27 Feb Role of SEO in Driving Traffic to E-Commerce Sites
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Role of SEO in Driving Traffic to E-Commerce Sites
When you create an e-commerce website, you only achieve the first of many steps involved with running an online business. To be a store that has consistently good sales, you have to put in a lot of work. To bring traffic to your website consistently, you can use a lot of different tactics.
As time has passed, it has become very clear that nothing is better than using SEO. If you want to see long-term results, you have to develop effective strategies for implementing SEO on your e-commerce store.
However, to do that, you must also understand how SEO does its part in bringing you the desired results. While this carries many aspects, we will share the ones that we found to be the most impactful. SEO is ruling the present in e-commerce, and it does not seem to be slowing down in the future either. So let us take a look at what kind of impact it will have on your business.
The traffic and sales link
It is a no brainer to think about how targeting the right people can bring you higher sales. The more your word reaches people who are interested in your product, the more successful you will be. So the fundamental question that comes to mind is how you can bring all that traffic to your site. And the answer to that is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.
When you start your business, you do not have a well-known name so people cannot find you. However, people do know what they want, and that is what they search for in search engines. Optimising your website content to match those words to the max is your main goal.
The result? A brand new business that emerges from obscurity and suddenly starts accruing sales. There are solid numbers to support this too. According to a 2016 research conducted by Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly, there was an average of 2.5% conversions resulting from SEO. That means for every 100 people who visit your website, 2-3 people are going to make a purchase.
So essentially, you are looking at 25-30 sales per 1000 visitors which is quite decent. This number is more than enough to convince anyone that SEO should be the first thing a business should invest in before going for other options like Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
However, one thing that you must keep in mind is that gaining results from SEO takes time. You cannot expect to see an immediate jump in traffic/sales the moment you implement SEO on your pages. Of course, if you have not used SEO until now, there might be some level of expansion that you may see in a matter of days. However, long term growth and sales usually take months.
But the rewards are certainly worth the wait. And you should go for it since this has the potential of returning your investment within the same year too.
The marketing expense
If you think working on an online e-commerce platform instead of building an actual physical store will save you lots of money, you are wrong! Yes, there IS some difference in terms of investment, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to spend any money. There are many expenses related to an online business that you can avoid in a conventional store. What this means is you do still have to spend money, it is just somewhere else instead of construction.
One of the things that online businesses have to spend the most money on is advertising. Just like a regular shop, you still need people to find out about your business, so you make deals left and right to spread the word.
Whether it is posting ads on popular relevant websites, investing in platforms like Google Ads, or any other strategy, the bucks get spent in large amounts. And the worst part about this strategy is that you are rarely sure if you will get a proper return on your investment or not.
So, why not use that money more effectively? SEO, just like advertising, is a way of marketing. Instead of targeting customers, you start targeting bots. Search engines like Google use bots to find information around the internet so they can present it to their users. With a good SEO strategy, you can get your website to be noticed by these bots a lot more easily.
The result of that is a much better page ranking. If you can secure a position on page one, you have more chances of getting users to visit your website.
The best part of all this? All your traffic is organic, i.e. people who are visiting your site are doing so out of pure interest. You are not paying people without interest to visit your website just to boost your visitor numbers. The ultimate goal of e-commerce businesses is sales which can only come when people are genuinely interested in your products.
“SEO plays a vital role in driving traffic to websites and our experts know just how to take full advantage of it.”
A standard for the industry
The fact of the matter is, everyone understands SEO’s importance in driving traffic to e-commerce websites! Using an e-commerce SEO process for your website is such an industrial norm now that if a business ignores it, sales automatically drop. If you want to compete, you have to make sure you land on the top pages of every search engine.
To do that, you have to rely on SEO. The fact that 90% of searchers never make it to the second page should be enough to make anyone realise how important it is to rank high.
You have to beat a lot of other competitors and make your mark in a way that no one else does. However, just being able to use the right words is no longer enough as Google is setting out new requirements every day. You need to meet all of these requirements if you are to gain any chance of making it to the first page. Here are some of the things that you must consider when optimising your website:
Loading times
People are mostly looking things up on the go, and that means you have to be fast. To be able to grab a user’s attention, you must create a website that loads quickly and can provide the information the user needs in the least amount of time. If a website takes too long to load, Google automatically ranks it lower. And why wouldn’t it? After all, if all a user gets from the search engine is slow answers, then it would be a lot better to not use that search engine at all.
Since Google cannot afford that, they make you, the website owner to do your job properly.
Mobile-friendly
One of the key developments in technology is how everything has gotten smaller and smaller in size. Case in point; we now have powerful, portable computers in the palm of our hands. Yes, we are talking about smartphones and tablets. As of right now, more than half of the traffic going through Google comes from mobile devices.
Their smaller form factor means you simply cannot present a desktop site to them as it would be impossible to look at. So, you need to present your data in a way that looks better and more suited to a mobile device. Doing so is so important for SEO that a lot of website development tools come with this feature preloaded. If your website is not mobile-friendly, Google will rank it lower in SEO performance, and you will lose mobile traffic!
Managing the blog
You might be thinking that SEO is something that blogs use and you know what, you are right! One of the website types that benefit the most from SEO is blogs, and almost all of them do it thoroughly. But here is the interesting part. Did you know that e-commerce websites that maintain a blog have better average sales than those without a blog?
If you look at it, the logic of why that happens is quite simple. A blog is a place where you can let users know about your thoughts on different subjects related to your products. This virtual “common room” space that you create allows your customers to enter discussions with you on different things and create a relationship with you. This is a big step in finding long term customers.
Now to make your blog visible, you need to implement a solid SEO strategy so maximum people can visit it. The subtle marketing that brands do in such articles can be very effective. The reader is coming to your website for information, and you can use that chance to win them over for your product. Look around, and you will always find a blog section on every successful e-commerce website.
It is the perfect place to showcase your goods from a consumer’s perspective and make them realise that they should buy your products. In addition to that, it is also very effective in engaging with customers who want to buy your product but are looking for more practical information about it. Showing your products in action is something you can do very well on a blog and as a result, bring in more sales.
Some tips to consider
It should be abundantly clear by now that implementing SEO on your e-commerce website is an absolute must. Gaining proper rewards without doing so is close to impossible. So, it is time that you developed a good SEO strategy, and the following points should be considered:
- Optimise not just your content but also your images and meta tags/descriptions.
- Do not forget to include keywords in every aspect of your webpage.
- Spend some money on keyword research to find out which ones will bring in the most relevant traffic.
- Include as much content as you can on each page. Ideally, you should have at least 1500-2000 words on each page for first-page ranking.
- Socialise with your audience through your blog. Make them feel like they are not just seeing a website with letters, numbers and pictures. Let them realise that there is a real human connection involved.
- Create internal links so your visitors can gain as much knowledge as they can about your products.
- Create a healthy balance between content and SEO. Do not overdo it or make it sound robotic.
The importance of SEO to your e-commerce business cannot be stressed enough. If you think you could do better by having an expert take care of things for you, then do it. As it happens, edirect has a highly professional and experienced SEO team that can do this job for you effectively and bring you the results you have been waiting for, so you can get started right away.