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Optimizing your website for search engines can provide numerous benefits for your brand. Besides the obvious one, which is the increase in organic traffic, search engine optimization can also boost brand awareness, improve pay-per-click and social media conversions, and set the basis for other marketing efforts.
Most notably, creating a viable SEO strategy can have a major impact on your bottom line. Just having a nice-looking site can boost your eCommerce sales by a lot. For example, your potential customers are more likely to purchase from platforms that load quickly and whose web pages are easy to browse.
Because organic search is responsible for 51% of all search traffic, it’s not hard to see the link between a well-optimized eCommerce store and improved sales performance. In this article, we’ll explain how SEO efforts can improve your overall sales numbers and how SEO interacts with other marketing strategies.
1. Increases Online Traffic
There’s no question that high search engine rankings are critical to your success. Since 81% of people use search engine results pages to look for valuable information, your ability to sway some of that traffic to your website can be a real game-changer.
It’s important to mention that 75% of all searchers never scroll past the first page of search results. So, reaching the top of a high-converting search engine results page can significantly boost your sales.
That’s why using tested SEO techniques to boost your search engine visibility is the key to gaining customers. Interested buyers may be searching for your product like yours, but you won’t be making those sales if they can’t find your online store. While it may sound obvious, far too many online retailers either don’t understand the impact SEO has, aren’t willing to invest the time, or choose to ignore it and hope for the best.
2. Improves Trust and Authority
The main reason why many up-and-coming stores fall flat is because people don’t trust them enough to make a purchase. Furthermore, did you know that 136% of buyers prefer to search for products on Google as opposed to individual retail websites?
Where they land and which eCommerce store they’ll ultimately buy from depends on a number of factors — with trust being a major decider. In fact, 31% of consumers say it’s the most important factor of all.
Visibility and authority are two sides of the same coin. Increasing your online presence with strong content sends trust signals to both Google and your potential customers. But it’s only part of the equation since you can be highly visible yet perceived as untrustworthy. Visibility gives you the platform, but it’s up to you to deliver content and interact with your online traffic in a way that builds up authority.
Trust and authority aren’t only important for Google search; potential customers usually conduct thorough research on any business website before spending money on it. In that sense, the success of your digital marketing doesn’t only relate to your SEO strategies, link building, and content writing but also to how well you’re managing online reputation.
3. Boosts Technical Performance
Improving the technical performance of your website is crucial for any digital marketing strategy, not only search engine optimization. For example, it’s vital for boosting advertising and social media marketing conversions. Once the users land on your eCommerce website, they want to have a seamless experience and quickly reach the pages they’re interested in.
These are the main things that you need to focus on if you wish to grow your business and sales SEO conversions:
General Optimization
When an SEO expert takes on a new project, he needs to get acquainted with the company and the industry it serves. A professional has to learn about common user intent and conduct keyword research, but also perform a widespread audit. During this process, the marketer tackles various content-related tasks, addresses errors, and improves architectures for crawlers and users, among others.
Technical SEO factors include but aren’t limited to:
- Keyword placement in titles, headings, and meta descriptions
- Proper heading hierarchy
- Meta description optimization
- Image description optimization
- 404 errors
- Schema markups
- XML sitemaps
Fortunately, popular plugins like Yoast SEO can handle many of these automatically. The bottom line is that if you’re wondering how to increase your online sales, it’s imperative you start with proper SEO practices
Site Security
Today, there’s no excuse not to have an SSL-secured website. The extra layer of protection is critical for eCommerce business owners, as it prevents sensitive payment and customer information. In fact, security and reliability are good methods for increasing sales, as no one wants to buy from sites that can’t protect their users.
Beyond that, however, is the basic fact that a lack of SSL will force Google to severely penalize your site. And if that’s not enough, browsers like Chrome will warn visitors that your site is potentially unsafe — which can be fatal to your business.
Page Speed
To reward web searchers with the best possible user experience, Google weighs page speed metrics heavily. Since nobody wants to deal with a slowly-loading page, your site will be penalized if it isn’t optimized for speed. Like other factors, speed is crucial for sales, as many people bounce from a page if it doesn’t open in three seconds or less.
There are several factors that affect site speed, ranging from your CMS plugins to content optimization, database, and server issues. If your online store is slow, consider consulting with an SEO eCommerce expert for advice.
Mobile-Friendliness
More people use smartphones and mobile devices today than desktops to access the internet. To that end, Google and the other search engines consider mobile-friendliness to be a critical deciding ranking factor.
An SEO audit of your site’s mobile friendliness will ensure that your site is ready and able to handle mobile visitors while delivering an optimum user experience. As many people buy products and services after mobile searches, optimizing your site for these devices can significantly boost your sales.
4. Improves Keyword Targeting
One of the big reasons why many online stores vanish is because they don’t understand the buyer’s journey. These eCommerce shops know little about the sales process and how their website visitors interact with Google search and their platform. As you can presume, this can be a major hindrance to your conversions.
By analyzing relevant keywords with Ahrefs and other keyword research tools, you can better understand search volumes and difficulties for specific keywords. With this analysis, you can find the right keywords that are easy to optimize and might generate high traffic. Most notably, you can focus on phrases that are more likely to result in sales.
Sales Funnel
Similar to traditional marketing tactics, digital strategies utilize funnels to introduce a brand to potential clients. After sharing the company message, the marketing and sales team tries to connect with the users in an attempt to convert them. Depending on the industry and the product, this process can be rather straightforward or quite arduous.
In fact, if you check the stats, 79% of marketing leads never become customers because the company’s sales funnel was inefficient from one stage to another. That being said, it isn’t surprising that 67% of brands utilize some sort of lead nurturing process to ensure higher conversions.
So, how does an SEO sales funnel look in practice?
- The first contact between a company and a lead starts when a visitor lands on a page. These pages usually revolve around an information keyword and are meant to increase users’ knowledge of a general topic
- Marketers leave internal links on the landing page, trying to drive users to pages with higher commercial intent. Alternatively, they will use pop-ups and similar forms to save their personal information and email address
- Most campaigns fail after this initial contact, which is why marketers need to find a way to stay in touch with their visitors. They can do so by sending newsletters, using PPC ads, or a few other techniques
- After several interactions with the brand, the sales team takes over. Your employees can contact the lead directly to try and sell straight away or slowly nurture the user
The importance of funnels can’t be overstated. In the end, they’re the best way to establish meaningful relationships and sell various products and services.
5. Drives Local Visitors
Word-of-mouth marketing is officially dead. Most people rely on Google local search to find reliable local service providers that can solve all their issues. So, if you have one such business, you should consider utilizing local SEO.
The great thing about local optimization is that it’s virtually free. Yes, you need to create a Google My Business account and do a few other things, but the process is much faster and cheaper compared to traditional SEO and other digital marketing tactics.
Approximately 46% of all searches are local. While not all of them are of commercial intent, a large portion will still result in conversions.
The best thing yet is that the decision-making process is much faster than with other marketing strategies. For example, if you’re looking for a restaurant nearby, you can make a decision within a few minutes. Need a plumber? Call a local repairman to help you out.
Users generally select providers based on their scores in Google. So, for local SEO to be effective, you need to pay close attention to your reputation. Interacting with your brick-and-mortar store visitors can be invaluable here, as it might entice them to leave positive reviews for your business.
Challenges of Sales SEO Approach
Interestingly enough, many SEO providers pay little attention to online sales and other conversions. Many marketers focus on getting as much website traffic as possible for their clients without considering if these users will convert into buyers. This is a major friction point between the two sides, often leading to an abrupt ending of the contract.
We at MiroMind understand this dynamic very well. This is why we always put emphasis on conversion as the best measurement of our SEO efforts. In the end, if we can’t at least keep a client afloat, there’s no point for them to extend our contract.
Another common issue occurs when a company utilizes several digital marketing approaches simultaneously. In these cases, you can’t be fully certain if SEO was the reason behind increased sales. Similarly, there are situations where the marketing team does everything right, but the sales team fumbles the ball.
Whether you’re trying to boost sales, increase brand awareness, or accomplish some other marketing goal, the project’s success hinges on your selection of an SEO provider. So, we suggest you take your time, vet several quality candidates, and choose the best service provider for your brand.
Improve your online sales with strong SEO
Having a strong and effective SEO strategy will have a major impact on your online store’s success. Your site will be more visible and relevant to your target audience, and you’ll be able to deliver content that will attract and convert those visitors into buyers.
With over 12 years of experience delivering eCommerce SEO results to entrepreneurs around the world, Miromind’s team of experts can help you turbocharge your sales and maximize your profits. Contact us to learn how our eCommerce SEO services can grow your business.