any future problems that may arise and make it easier for you to build on top of them.
Create Unique Product Descriptions
Your product description should be compelling enough to draw potential buyers towards your store. A good description is very important because it tells users exactly what they are getting when they click ‘add to cart.'
On-Page SEO
Many different factors go into making sure your website appears on the first page of search results. These include:
- Keyword Selection
- Page Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Body Content
- Keywords in H1 tags
- URL Structure
- Image Alt Texts
- Image Sizes
- Page Load Speed
These are just some of the things that you need to consider when optimizing your website for on-page SEO. For example, a well-optimized image alt text should contain a clear explanation of the picture. This way, when someone clicks on an image, they see something meaningful rather than a blank space.
Optimize Images
Images play a crucial role in driving sales. They give a visual representation of the product and its features. Optimizing images makes them load faster and also improves the overall performance of the website.
Fasten Site Loading Speed
Page speed refers to how quickly the website content loads. There are ways to improve the loading speed such as
- Enable file compression
- Minimize Redirects
- Remove unused codes of HTML, CSS, and JavaScipt
- Remove blocking JavaScript
- Utilize Browser Caching
- Optimize Server Response Time
- Use Content Delivery Networks
Use Schema Markup
Schema markup is a way of telling search engines how your web pages are structured. Using schema markup ensures that search engines understand how your web pages are organized and display them accordingly.
Use Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is another effective method of promoting your business online. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. offer great opportunities to promote your products and brand. to drive traffic to your website. You can use these sites to create buzz about your company and drive traffic back to your site.
Create Quality Content
Once you have identified your target keywords, it's time to create content around those topics. Your goal here is to provide useful information to your audience so they come back to your site again and again. Content creation includes product descriptions, blog posts, landing page copy, and even social media updates.
Link Building
Building backlinks is a very important SEO strategy, the aim of which is to increase the quality and number of external websites linking to your website. Building high-quality backlinks help your e-commerce store rank higher.
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They help improve your search ranking because they indicate that someone else thinks highly of your site. You must consider which internal links and external backlinks you will use. Choosing the right sources or being cited as a resource for another organization can help you build credibility, brand awareness and add link juice.
Maintain Site Security
This SEO strategy protects your website from being exploited. The best practices are to:
- Intercept as well as replicate information to and from web applications.
- Avoid sleazy links that are spam.
- Use SaaS-based CMS to enhance site security.
- Ensure a secure hosting environment
Osborne Digital Marketing
Ecommerce SEO is a great tool to enhance the visibility of your website. However, many factors influence the success or failure of this technique. So, it is advisable to hire a professional agency like Osborne Digital Marketing for off-page SEO techniques for eCommerce websites.
We provide affordable eCommerce SEO packages to get organic searches and make your website stand out from the competitor's website.
Conclusion
The internet is a very competitive place. If you want to be successful, you need to know how to get your website noticed by the target audience. One of the most effective ways to do this is with search engine optimization (SEO). This involves optimizing your website to appear at the top of search engine results pages ( SERPS ).
So, if you want to increase your sales and expand your market, you need to have a strong eCommerce SEO strategy. Your e-commerce store will benefit from SEO, in terms of visibility, credibility, and long-term traffic.
You can rank your website as high as possible by adapting simple SEO techniques or getting help from the experts so that there is no looking back.
