Now that ecommerce, the act of buying and selling items online, has become a daily part of our lives you have probably heard that search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is an indispensable tool for digital marketing, but you still might not be sure what exactly SEO involves, and why it’s so important.
In brief, SEO is a method of increasing the amount of traffic that comes to your business’s website from organic search engine results. The results are ranked and the higher up you are on the search engine page when someone searches for your keywords, the more traffic you will generate. The SEO game is as much art as science, which is why many businesses turn to an expert ecommerce SEO company to help them garner the best possible results, increasing your brand’s visibility online and driving more traffic to it. Having great SEO will also help your brand’s reputation as a trustworthy company that consumers can feel confident making purchases from.
The following are some of the factors that make SEO so important to your brand!
Web Traffic –
If potential customers can’t locate your website they aren’t buying anything from it! Good SEO optimizes your site’s organic search engine traffic which makes it more visible on the search page so more people will find your site and visit it which will lead to an increase in sales.
Rankings and Visibility –
Search engine users are most likely to click on one of the top five suggestions in the search pages ranking. Google can return thousands of results for an entered search term, but the majority of searchers never look past the first page. SEO helps your site rank higher in the search results so it’s more visible online where potential customers can see it and click.
User Experience –
The user experience is an important ranking factor for Google. Having a well-optimized website that clearly highlights the products or services on offer, shows potential customers how to purchase them, and quickly and accurately answer any questions means the site is going to enjoy a higher ranking on Google searches. Alternatively, if a user finds your site difficult to navigate, that means the search engines will face the same poor user experience and it’s going to damage your rankings and result in you receiving less traffic.
Trust –
A well optimized site will rank higher on search engines like Google which will increase its visibility, resulting in it also benefitting from a higher level of trust among potential customers. Users pay attention to a search engine’s recommendations, so placing in a higher position for your brand related keywords that people are searching for will give your site a reputation for trustworthiness.
Growth –
Having high quality SEO is going to be a major contributor to the growth of your brand. The higher your search engine rankings for a variety of high-volume keywords is, the more organic (which means you are getting it for free, not paying for it) web traffic your site is going to get. A well optimized website is more likely to attract new customers and produce more sales based on the increased leads it generates. Once they have discovered your website through a search engine users are more likely to recommend your brand on other social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Learn – Which of the following would be an ideal goal for an SEO plan?
The following are some of SEO’s main elements:
On-site SEO –
This refers to the improvements you must apply to your site’s content that will ensure it is friendly to search engines. Optimizing your website for search engines includes telling them exactly what every one of its webpages is about. On-site SEO adapts your website’s structure by adding keywords and other things to various portions of each page, as follows:
Keywords –
It’s going to take some research to pick out the perfect keywords for your website. You will need to shoot for the right combination of high relevance + high volume + achievable difficulty. Your research has to ensure that the language in use across your site contains a number of high-volume keywords that are relevant to your brand’s goods and services, which will draw in users.
Internal Links –
Sensible linking structure is essential for both the user experience and for SEO, which always work in tandem. Placing an easy to follow link from one page to another across your site that will lead users to relevant and related content makes it a simple task for users to locate what they need. While Google is crawling your pages, it follows all of the various links that are included in your site’s content. The presence of these internal links makes it easier for Google to navigate your site.
External Links –
These exist mainly to demonstrate your website’s authority. Google values trust as a major factor, so Google considers sites that are linked to (or from) other trusted and authoritative sites to be more trustworthy. Requesting other websites to create a link to your own is an involved process, more on that in a minute. You can start by including links from your site to other sites (hint: not to your competitors!) which is very beneficial to your SEO,
Off-Site SEO –
The techniques used by off-site search engine optimization involve websites outside of your own making an effort to push your site’s ranking higher. Off-site SEO consists of link building by creating ‘backlinks’, in an effort to have other reputable, high-traffic websites provide a link back to your website. Because backlinks are a signal of mutual trust between sites to search engines they can provide a very positive boost to your ranking position. The links must be coming from well-known and trusted sites so your ranking will be positively affected.
No Black Hat Tactics! –
Take this warning seriously, never try to trick the search engine into recognizing a bad link by using “black hat” tactics, you are going to get caught and it’s sure to lead to you being penalized and potentially even banned from the search engines that are your site’s lifeblood!
We hope this helped give you a better understanding of SEO and its importance!