What Is the Point of E-commerce SEO?
If you’re trying to succeed at selling your goods or services online, you’ve probably been told you need to hire a great e-commerce SEO agency. You may or may not be familiar with the concept of SEO: utilizing keywords to boost your online presence. But what is the point of e-commerce SEO? Why is it so critical that businesses utilize SEO effectively in order to succeed in our modern interconnected world?
In this article, we’ll discuss what SEO is, its purpose, and how you can properly utilize it in order to help your business to thrive in the online marketplace.
Search Engine Optimization
The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is a method of organically increasing traffic to your website by ensuring your business appears near the top of the results generated by search engines like Google.
It’s related to the concept of traditional advertising in the sense that its primary purpose is to improve visibility for a business, as well as increase brand recognition so that potential customers are more likely to consider its products. However, SEO also differs from traditional advertising in the sense that it is not obvious advertising. Customers may not be aware that SEO techniques are being utilized because they are designed to communicate more effectively with search engines without diminishing the user experience.
How Does It Work?
Search engines work by utilizing digital crawlers to pull information from as many websites as possible. The process is automated, meaning that search engines are primarily looking for keywords, links, and other related info. These results are then “ranked” based on relevancy, as determined by the search engine. This means that a website that utilizes the correct combination of keywords and links will appear higher in the search results than one that does not.
An e-commerce SEO agency will attempt to improve their clients’ search engine ranks by adding relevant keywords, word chains, links, and other necessary information in order to get the attention of the algorithms that are being used. In doing so, they hope to improve businesses’ online ranks and consequently drive more traffic to their websites.
Why Is SEO So Important?
Brand visibility is a critical element of any business, but this is especially true for an e-commerce enterprise. After all, if you are selling goods or services online, your customers don’t have a storefront they’ll drive by every day. Instead, they need online advertisements to even be aware that your business exists. However, most customers are more likely to trust the results of an online search than an advertisement. While these search results are important to potential customers, it’s unlikely they’ll look any further than the first few links they see. So this is where you want your page to rank.
This can be a problem for businesses because chances are, whatever industry you are in, you will have many competitors jostling for the highest positions in the search engine ranking. These other businesses may not even compete with you directly for customers; they might be located in an entirely different area and serve a different clientele. Nevertheless, if their search engine rank is higher than yours, they may cost you business.
The reality of competition and the relative myopia of potential customers means that a high search engine rank is absolutely critical for an online business.
Developing an SEO Strategy
With SEO being as important as it is for successful e-commerce, your business won’t be the only one to employ it. This means that achieving an edge over your competitors will require a strong SEO strategy so your business can remain near the top of the search results.
The right SEO strategy requires more than simply adding a few keywords to your website; it also means placing them in the right place so that their effectiveness is maximized. Search engine crawlers will do more than just scour a site for certain words. Their algorithms are programmed to prioritize keywords placed in certain spots, like headings. This means that placing keywords deliberately on a webpage will do a lot to help ensure your page is discovered quickly.
A well-crafted website is also an important element of SEO. Algorithms not only track traffic to a website, but they also track how long a user has remained on a website. This means that, even if you have a site that is intriguing enough to merit a click, that site will not appear near the top of search results unless prospective customers are spending some time there. Improving the amount of time a customer spends on a page is a matter of engaging content, multimedia marketing such as video, and an easy-to-navigate page that provides users with the information they are searching for.
Another important element of a successful SEO strategy is to ensure that you have a website that is regularly updated. Search engine algorithms prefer sites that are active, meaning that if your website sits there without any updates for a long period of time, it may not be given a higher rank by search engines such as Google.
Finding the Right SEO Agency
The importance of SEO to an online business means that you should hire a professional to handle the task for you. Finding the right e-commerce SEO agency is often a matter of looking off the beaten path. Successful marketing agencies have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
Your best option is to seek out an “anti-agency,” like InnoVision, to handle all of your online marketing needs. InnoVision is referred to as an anti-agency because we don’t follow the rigid structure of a traditional advertising company. This means that we are willing to attempt new and different methods in order to earn you the interest and, eventually, loyalty of a new customer base. We’ll work to ensure that your business stands out from the pack, and we understand that a strong SEO strategy is a major element of that.
