In today’s eCommerce market, brands must leverage a multi-pronged approach to stay relevant and retain customers. One of the most popular channels includes organic search — most notably Google, whose search engine receives over 3.5 billion searches every day. As brands focus on retention during economic downturns and as third-party privacy changes impact advertising, optimizing and ranking on organic search is crucial. Now more than ever, eCommerce brands need to tap into the potential of search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s gather an understanding of what SEO is, its importance for eCommerce brands, and the major factors that can affect your ranking.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of enhancing a webpage to increase visibility when users are on search engines, such as Google.
Search engine optimization also involves improving the quality of website traffic to and throughout your site. SEO looks at organic or unpaid traffic and indexes rankings according to an algorithm within each search engine.
SEO for eCommerce brands: Why does it matter?
Search engine optimization touches on many components that affect a customer’s shopping experience — from discovery to retention. Harnessing the potential of SEO is important at each stage in shoppers’ path to purchase. With regard to discovery, optimizing search, advertisement performance, Google shopping results, and even social commerce are all impacted by SEO.
Additionally, site load speed, site architecture, and the use of keywords on product pages can make the difference between a purchase and an abandoned cart.
4 major factors that influence SEO
1. Keyword research
Keyword research requires understanding which search terms and phrases customers may use to discover your product. With a solid keyword foundation, you can effectively establish a presence on Google and other search engines. Being discoverable on search is crucial for eCommerce businesses considering that 46% of consumers turn to Google when they are looking for a particular product or service. While doing research, ensure that you’re also assessing competitor keywords so that you can find any gaps and potential areas of improvement
2. Site architecture
As customers move through the path to purchase, optimizing your site’s architecture greatly impacts your SEO ranking and, ultimately, conversions. Site architecture involves the planning, design, functionality, and overall development of your website. In fact, site architecture is so important that recent updates to Google’s algorithm for SEO ranking have introduced usability as a considerable SEO ranking contributor. This emphasizes the importance of a seamless and intuitive shopping experience as customers navigate your site.
3. Content (On-page SEO)
On-page SEO ranks the copy, images, and metadata published on your site. This includes product descriptions (emphasizing the importance of keywords), alt-text within an image, reviews, headlines, meta descriptions, and more. Social media content, including hashtags, captions, and the images themselves also impact SEO.
4. Customer reviews
Customer reviews, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC), have immense potential for improving SEO. Reviews are content-rich, and they can provide search engines with new opportunities to help you rank for long-tail keywords that may otherwise be difficult to place within other site content. However, while the keywords and content in your reviews can affect your SEO ranking, negative reviews won’t impact your Google search rankings.
