Why SEO is so crucial for E-commerce?

I am certain that you are familiar and have been using search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo for a long while…but as a customer, have you ever thought about what controls our search results? Is your result organic? Does each website just popped up because that is what you looking for? Google surprisingly has so much trust and broadly utilized in daily lives. Plus, it has influential power on the search results, particularly what information you see and what website you shop. One significant tool behind your search result is SEO.

On the other hand, let’s talk in “Business” perspective. If you are an E-commerce business owner, the action of popping up as a search result allow your potential customer to see and maybe click on your website. Anyhow, if your website does not show up at all…that is definitely going to hurt your sales.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which refers to “the art and science of persuading search engines to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.”
— Jason Barnard. It can organically contribute to the higher ranking of your website as a search result with related keywords on search engines for without monetary requirement or cost.

For easier understanding, It is basically about optimizing your website and online content, so that Google include your website in the top rank of the result whenever people search for specific keywords.

Why is SEO important for E-commerce business?

One of the most significant reason is that most of online traffic drives from the result of search engines, comparing to all of the paid advertisements and social media promotions. Furthermore, organic search result appears to be more credible in the eye of customers, create the sense of trustworthy, and has higher tendency to be clicked on, as the data shows that only less than 3% of the searchers clicked on the sponsored results. Plus, the first 5 results on Google get almost 70% of all clicks, which simply reflects the opportunity to gain bigger size of traffic potential customers.

Believe it or not, SEO can contribute to approximately 20 times more traffic to your website, that Pay Per Click (PPC) which is another way of using advertisement to drive traffic to the site and the advertising cost depends on how many clicks the advertisement received.

Even though, the conversion rate for E-commerce site is extremely low…I don’t want to scare you but it is only 2%, the more traffic brought to the site leads to the bigger number of website visitors who are converted to customers. And thus, contributed to the higher sales.

If you are curious about how can you start doing SEO, check Google SEO starter guide.

Since SEO is very significant for your business, here are some key requirements that can effectively help increasing sales on E-commerce site.

1. Make sure that your keyword strategy is well thought out.
   Since keywords are the most important variables of SEO, it is a must to ensure the use of right keywords. By the fact that it determines the success of your site. There are beneficial tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner that can guide you what are the most popular keywords to use for your site.
2. Create trustworthy content.
   Because of the fact that content is what you use to communicate and persuade your visitors to become customers, it is crucial that your content has to be original. While, misleading and overstatement content has to be avoided, in order to retain and sustain relationship with customers in long term.
3. Use high definition product images.
   By the reason that product photos are one of the main factors that lead to customer’s purchase attention, having high resolution photos is more convincing and letting customer see all of the details of the product.
4. Be present and connect to your customers through social media platform.
   Even though, social media would not drive that much traffic, compared to search engine, social media can be utilized as a channel to engage and interact with customers. In order to exist in the minds of customers, being in the place where they are is very important.
5. Stay up-to-date with your competitors’ SEO strategy.
   There are opportunities for you to learn what works and what does not about SEO from you competitors. Additionally, having website visitors from a search engine page does not depend on your SEO strategy alone, but you competitors, too.
6. Utilize practical URLs.
   As URLs contain letters, having a keyword-friendly ones are more beneficial to the site. By the reason that it facilitates customers to know what they are about to see after they clicked the link. Thus, the URLs should be created specifically for each page, and have the right keywords in it.