If you have an e-commerce company and are wondering how you can become a giant among other e-commerce businesses, the solution boils down to three simple words: search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO?
Basically, SEO is a process that optimizes your business website to improve its visibility and ranking for specific keywords and phrases. The goal is to increase the quantity and quality of your web traffic, making it easier for people that are looking for products or services like yours to find and make purchases.
Who Will Do The SEO For You?
Well, you can hire someone in-house to do it for you. But they won’t have the expertise or experience we at Marketing-Jive have at maintaining an online presence. We handle the SEO you need utilizing optimization techniques like keyword research, content creation, link building, and algorithm optimization. That’s a fancy way of saying we’ll handle it all so you don’t have to worry about it.
But that’s not all we’ll handle. SEO is an ongoing process. As search engines update and change their algorithms and the way they rank websites, so too must your website adjust. This means Marketing-Jive will perform regular monitoring and adjusting to make sure your website stays relevant and at the top of those rankings.
12 Reasons Why Your eCommerce Business Needs SEO
There’s no doubt SEO is a powerful tool, if not the most powerful tool, for ecommerce businesses that want to increase their visibility in online spaces while driving targeted traffic to their platform. However, SEO doesn’t happen by magic. Companies have to spend more upfront on SEO to become more successful and stay ahead of their competition.
That investment, though, can turn your ecommerce platform into an industry leader by optimizing your business for search engines. By doing this, you’ll increase visibility, build trust among your customers, outrank your competition, improve targeting, and increase conversions. All of these can turn your business into a leading ecommerce platform in a relatively short amount of time.
Here are 12 reasons why you, like other successful ecommerce business leaders, should invest in SEO today.
1. Search Engine Increased Visibility
Put simply, Ecommerce SEO services will improve your website’s search engine ranking. As a result, your visibility will increase.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing utilize algorithms to govern the relevance of a website and its associated pages through keywords. Through optimization of your website’s content, you’ll show search engines that your website is relevant. When this happens, your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) can go higher. If you reach the top of SERPs with relevant keywords, the chances of your website being seen by more people also increases. More people means more potential customers and increased visibility overall.
2. Cost-Effective Investment
There are several reasons why SEO is considered cost-effective by ecommerce platforms worldwide. Those reasons include:
- SEO focuses on creating free organic search traffic for a website, following a traditional paid advertising route.
- With the right optimization, your website becomes your best salesperson and is available 24/7.
- The higher your SERP ranking over time, the more people you can attract with fewer pay-per-click (PPC) service out-of-pocket expenses for you in the long run, all thanks to SEO.
- Unlike a Googe ads campaign management services, once it’s over you’ll continue to see the benefits of that campaign with the right SEO to maintain your SERP rankings and conversion rates.
SEO will require an upfront initial investment of time and talent, but once your website is optimized, it’ll be a cost-effective method to drive targeted traffic to your platform.
3. Long-Term SEO Organic Traffic
Many of the items provided in this list can be considered long-term benefits of having an SEO website. However, it needs to be made very clear how important a role SEO plays in establishing your site so that organic search traffic is driven toward it in a sustainable and consistent way. This organic search traffic is important in the short-term but even more so in the medium and long term.
This is done by:
- Continuously adapting your website to the latest search engine algorithms
- Continuously providing relevant information to your target audience
Doing these simple things will keep your platform near or at the top of SERPs and ahead of the competition.
4. Optimized Targeting
SEO can result in optimized targeting, ensuring your platform lands in front of the audience that is the most likely to become leads and customers.
Identifying Profitable SEO Keywords
Profitable keywords and phrases can be identified that will target the right audience all the time. This audience will find what they’re looking for, which will ultimately be on your website.
Optimizing Website Content Marketing
Websites that have been optimized with relevant keywords can also attract the same targeted audience. However, if your website doesn’t deliver on the initial promise of the search results, a potential user may lose trust and not stick around. Optimizing your website can help prevent this from happening.
Optimizing SEO Landing Pages
How do you keep a potential customer or lead around on your website? Make sure your landing pages are also optimized with relevant content that leads to a conversion. This also means your content needs to be valuable and engaging while providing a user-friendly experience that establishes and maintains trust throughout the process.
Utilizing Analytics
By using tools like Google Analytics, your ecommerce business will have an up-to-date snapshot of your target audience’s behavior and an understanding of how keywords, landing pages, and content are translated into conversions. This can all help to adjust and better target the audience toward your products and services.
5. Effective SEO Strategy = Better User Experience
SEO provides a better user experience by ensuring your website:
- Is user-friendly and easy to navigate
- Is optimized for speed and performance, reducing website loading times while improving performance
- Has content that’s more engaging and relevant to what the user is searching for
- Has appropriate and appealing images and videos
- Provides clear messaging
- Uses an easy-to-read formatting
By providing a better user experience through SEO, your site will see an increase in conversion rates, user engagement, and customer satisfaction.
6. Increased Trust In Online Presence
One of the biggest things you can develop as an e-commerce business is a sense of trust and loyalty in your customers. You can achieve and maintain this trust with quality SEO.
High Search Engine Rankings
The higher your website ranks in regards to SERPs, the more people will know your website has the relevant and credible information they’re searching for. As a result, initial trust is built.
Quality Content
Once a user is driven to your website, they should find valuable and informative content that delivers on the initial promise of your SERP ranking, reinforcing the trust you’ve already established.
Positive Reviews And Social Media
Positive reviews and good word of mouth on social media never hurts trust among your customer base. Incorporating good reviews on your website demonstrates confidence from others in your product and your brand.
Domain Authority
You can increase domain authority by creating backlinks from other websites. These are important for SEO because they signal to search engines that other websites consider the content on your website as trustworthy, valuable, and relevant.
7. Increased Brand Awareness
Everything mentioned so far will all lead to an increase in awareness of your brand. Increasing visibility, providing a better user experience, and creating valuable and engaging content all support your brand recognition as well as your brand’s reputation. Add to these, a strong online presence, building domain authority, and the efficient use of social media will lead to your brand reaching a wider audience.
8. Increased Mobile SEO
If you want to utilize the full power of SEO, there is no avoiding the importance of optimization for mobile devices. Nor should it be avoided. Mobile optimization is important, if not critical, for your SEO for several reasons, including:
Mobile-First Indexing
When it comes to indexing and ranking websites, Google now predominantly uses the mobile version of a website. So, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it may not rank well in Google SERPs or any other search engine.
User Experience
We’ve already mentioned the importance of providing a better user experience. However, with the increasing number of mobile customers, not having a website optimized for mobile customers ruins the user experience you’re trying to improve and maintain. This not only leads to a poor user experience but also a decrease in engagement, loss of trust, lower rankings, and a decrease in sales.
Speed
Google factors a website’s loading speed on mobile devices into its rankings. A website not optimized for mobile devices will load slower, leading to lower rankings, period.
Investing In Specific Features
If your website is optimized for mobile devices, it’ll include such things as touch-friendly navigation, large fonts, and user-friendly button sizes. Combined, these will improve the user experience on mobile devices.
Local Ecommerce SEO Services
A website that’s optimized for mobile devices can also improve your local SEO ranking. Why? Well, if mobile customers are on the move, so to speak, they’re likely to look for local businesses. This helps your business, assuming you’re optimized for mobile devices.
By optimizing your website for mobile devices, you’ll improve the user experience for mobile users, increase your rankings, and reach your target audience wherever they are. Local SEO services are great for local Ecommerce businesses with physical store front locations.
9. Better Customer Insights
Better customer insights can help with SEO in several ways, chief among them being the data collected on how keywords, content, and website satisfaction are performing amongst your targeted audience. This allows adjustments in how you approach your audience while also allowing you to correct any issues that may leave them unengaged or turning them away.
Customer insights will also help you adapt your business as markets change with the introduction of new products or services. This gives you the flexibility to optimize for changing algorithms on search engines.
Lastly, customer insights will help you better personalize your ecommerce platform to reflect their search behaviors and allow you to retarget them with updated ads and special offers.
10. Better Conversion Rates
Driving traffic to your website is one thing. Turning that traffic into increased leads and sales is another. SEO results in better conversion rates by doing all of the following:
- Continuously driving targeted traffic to the website using optimization.
- Improving user experience.
- Establishing and maintaining trust.
- Building your brand.
- Optimizing your platform for mobile devices.
- Ensure content on the website is continuously updated and optimized based on customer insights and behavior.
Yes, these have all been mentioned in detail. But taken as a whole, they combine to result in better conversion rates for your ecommerce business. If you’re weak in one or more of those areas, your search engine ranking will fall, your cost-effectiveness will drop, your long-term benefits will dwindle, and your conversion rates can stall or plummet.
However, by utilizing SEO best practices, all those boxes will be checked and the end result will be better conversion rates, higher revenue, and a healthy return on investment.
11. Better ROI
Speaking of a healthy return on investment, you can’t discuss SEO without mentioning one of the main things that make it all worth it: ROI. With an effective SEO strategy, you’re more than likely going to see a high ROI.
Why?
Well, although SEO can require more upfront costs, over time, those costs will come down as your ranking, audience, and conversion rates grow. Through continuous adjustments and updates utilizing SEO best practices, your ROI will grow. This indicates that your investment in SEO is paying off and generating a good return. In addition, it will more than justify your investment in optimization for the short, medium, and long term.
In short, SEO will be great for your bottom line.
12. Outperforming Your Competitors
A great ROI is, well, great. But so is outperforming your competitors. SEO will help you do that, too.
As a reminder, your platform will outrank your competitors by appearing at the top of SERPs. And who doesn’t like a competitive edge, especially if your competitors are employing SEO best practices?
Even if your competitors have an optimized website, if they’re not identifying the most profitable keywords and phrases while also monitoring and updating your website as Marketing-Jive will do for you, they’ll be left behind. Why is this true? Because SEO is a long-term strategy and SERPs are constantly changing. To stay at the top and fully optimized, you’ll need an agency like Marketing-Jive to keep you well ahead of the competition in the digital marketing age.
Conclusion
E-commerce giants understand the importance of SEO. When you look at examples of the best SEO cases, you’ll also see companies at the top of their fields in trust, brand recognition, and revenue. Successful businesses need to invest in SEO services to keep them constantly growing in an evermore competitive landscape. In the digital realm, investing in eCommerce SEO is critical for any company that wants long-term success. By investing in SEO and partnering with Marketing-Jive, you’ll have a platform well ahead of your competition in today’s digital marketplace. You’ll also reap the long-term benefits as a result.
