If you run an ecommerce business, your Google search rankings matter a lot.
The higher you rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), the more visitors you’ll attract to your online store – and the more sales you can make.
So how do you get to the top of search rankings?
With search engine optimization.
SEO should be a part of every ecommerce store’s marketing strategy. Whether you’re a beginner looking to gain traction or a seasoned retailer looking to improve online sales, optimizing for search is a must.
Here are the seven benefits of ecommerce SEO that every retailer needs to know.
The Benefits of SEO for Ecommerce Businesses
SEO offers many significant advantages for ecommerce businesses, from driving more traffic to positioning you as THE authority in your industry.
1. Drives Qualified Traffic to Your Website
SEO doesn’t drive random traffic to your site — it drives sustainable, organic traffic from potential customers who are already interested in your products or industry and are considering making a purchase. A good SEO strategy can attract your target audience to your website, especially if it includes content marketing.
Creating content about topics your audience is interested in can put your business in front of people who are in the process of deciding what to buy.
By driving qualified traffic to your site with customer-relevant content, SEO can help increase conversion rates and make your business more profitable.
2. Higher Long-Term ROI Than PPC
Pay-per-click ads can drive a lot of website traffic quickly, but PPC ads won’t drive consistent traffic. It’s much more cost-effective to publish blog articles that can live on your website forever and continue to drive traffic on repeat.
Unlike expensive PPC ads that can attract instant traffic, SEO is more of a long game that drives a higher long-term ROI than paid ads.
SEO is an investment in your business. It will cost you time if you choose to do it on your own. It will cost you money if you hire someone to do it for you.
No matter which approach you take, it won’t generate tons of sales overnight. But it can provide gradual, exponential growth that pays off significantly.
3. Increases Brand Awareness
SEO enhances your search engine rankings, which increases your brand’s visibility and puts your name alongside your competitors’ names in product-related searches. This can help improve your reputation and build trust with new customers.
The whole point of SEO is to make you appear at the top of Google search results. This is key, as 50% of Google clicks go to the top three pages listed in a search. They can almost always find what they’re looking for in those results, so there’s no need to scroll further.
Yet reaching the first page of Google search results has less to do with getting a customer to make an immediate purchase and more to do with building long-term visibility.
High SEO rankings help influence purchasing decisions going forward. They might not buy from you today, but they might consider you first when it’s time to buy.
4. Turns Your Website into a PR Channel
If you create great content, your ecommerce website can become an organic PR channel that requires no outreach.
Here’s how:
A high-ranking blog article can drive thousands of backlinks from other websites without any promotion. For example, our article 45 Mind-Bottling SEO Stats for 2024 has earned more than 2,500 backlinks from other websites, journalists, and bloggers who found this article valuable enough to cite in their own content.
Great content also gets shared on social media. While it’s helpful to promote your own content on social platforms and share new posts in your newsletter, websites that backlink to you will also promote it without any outreach on your part.
5. Builds Industry Credibility
Great content allows your team to share knowledge with customers and demonstrate your expertise to industry competitors.
With superior content, you can acquire backlinks and shares on social media at the same time. The more quality backlinks you have and the more your content is shared on social media, the more people will become familiar with your brand.
Your competitors will see you as more of a threat and your customers see you as more of an expert in your niche.
Related: 5+ Simple Link-Building Techniques to Scale Search Rankings
6. Measurable From Beginning to End
SEO tools make it easier for your ecommerce business to rise to the top of search engine rankings and help you track your results. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Google Analytics, and Search Console allow ecommerce business owners to see how your SEO campaigns are paying off in real-time.
This is one of the key things that differentiates SEO from other types of marketing, like podcast or TV ads, that businesses might invest in.
Read The Best Ecommerce SEO Tools to learn more about how these tools work and how they can benefit your ecommerce business.
7. Improves Your Website’s User Experience
There’s so much more to SEO than including the right keywords and tailoring an article to satisfy a specific Google search intent. There are technical aspects to SEO as well.
Your customers aren’t going to stick around if your website has 404 errors, slow page speeds, or is difficult to navigate. They expect and deserve functionality and a user-friendly experience, and that’s where technical SEO comes into play.
You can create the best content ever and publish the most informative and entertaining blogs in the world – but if your website lacks functionality, no one will stick around long enough to read it. Poor functionality leads to high bounce rates, but technical SEO helps keep customers on your site longer and improves the customer experience overall.
Three Ways to Up Your SEO Game
There are three things to focus on when putting together an ecommerce SEO strategy:
- Content creation
- Link building
- Technical SEO
We touched on all of these above, but let’s recap why each of these is so necessary.
1. Content Creation
SEO-centric blog content is key, but it’s one of many different types of content your ecommerce SEO strategy can include.
Along with written content, you can up your SEO game by posting social media videos that give more insight into your brand, entertaining your target audience with podcasts, or sharing infographics and images to help customers make purchasing decisions.
You might also create some product-centered content that helps existing customers to use or troubleshoot your product. It may not drive much organic search traffic or new customers, but it will improve the product experience for people who’ve already purchased from you.
2. Page Optimizations.
It’s important to optimize all pages of your site, including product pages.
You can do so by including target keywords in your meta titles that tell engines and site visitors what each page is about. You can also include relevant keywords (in a non-spammy way) into your product descriptions to encourage searchers to click.
3. Link Building
Generate content that others find valuable and you can drive exponential traffic to your website from external sources. Quality backlinks can make your online business more relevant in your industry, which can put more eyes on you and help you increase sales.
4. Technical SEO
Don’t underestimate the importance of technical SEO. It’s essential to have a web developer or technical SEO specialist to optimize your site by:
- Improving site load times and page loading speeds
- Creating a logical site structure and sitemap
- Writing customized schema markup to help Google understand your product listings
- Removing and repairing broken links
- Including breadcrumbs for easier site navigation
- Optimizing your site for mobile devices
This last point is critical, as you want your ecommerce site to function as well on mobile devices as on laptops and PCs.
Digital Marketing Agencies Can Handle SEO For You
SEO is complicated and ever-changing. Rather than trying to keep up with best practices to stay competitive, Intergrowth can handle all your content marketing needs.
Our SEO experts do it all so that you don’t have to. From creating a content strategy to acquiring backlinks to monitoring technical SEO and analyzing your results, we generate content that performs for months and years to come.
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