Organic traffic is without a doubt one of the most important elements to running a successful business online, but it rarely comes easy. You need a well thought out marketing strategy in place in order to have a chance at reaching those coveted page one rankings.
There are several key benefits to professional SEO services, such as:
- Higher volume of qualified traffic
- Improved brand authority
- More insight into user behavior
- Website enhancements for user experience
- Fresh content for your blog
- Powerful backlinks
- Greater trust factor in your products
SEO for eCommerce is simply a smart decision from a growth standpoint. If you want to please the search engines, connect better with your users, and get your products in front of more eyes online, there is simply no better way of going about doing so.
The following guide will take an in-depth look at the importance of investing in SEO if you are operating an online store, and what you can actually expect to gain from a proper-managed campaign that hits all the right notes.
The Importance of SEO Services For eCommerce
The world of eCommerce is rapidly changing and is seeing massive growth. In the wake of recent events, with more people shopping online than ever before, you need to do everything in your power to keep your business relevant and optimized.
Online shoppers can sniff out poorly-made websites from a mile away, and so can Google. Expectations are higher than ever and Google is only concerned with providing the best possible experience for its users. If your website is slow, unoptimized, has confusing navigation, thin content, and weak product descriptions, there’s a very good chance that you will never see page one no matter how old your website is.
In fact, these days, domain age is hardly even a ranking factor anymore. Google is much more concerned with how your website actually performs and whether or not it is actually helping users find what they are looking for and if your content answers their questions. Even if you have a fairly popular product, the question is, how are you going to compete against other companies that sell the same product or something similar with keywords that they are already ranking for?
You might even be inclined to try and take SEO into your own hands and perform some of these tweaks yourself. Maybe you even have a blog going and you know a few of the keywords you need to target, and even understand a little bit about how to implement them on your web pages.
The truth is however that eCommerce SEO is far more complex than this, and requires not only a great degree of technical skill, but also years of experience with actually running campaigns and getting results. Search engine optimization is not simply about adding a few keywords to your blogs or changing a few meta titles and alt tags. These tiny changes help, but SEO is both a progressive and comprehensive undertaking.
Progressive in the sense that SEO must be continuously addressed over the course of several months and years in order to see actionable results, and comprehensive because the actual tasks involved to run an SEO campaign are numerous to say the least.
Here is just an example of the different kind of actions a Professional SEO company will perform for you during the course of a campaign:
- Meticulous keyword research spanning multiple weeks
- Competitor analysis using proprietary tools and third-party software
- Comprehensive audit for your entire website
- Product and category page content enhancement
- Meta title updates based on chosen keywords
- Long and engaging blog posts
- 301 redirects
- Disavowing spam links to your domain
- Catching and fixing broken links
- Local listing and third party website backlinks
- Offsite blog content generation
There’s no feasible way you can take all of this into your own hands even if you had a ton of free time to yourself. This is because an SEO agency utilizes the knowledge and skills of multiple experts across diverse fields of expertise, including content writing, technical SEO, digital marketing, and project management. No matter how large your business is and how many employees you have on hand to help with your digital marketing efforts, you still won’t be able to mirror or even come close to the kind of quality you could potentially receive through a true professional SEO agency.
Yet, going without these services could spell trouble for your business. It’s clear that the competition is only going to become increasingly crowded, and Google’s requirements for ranking well will only become more stringent over time, as has been the case for the last decade. If everything in eCommerce continues to trend in the same direction, you are going to need to take action simply to remain at the level you are currently at, let alone make progress and grow as a business.
What’s also critical to note here is that you can’t replace great organic traffic. While you can invest in PPC and other forms of advertising, having that steady stream of users find your website naturally through high rankings in Google should be your ultimate goal. This kind of traffic is already warm to the prospect of purchasing something or looking for an answer to their questions.
The opposite is true when it comes to running ads, as you are essentially trying to warm someone who is cold. Organic traffic has an incredible rate of conversion in most industries because if a user finds what they are looking for on your website, after having specifically searched for the item on Google, there is a high likelihood that they will go forward with the purchase right away.
You also have to factor in brand authority. Anyone can start up a Facebook page and run ads for products on a brand new website. Most users are savvy enough to know this, so unless the ad is extremely well done and targeted just right, most users won’t even bother clicking on it. However, if your website or product appears in one of the top spots in Google, this automatically tells the user that at the very least, you are a reputable brand. Even if you don’t have exactly what the user is looking for at first glance, they might just click on your website anyway to judge prices or get more information.
Seeing the value in this is important, and is why SEO is so valued as a service for eCommerce businesses. If your products are appearing high in Google searches, you will obtain a steady stream of traffic that is already warm to the prospect of buying from you. There’s nothing else quite like it in the history of marketing, and regardless of how many other digital marketing channels there are, it’s likely that the value of SEO will only increase over time, not decrease.
There are numerous ways you can market your online store in order to get traffic. Email outreach is big for certain niches, and social media marketing is only getting bigger as well, just to toss up a couple of examples. You have to weigh several factors when deciding which marketing channel to invest in however. Email outreach is only as effective as your list building skills are, and if you aren’t getting a lot of traffic as it is, it’s unlikely you are getting enough subscribers to your list to make this a viable option for complete business sustainability. Likewise, to build a strong and profitable following on social media, you need a massive time investment and even then, the ROI isn’t nearly as great as it is through traffic that is acquired organically.
The main reason for this is because unlike most other channels of marketing, SEO is one of the rare cases where a customer will actually seek you out instead of the other way around. What’s more, they don’t even have to have your business in mind specifically in order for you to get them into your store. By properly optimizing your website with SEO, you are merely providing the conditions for Google to help connect its users to your products and services. They already know what they want, whether it’s a specific product or an answer to a problem, and if Google thinks your website provides the right solution, the connection is made and the user will click on your website with the intent to buy. While this is the ideal scenario and doesn’t represent every user that searches for the keywords you are targeting, you can get the gist of the kind of conversion rate that this kind of marketing can provide for you. As far as ROI is concerned, there’s nothing else like it.
What Can You Expect From a Professional SEO Campaign
If you are interested in professional SEO services for your eCommerce store, you will want to set realistic goals and expectations. When you optimize your website for search engines, you are essentially building a foundation for your business over the span of several weeks and months. If you are expecting quick results or instant increases in impressions or conversions, you are already going in with the wrong mindset.
Remember what Google is looking for: authority and trust. If you could magically build this overnight, everyone would be doing it and the top spots in Google would rapidly fluctuate. SEO doesn’t work that way, and you shouldn’t expect it to. You nab those top spots in the SERPs by laying the groundwork with a comprehensive SEO strategy that covers everything from aggressive keyword research to crafting high-quality blogs for your users to learn from and get a sense of your brand’s message.
A well-ran SEO campaign will include regular updates on the progress of changes being made to your website as well as complete transparency. This is important, and one of the factors that separate an amateur agency from a professional one. SEO requires numerous technical tweaks, content adjustments, backlink building, and blog writing in order for everything to all come together. If you as the store owner aren’t being constantly made aware of these changes, who knows what’s even being done. Not only should you expect transparent communication but ongoing and in-depth reporting regarding improvements in rankings, new keyword opportunities, how you are faring against your competitors, and the overall health of your website in general.
SEO is a fluid, constantly changing arena that you have to keep after in order to see success. The results you get out of an ongoing and properly managed campaign however are well worth the time and money spent, because you are constructing the foundation of your brand and digital presence for years to come. This is pure value that other forms of digital marketing simply can’t replicate.
Selecting an Agency That Knows eCommerce
For the best results possible, you need a team of SEO specialists that actually know how to rank online stores, even in the most competitive industries. It’s not enough to simply purchase seo packages or cookie-cutter services that don’t actually address the specific needs of your business as they relate to eCommerce.
What’s more, you also need an agency that’s well versed with all of the major eCommerce platforms, as SEO requires a great deal of technical skill. Whether your store is on BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, or even Magento, you need a professional SEO agency that has a background in each platform and can accommodate your specific needs without any trouble.
Here at Genius eCommerce®, we make it our business to fully understand all aspects of eCommerce SEO in order to provide maximum benefit for store owners looking to boost their rankings and ultimately drive more traffic and sales. Our SEO team is adept at finding valuable keyword opportunities and can craft campaigns that get results time and time again. If you want a solution for your business that will help strengthen your brand and get more visitors to your website, give us a call at 888.982.8269.