Why SEO is so beneficial for any eCommerce business

The eCommerce industry has seen some exciting changes in 2018 and has provided some great prospects looking forward. Electronic commerce refers to the commercial transactions carried out over electronic networks, predominantly the internet. What’s so great about it at this point in time?

Why SEO is essential for any eCommerce business

Here are some of the top reasons eCommerce is becoming so prevalent:

  1. Less costs and time
  2. Growing availability of digital payment methods – especially in mobile format
  3. Growing artificial intelligence technologies
  4. More efficient logistics – and easier than ever to track a purchase
  5. Improved search engine visibility

Now, this last one is arguably the most important. As with any store, an online eCommerce store must first and foremost build brand awareness. Google gets millions of  search queries on the daily, and an enormous amount of traffic. The problem is, there are also millions of web pages out there all competing for a spot in the first page of results. Because let’s be honest, how often do you go past this?

SEO marketing, or optimizing your webpage for Google rankings, has also continued to grow in popularity over the last 12 months. It’s all about choosing and refining the right strategies to increase the visibility of your website on search engines.

In addition to the basics of bringing in more traffic and with it an increased revenue, there are a list of other reasons why SEO is essential for any eCommerce business that you may not know about. Let’s take a look at some of them.

More budget-friendly ads

Why SEO is essential for any eCommerce business

Digital marketing and SEO strategies cost significantly less than traditional marketing. Online content is super easy to create, as is keyword research, and excluding paid Google ads, is free to share across web pages, blogs, and social media channels.

However traditional marketing means such as television, radio or newspaper can quickly become very costly. If you invest the same amount you would spend on these into SEO, you’ll go far in the online world.

Long term cost-effectiveness

SEO has a relatively low expense to get the ball rolling. With this you can quickly attract  a lot of internet users, and increase the portion of long-term customers you would have,  and yes, build brand awareness.

From here, you can continue optimizing pages and producing quality content for your eCommerce store, generate more e-word-of-mouth, increase sales, and attract even more loyal customers.

The long term ROI of SEO far outweighs initial investments, and far outweighs the returns of traditional marketing.

Fully engage with your audience

Why SEO is so beneficial for any eCommerce business

The era of read-only material on the internet is slowly becoming bygone. We’re now in a time where it’s expected by all parties involved that there is one or more ways to to respond to the stuff we see online.

For example, we may leave comments or reviews about a product, service, or piece of content. We could do this on the site itself, on social media or even in vlogs on platforms like YouTube.

It’s a two-way street and customers can now interact with sellers to gain more information. In fact, a recent study has found that 57% of customers surveyed prefer to have the option of receiving instant answers for their queries. This is why we’ve seen an explosion of chatbots across eCommerce sites over 2018.

In line with this, a big part of SEO research involves close observation of the interaction between users and the content, including:

  • Click-through-rates – how many are clicking on your listing on Google results?
  • Time spent on page

It’s easier than ever to record, monitor, and respond to data. Researching and refining  your SEO techniques is cornerstone to engaging in this two-way interaction street.