Search Engine Optimisation for eCommerce Companies
If you run an e-commerce business, you know it is not all about the selling products to customers online. While this is without question an integral part of the company, you also face numerous business challenges every day. And one of the biggest difficulties is, of course, gaining new customers. You need to make it easy for customers to discover your online store.
There are several methods eCommerce companies can use to attract people to their websites. Popular methods include social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and search engine optimisation (SEO). These methods all have their pros and cons. For example, social media marketing and PPC will give you results right away because people will go to your website as soon as they see an ad for it online.
However, these options are costly and do not give you long-term benefits or results. New website visitors will only keep coming to your website as long as you keep paying for adverts. Conversely, search engine optimisation methods usually take a few months to start showing results. But, if you invest in SEO, your website’s positions in search results will improve and bring more organic traffic to the site. Furthermore, your website will keep these positions even if you choose to stop using SEO services in the future. This means you can continue getting free traffic indefinitely.
In regards to the long-term, investing in SEO services is a far superior option than paying vast sums of money for social media or PPC ads year after year. Plus, potential customers will trust you more if they find your website organically through search results rather than seeing an advert for your e-commerce goods and services.
But, the fundamental question is, can e-commerce companies genuinely attract new customers to their websites and businesses using SEO? The answer is a resounding yes. Below, we will show you just how successful your business can be if you employ an effective SEO strategy.
Search Demand for E-Commerce on Google
The above screenshot shows Google search data on the term ‘online shopping’. As we can see, people globally search for this term 622 thousand times a month on average! These searches occur in substantial figures across many countries around the world. Roughly 383 thousand of these searches occur in India, 34 thousand in the United States, 21 thousand in South Africa, and a little further down the list, 16 thousand in both Australia and the United Kingdom. This demonstrates that there is a significant number of people looking for e-commerce services in your country daily. Therefore, effective SEO can help you attract tens of thousands of visitors to your website every month. If you choose to hire an SEO company to promote your e-commerce business website in search results, you will be in good stead to get a high return on investment (ROIs) for years to come in the future, especially as social media and PPC ads are becoming increasingly expensive and competitive.
People Use Lots of Search Terms to Find E-Commerce
It is important to be aware that ‘online shopping’ and ‘online store’ are only a couple of possible keywords, and there are numerous other terms people might use when looking for e-commerce goods and services. One critical part of SEO is keyword research, during which experts examine search queries and work out which pages need to be created on the website and optimised for keyword usage to draw maximum traffic. Here is just a small number of examples of search queries people enter on Google when they require e-commerce services:
- ‘Online retail’
- ‘Secure online store’
- ‘Online shopping for…’ + requirement. For example, ‘online shopping for clothes’.
- ‘Online shopping for…’ + country. For instance, ‘online shopping for the UK’.
- Descriptions of delivery times, such as ‘online shopping fast delivery’.
- Descriptions of whether they wish to buy or sell. For example ‘where to sell my old CDs online’.
The screenshots below show the average monthly search volume for a range of e-commerce-related keywords. As you can see, there are millions of people searching for these keywords every month, meaning that a great SEO-optimised e-commerce website can draw thousands of free visitors each month purely by showing up for these keywords on Google.
Other E-Commerce Companies are Already Getting Results from SEO
Effective search engine optimisation can bring phenomenal results, helping websites show up higher in search results as well as potentially saving website owners thousands of dollars on advertising every month. But don’t just take our word for it! Below, we take a look at several examples of e-commerce websites that are enjoying an excellent return from their SEO efforts.
Our first example is www.ebuyer.com. Founded in 1999 in Sheffield, UK, Ebuyer is an electronic commerce retailer of electrical and computer goods. The website has 795 thousand average monthly visitors. These are people who visit the site after seeing it pop up in Google search results.
At the same time, the website’s average monthly traffic value is roughly $262,000. This amount shows how much money the owner of the website would need to spend every month to purchase an identical amount of traffic they get organically from contextual advertising systems such as PPC ads. Consequently, this means that the website’s owner can save over $260,000 every month because their website has fantastic positions in Google’s search results.
The image below presents which pages bring the most traffic to this website.
As we can see, the pages in this list above collect impressive traffic from a range of pages. An excellent SEO expert can analyse the pages currently on your website (as well as on competitor websites), optimise existing pages to help attract even more people, and create brand new pages that will collect as much organic search traffic as possible. Naturally, this is just one aspect of SEO work, and there are many other things SEO agencies do to promote and optimise websites.
You might be thinking it is hardly surprising to see impressive results with an older and well-established e-commerce website, but what about a newer and smaller company that provides tools for other online retailers rather than selling products themselves? Is SEO still a viable investment? Our screenshot below will demonstrate to you that it most certainly is.
Clearly, even for a smaller and newer website, the results are encouraging. Alloy Automation is a California based e-commerce business founded only in 2019. It is an e-commerce automation tool used by many top brands to automate all sorts of marketing and operations workflows.
Let’s consider how their website is doing at the moment. Alloy Automation attracts roughly 3.5 thousand organic website visitors each month and has a traffic value of approximately $900. It ranks highly on Google for many keywords and is attracting admirable traffic. This website gets $900 worth of free traffic from Google, meaning they can save this money that would otherwise have been spent on PPC ads.
The primary factor to bear in mind is that PPC ads involve basically buying traffic in exchange for money. So it follows that once you stop paying for these ads, you also stop getting traffic. But, with SEO, you will maintain your search positions and continue to get traffic even if you no longer use SEO services. By hiring an expert SEO agency and boosting the rankings of your website on Google, you can save money and keep your website’s traffic without having to spend money on advertising channels such as PPC.
Let’s now consider the pages that bring the most visitors to this website:
Some of the keywords that bring the majority of traffic to these pages include ‘eCommerce automation’, ‘Shopify buyer protection’, and ‘how to add a pop up on Shopify. This again shows that there is a substantial variety of keywords that your website can use to collect free organic traffic on Google whether you sell products to customers directly or create tools for other sellers. A qualified SEO agency can effectively create, optimise, and promote those pages, bringing further business to your company.
What Does an SEO Company Do?
While SEO is definitely a fantastic investment for e-commerce companies, achieving excellent results takes a lot of expertise, skill, and hard work. This is no exception for websites that provide services. Google maintains high standards to ensure that low-quality websites do not reach the highest positions in search results.
But, NUOPTIMA has been working with brands in various industries for many years, including the e-commerce industry. Our experts have a surplus of experience doing SEO for clients, including real estate, medical clinics, startups, SaaS, and, of course, e-commerce. Therefore, we know exactly what to do to get your website to appear on the first page of Google. Here are just a few things that we can do to improve your e-commerce company’s business rankings:
- Arrange link placements on reputable and relevant online retailer directories and databases.
- Create SEO-optimised content to help your website rank for more keywords on Google.
- Optimise existing pages to make sure they comply with Google’s best practices and rules.
- Create all the necessary pages to help your website in collecting as much organic traffic as possible.
Efficient search engine optimisation can bring brilliant results if done correctly and properly by qualified experts. At NUOPTIMA, we have a significant SEO team fit to bursting with expertise to help your website achieve great results. Book a free discovery call today with our professional team to explore how we can use SEO to get incredible results for both your website and your e-commerce business.
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