By Dan Kogan Everyone knows that eCommerce SEO services can help improve your website’s domain authority and standings in the organic search results pages.
That itself will produce more impressions, higher brand awareness, and bring you more organic traffic. Hopefully, it will bring you more organic sales, too.
But there are many, many unexpected, and in some cases even unintended (but beneficial) effects of SEO services.
These are 4 of the best ones.
It Improves Your Website’s UX
Most users to a website, eCommerce or otherwise, will leave if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Most users to a website will not purchase if there isn’t an SSL certificate installed (or a little padlock up there by the URL).
Most users will bounce if they can’t figure out how to navigate the website.
Many will bounce if they can’t quickly find what they came for, or if the content on the website doesn’t address their concerns.
Guess what? All of those things mentioned are ranking signals that impact a website’s organic rankings.
They just also help the user experience.
It Attracts More Qualified Customers (Who Are More Likely to Buy)
Every single keyword and search term is associated with some sort of search intent. These can be roughly broken down into informational and transactional – that is, keywords that people search when they want an answer or when they want to buy something.
Every SEO strategy has a keyword strategy. The two are interrelated. Now, a good SEO strategy will involve a keyword strategy aligned with user expectations.
That means, for eCommerce businesses, optimizing for keywords that are aligned with intent to purchase.
Therefore, when implemented properly, good eCommerce SEO services will not just bring you more traffic; they will bring you more traffic that wants to purchase whatever you’re selling.
It Decreases Your Reliance on Paid Search Marketing
A lot of businesses rely on paid search marketing strategies like PPC to bring them new leads and sustain sales.
The only catch is that even a good PPC campaign will get 2% CTR on average, as well as a rough average close rate of somewhere around 10%.
That’s pretty abysmal compared to SEO, when you consider that average close rates for leads that started organically have something like a 15% close rate.
Which means, as long as you are targeting the right keywords, eCommerce SEO services will help get you off the crutch of paid search marketing.
It’s Always Working in the Background
You may have heard this before, but SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes many months to build up a head of steam and in all earnest sometimes real gains take two to three years to really form.
But the thing about SEO is that, while it’s a consistent effort and takes the most work in the short-term, the work you put in today will keep on working down the line.
A really well-optimized page, for instance, might be a little slow to grow for a year or so, and then suddenly burst with organic traffic after one or two years.
The fact that SEO work accumulates on itself and works on its own down the line is one thing that really makes the efforts worth it.
When you stop PPC or social media marketing, engagement and traffic usually drops off basically overnight. That’s not so with SEO.
Choosing an eCommerce SEO Services Provider
All of these, on their own, are good reasons to invest in eCommerce SEO services. If you’re thinking about hiring an eCommerce SEO agency, consider the following:
- Do they have a lot of reviews published?
- Are case studies or a client portfolio that details their efforts?
- What industries do they serve?
- Are they proficient with the eCommerce platform that your online store is built on?
- Are they proficient with keyword research, SEO strategy, and content marketing?
- What other complementary digital marketing services do they offer?
- Do they work with web designers and developers to improve your UX pursuant to your SEO goals?
- Do they offer packages that will fit my budget and still meet my goals?
These are only a few of the questions that you should be asking before hiring any digital marketing agency – but one way or the other, working with qualified eCommerce SEO experts to improve your website can have big, positive impacts on your business in the long run.
