Optimizing your website for search engine visibility is an essential part of your eCommerce business, no matter the size.
As a business owner, you need to understand how vital SEO (search engine optimization) is to your business. It can help you grow your business significantly and increase your profits.
This article will cover how important SEO is for eCommerce businesses and all the reasons why.
Importance of SEO for eCommerce Businesses
To grow your eCommerce business and make it more visible, you need SEO. This process involves tweaking your content and the structure of your website so that search engines such as Google and Bing can easily find and rank your website high on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Thanks to advancements in technology, people have changed the way they make purchasing decisions. People who need to purchase something simply visit search engines, type in their queries, find results, and buy the item.
Hence, online search has become a vital part of the buying process. In most cases, buyers rely on the results of these searches to make their purchases.
So, how well you use SEO can be a major determinant of whether your business thrives or not. Without effective SEO, you risk ruining your brand’s visibility, which leads to fewer sales and you losing to your competition with better practices.
However, by ranking high on SERPs, you increase the odds of potential customers finding your products. Using standard practices, you can build your eCommerce business based on SEO and be one step closer to attaining success.
A great place to set up shop is Shopify, which is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the internet. In fact, Shopify received an average of 7.1 billion monthly visits. That said, you still need to work to ensure that your online store is on par with others when it comes to SEO.
Benefits of SEO for eCommerce Businesses
The necessity for your eCommerce business to follow SEO practices cannot be overemphasized. Here are a few benefits of using SEO on your business website.
Increased Organic Traffic
Name: Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk from Unsplash
Alt text: Monitor screen showing monthly traffic
Organic traffic is a visit to your website without paid advertisement. People visit your website simply by discovering it on the search result page. You get this kind of traffic when your web pages end up at the top of the first page of a SERP.
This is where SEO comes in because if you optimize your website right, then it will rank higher on SERPs. Having your website on the first page also helps to increase click-throughs, which essentially means people visiting one page after another on your website.
Click-throughs are great because they inform search engines that your site has relevant content. This would contribute to your website ranking first on the first SERP if it isn’t already.
With more organic traffic, the chances of gaining loyal customer increases, and therefore, your business grows.
That said, it is not only important to create relevant content on your website, but you should also make sure that it is appealing and relatable.
The meta-description and meta-title are two areas you should focus on because those are the first things viewers see before deciding to engage with your website.
Better User Experience
Another vital reason for SEO is sales conversions. With proper SEO, the users’ experience on your website improves, which could improve your ranking.
Keyword data acts as a means of understanding shoppers. These shoppers are looking for something to buy online, and the sooner they find it, the sooner they buy. Hence, sites that typically have what the user is looking for early on have a higher chance of making the sale.
You could also use this data to understand how shoppers search for products. Therefore, if you can figure out how the shoppers speak and think about products, you can use these keywords on your site to enhance the experience.
For instance, if you find that most shoppers search for “premium t-shirts,” you can lay emphasis on your high-quality options.
Furthermore, providing users with a quality experience is also a vital factor in your rankings. This is because if multiple shoppers come to your website and go back to search results immediately, search engines may consider your site irrelevant to the query and lower your ranking.
Build Domain Authority
Domain authority refers to how much search engines trust and respect a website. Sites with user-friendly and relevant content tend to have more authority and with this higher authority comes higher rankings.
The most authoritative sites have the highest rankings on SERPs and are trusted by search engines, such as Google. This is a great search engine to have trust your website because it is the biggest search engine on the internet. In fact, Google has a leading 92.37% market share among search engines.
Some ways you can build domain authority, include getting excellent reviews from consumers, building stellar social media profilers, and others. However, these methods only work when customers already know your brand.
The goal of SEO is to get noticed by anyone who needs information regarding anything related to your industry, which means ranking higher on search results. With SEO, you can create a website filled with reliable and accurate content that search engines and people can trust.
This is another area where keywords come into play. By using research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Keywords Everywhere, you can find target keywords in your niche and use them to your advantage. After finding those keywords, you can create content using them.
The more you build informative, relevant, and accurate content, the more likely people will want to share it on all platforms, such as social media, giving your website a reputation for being reliable.
In addition, other websites would classify your site as a trusted source and want to link it to theirs. This gives you significant backlinks, thereby informing search engines that your website is relevant in your niche.
Spend Less on Marketing
Using SEO is affordable. Therefore, you do not need to break the bank to optimize your website for search engines. Despite its affordability, you can still use SEO as an efficient marketing tool to take your business to the next level.
SEO allows you to see a return on investment in your marketing. This means that at some point, you will earn more than you spend on marketing. Unlike when you invest in stocks, you can see returns in a very short amount of time.
Additionally, these results last a long time; thus, you get to enjoy these benefits long-term. This is unlike traffic from ads that only last for as long as a campaign is running. A product page with all the best practices will gain traffic and increase your profits as long as you keep it relevant.
SEO is especially important for small businesses that do not have the financial capabilities to spend a fortune on marketing strategies. This way you do not need to pay for traffic. Instead, you can increase your organic traffic using SEO strategies.
While SEO works great in boosting your traffic at a low cost, it is also a good idea to incorporate a general marketing plan.
Therefore, you should find a suitable balance to give you the best results. This means incorporating marketing plans like guest post service, content marketing, social media marketing, and others. They may cost a bit more but will be worth it in the long run.
Stand Out Among Your Other Businesses
Regardless of the niche you find yourself in, you are bound to have some competition, and one of the best ways to stand out is with SEO.
SEO involves several practices to help your page stay relevant. If you have a top-notch SEO strategy, your website should have helpful content, be responsive, and be user-friendly. These are all things that can make your business stand out.
Without SEO, you might find yourself losing to your competition. For example, a customer might find your website, but due to how slowly your webpage loads, they would probably leave your website and find another.
Alternatively, the right customer might search for something and come across your website hoping to find the answer only to discover limited information. The visitor would immediately leave your website to find other websites with better solutions.
In cases like these, not only are you losing customers, but this high abandonment rate informs search engines that your website is not user-friendly and does not contain useful content for users’ needs.
Consequently, your web pages will have lower rankings because your SEO does not measure up to the competition.
Conclusion
SEO is integral to any eCommerce business, no matter the type. It has proven to provide both short and long-term results. Some of these benefits include elevated sales conversion, increased brand recognition, more organic traffic, and higher rankings in SERPs.
Abiding by the best SEO practices is in your best interest because it allows you to take your business to the next level and achieve massive success.