SEO for e-commerce is a must-use technique for generating organic traffic to your site. Let’s start by going over a few key factors:
What is an E-commerce?
An E-Commerce is a business model where you buy and sell goods online. E-Commerces use the internet instead of (or in addition to) a physical location potential customers can visit. This system is not new; people have been shopping online for years now (decades, actually). However, it has become a mainstream way to conduct business in recent years. The 2020 pandemic has had much to do with the surge in e-commerce. Now, shopping online is here to stay!
Many of us prefer to shop at our favorite online stores without leaving the house. The love for e-commerce shopping opens new opportunities for entrepreneurs on the daily. Business owners can now offer their products to a broad, international online audience. Some choose to sell their products, and others have opted to become resellers for foreign and local manufacturing brands. The model became known as dropshipping and has grown to be very popular. This is mainly because it frees the business owner from having to purchase or store stock. Drop shipping has many benefits and generates revenue for families across the world. In the U.S., dropshipping stores that work with U.S. suppliers have played a crucial role in the reactivation of the national economy (more on that here).
E-commerce stores pose many benefits. Stores are available 24/7and easily accessible. You can access online stores from all over the world from the comfort of your home.
Increasing E-Commerce Sales:
The fact that the e-commerce business has grown so much in the past years does not exclude the system from using marketing techniques to seek further growth, like in any other business model.
The techniques that e-commerce store owners select to increase their sales are usually limited to the following three marketing efforts:
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising:
For this online advertising method, the business owner pays every time an advertisement is “clicked” on by a potential customer. There is a cost per click, regardless of whether the click results in an actual purchase. The companies that work with this advertising model are search engines and social media networks. Google Ads is the most common network for PPC advertising campaigns today.
This method works primarily using targeted and long-tail keywords. Search queries that are longer than single keywords are called long-tail keywords and tend to have higher conversion rates. If a potential customer types in a specific keyword or long-tail keyword into the search engine, the advertisement, or sponsored link, will appear. This makes marketing efforts extremely efficient because the ad is only visible to a person actively searching for information regarding a relevant keyword. The targeted traffic means your brand has more exposure and visibility among individuals likely to relate to it.
This advertising model has a high (ROAS) Return on ad spend. However, an effective PPC campaign takes time, focus, skill (and a budget).
The landing pages the advertisement leads to must also be optimized in a way that is easy to navigate, has a clear message, and facilitates conversions. Having star ratings displayed is also a good idea to prolong the time a potential customer will spend on an e-commerce store website. All of these factors are constantly working to improve the user experience for a potential customer.
E-Mail Marketing:
Nowadays, a business’s mailing list is one of its most important assets. A company that proactively reaches out to its customer base via email opens opportunities for retargeting existing customers and bringing in new ones. This strategy requires great care to ensure the messages sent are not considered spam by the target audience. Most spam flags happen due to the overbearing frequency of sent emails or bland, unengaging content (that none of us want to receive).
Email marketing has been around for a long time because it has proven effectivity. The fact is that email is still one of the top ways for brands to communicate with their audiences.
Companies that showcase authenticity and provide valuable content to customers are better at relating to them in a way that sparks interest and gains a loyal following. Email marketing enables business owners to nurture their client base and improve conversion rates.
This direct marketing type aims to convince a mailing list to take a specific action. This can include signing up for a trial, booking a demo call, purchasing, or registering for an upcoming event.
Email marketing campaigns stay fresh and relevant using different tactics. By continuing the effort to expand their mailing lists, companies stay ahead of the game. One way to do this is by generating lead magnets. These refer to items business owners give away for free (like downloadable templates, e-books, discount codes, or webinars) in exchange for an email address that is added to their database.
Once a business owner has a hefty mailing list, segmenting it to achieve maximum effectiveness is also helpful. This means the list will be divided into smaller groups based on specific qualities or criteria that will make the campaigns more relevant and personalized.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
Social Media platforms have gained almost unbelievable growth levels in the past years. Most internet users have at least one social media platform profile. Buying decisions are significantly influenced by information available to the public via social media. A digital report published by Business Wire stated that social media users make up about 58% of the world’s population.
These numbers make social media a perfect vehicle for e-commerce owners to use when advertising their businesses. The main goal is to engage with existing customers while still managing to capture new ones.
Social Media allows business owners to share engaging content that will help them connect with their customer base. It is also an enormous source of information containing details on potential customers’ behaviors, preferences, and personal data. That is what allows SMM campaigns to be targeted in practical ways.
Social Media Marketing techniques can vary from paying ads to the social media providers to generating what is considered “sticky content.” This type of content is highly engaging and shareable. This strategy allows a brand to amass purchasing customers who endorse their products or services and recommend them to personal networks.
All the marketing strategies above aim to generate more traffic to an e-commerce website and need the business owner to pay for the campaigns to increase visitor traffic flow.
Organic Traffic, the hidden gem for e-commerce:
However, what if we told you there is a kind of traffic that is not paid for at all? What if we also said that this traffic is carefully curated to target visitors specifically interested in what you offer? This hidden gem exists, and it is called Organic Traffic.
Some of the main benefits of organic traffic are—highly engaged customers, increased loyalty towards the brand, highly qualified leads, and excellent conversion rates. Social media and SERPs (search engine result pages) are today’s most significant organic traffic sources.
You need to get to work if your goal is to increase organic traffic to your e-commerce website. Initially, your content should be built (or updated) with the search engines in mind. This way, when a potential customer looks for a specific keyword and a list of results is displayed, your page appears among those results (ideally on the first page). Over 95% of researchers end up clicking on the articles on the first page of the search results (source).
Usually, the first results that appear on search engines are paid ads that follow the business model we explained earlier (PPC Campaigns). Then, below those sponsored results, you have the rest of the results that appear there by ranking organically. The higher a website ranks for a keyword, the more organic traffic it gets.
Compared to any other kind of traffic, Organic Traffic is by far the most valuable resource to any business or e-commerce.
SEO for E-Commerce:
To generate organic traffic to an e-commerce site, you need a digital marketing strategy that focuses specifically on this; in other words, you need a plan.
There are many steps to ensure your e-commerce store jumps on the Organic Traffic wagon.
Here are ten examples of steps you can start taking today:
- Create valuable, engaging content for your website and social media.
- Work on website loading speed and hassle-free navigation and checkout processes.
- Make sure your site is mobile and tablet-friendly.
- Form significant alliances to start working on getting backlinks to your site.
- Focus on content marketing.
- Make sure you have high-quality meta descriptions and product descriptions.
- Write Blog Posts.
- Use internal links on your website.
- Use Title tags on your e-commerce store products.
- Create eye-catching and easy-to-navigate category pages.
However, if you are in this for the long run (as you should be!), an SEO strategy is the most important thing you need to focus on to work towards your organic traffic goal as an e-commerce store owner. SEO is estimated to generate over 1000% more traffic than social media! (source).
What is SEO for e-commerce:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and It works by targeting specific keywords and later creating content for them. This is done to bring more traffic to your website.
It is essential to remember that not all traffic is good traffic that will result in conversions (which is what all e-commerce owners want, more sales). An effective SEO strategy will focus on getting potential customers to your website by targeting keywords related to your niche and product offering. If you are the owner of an e-commerce store that sells toys, you will only benefit a little from getting a bunch of traffic from single college students, for example. You need visitors who are interested in purchasing what you offer.
This means that regardless of the number of visitors, you need to focus on the number of conversions and how much time potential customers spend on your website. A High-quality SEO strategy will match a user’s search on an engine to the content on your e-commerce site and capture his attention enough to get him to make a purchase.
How does SEO differ from other E-commerce marketing strategies?
SEO is different from any other marketing technique because rather than going out and creating a custom message or ad for your customers to consume, SEO is a way to invite them to come into your world only after they have requested access (by typing in the keyword(s) the campaign is focused on).
The fact that the first approach is different from traditional advertising methods makes it so that the customer has an initial impression of you that is full of curiosity and intent rather than annoyance. After all, the customer went online by their initiative to search for a specific term; you just happened to be there to provide the exact information they needed, precisely when they needed it.
To sum it up, when it comes to modern-day marketing, regardless of the size of your advertising budget, if your website is not showing up as a result on the first page of Google, that money will probably not have a high return when it comes to an increase in sales. This is why a solid SEO strategy will ensure that your e-commerce withstands the test of time and is ready for the coming trends of the online shopping industry.
Why your e-commerce needs an SEO expert:
Search Engine Optimization has become a popular term over the years, and many businesses have started implementing SEO strategies as a part of their marketing efforts. However, the e-commerce industry needs to catch up to join the movement. As we mentioned earlier, traditional e-commerce marketing tends to rely mostly on paid marketing efforts. Nonetheless, these techniques have ever-increasing costs and are less reliable than they used to be.
An excellent SEO strategy is not something you can improvise. A comprehensive set of technical skills and know-how is needed to develop and implement a strategy focusing on SEO’s four aspects. On-site SEO, Off-Site SEO, Technical SEO, and Local SEO.
Where to find an E-commerce SEO expert?
John Murphy is the founder of the ECOM SEO formula. He is an Irish entrepreneur, Forbes-published author, and successful e-commerce owner. He created the 7-figure revenue-generating store: eBikeGeneration.com. The difference between him and the other drop shippers and e-commerce owners is that most of his website traffic and sales originate from organic traffic through SEO. After he started applying SEO strategies to his e-commerce, the store only needed a few years to go from a few thousand dollars in revenue to over 3 million dollars.
An e-commerce’s nightmare:
When John first launched his e-commerce, he made the same mistake many others made. He solely relied on paid traffic sources (which, as we mentioned, keep increasing their prices). In hindsight, he now compares this strategy to owning a one-legged stool. In his words, it is a lot better for your business to have more legs under the stool in case one leg gets taken away from you (which is precisely what happened to him).
John Murphy relied solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic for his store. Suddenly, both platforms decided he had violated one of their many policies and banned him from advertising on their sites. This is one of the biggest fears for many e-commerce store owners. If Google or Facebook decide that you violated one or several of their policies, all your traffic decreases, and you might even end up out of business. After all, how can you sell what you offer? If there is no one visiting your website?
This desperation is what led him to go down the SEO rabbit hole in hopes of finding a way of generating organic traffic to his eCommerce site. This allowed him to create free traffic and brought hope to his store. He then focused on developing valuable information for his readers and providing them with helpful resources aligned with the products he carried.
He started publishing content in February 2019, and in 2020 he generated over $2 million in sales from the organic traffic strategies he implemented. John understands that had he not started implementing an SEO strategy, he would now be out of business instead of the successful businessman he is.
ECOM SEO FORMULA.
John Murphy’s experience and the knowledge he amassed while implementing his strategies led him to create the ECOM SEO FORMULA course. He focuses on teaching valuable strategies that produce long-lasting results in the course. We took it, and we are so happy we did!
His advice for fellow e-commerce owners is not to wait until they are having trouble with their paid marketing strategies to start implementing SEO on their sites (which is precisely what we just started doing).
If you are looking for a sign to start implementing this strategy on your e-commerce site, this is it. You might need help deciding what kind of content you should create; his advice is to focus on your niche and the most frequent questions you receive. That way, you can become an industry leader that is a go-to place for valuable content and helpful answers. This will earn your client’s trust and preference.
The important thing is to make sure you start writing content! By doing this, you will not only be future-proofing your business by implementing a long-term traffic and customer acquisition strategy, but you are also doing so in a cost-effective way that does not pose a risk of being banned.
Implementing the SEO strategies learned through a course like ECOM SEO Formula will teach you how to get organic traffic to your site. This means that you will spend less money attracting potential customers to your site, have higher profit margins, and be able to focus on providing more discounts and increasing the monthly sales you receive.
Take his course!
The Ecom SEO Formula course is an incredible tool that will allow you to focus on SEO and content marketing. As we mentioned, SEO strategies require technical skills, creativity for developing engaging content, strategic planning, and the right strategy. John’s course is the best place to learn all of that. This strategy for building an affiliate army is a little snippet of what you will learn during his course.
Remember that a good SEO strategy is a long-term plan, and results take time to be evident. Any course or teacher promising specific timelines or results is probably not someone you should trust. John’s lessons during the course are clear, easy to understand, full of valuable content, and detailed.
You will get immediate access via email when you purchase the ECOM SEO FORMULA course. This means you can log in and start learning in minutes!
Let us know your thoughts on increasing organic traffic to your e-commerce website and what has worked for you. We would love to connect!
0 Comments