As per consumer insights by Google, there has been a 30% increase in product-related search queries as of September 2023. This shows that more people are looking for detailed product information, such as reviews and specifications, to understand their possible experience with a product before making a purchase.
For ecommerce sites, this means prioritizing ecommerce SEO to ensure it appears higher in search engines. An optimized website is more likely to attract these research-focused consumers who tend to stay on the first page of search results. But why exactly should you invest in ecommerce SEO? Read on to know the benefits of ecommerce SEO.
What is Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization?
Ecommerce search engine optimization (or ecommerce SEO) involves optimizing an online store to improve its visibility in search engine results. This mainly includes enhancing the website structure, improving the crawling and indexing of the website, publishing high-quality content, building website authority, and using relevant keywords on the website to gain organic traffic from search engines.
The goal is to rank higher in search results for queries related to a specific product or category. This benefits an ecommerce business with an increase in organic traffic, leading to more visitors and sales without paying for ads.
Benefits of Ecommerce SEO for Your Business
The benefits of ecommerce SEO for your business can be multi-faceted, but how exactly can it help your ecommerce business? Let’s look at some key reasons you should invest in ecommerce SEO!
1. More Organic Traffic and Sales
According to Google, around 51% of customers research their potential purchases using Google before buying. Ecommerce SEO can help you capture this audience and organically drive them to your website to convert into paid customers. With keyword research, you can identify what these potential customers are looking for and optimize your website accordingly. This can be improving product descriptions to match their taste, creating engaging content, and ensuring fast page load times on your site.
We at Zestard adopted a similar optimization strategy to help one of our ecommerce clients in the home improvement space achieve 5x organic traffic and a 9x increase in revenue. The revenue increased from £12,673 to £99,916 per month through Ecommerce SEO Services.
2. Increased Brand Awareness
When your website consistently ranks high in search engine results for relevant keywords, you reap many benefits of ecommerce SEO as more potential customers discover your brand. This repeated visibility strengthens your brand’s position in the minds of potential customers, which makes them more likely to remember and trust your business.
Optimized content plays a crucial role here as it provides valuable information that answers the queries of your target audience and makes your site a go-to resource. Word-of-mouth becomes easier in such scenarios as valuable content tends to be shared more on social media.
This gets more people talking about how helpful your content is – further amplifying your brand’s reach without additional costs.
3. Audience Research
When your online store is SEO-optimized, you better understand what customers look for when they search online. By optimizing your website with relevant keywords, you can see which ones bring the most visitors and sales.
This data tells you what products or services your target audience is interested in, helping you better meet their needs with tailored marketing strategies for better ranking in search engines. In essence, ecommerce SEO enables you to learn more about your audience to serve them better and boost your business.
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Give Zestard a try to improve your brand’s online presence and fulfil all your digital marketing needs.
4. Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost
Ecommerce companies often start their marketing using Performance Marketing [Google Ads & Facebook Ads]. They do it since it helps them get traffic and sales a bit faster compared to a marketing channel like SEO. The problem starts when they continue to rely only on performance marketing and do not diversify their marketing channels.
We all know that Google Ads & Meta Ads are auction-driven platforms, i.e. the one who bids the highest gets the highest click. And hence, in an auction-driven system, it is very obvious that your CPC [Cost Per Click] and CAC [Customer Acquisition Cost] are going to rise year after year.
Your CPC and CAC are never going to come down.
So, if you want to build a sustainable ecommerce business, it’s very important that you invest in a marketing channel like SEO, such that it helps you bring down your Customer Acquisition Cost.
SEO is a marketing channel known for a lower CAC mainly because once you start ranking for a set of keywords, you more or less rank there for a long period of time, resulting in free traffic from search engines.
Here’s an example of how SEO can bring down your CAC:
| No | Marketing Channel | CAC |
| 1 | Performance Marketing | $350 |
| 2 | SEO | $80 |
| 3 | Average CAC | $215 |
As you can see the average CAC was brought down by almost 35% by investing into SEO.
This reduction in CAC, can help you build a long-term sustainable business.
5. Higher Conversion Rate
SEO traffic often converts better than social media or paid ads. This is because it connects with people who are actively searching for something specific – whether that’s information, a product, or a service.
When someone comes across your website through a search engine like Google, they’re somehow already interested in what you offer. How? They have put in time and effort in searching for it, which indicates they are more likely to take action.
On the other hand, with social media or paid ads, people might just randomly stumble upon your content while scrolling (even when they don’t have any intention to buy).
In short, SEO brings in people who are not simply browsing, but are actively looking to solve their problems. So, when you focus on e-commerce search engine optimization, there are better chances of converting your potential customers.
6. Better Visibility and Credibility Using Local SEO
If you have a local ecommerce or retail store, using local SEO can make your site more visible in local search results. This increased visibility not only attracts more local customers but also improves credibility within your area and positions your business as a trustworthy local option.
Local SEO improves your website’s visibility in rankings by ensuring that it meets the exact criteria search engines look for in local searches. For that, you need to optimize your website for local keywords, create location-specific content, and list your business on local directories & Google My Business.
For example, the above search result shows how local businesses can appear among the top results with the right local SEO strategy.
In the above example – “Proper Cloth” has an offline store and an online ecommerce website. Their website may not have appeared for the keyword “buy shirts near me” but because they invested in Local SEO, their Google Business Listing appeared.
So if you are ecommerce business that also sells offline, it’s important that you invest in local SEO so that your business is visible when local people are searching for your products.
7. Cost-Effective than PPC in the Long Run
One of the benefits of e-commerce SEO is its cost-effectiveness compared to the pay-per-click model in the long run. On average, PPC costs increase over time due to competition and bidding wars for target keywords.
According to a study by WordStream, the average cost per click for Google Ads in the ecommerce industry is $2.49. This ongoing cost can accumulate quickly, especially for competitive target keywords, making SEO (which doesn’t incur per-click costs) more effective than PPC in the long run.
SEO focuses on organic results in search engines, which means once your web pages rank well, you can attract consistent organic traffic without paying for each click. With PPC, where costs accrue for clicks by the targeted traffic.
8. Long Term Benefits
Unlike paid ads that provide results only while you’re paying for them, SEO results are long-lasting.
If your content delivers actual value to the users, and you:
- Optimize it with the right keywords,
- Use internal links strategically, and
- Focus on all other elements of SEO (such as meta details & alt text),
it will continue to reward you for years.
As long as you consistently put in the effort to improve the SEO, your site will rank higher in the organic search engine rankings over time. As it gains authority and visibility through these efforts, you will attract visitors and potential customers who trust organic search results over paid ads.
This cumulative effect of SEO investments means that the benefits compound over time, which generates sustainable growth and reduces your dependence on costly advertising campaigns that cannot match the authenticity of organic efforts.
One of our ecommerce clients saw 5x more organic traffic and 8x more revenue with our consistent SEO efforts without spending a dime on paid ads. The approach was simple – we started by identifying core technical issues to organically increase traffic, added unique content on category pages & blogs, and built high-quality backlinks for better organic visibility.
Discover here – “7 Best Link Building Companies in 2024”
9. Better User Experience
Search engine optimization is not just about pleasing search engines with keyword research but creating a seamless, enjoyable experience for your visitors. When your website is optimized for search engine results, it loads faster, is easier to navigate, and provides relevant content, making shopping a breeze for your customers.
Core Web Vitals, an essential component of technical SEO, helps measure crucial aspects of this user experience. This typically includes how fast your category pages load, how quickly your site responds to user actions, and how stable your page layout is as it loads.
To further enhance user experience, incorporating structured data and schema markup into your ecommerce SEO strategies can provide precise information to search engines. This ensures that your product details, reviews, and other details appear correctly in search results, making it easy for the users to find the information they need.
When people directly see accurate and detailed information in search results, their interaction with your ecommerce business website will likely be positive.
Google Search Console is another vital tool that can improve user experience through e-commerce SEO. By monitoring your website’s performance, you can identify issues affecting your site’s usability and take corrective actions to improve it.
Google Analytics can help by analyzing user behavior to determine which web pages are performing well and which need improvement.
10. Effective Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing is a powerful SEO strategy that has proven to garner a 147% higher conversion rate than regular paid ads. Suppose your ecommerce SEO efforts successfully make a spot for your site in search engine rankings for a specific product.
People who click on it but don’t make a purchase can be added to a remarketing list, which you can use to serve personalized ads showcasing the same product or a similar one to remind them of their initial interest.
This targeted approach leverages their existing interest and increases the likelihood of conversion, which makes your advertising spend more efficient.
For example, Webflow often uses remarketing, where users who previously visited the website and viewed specific products are targeted with personalized ads. Using cookies to track their browsing behavior, Webflow can display relevant products the user showed interest in when visiting other websites. This ad features a product image and a call to action, encouraging the users to revisit Webflow’s website and complete their action.
Conclusion
You need a well-implemented SEO strategy to grow the online presence of your ecommerce store. Whether you want to target local customers or cater to a global audience, your ecommerce website will always need an SEO strategy that delivers practical results beyond mere driving traffic.
It ensures your product listings are optimized, and the user experience is top-notch – amplifying sales conversions. So, make sure you embrace the benefits of SEO for ecommerce as a strategic investment to propel your online business toward sustained success and profitability.
If you’re ready to take your ecommerce store to the next level, we offer a range of Organic SEO Services designed to increase your organic traffic and sales. From keyword research to on-page SEO optimization, our team of experts will work with you to create a customized SEO strategy that gets results. Contact Zestard today for a free consultation and see how we can help your ecommerce business thrive.
