10 Benefits of SEO for Ecommerce

Keyword research is a huge aspect of SEO. Without keyword targeting, or if you target the wrong keywords, your ecommerce site may appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) for queries that aren’t relevant to your business, leading to a high bounce rate.

When you intentionally target keywords that reflect your products and services, as well as any common queries your target audience are likely to search, the clicks your pages receive will be from people who already have an interest in the kind of thing you’re selling.

Ecommerce SEO also helps to optimize your store’s conversion rate, attracting customers by putting your store in the conversation at the right time. Once users are on your optimized store, its high performance and quality content will send plenty of trust signals and give them little reason to question their decision to follow through with their purchase.

➡️To learn how to increase your sales, check out our guide to checkout page optimization.

There are several ways you can bring traffic to your website, such as paid social media and advertising on Google. While the results of these methods are fast acting, they only last as long as your budget, and the cost fluctuates greatly depending on supply and demand.

SEO takes more time and effort to implement, but provides a much more sustainable level of traffic that is less susceptible to change. Of course, you’ll need to regularly update your website to ensure it’s following ecommerce SEO best practices, but SEO is a solid foundation for achieving regular traffic and steady sales.

A fully optimized website that performs smoothly helps you to establish trust in your store with potential customers, which is a key factor in deciding whether to follow through with a purchase.

Secondly, Google ranks websites it trusts, which is a great signal to users searching for businesses – the higher up your site appears in search results, the more trustworthy it appears.

I’ve already touched on other methods of drawing traffic to your ecommerce site, but unlike paid advertising, following ecommerce SEO best practices earns you a great source of traffic without the need to pay big upfront costs. And despite the number of ads in the SERPs, research shows that 65% of users seek out and click on organic search results instead.

Of course, the cost of SEO will increase if you outsource to external agencies. However, if the result is directly boosting your online visibility, website traffic, and product sales, this could be considered a more worthwhile investment than advertising.

One of the most commonly known benefits of SEO is that it improves your ranking position. In fact, that’s what it’s designed for. The process of SEO will cover your ecommerce store for the ranking factors that Google considers, such as content quality, backlinks, and web page performance. This means that you’ll send all the positive signals to Google and heighten your chance of ranking well on Google Shopping and the main SERP.

If your store is appearing to customers who are actually in need of your products and services, and they have a positive experience on your pages and with your products, they will be more likely to return again.

On top of that, high-quality SEO page elements, such as product descriptions and product photos, will help you to engage your site visitors. This will put you above other competitors and develop a level of trust in your offerings.

Once on your site, most users will want to do a bit of research into your products and business before completing a purchase. A website theme that’s optimized for ecommerce will make it easy for users to navigate around your store seamlessly, giving an overall positive experience and encouraging them to spend more time on your site.

As with other parts of this list, the benefits are cyclical. SEO improves your user experience, and pages providing a positive user experience are rewarded by Google with high rankings.

It can seem like there are a lot of steps to SEO, but this is actually a good thing. SEO acts as a type of checklist to help you consistently create high-quality content. When your pages tick all the boxes, such as having optimized images, you’ll be able to attract new customers and engage them.

Honing in on a specific set of keywords will also ensure new products, or any written content, such as an ecommerce blog, stay relevant to your target audience.

By maintaining a high ranking position across the keywords relevant to your target audience, you’ll begin to build brand awareness and be recognised for your products. This sends automatic trust signals to your site visitors, and they may even start to seek you out in SERPs. With high competition levels, familiarity with your brand is often the deciding factor that sways a customer to pick your brand.

There are a huge number of benefits to conducting SEO for your ecommerce website. Some of the biggest of these include increased traffic, developing customer trust, and ensuring that your store is part of the conversation during the customer research process.