After working with online retailers for over 10 years now, one of the key questions remains the same asked by brands, clients, and retailers. Why is SEO so critical and important to e-commerce websites and retailing online? To answer this, we have listed here the top SEO benefits for online retailers.
Every year over 100 million people purchase goods from online retailers in North America. The online retail market is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. It can also be a very competitive market. It often depends on the products sold and online market conditions.
Any product sold online requires the e-commerce website to be marketed to increase website traffic, online sales, and loyal customers. Search Engine Optimization or also called SEO raises a retailers position in search engines such as Google for organic traffic. Organic traffic are the individuals who visit a retailers website without the means of advertisements.
Top SEO Benefits for Online Retailers
There are numerous benefits of online marketing for retailers of any products. The top SEO benefits for online retailers gained from these marketing campaigns are hard to ignore. SEO marketing tactics get a retail website on the first page of Google, Bing, and Yahoo for tremendous amounts of traffic. The higher the website is in search (preferably 1-3 positions) the more traffic it will receive.
The goal of SEO is to increase ROI as well. This can lead to a drastic increase in sales. SEO campaigns focus on very specific keyword phrases, which enable an online retailer to improve the quality of traffic as well as conversion rates.
The higher a retailer is ranked in search (for many keyword phrases), the more brand and customer awareness it will gain. SEO campaigns alter websites to load them faster, provide better information, and optimize key pages. This further improves the user and customer experience.
Consumers want to trust brands. This is especially true with online retailers. The higher a retailer ranks in search results, the more likely consumers will trust the retailer and shop. Consumers assume the highest-ranking websites offer the best service and products. Having e-commerce websites ranked in the top with SEO campaigns increases the trust factor for brands with consumers.
Unlike many other forms of marketing, SEO campaigns yield long-term benefits. Online retailers, who have deployed successfully SEO campaigns for a couple years, may reap benefits for many years from the achieved positions in search results. SEO results remain active even after a campaign has been stopped. This is not true for paid advertising methods.