Sell and Earn With A Click: How Ecommerce SEO Leads to Higher Conversion Rates
This is a guest post by Michelle Deery, a freelance writer that works with Heroic Search, a SEO company based in Tulsa.
It’s no secret that there’s more to eCommerce success than having the right product, but what they might not have told you is how important SEO is.
I know, I know – SEO sounds complex. Who knew that launching an online store means you have to get good at SEO?
But what they might not have told you is that SEO is the secret weapon that can turbocharge your conversions, and thus your sales.
In this article, I’ll demonstrate how you can use SEO to your advantage so that traffic, conversions and sales all go up.
Product Descriptions and Duplicate Content
I get it – writing product descriptions is hard. Ask any content writer and they’ll probably grimace when you ask them what they think of writing product descriptions.
The problem for eCommerce store owners who sell lots of products is that it’s very easy to produce near-duplicate content when writing about our (many) products.
Duplicate content is bad for SEO because it confuses Google so much that it doesn’t know what to index and what not to index.
This is bad news for you because, while duplicate content won’t always induce a penalty, it might mean that a product that is selling badly starts to rank a lot higher than a product that’s selling well – and all because you used almost the exact same product description and confused Google.
When this happens, your conversions will be down.
What you want is ALL your content to achieve a good search visibility. If you’re not good at writing product descriptions and have a tendency to copy and paste, outsource this to a professional writer.
Add Product Reviews
Product reviews give your store more credibility and help to build rapport and trust among new customers. But they’re also worth adding to your store for SEO reasons.
In fact, Google uses product reviews as a ranking factor. This means that the more (positive) reviews you have, the higher your store will rank – and the more conversions you have.
Indeed, a number of reviews can convert a customer all by themselves.
Reevoo did some research on this and found that 50 reviews – some perhaps not so great but most of them positive – of a particular product are enough to boost conversions by 4.6%.
Why are product reviews so good for conversions and SEO?
1) They’re a powerful form of social proof
2) They’re a piece of unique content – which Google loves.
Not sure how to bag yourself more reviews? It might sound simplistic but the easiest thing to do is to just ask. Once a customer has made a purchase, send them an automated email a few days later. Politely ask them if they’d kindly leave you a quick review.
Otherwise, make it easy for folk to leave a review. No one is going to review anything if they don’t know how and where.
Indulge in PPC
PPC ultimately gets you store seen when all else is failing. Your ads are placed at the top of the search results and, if your copy is sweet, there’s a great chance that your click-through rate will be high.
Naturally, you need to first of all target the right people. If you do this, as many as 65% of those who see your ad will click it.
Kickstart a Content Marketing Campaign
Like with product reviews, a content marketing campaign helps you build a stronger relationship with consumers, and it also boosts your SEO campaign.
Content marketing can include videos and podcasts, but for SEO purposes you’ll be focusing on blogs and enriching those blogs with long tail keywords that are popular in your niche.
However, for any long tail keyword to convert, you need to understand more about your audience and what their intent is.
For example, let’s say I choose the keyword “black men’s leather jacket” and add it 4-5 times to a blog post purely because I know it has a high search volume. It drives traffic, sure – but my conversions are down. What gives?
Plain and simply, I’m driving the wrong traffic to the wrong stage of my purchasing funnel.
Here is an article all about user intent. The more you understand about user intent, the more you’ll be able to optimize your content with the right keywords that are targeting the right people at the right time.
For example, once I know more about my audience, my main keyword might change to “where can I buy a black men’s leather jacket near me.”
Traffic might not be as high as it would have been for the keyword “black men’s leather jacket” but it’s now the right traffic and my conversions are increasing.
Optimize For Omnichannel Shopping
Google has changed a lot over the years and is now very user-centric. In other words, it’s all about making the user experience as seamless as possible – and omnichannel shopping is key to this.
In 2018, customers want to be able to switch devices at will during the purchasing journey.
They want to be able to browse online, buy online and pickup in store. They want to be able to buy when and where they want, and they want their data and details to remain the same across all devices and channels.
This is where a point of sales card reader comes in handy for you as a store owner. It’s a key part of the omnichannel shopping experience that shows the customer – and Google – that you’re putting their wants and needs first.
This also means optimizing your online store for mobile. More and more of us are shopping online via our mobile device, which means that if your store isn’t mobile friendly your bounce rate will be high and thus your visibility on Google will decrease.
Conclusion
These are ways that SEO leads to higher conversion rates for your online store. Be proactive when it comes to SEO. Selling products might be your priority, but it doesn’t matter how good your product is if the wrong people are seeing it. And this is what SEO helps with.
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