E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods or services online, including the exchange of currency for those goods and services. The power of e-commerce exploded during the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021. Many bricks and mortar stores had to pivot online to stay in business.
Many businesses discovered that being an online business was much better than brick-and-mortar. No rental on real estate, your customer reach was further, and you could update your product listing rapidly.
They also discovered that being online, they needed a different marketing model, and they needed SEO help.
What is SEO for E-commerce?
SEO for e-commerce has many similarities to SEO in general, but there are some niche practices and some specific tricks you can use to get yourself ranked. Google ranks websites in their SERPs by the perceived value they will present to the person doing the search. A user’s search intent drives what results are given to them in SERPs. This means your web page and its content needs to understand search intent and deliver.
If a user’s search intent is transactional, they’re researching what to buy. Therefore an informative and educational blog piece can help them choose you. If a user’s search intent is commercial, they’re ready to buy and want to find a product. This is where you have category and product pages, with SEO copy, to serve that intent and bring traffic to your e-commerce site.
Here are the top 8 benefits of e-commerce
1. Increases Brand Visibility & Credibility
If your brand regularly appears at the top of search results, people tend to associate your brand with the products and services they want. You could get to the stage where people go directly to your online store, rather than Google for alternatives.
Brand awareness is the first step in the marketing funnel. You need to target keywords and produce content that serves those higher-up queries, the informational and transactional queries. If you can answer someone’s questions on HOW to do something, without selling to them, your brand’s credibility will also increase.
Through smart SEO, you can give helpful information and advice, so that when someone is further along in your marketing funnel, it is your brand they will turn to first.
2. Generates Consistent & Sustainable Traffic
The traditional stages of a sales funnel are awareness, interest, desire and action. Content can be written for every stage, from helpful How-to articles to product reviews. Combine this with brand credibility, and your SEO can bring a constant stream of customers.
By utilising a multi-faceted SEO approach, with keywords and content targeted at your audience and their intent, you will increase your brand’s credibility and value in the eyes of Google, which will raise you up the SERPs, and hence bring in more traffic.
Which leads into…
3. Generates more Sales and higher ROI
Growing traffic and consistent traffic can lead to more conversions and sales to your website, naturally. With SEO tailored to your e-commerce audience, and how SEO works over the long term, you’ll invest less over time to get a growing audience.
Having more conversions with the same investment gives you an ever-increasing ROI.
4. Increases your Click Through Rate (CTR) and Average Order Value (AOV)
Good SEO gets your website pages ranking high with Google SERPs. The higher up the list, the more click-throughs you get. The first organic result gets 30% more click-throughs than the rest.
The Average Order Value can increase, too, with the higher up the ranking you go. Top search results are achieved through a mixture of Google recognising your authority based on search terms and search intent. A person’s desire to spend is based on brand loyalty and recognition, and the value they see in what you present.
Start combining elements of e-commerce SEO, such as brand visibility, an enhanced customer experience, and good content that fits your marketing funnel, and you can see why people would start to put more into their shopping cart each time.
5. Enhances your Customer Experience
If a customer lands on your website, and it doesn’t look good, or it is hard to navigate, or it does not answer their queries, they will leave. If your website structure is not optimised to load quickly and cleanly, again, it will give customers a poor experience. You need your e-commerce website optimised for Google to crawl and for load speeds. If your website has the same content as your competitors, but is optimised to load faster and cleaner, it will rank higher than your competitors.
A high user experience drives conversions and sales. Google will see that your website is generating sales thanks to this user engagement, and this will help raise your rankings in Google.
6. Opens up more Remarketing opportunities
Do you accept cookies when you’re using the internet? These are great tools to allow you to market to people who have visited your site. E-commerce SEO that works, and gets people to visit your website, can allow you to drop a cookie onto their browser, asking permission, of course.
From there, you can send them follow-up advertising as banner ads or through social media.
7. Organic Traffic is Free!
There are many ways to generate free traffic to your website through SEO techniques. Some of the most effective ways to generate free traffic through SEO include creating high-quality, relevant content, building backlinks, optimising your website’s structure and navigation, and promoting your website and content on social media platforms. While content creation and SEO tools come with an initial cost, you won’t have to keep spending money like you would in the case of a PPC campaign where you pay per click.
8. Long-term growth
SEO grows over time. This means that the more you invest in your campaign over time, the greater the rewards. Organic visits to your online store will increase. The number of conversions will grow too. The range of content you’re serving to your clients will grow, and from this, you can use the content for e-books, multi-channel marketing and more.
Positive customer reviews, high-quality content and a website optimised for Google and user experience, provides value to you for years.
Our E-Commerce SEO Services
If you have a store online using Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento2 or any other e-commerce platform, get in touch with StudioHawk. We can do a free SEO audit of your website. You will receive a no-obligation report showing you the strengths and weaknesses with your current SEO. You can take this report and fix the problems and not hire us, that’s okay.
Unsure what’s right for you? Get in touch with one of our specialists today. We’ll help you determine the best approach to achieve your marketing goals.
