It’s no secret that e-commerce is taking off. It’s an industry that’s easy for many business owners to get into and convenient for shoppers. With the rapid increase of e-commerce sites popping up each day, many e-commerce industries are noticing a market saturation. Online businesses that are not investing in digital marketing are hastily finding themselves falling behind their competitors and even going out of business. To help your company reach its full potential and keep up with the competition, digital marketing is a needed investment, specifically as it pertains to search engine optimization. Discover why e-commerce businesses require SEO.
Reasons E-Commerce Shops Need SEO
E-commerce businesses need to invest in SEO for many reasons. E-commerce businesses often find that other competing online shops sell very similar or even identical items to their store. Digital marketing is a method used by nearly every e-commerce store, meaning those that don’t invest in this strategy fall behind. Search engine optimization is a form of digital marketing that plays into the long game. Establishing a site as an authority in the eyes of trusted search engines such as Google provides an excellent long-term return on investment. Explore some additional reasons that e-commerce shops need to invest in SEO.
E-commerce Is Only Online
E-commerce sites are only online. These shops can’t count on chance discoveries or random walk-ins for sales. Most e-commerce sites rely heavily on digital marketing methods to recruit new customers and bring back existing ones. Investing in search engine optimization helps e-commerce sites expand their audiences and, ultimately, increase their sales.
Organic Searches Are the Biggest Channel for Traffic
Organic searches are the biggest channel for online traffic. Many times, users will ignore paid advertisements on paid searches or even avoid clicking ads at all. Organic search results come with prestige, which no other form of digital marketing can provide.
Showing up in organic search results builds trust with the consumer. With the sheer amount of e-commerce sites that pop up each day and the growing number of scam e-commerce sites online, it’s crucial to establish trust with potential customers. Suppose Google or other popular search engines trust your site enough to allow it to rank for specific keywords. In that case, you have already established a little more trust with your future customers.
Relying Entirely on Paid Ads Is Costly
E-commerce sites that don’t invest in SEO or don’t invest in it enough find themselves relying entirely on paid ads to drive traffic and create conversions. Paid advertisements are effective and are worth investing in. Still, a business’s goal is to make sales without having to shell out a large sum each month to drive people to their site.
Financially, paid ads show immediate increases in sales, but SEO makes the most sense long-term. Over the course of just five years, SEO investments can end up bringing in more traffic for less expense than paid advertisements.
Effective SEO Methods for E-Commerce Shops
E-commerce sites need SEO to flourish in today’s competitive online environment and the future. Many factors determine the organic rankings of a website, and manipulating sites to be SEO friendly is complicated. Below are some of the top things to do to increase your site’s organic rankings.
Avoid Focusing on Products
Focusing on products is excellent for paid advertisements because it brings people back to a specific product page. Still, for SEO, this is often a waste of time. Search engine optimization relies on category pages and more permanent fixtures of the website to grow rankings. Product pages with rankings aren’t always great for the business, as the product may be out of stock or the company may stop carrying the item.
When it comes to SEO, it’s vital to think long-term. Consider what pages will always remain on the site. Those are the pages that are most critical to increasing rankings.
Add Content To Category Pages
One of the biggest pitfalls a company can fall into is neglecting its category pages. Category pages need content. Search engines don’t bother with pages that don’t contain content. Search engines look for informative content to help the site crawlers “understand” what the page is so they can index it correctly.
Put content on every category page and ensure each page displays unique content relevant to its purpose.
Create a Blog
Blogging is essential to SEO rankings on a site. Blogs show search engines that a website focuses on providing helpful information that’s relevant to the site’s users. User-focused sites regularly see more significant ranking increases than sites without content.
Blogs are also essential because they are the best and most efficient way to continually add new, fresh content to a website. Regularly adding new content shows search engines that a site is active and useful.
Target Realistic Keywords
Another common mistake that businesses make is targeting unrealistic keywords. Choosing keywords for a company is an involved process that requires analytics and research to develop. Targeting realistic keywords is the best way to see rapid growth in rankings.
For example, an e-commerce company that sells shoes would most likely be wasting their time targeting the keyword “shoes.” The companies ranking for “shoes” are big-box retailers and online giants that are often too big to compete with smaller companies. Instead, a company can target “red wedge sandals.” It is easier to climb the rankings for this longer-tailed, more specific keyword, as there is less competition for this variation than for the general keyword “shoes.”
There is so much competition in the e-commerce sphere that digital marketing isn’t an optional item for companies anymore—it’s a requirement. E-commerce companies that neglect their search engine optimization services find themselves relying entirely on paid advertisements for conversion creation. Relying only on paid advertisement conversions isn’t a sustainable model as far as profitability goes. In the short term, paid ads will bring immediate traffic and revenue. Still, in five years, organic searches are significantly cheaper and longer-lasting.
At Logical Position, we employ experts in search engine optimization and offer packages tailored to e-commerce websites. Our packages include a dedicated team of account managers, graphic designers, content writers, analysts, and so many others. We handle your on-site optimization and maintain an informational and high-quality blog and backlinks from our vast network of publishing partners. Contact us today for more information and a free consultation on our local and national SEO services.
