When we discuss about Ecommerce SEO matters with our clients who own Ecommerce websites, we are often asked with this question: “Should we proceed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?”
We would like to look from this perspective: SEM can be a short-term campaign, whereas SEO can be a long-term campaign.
This is because SEM involves paid advertising, such that a visitor that is brought to your website can cost to as much as a few dollars per click! On the other hand, if a website is ranked for organic (SEO) results, generating traffic from search engines to your websites as site visitors is absolutely free!
The Powerful Effect of SEO on Ecommerce businesses today
Gaining online exposure is everything to an Ecommerce business. As most of the prospective customers come from the search engines by entering keyword phrases to search and buy products, the success of an Ecommerce business very much depends on the online traffic. Through proper SEO Practices, it is very easy to target not only audience of an entire region, but also the correct audience, to which you provide services or ship the items you sell. Today, all the businesses online have understood the need for the implementation of SEO practices for their ecommerce businesses and are keen to rank better for their desired keywords.
A recent report by Neilson Media shows that the Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Google organic search results are over 72%. To make matters worse, other reports have shown that the cost for pay per click (PPC) are consistantly increasing at 10-12% year after year. Hence, with SEO, being able to achieve the top rankings for a ecommerce website is extremely critical for a long term success.
When implementing SEO practices correctly, the Ecommerce website’s internal linking structure and site navigational structure improve greatly and in turn, improves usability. This helps with increasing customer satisfaction and encourages repeat buying, turning your visitors into loyal customers!
Common Issues Faced When Implementing Ecommerce SEO
Unlike other types of websites, the structure and layout of Ecommerce websites are very different. For example, an Ecommerce website usually has web pages that contain primarily the product images and offer very little description snipplets of the products. To the visitors, these can be satisfactory enough as they can be convinced with the product images and make their purchase based on the impression given. Generally, Ecommerce website often puts up descriptions that were provided by the product manufacturers, and the internal linking structure is very weak and more focused on buildin the back-end / administration portion of the website, such as to facilitate the uploading of product images and details.
Due to these issues, Ecommerce websites are a whole lot more difficult to optimise for in the search engines, hence losing potential ranks in the search engine results page. Hence, only a few SEO companies will accept job requests for Ecommerce SEO as the chances of disappointing clients are way too high.
Our Ecommerce SEO Services
Optimising Ecommerce websites requires a different SEO campaign altogether as opposed to other types of website such as a corporate website. We have optimized our clients’ corporate websites for mainly their company information, products and services pages. However, for Ecommerce websites, not all of the pages require a full SEO campaign. For instance, our search engine optimization experts usually optimize our Ecommerce clients’ home pages, categories and featured products pages.