For online businesses, SEO is one of the smartest investments you can make. Whether you are trying to drum up more traffic, boost your eCommerce conversions, or enhance your brand image, the many benefits of a search engine optimization campaign are exactly what most businesses need to set themselves in the right direction.
Locating the best eCommerce marketing agency for your SEO campaign is a must if you want to get worthwhile results. An agency that understands how to build a comprehensive strategy that will be custom-fit for your online store.
The following article will explain how SEO will actually benefit your business and what to look for in an eCommerce agency so you know your marketing will be in good hands.
How Does eCommerce SEO Work?
Even if you are somewhat familiar with the general idea of SEO, there’s a substantial difference when you start adding eCommerce into the mix. Everything from the search intent behind your keywords to the course of action that users take on your website will be quite a bit different than if you were simply trying to market a service-based website or blog.
eCommerce websites are digital storefronts that should be designed to entice customers to buy a certain product on the spot. This usually means that everything from the branding to the actual shopping process has to feel natural and professional. As eCommerce becomes more widespread and mainstream, shoppers are becoming savvier and their expectations continue to rise. If your website does not meet these expectations from a user experience standpoint, there is likely to be a conflict.
SEO isn’t just about helping your users find your website, as these optimizations now include user experience as well. eCommerce SEO specifically focuses on the relationship between products and categories, the relevance of your keywords, the quality of the shopping experience, the trustworthiness of your brand, and how informative your content is respective of the products you offer.
Here is a quick overview of the eCommerce SEO process:
- A successful SEO campaign always begins with a deep dive into your industry, product line, and competitors. This research is necessary to provide context with which to begin the strategy.
- From here, keyword research is conducted. This is perhaps the most pivotal step in the process, and one that most agencies don’t do a good enough job of. Uncovering the perfect ranking opportunities and taking the time to carefully select target keywords is what truly drives an SEO strategy.
- Once keywords have been selected, a content strategy is mapped out. This will include improvements to current landing pages and category pages, blog content that focuses on certain keywords, and a backlinking strategy that is designed to send relevant authority and link juice to specific areas of your website.
In between the overarching strategy, you can expect a wide range of technical updates, analyses, and user-focused initiatives, such as providing helpful blogs that feature tutorials, or new meta titles that explain collection pages better.
It should be noted that an eCommerce SEO strategy can be adapted to all of the major eCommerce platforms, so regardless of whether or not you are on Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce, a knowledgeable marketing agency will understand the differences and act accordingly.
Once a properly designed campaign is set in motion, the ultimate goals are an improved experience for your users and a higher position in the search results for your website. For eCommerce businesses that want to get more traffic and sales and strengthen their brand in general, search engine optimization is considered one of the best marketing methods. Once you begin to get traction in Google, more users will recognize and find your store, and this will naturally result in a greater number of eCommerce conversions over time.
Why is SEO So Important For Online Businesses?
After this initial overview, you still might be wondering why SEO is as important as it is. Couldn’t you get by with some paid advertising and social media marketing?
While every business differs, the key reason why SEO is so crucial for eCommerce stores is because it greatly influences the amount of organic traffic you receive. Unlike paid traffic, and traffic from other sources like email marketing, SEO-driven traffic converts well and can form a reliable backbone of your overall profits.
Having a steady flow of organic traffic visiting your website every day can have a powerful impact on the growth of your business. The more people that see your website and buy your products, the more recognized your brand will become and the more return customers you will get as well.
Also keep in mind that with other forms of marketing, your target audience may not even be thinking about shopping at the time, which means you have to convince them to click and buy something on your website. With organic traffic, however, the opposite is typically the case. If you are targeting the right keywords and attracting the right users, you will be capturing people that already are in the process of shopping. They have put a search term into Google and are actively looking for a product, you are simply making the connection and providing them with said product by implementing the right keywords and content on your pages.
What this means is that essentially, the best eCommerce marketing agencies are able to help your ideal shopper find your products as easily as possible, so they are able to quickly convert.
SEO has other periphery benefits for online stores as well. From brand awareness to a more fluid customer experience, eCommerce SEO encompasses a wide range of health factors for your business that make it more of a marketing necessity rather than an option.
It’s true that digital marketing strategies can vary, but if you really want to improve your eCommerce shop and make sure that your customers are finding your website and that they have a great experience while on your website, SEO is one of the best investments you can make.
What Will an eCommerce Marketing Agency Do For Your Business?
At this point you might be wondering, what will a digital marketing agency even do for your website? What kinds of changes will they make and how will they outline a strategy for you?
It depends on the agency, to be honest. Every marketing company has their own methods for developing a strategy and implementing it. One thing you want to be aware of is that under no circumstances should you settle for prepackaged services or “done for you” SEO plans that aren’t customized for your business. Generic SEO is not enough to make a significant impact on your rankings in most cases and even when it does, it usually results in traffic that isn’t optimized for your products.
To give you a deeper understanding of what you can expect from an eCommerce marketing campaign that focuses on SEO for online stores, here are some of the tasks we cover in our custom SEO plans:
- Ongoing spam link disavowing
- Keyword fluctuation monitoring
- Consistent SEO optimized blog writing
- Onsite page updates using carefully chosen keywords
- Site speed optimizations
- 404 and broken link checks
- Backlink building using a wide variety of multichannel offsite content including Web 2.0 links, content distribution sites, third-party blogs, and other kinds of authoritative content.
- An adaptable strategy that is able to change depending on business needs, market conditions, budget, and product importance.
The value of a properly-managed SEO campaign is not just in all of the individual tasks that are completed on a routine basis, but how these tasks work together as a part of an overarching content marketing strategy that is designed to improve your website relevance, help users find the right products, and send signals to Google that you are the best choice in your industry.
This is why even if you have a strong grasp on SEO, it is unlikely that you or your in-house marketing team would be able to take on a full-scale SEO campaign without the help of an eCommerce marketing agency. Not only do you have to make sure that all of these tasks are handled on a rolling basis, they need to be implemented properly and within the scope of a carefully laid out strategy as well.
Only a capable marketing agency with years of experience and collective insight would be able to help you chart a course that enables you to come out on top over the competition. A few small tweaks and updates to your SEO, or the occasional blog, is not going to be enough to push you higher in the search results, especially on a consistent basis that results in more sales.
Tips on Choosing The Best Marketing Agency
So what do you actually look for when deciding which eCommerce marketing company to choose? It seems as though there are hundreds of agencies out there all claiming that they can get you to page one. Obviously, this is an exaggeration, because the journey to page one for most businesses is tough, and if anyone could do it, there would be no need for this article.
When you actually look at the playing field and see what’s out there in terms of SEO services for eCommerce stores, it’s important to select a company that will provide you with full-service marketing from the ground up. Everything from keyword research to a content strategy must be crafted and customized to fit your needs so that you will have the best possible chance at ranking, even if you are in a competitive niche.
This is why our approach stands out as an SEO agency. Genius eCommerce® utilizes “genius” solutions to many of the most common marketing problems that online stores face. We know how to enhance the actual quality of a website in order to please both your users and the search engines, so that you rank higher for more keywords and remain in a competitive position despite market fluctuations and algorithm changes.
One of the key aspects of our campaigns is that they are fully customized to fit each client. This is not something you commonly see in the industry, as it takes a great deal of knowledge and skill to carve out a unique SEO campaign for every business. It takes far more keyword research and attention to detail, expertise in web design, Google analytics, user behavior, and content strategy. And ultimately, it forces our team to be in tune with the current eCommerce landscape, including industry trends and shopper expectations.
The end result is a process unlike any other in the industry. This is why many consider us to be the best eCommerce marketing agency for SEO, because we know how to get consistent results for clients. Whether it’s better brand appeal, more organic traffic, or a better conversion rate, our specialized strategies will help get your business where it needs to be.
If you want to tackle your business goals and ultimately push your eCommerce store in the right direction, a sound marketing strategy is a must. Even with a great website design, you still need a plan of action that will connect you with potential customers and promote growth. Out of all of the different kinds of digital marketing out there, SEO has been shown to provide some of the best long-term ROI for businesses in this space, which is why you want to make sure the agency you select for the job knows their stuff.
The ideal eCommerce marketing agency will be able to build you a custom plan that aligns with your brand ideals and that has extensive experience in the eCommerce industry. This defines our team to a T. Genius eCommerce® has been recognized as one of the best eCommerce marketing agencies when it comes to creating SEO plans that get results. If you want to finally start climbing the SERPs, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of experts in order to get started.
