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Ecommerce SEO: How Online Stores Can Capture More Organic Traffic
By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce
If you’re an online store owner that may not be familiar with organic traffic and the potential this kind of visitor presents for your sales and marketing success, then you definitely need to get yourself tanked up and in the race.
What we can tell you is that organic traffic has nothing to do with organic farming, food, clothing or beauty products. And, not to stretch the metaphor too thinly, imagining organic visitors as cyberspace vehicles on the internet highway, is an excellent way to visualize how you, as an ecommerce business, can potentially capture more organic traffic.
Organic visitors are more than their names. They possess a real cache and power that can be very useful from an ecommerce SEO perspective. But where does organic traffic originate and, as an online store, what should you be doing to actively attract this organic flow of visitors so they plot their journey onto your freeway, and aren’t sidetracked or distracted by other routes or road signs?
As a broad rule of thumb, direct traffic arrives at your site by typing your URL directly into their browser. By comparison, organic traffic is those visits which are tracked by another means or method, usually because they’ve arrived through search engines, but can also come from other sources.
The important point to make is that organic traffic is free. It’s not cost you a penny to get the hit. There are no paid ads or stealth clicks going on here. This kind of traffic is genuinely interested in reading your SEO content because they want to. But what are the SEO secrets of success when it comes to capturing organic traffic and keeping it in your domain?
81% of users find their desired destination via a search engine. So it stands to reason that SEO is the driving force that all ecommerce companies should be locked to. Pay per click (PPC) is all very well, but will they drive organic traffic across town and into your ecommerce parking bay where visits convert into sales?
“Organic results are 8.5 times more likely to be clicked on than paid search results!”
It’s a pretty big disparity in figures, which we can likely put down to searchers and/or visitors gradually learning the difference between organic and sponsored results, and recognising that organic results are typically the more respected resource. Actual news versus fake news, if you will.
To bolster this finding, researchers discovered that by using heat-sensitive map technology, they were able to prove that most people’s eyes lock on to the central content on a page. This is instead of focusing on ads and PPCs situated to the right or elsewhere on a web page.
The SEO process may seem simple in theory, but there’s always a catch, right? SEO is a bit more complicated than just writing great content and making sure your keywords match up and flow naturally.
Let’s put aside for a moment the basic aspects of SEO such as publishing quality content and social media reach – ecommerce and online stores also need to implement and stick with specific and unique strategies that maximize organic search traffic, sales, leads, which all, ultimately, contribute to the growth of your business and sales.
The golden rule of SEO is never to write for a faceless search engine. In the real world, there are actual people with actual personalities. They have likes, dislikes, attractions and repulsions. Having a strong idea of who your ideal buyer or customer means you’ll already be writing content that they are going to want to read, which in turn will influence where they go and what they want to do.
By creating engaging and educational content that resonates with your ‘dream scenario’ buyers or visitors, your SEO will improve organically! By tapping into the main issues of your buyer personalities and the keywords they might use in search queries, you’ll be optimizing your content from the get-go.
However, doing it the other way around and writing to a rigid keyword format could leave you with a jumbled mess of try-hard nonsense. But enough of the theory. What about the practice? Here’s our rundown on some ecommerce techniques we would suggest adopting as an online store looking to capture more organic traffic:
Cutting and pasting your product description from the manufacturer’s catalog is an immediate no-no. Whilst it may take longer to do, writing unique descriptions of your online products means that your SEO campaign already begins life organically.
Try using what are called long-tail keywords – namely those three or four keyword phrases which are highly specific to whatever you’re selling or marketing. Whenever a customer or potential visitor uses a longer, more specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they want to buy.
The meta title, URL and overall description are three key ingredients for any optimized web page or blog post. This is a complete no-brainer and, if you’re not sure how to do it yourself, then there are plenty of plugins to help you.
But don’t rest on your laurels yet — it’s not enough to just add the plugin. You’ll still have to work on each page in turn to make sure your meta is polished and in tip-top condition.
If you’re going to spend time creating unique, quality content about how fabulous your product or services are, then make sure this content is shared far and wide.
Quality content has a shelf life far beyond a tweet, so make sure you build your presence on the social platforms your audience are most active on, remembering to add share buttons on your site so that visitors can easily share your content on their social platforms too.
And finally, exploit those metrics. Use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site and get your blog up and out there. Being able to see where your organic traffic has come from and what keywords they searched for allows you to continually fine-tune your content, thereby continually improving on your ability to entice and capture your own fleet of organic traffic.
Organic traffic is vital for growing your online store — it’s free and achievable, as long as you know how. Follow the tips above and increase your organic traffic slowly but surely in 2020.
