If you own an eCommerce brand, you’ll understand the difficulties that go along with it.
Each year, more and more brands are moving online, increasing competition and forcing businesses to come up with innovative marketing strategies.
One strategy, however, though looked at as “classical”, is bringing in results like no other.
The marketing channel? SEO
Whether now or ten years ago, eCommerce SEO has brought in continuous results for brands looking to improve their online visibility.
The Importance of eCommerce SEO
eCommerce SEO is important as it helps brands drive brand awareness, authority, and traffic to their websites.
This, arguably, is getting more and more popular each year. In fact, 38% of product discovery starts with search engines, and 43% of eCommerce traffic comes from Google organic results.
Not only this, but the ROI on SEO is huge. It’s much greater than other marketing channels. Currently, it has a 1,600% higher ROI than paid search.
These stats are just the tip of the barrel as well. SEO, again and again, has proven to be a key driver for online success.
Why SEO Matters for eCommerce
If you have an eCommerce brand, you need to be doing SEO. Why? Because everybody is doing it, and if you’re not, you’ll be left behind.
As you now know, most eCommerce traffic comes from Google’s organic results. This doesn’t account for other search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, etc., so we can confidently assume that over 50% of eCommerce traffic comes from search.
Alongside this, you can laser target users based on search query/keyword. Compared to other marketing channels like social or display, this type of targeting is far less effective.
There’s a lot of difference between targeting someone searching for “White Addidas Shoes” and targeting people interested in “White Addidas Shoes”. It’s two different intents.
Plus, it’s profitable. A 1,600% higher ROI than paid search. That’s huge, considering paid search has a higher ROI than display and social advertising.
Key Benefits of SEO for eCommerce Stores
SEO optimisation for online stores can provide users with benefits like no other.
1. Search Engines = A Lot of Traffic
If you have an SEO tool like Ahrefs, you can quickly see how much traffic search engines receive.
Currently, “Google.com”, you also have .nl, .co.uk, etc., gets around 38.5 million visitors per month.
This is a lot, without question, but it’s only just a small part of Google’s traffic. Over their entire network, there are 5.9 million Google searches per minute.
Less popular search engines, like “Bing.com” (you can also get .co.uk, etc.), also get a lot of traffic. As of this writing, they are generating 15.2 million visitors a month.
Google and Bing are also just two of the hundreds of search engines. There are a ton more search engines generating traffic; these are just the most popular.
SEO Improves User Experience
Search engines show websites to users that provide an exceptional user experience.
Because of this, naturally, by having good SEO, you have a good, well-rounded website that fulfils the searcher's intent and satisfies them once they click on your page.
Google themselves suggests that the main search signals (how they rank websites) are meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context. Therefore, if you excel in all these areas, based on their algorithm trained over billions of web pages, you have a quality user experience.
As a result, SEO isn’t just a means of “getting traffic”. It helps develop websites that benefit users, and if you do this, you’ll be rewarded immensely.
Higher ROI Than Paid Ads
As mentioned earlier, SEO has a 1,600% higher ROI than paid search ads. Really, you don’t need to be a mathematician to understand how incredible this figure is.
The thing with SEO, however, is that it doesn’t provide instant results. With an advertising channel like paid search, you can get traffic in minutes, sometimes seconds. SEO, though, can take months, sometimes years, to see a return.
This delay is what puts people off SEO. It’s delayed gratification. You don’t get instant results, but when you turn the SEO tap off, you still bring in results, unlike paid search.
Data-Driven Decisions
The backbone of SEO is data, and with tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Consoles, and third-party tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, access to data is effortless. This in and of itself presents so many unique opportunities.
Firstly, it’s quantifiable, so you can measure performance. Because you can measure performance, you can also generate forecasts for SEO budgets, expected conversions, etc.
Secondly, it’s trackable, so you can track everything from the search query to the conversion to the CRM.
Search Drives Brand Awareness and Authority
If you perform eCommerce Keyword Research, you’ll quickly see that even if you don’t invest in SEO, SEO can still play in your favour.
Remember, search engines, well, they’re made for searching. Therefore, people use them to compare products, look at reviews, and so forth. This type of content doesn’t need to be written by you; however, it can still make users aware of your brand.
For example, the keyword “Duolingo English” gets over 5.3K monthly searches.
However, similar terms, like price, test, comparison, etc., get 744k monthly searches. Not all the ranking pages will be from Duolingo, yet it still drives awareness.
Note: GSV means Global Search Traffic (Monthly)
SEO Strategies for eCommerce Success
When trying to improve search engine ranking for eCommerce, you need to focus on four key strategies:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO focuses on optimising individual web pages through HTML elements and content to align with the search intent.
Pretty much, it requires you to make the content and HTML elements relevant to the searcher's intent. For example, embedding keywords related to the search, creating content that helps the users search, etc.
For the most part, to ensure proper on-page SEO, you need to focus on elements like keyword research, H1 tags, title tags, meta tags, image SEO (alt text, etc.), proper URL structure, and breadcrumb navigation.
All of these elements must SCREAM the intent. For instance, if someone types in “Best sandwich shops in Sydney, AU”, your content and HTML elements should all align with that specific search query.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is really where the magic happens. We’d class this as 50% (maybe even more) of SEO, so it’s incredibly important.
This type of SEO refers to the external actions that boost a site’s authority and reputation. These are things like backlinks (highly important), social signals, online citations, and brand monitoring (i.g., reviews and forum discussions).
Google uses an E-E-A-T system (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and relies heavily on off-page SEO to monitor a website's E-E-A-T.
The reason for this is that it’s hard. Though you can inorganically improve E-E-A-T through blackhat techniques, it’s very difficult; search engines usually spot this and will unindex or crawl web pages that do.
Technical SEO
Technical is less important than on and off-page SEO; however, it’s still a part of SEO that needs to be optimised to boost organic search performance.
In simple terms, technical SEO optimises a website’s infrastructure for search engine crawlers and users. Therefore, the aim is to improve crawlability, site speed, mobile-friendliness, use of structured data, etc.
Typically, technical SEO for eCommerce is more difficult than other types of websites, like blogs. The reason is that there could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of product pages, all of which need to be technically sound to benefit crawlers and users.
Content Strategy
An eCommerce SEO strategy isn’t complete without a content strategy. This is a strategic approach to content creation and distribution.
With SEO, you can’t just write or optimise content for anything. That would then just rely on luck. Instead, you need to act on data and user intent.
There are plenty of keyword research tools nowadays where you can identify high-intent phrases, different types of keywords (informational, commercial, etc.), and different user intent. You then need to use this data to develop a strategy that helps build relevance and authority.
For example, let’s say your goal is to boost conversions. You’ll want to look for conversion and commercial-based keywords for your niche. You can then create topic hubs (like content clusters) to build pillar pages and supporting articles to boost relevance for that specific type of keyword.
Final Word
If you own an eCommerce store, you must be implementing SEO. The traffic, conversions, customers, and brand exposure you’re missing could be huge.
You don’t need to follow advanced SEO strategies for eCommerce, either.
Keep it simple. Create good content, generate relevant backlinks, and ensure your website is fast and mobile-friendly. If you focus on these four areas, you’ll already be doing a better job than most.
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