Digital marketing is an ever-changing industry that shifts and moves with the times. As technology and algorithms continue to improve, so does our understanding and application of digital marketing. That said, for eCommerce businesses looking to improve their traffic and search engine rankings in the coming months, it’s important to consider what your long-term strategy is, and how you’re going to implement it.
For eCommerce businesses to stay competitive online, they need a solid presence and marketing strategy that will continuously put them in front of potential clients and customers. There are generally two ways to accomplish that: either through organic or paid marketing strategies.
The Problem with Paid Advertising
If you’re a small business that’s just starting out, you’re probably considering paying for PPC or social media ads already. After all, paid advertising is the fastest way for you to start creating and building revenue streams.
The problem with this approach, however, is that it can be costly, especially if you’re going to be running the ads yourself. What will end up happening is that you’ll be doing a lot of trial and error and experimentation before you’ll start seeing returns. In the end, it will be a very expensive lesson.
This is where organic methods of digital marketing, like search engine optimization (SEO), come into play.
What is SEO?
For business owners that are not yet familiar with SEO, search engine optimization is the process and method of building and improving posts and pages on your website to help you rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. It’s an organic (or cost-free) way of generating traffic to your website by optimizing your pages for certain keywords or search terms.
It’s also a way of understanding your ideal customer and anticipating the intentions behind their search query to provide the service, information, answers, and products that will best serve their needs. In other words, it’s about attracting the people who are most likely to engage with your business, and winning them over as customers and clients.
What are the Benefits of Ecommerce SEO?
There are several long term benefits of ecommerce SEO that make it worthwhile. Although it will generally take you a bit longer to see the fruits of your labor compared to paid advertising, optimizing your website for search is very much worth it in the long run for the following reasons:
1. Continuous Organic Traffic
One big difference between pay-per-click ads and SEO is that once you stop paying for ads, the traffic that goes to your website stops as well. That’s not the case with SEO. When you optimize your website for search engines, and you end up ranking high on Google’s search engine ranking pages, you’ll continue to see traffic coming into your website for as long as users and search engines find your content relevant and valuable.
This means that you can create a piece of content, or a webpage once, and then see results for months and months on end. The only changes you’ll need to make to your content will be to update it much later on, when there’s more relevant and useful information available.
2. SEO Actually Supplements Your PPC Campaigns
Believe it or not, organic and paid marketing strategies actually work hand in hand. This is especially true when it comes to PPC and SEO. When you end up ranking high for both organic and paid search terms and keywords, this actually boosts your brand’s authority and credibility. Your SEO efforts can even help you reduce the cost per click of your PPC campaigns because search engines recognize that you’re a valued resource and destination for its users.
3. SEO Help Improve Your Credibility
It’s often been said that it can be very difficult to get your content or website to rank on the first page of Google. However, once you’re able to accomplish that, this actually boosts your credibility. After all, Google doesn’t allow just any website to appear on the first page of their search results. Search engines are particularly meticulous in weeding out content that’s irrelevant and spammy. This means that once you’re able to rank higher on Google’s results page, then you’ve arrived. Trust and credibility from users will almost certainly follow. Users are far more likely to trust your company and your brand because you appeared first on their search results.
4. SEO Improves and Elevates User Experience
A good SEO strategy involves understanding and getting to know one’s target audience. It requires you to think about what keywords or search terms your ideal customer will type in to find your products or content.
It requires you to think about the intentions behind that potential customer’s search. Are they searching for answers to a question? Are they looking for a solution to their problem? Or are they looking for the perfect product or service that will solve their problems for them?
A good SEO strategy also requires you to optimize your website and webpages as well. You need fast loading speeds, low bounce rates, and a mobile-friendly website to be able to rank high on Google. Because SEO takes all these questions into account, this means that users’ overall experience on your website is better compared to your competitors.
5. SEO Yields Higher Conversion and Closing Rates
Do you still perform a bit of outbound marketing in your business? You might be interested to know that SEO leads achieve an average of 14.6% close rate compared to 1.7% from outbound or cold leads. This is because unlike cold leads, the leads you acquire from SEO are customers who’ve already done the hard work of doing research online. They’re more informed, and more prepared to make a purchase.
Get All the Benefits of Ecommerce SEO and More!
The most important thing about SEO is that you have to get started right away. It can take time before you’ll be able to reap the benefits of all the effort you’ve sowed into your website, and so it’s always good to take action early on, as you start your ecommerce business.
If you feel as though you need to learn more about SEO and ecommerce, though, you can keep checking out and reading our other articles here on Genius eCommerce. Or, if you need help in directly implementing the SEO and PPC strategies you have in mind, you can also contact us and we can talk about how we can turn your goals and aspirations into reality.
