SEO Benefits For Ecommerce
Unless you are a hermit, or have been living under a rock, you must have come across the term SEO (search engine optimization). You can’t miss it on the internet, from SEO marketers trying to sell their services to bloggers writing about SEO and much more.
Search Engine Optimization is the term given to the numerous strategies e-commerce site owners, marketers, bloggers, etc., practice to try to make their site rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs). It is important to rank high on SERPs, particularly on Google, since Google accounts for 95% of internet searches. Not to mention that, Google search is 10 times more effective for SEO than social media. One of the reason is that 90% of internet activity starts from a search engine search, and Google is the number one search engine in the world.
Brand Awareness
Before your e-commerce business can start making huge profits and meeting people’s needs on a large scale, first people have to know that your brand exist. They can’t benefit from your brand if they don’t know your brand or your service/product. SEO is one of the low-budget means through which you can gradually create awareness for your brand. When your e-commerce site shows in the top results on search engines, it can establish your brand as an authority in your niche. In this way, internet users will know about your brand, and eventually, when they need the service or product you provide, they will have some level of trust in your brand.
SEO is also useful for creating awareness for new products.
Generates Profit
The ultimate purpose of an e-commerce brand is to make profit. Of course, you also want to add value to your target audience, create solutions and maybe fulfill your passion. SEO, when done properly, can help drive traffic which in turn might lead to sales. If your landing page is well-curated with relevant content, then you can hope that at least three out of every 100 visitors will be converted to customers.
Increases Remarketing Audience
How do you do utilize the traffic your SEO is generating to grow your business? Whether the visitors that come to your site make a purchase or not, the fact that they visited your site is enough for you to utilize. You can set up cookies on your ecommerce site that will help you save user data which you will use to create retargeting campaigns. This way, users will always have your brand trailing them all over the internet with content, services and products suggestions.
The more traffic you generate, the higher the number of users available for you to create your retargeting campaigns for.
Improves User Experience
Google and other search engines have rules that they expect websites to follow if they want to make it to SERPs top results. Bounce rate is one of the factors considered – Google favors sites with low bounce rate. This means that the site offers relevant content to users, so when they visit the site, they find the information they’re looking for and there’s no need for them to leave in a hurry. On the part of the e-commerce site owner, this means that your web content has real value, this means that your site is user-friendly. So, while you’re doing SEO, you’re also serving your customers well.
There are several elements search engines consider when ranking a site, some of them are mobile responsiveness, bounce rate, loading speed, use of keyword, originality of content etc. The aim of the search engines is to provide a smooth experience for internet users. Hence, when sites follow search engines guidelines when implementing their SEO strategies, they’re also improving the user experience of their own e-commerce sites.
Helps To Understand Your Target Audience Better
Here’s an illustration; when a programmer develops an app, he or she develops it hoping that it will be used in a certain way. The programmer will assume the user language and how the users will generally use the app. However, when the app is launched, the programmer will realize that he didn’t exactly capture the user language the way the users prefer. In fact, users will often change how they generally use the app. As a result, a good programmer will take note of user preference and create new update for the app to meet users’ needs.
This is also how it works in e-commerce (and every industry), users have their own way of doings things that’s different from how the creators originally envisioned it. SEO provides opportunities for e-commerce site owners to get feedback of shoppers’ preferences. SEO will help you understand user language – the keywords they use in search engines that lead them to your site, the keywords they enter in your site’s search box. These are important data that your SEO tools can provide you with, which you can then use to improve how your e-commerce site works. You can also use the data to better attract new customers by providing more relatable content and experience.
Reduces Dependency On Paid Advertisements
In this digital age where there are numerous marketing avenues, there are not many free ones. However, SEO, although not entirely free can be low-budget, and this is a good marketing option to start with as a startup e-commerce owner. Invest more time in creating valuable content; original well-written articles, use long-tail keywords, add meta-tags to your URLs, work on your link building, etc. As long as you try as much as you can to perfect your SEO practices, you won’t need to depend on paid ads to grow your e-commerce brand. You will get organic traffic, increase your site ranking on search engines, and ultimately increase sales.
Over To You
As mentioned above, SEO practices improves user experience, but that’s not all. When done right, it is also bound to add long-term value to your e-commerce business. Reason being that all the strategies you put in place, potentially refined with the help of SEO services, will continue to be useful for the maintenance and growth of your e-commerce site.. You will also improve your knowledge of SEO and know what SEO practices work well for your brand. Good luck SEO’ing!