Despite the growing number of digital marketing techniques out there, search engine optimization remains one of the most important for creating a strong foundation for your business that will lead to long-term success. While other forms of marketing are worth utilizing, a smart eCommerce SEO strategy should be at the core of your efforts.
For merchants interested in scaling their online stores with a reliable digital marketing strategy, the following points will help you see why SEO is important for eCommerce, especially over the long term.
The Key Reasons Why eCommerce SEO is Still Important
While paid advertising has its benefits, nothing beats organic metrics. You want shoppers to be able to find your online store and buy from you without having to barrage them with ads. There’s certainly nothing wrong with utilizing pay-per-click advertising and social media marketing, but the heart of your marketing strategy should consist of a rock-solid SEO campaign.
Is SEO still relevant in 2021, though? Even with the popularity of social media platforms like Instagram and how common paid ads are? Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in YouTube advertising, Hulu advertising, Facebook ads, or even TikTok? Does SEO really top all of these different marketing channels?
It’s not so much that SEO replaces them or is better than them, but that properly implemented SEO provides a stronger and more reliable avenue of advertising that will be there to act as the foundation for your eCommerce business. Here’s just a few of the key benefits of eCommerce SEO and why it’s vital that you implement a full-scale search engine optimization strategy for your store.
- The best way to generate organic traffic. SEO is necessary if you intend on ranking on page one of the search results, which is key to receiving a steady flow of visitors to your website.
- Brand authority is another key reason why SEO is so critical. When users search for certain products in your niche, you want your website to appear high in the search results. Even when users don’t necessarily click on your offerings, simply the fact that your eCommerce store appears can convey an incredible amount of authority. This is how you build confidence in your brand and draw in new customers. Building brand awareness through SEO will result in repeat customers, customer loyalty, and a better organic conversion rate over time.
- Organic sales are another important reason to implement an eCommerce SEO campaign for your online store. Once you start generating more organic traffic and really refine your keyword strategy, you will begin to rank better for search queries related to your specific products. This will naturally result in a better conversion rate. In other words, by laying the foundation now with a professional SEO campaign, you will eventually increase your sales without paying a dime in extra ad spend.
- A better experience for your users. SEO used to be all about keywords and backlinks, and while these elements are still incredibly important, SEO has evolved to encompass so much more. Google now takes user experience into consideration when ranking websites, which ultimately means that the responsiveness of your store and how functional it is will determine whether or not you can land on page one. A full-scale SEO campaign will actually help improve the fundamentals of your online store, by helping with load times, improving on-page copy so that it reads better, enhancing your navigation that it becomes easier for your users to find certain products, and even making sure that your server is working properly and that there are no errors on the backend that could be interfering with load times and indexing. In general, SEO services will actually increase the quality of your store, which in turn will create a better experience for your customers.
It’s pretty obvious at this point why SEO is so important. From a marketing standpoint, there’s no other technique that really compares to the kinds of results you can get if you take your search engine optimizations seriously.
Grow Your Online Store With Our eCommerce SEO Services
Even if you have struggled in the past with ranking your website, that doesn’t mean you should give up on optimizing for the search engines. By taking the proper measures, you can enjoy more traffic and sales, a stronger online reputation, and provide an even better experience for your shoppers.
To pull all of this off, however, you may want to consider hiring eCommerce SEO experts to help you put together a coherent marketing strategy based on in-depth research and techniques that actually work. If you are prepared to grow your business the right way, we here at Genius eCommerce® are ready to help elevate your store and get you those all-too-important rankings. Just give us a call or request an audit using the form at the bottom of this page to get started.