E-commerce SEO

E-commerce sites and online retailers are ideally suited for search optimisation. An overwhelming majority of your potential customers use search engines during the buying process.

• More than 80% of purchasing decisions start with search ⁽¹⁾
• 51% of traffic and 40% of sales for online retailers result from search engines ⁽²⁾
• On 53% of conversion paths, the last click is on a non-brand keyword. This means that more than half of your potential customers - including those that know your brand name and have visited your site before - will return to search engines and look for the product before deciding to purchase.

1. Fleishman Hillard, 2012
2. BrightEdge, 2014
3. Google Zero Moment Of Truth, 2013

 

SEO isn't a dark art, and it is not as changeable as you might think. Long term SEO strategies have been successful since search engines began, and continue to be effective today. The right mix of activities will allow your site to see continued growth from search engines. For most retailers, this is a blend of three areas.

 

Technical SEO

Often overlooked, ensuring your underlying platform is easily understood by search engines is a key factor. Technology errors can destroy your potential to rank in search engines, while optimised technology will see you outrank your competitors.

Content optimisation

Some businesses see sites like Wikipedia ranking for hundreds of keywords and (understandably) think that this means their product and category pages need hundreds of words of textual content in order to perform in search. This isn't the case. When users search for products to buy, Google wants to return retailers and searchers want to see products - not overwhelming amounts of reading material. Search engines will rank your pages if you have the right content in the right places, and we can help you to create it.

Offsite SEO

Search engines want to protect their users - and their own reputations - by making sure the results they show are both relevant and trustworthy. If you're a major retailer, it's likely that you already have the brand recognition that Google is looking for, and you just need to "connect the dots" to ensure this is reflected in your search performance. Be cautious of poorly conceived "link building" tactics that can destroy your reputation with search engines. If you're building your brand or are a smaller retailer, you can make sure that search follows your business growth and SEO is your highest growth channel.

How we can help

There's no "one size fits all" approach to e-commerce SEO and you should choose activities best suited to your site and the resources available. If you have an in-house marketing team, we can work with them to ensure you get the most from search engines. If you're building a team, we offer industry-leading SEO training that will ensure SEO best practices are part of your marketing mix. If your resources are limited, we can provide full service options all the way from from development to copywriting.

The SEO process

We follow a tried and tested process to enhance the performance of e-commerce sites in search results:

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Want to learn more? We typically perform a free initial assessment of your site to make sure that SEO is right for you. We can also check your performance against benchmarks or competitors to create clear performance expectations. Get in touch and start improving your SEO today.