SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is a collection of practices that make a website more attractive to search engines.
In other words, when you go into Google (News - Alert) and search for something, the organic listings that populate the results pages (not the ads) can be said to have “good” SEO.
In other words, whoever runs those websites is effectively putting SEO best practices into action.
Now, for those of you familiar with SEO, don’t hold your breath. Someone is going to come out in the New Year and say that SEO is dead.
That’s just hype, though, intended to attract attention and generate clicks. Those familiar with this digital marketing channel know that it remains one of the most lucrative if not the most lucrative digital marketing channels of all.
With that, let’s dive into 7 reasons why your business should invest in eCommerce SEO services in 2024.
Organic Search Still Makes the World Go ‘Round
TikTok and ChatGPT are getting a lot of press time (and not all of it is good). TikTok has seen a meteoric rise over the past few years, and the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has had some digital marketers quick to announce a new era.
Still, even in this era, organic search, through search engines like Google, still drives more than 10 times as much traffic as social media, and that’s combined, not just TikTok.
As for ChatGPT, it has its uses, but it’s like as not to give a poorly informed or downright false answer to a question - not to suggest that Google won’t, all models have their limitations - but it still has a lot of kinks to work out.
Besides, while you can buy through social media platforms, you can’t buy directly through an AI model. Not yet, anyway.
At any rate, the point is that Google is still the top contender when it comes to serving up information, whether that information is transactional or not.
Moreover, Google is the most visited website (search engine) in the world, with most people accessing it at least once per day, if not more.
It remains the top channel for organic marketing, and that means SEO.
SEO Helps Build a Better User Experience
Arguably, the two biggest components of SEO are keyword strategy and content.
Keyword strategy revolves around which keywords you choose to target. Targeting commercial and transactional keywords means you’re trying to optimize a website for search terms that users commit when they want to make a purchase.
With respect to content, the whole crux of SEO is answering a question. Users are looking for answers, and in some cases, searching to buy products, and that’s what SEO is all about .
If you optimize your website for keywords that users are searching for when they want to buy products like yours (or even your exact products) as well as publishing information that’s relative to the customer journey, that’s textbook quality eCommerce SEO.
It also produces a much superior user experience, which in turn increases brand awareness. Moreover, publishing quality, informative content will result in an increase in credibility amongst potential customers in your target market, which corresponds to increases in expertise and authority.
SEO Has One of the (If Not the) Highest Close Rate of All Digital Marketing Channels
Another great thing about eCommerce SEO is that it has one of the highest ROI scores, as well as close rates, among all digital marketing channels.
Consider this: you know those paid ads you see at the tops of the search engine results pages? The average click-through rate for those things is like 2%, if that.
A good conversion rate for paid ads is about 10%, but that’s just an estimate.
Now let’s talk about SEO. The average page one, spot one result (organic) has a click through rate of nearly 40%, about 20 times higher than the average for paid ads.
On top of that, leads that originated organically (that is, through SEO) have a close rate of 15% or so. That’s 5% higher and a 50% increase from the figures for PPC.
These reasons are some of the contributing factors that convince the overwhelming majority of digital marketers that SEO remains the most effective digital marketing channel of all.
SEO Diminishes Your Reliance on Paid (News - Alert) Advertising
Let’s talk about some plain figures. Refer back to the fact that PPC ads get about a 2% CTR and roughly 10% close rates, on average.
Here’s a much more humbling statistic. According to WordStream, as many as 94% of online users will scroll right past the ads at the top of the search results - intentionally.
Which means, if you’re getting a 2% CTR, you might be getting it from just 6% of the market. To put that in perspective, 2% of 6% of the whole market is just .1% of the whole market.
You know what’s worse than this? The second you stop PPC advertising, if your website doesn’t have good organic rankings, traffic will fall through the floor.
Now, if you had an organic SEO hedge, then if you suddenly didn’t have the budget for PPC, traffic might drop off, but not as dramatically.
The other thing is, no matter how long you run PPC, as soon as you stop, it’s as if there was never a campaign running in the first place.
SEO is not like this. If you stop SEO efforts today, you’ll reap the rewards long down the line, and efforts are cumulative.
Think of PPC as steroids and SEO as working out. One is earned, and results in overall superior health and wellness, and the other is not.
So, you can keep shelling out money for PPC, or you can invest in SEO, which usually offers a higher ROI anyway. You decide.
SEO Is a Long Term Strategy
A good case has already been made for the actual monetary value of SEO, but there’s another reason to get started with it now.
It takes a long time to work, in some cases, years. Domain authority and high organic rankings are never earned easily. It takes a lot of cumulative effort, and unfortunately, a lot of time.
That’s the case even for established behemoths like Amazon and Wikipedia. Even they started small, and they’ve been around a long time.
The best time your website could have started SEO efforts was, say, in 2010. But that’s not possible now and hindsight is 20/20. The best thing you can do is not let any more time pass the present.
Active SEO Efforts Help Your Business Attract More Qualified Leads
Did you know that all keywords have an intent behind them?
There are four broad categories of search intent, which are informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional, but we’ll just take a look at two: informational and transactional.
Informational intent is relatively self explanatory. If I type in “what are the benefits of SEO?” in Google, I’m going to click on a link that seems to have the answer, read it, close the tab, and be on my merry way.
Or, I could type in “books for sale.” In this case, my intent is more transactional, because I want to buy books - that much should be evident from the query.
However, in the realm of keyword research, things are much more nuanced. Some keywords that sound informational are in fact transactional and vice versa. This makes keyword research a bit tricky without a good deal of experience.
Here’s the kicker: eCommerce SEO experts use tools that tell them about search intent, as well as about volume and difficulty scores.
They can see what keywords make sense to target for your website, and which don’t.
Which means, with a solid SEO strategy, you won’t just attract more leads. You’ll attract more leads that are actually interested in whatever it is that you’re selling.And that’s what pays the bills.
Results Actually Are Quantifiable
It’s likely that one of the things that keeps more online entrepreneurs from investing in eCommerce SEO is that they don’t really understand how it works, or its value.
After that, they’re probably suspicious that results are not easily quantifiable. While there is some truth in this, and SEO is not as quantifiable as other channels like pay-per-click, a savvy marketer can still make sense of the numbers for you.
If you’re working on an SEO campaign that actively targets a set of keywords, and the URLs you target in association with those keywords see a sharp rise in traffic and conversions, well, there’s the proof in the pudding.
Sure, you can’t directly see that your optimization efforts made those changes, but there’s no other explanation.
On top of that, you can actively track increases in organic impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average position, sessions, time on page, pages per session, and conversion value through either Google Search Console or Google Analytics, without the need for any special proprietary tools.
All of these can be traced and filtered by time to see where changes were made and what effects those optimizations had, and some digital marketers may even use proprietary tools that capture more specific data, such as ranking increases for specific target keywords.
So, you actually can track the success of eCommerce SEO efforts.
The Time to Invest in eCommerce SEO Is Now
If you take one thing away from this post, make it this: if you’ve been kicking around the idea of investing in eCommerce SEO, it’s probably worth it as long as you partner with a qualified expert with a background in setting strategy.
Implemented following a good strategy and pursuant to established white hat techniques, the investment is likely to pay itself off eventually.
