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5 Reasons Why E-Commerce Brands Should Invest In SEO

A woman is using a laptop for marketing with Google, specifically for DTC on Shopify.

Do you want more people to know about your online store?

Are you looking for additional ways to generate revenue for your e-commerce brand?

Both questions can be answered by search engine optimization (SEO).

The beauty of this strategy is that it doesn't matter if you're starting your online store. When executed correctly, you can engage with highly qualified leads and turn them into customers of your brand!

To fully understand how SEO can achieve these, below are reasons why this marketing technique is a no-brainer for your e-commerce store.

1. Helps Customers Find You Easier on Search Engines

In a nutshell, SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a website within Google search results.

Below is a general overview of its steps:

  • Keyword Research – Finding search terms related to your store's industry that people are searching for on Google 
  • On-Page SEO – Improving a page's search visibility by optimizing its content, tags, and internal links for its target keyword.
  • Content Creation – Producing content for your site that is optimized around the keywords you just found while doing your keyword research.
  • Link Building – Also known as off-page SEO, involves finding link prospects and reaching out to them to gain a backlink from their site to yours. This consists of using various link-building techniques such as guest posting, broken links, and more.

Don't let these steps fool you, however. They may look easy on the surface, but getting to the nitty gritty of each task can contact complicated, as they require you to have a good grasp of your audience and business.

That said, you can consistently get lots of organic traffic from search engines just by these steps alone.

My company Clickslice has followed the same Ecommerce SEO process above to rank e-commerce websites at the top of Google search, resulting in increased visibility, organic traffic, and sales.

Each client that comes to us presents unique SEO problems with their website—but knowing how to identify issues that need to be addressed using the same process allowed us to turn their organic traffic for the better.

2. Increased Conversion Rates

As an e-commerce site owner, you must know why people search for your keywords on Google. 

Knowing the answer to this question lets you produce the best possible content on your site for users.

To do this, you need to be aware of keyword intent, of which there are four:

  • Informational – These keywords are looking for an answer to a question. They usually start with “why,” “how,” “what,” and others.
  • Navigational – They help users find a specific page on a brand's site. For example, “Shopify login, “Shopify pricing,” and others.
  • Commercial – People who search for these keywords are looking to buy something. Examples include queries with words like “coupons,” “deals,” “buy,” and others.
  • Transactional – Mixes commercial and informational intent in a search term. These keywords contain words like “review,” “best,” and “vs.” in them.

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By referring to these intent types, you can create content that best matches the keyword you're optimizing for your site.

If the keyword is “best pc gaming keyboards,” you shouldn't discuss gaming keywords and why they're essential in your content. The fact that users are searching for the best keyboards means they already know what they are and why they need one.

Instead, you should list the best gaming keyboards f this type on your page and describe what makes them great. 

Keeping your content in line with your keyword's intent keeps your visitors from leaving because you provided them with the correct information and can also turn them into customers much faster.

3. Better Brand Visibility and Recognition

Search engines are one of the many ways you can drive traffic to your e-commerce site. However, it's the only channel that allows you to exponentially increase your brand visibility and generate as much traffic as possible.

You must create lots of content on your site, each optimized for your researched keywords. 

You increase your site's topical authority (sometimes referred to as topical relevance), determined by the volume of high-quality content your website has produced about your industry.

The more high-quality content you can produce, the better your search rankings become.

To do this, you need to find as many search queries about your topic as possible. You can start by looking at the People Also Ask (PAA) section on Google SERPs for your topic keyword. 

You can expand your search using long-tail keyword research tools like SearchResponse.io and Answer The Public. They help you find hidden keywords that allow you to cover the site's topic in depth.

From here, you should have a keyword list to optimize your site and help you achieve topical authority.

You have to be smart with your approach when it comes to content creation. For instance, producing content for each keyword you want to optimize on your online store is not cost-efficient, especially if you have thousands of search queries in your list.

Instead, target and rank multiple identical keywords for a single page, an often-ignored tactic that helped my agency rank Shopify websites at the top of Google.

Our team researched relevant keywords we plan to rank for our client store. Then we clustered similar keywords to optimize them together for a single page. 

Aiming for multiple keywords on each page allows you to maximize their traffic potential and get more eyeballs to your store.

4. Improved User Experience

Part of what makes SEO integral in your marketing strategy is it forces you to provide website visitors with a seamless viewing and shopping experience.

This is all thanks to the Core Web Vitals (CWV). They are a set of metrics developed by Google that measures the following:

    • Largest Contentful Paint – Measures loading speed or how fast your site loads the most significant element on your site.
  • First Input Delay – Analyses interactivity of elements that requires engagement from readers, like buttons and links.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift – Determines visual stability of a web page. The goal is to prevent your site layout from shifting every time it loads an element.

You can view a page's CWV score by analyzing it using Google PageSpeed Insights.

Aside from showing you the page's CWV score, PageSpeed Insights suggests things you must do to improve your e-commerce store's performance, which should lead to a higher CVW score.

Getting your scores as high as possible is vital to your online store's success on search engines now that Google considers Core Web Vitals as ranking factors. That means a poor user experience can lead to increased bounce rates, lower conversion rates, and search engine rankings.

On the other hand, you are improving your CWV score results in a faster-loading site and a much better interface and layout, much to the benefit of your audience.

So aside from increasing your keyword rankings on SERPs, you can get more visitors to stay on and engage with your site, which can lead to increased sales and profits.

5. Better Return on Investment (ROI)

The most critical reason your e-commerce brand should jump into SEO is how much more money you can make from it in the long run.

Most online stores depend on paid ads to generate more revenue for their business, and rightfully so. They get to show ads about their online stores in front of people who are most likely to buy their products.

However, they must regularly launch and spend for ad campaigns to continue profiting from this tactic. If they stop, they will cut off their primary source of new customers and won't generate revenue.

At the same time, the cost per click (CPC) is increasing. That means they have to pay more to bid for your keywords while the conversion price remains the same. So, their stores won't make as much money as time passes.

While paid ads have a place in everyone's sales funnel, it's not a sustainable strategy, given the above factors.

With SEO, you won't have this issue at all.

Once your successful SEO campaign results, it will stay that way for a long time. That means you can generate sustainable organic traffic as long as your site pages rank on search results, even if you don't launch another campaign anytime soon.

Even better, the compounding effect of SEO allows your site pages to improve their ranking over time. From the insights you found in your previous campaign, identify areas of improvement that will be addressed in your upcoming campaign. 

You can achieve much higher keyword rankings if done correctly, resulting in more significant organic traffic.

Conclusion

If you genuinely want your e-commerce store to succeed, you must be willing to go far with it. That means trying tactics and strategies that aren't common in the industry.

While SEO has developed a reputation to be a great source of traffic for brand-new websites, it's not usually what most e-commerce store owners go for to promote their brand.

But if you put your resources into developing a solid SEO strategy now rather than wait for your site to grow, you'll enjoy the sustainable organic traffic it'll bring to your online store.

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