Why SEO is good for eCommerce?
As Andrew Chen says, there are only few ways to scale user growth.
In my opinion, this applies to eCommerce traffic and sales, too.
These ways are:
- paid acquisition
- virality
- SEO
Paid acquisition for eCommerce
If you are aware of the Lean Startup, by now you’ve validated the demand for the things you sell.
During the validation stage, it’s likely that you used paid channels to get that initial boost in your traffic and acquire your first customers. Using Adwords, as StartupBros suggest, is a quick way to validate your business idea on the cheap.
Yet:
Paid acquisition might not be the perfect solution for your online store in the long term.
Buying customers directly through ads will cut your already razor thin eCommerce margins.
If you are in a drop shipping eCommerce business, it’s likely that you have 5 to 20% product margin on your sales.
Make this simple calculation:
How much it costs you to acquire a paying customer through AdWords (or other paid acquisition channel)? And what are the return on investment (ROI) per paying customer and the customer lifetime value (CLTV)?
With my store, it costed me roughly $30 to get a paying customer through AdWords. And the CLTV was below that. I was losing money. Not good!
Virality for eCommerce
If you have an innovative, unique, custom-made product à la Kickstarter, viral word of mouth could work for you. Also, you can achieve virality with a good marketing strategy. And for some it did work. (hint: TheDollarShaveClub)
But what if you are selling a commodity? Would your friends love the office supplies you sell so much to share them with the whole wide web? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Even if you produce a unique product, you still need to design your viral loop and have a viral engine in place. Think here lots of A/B testing and experiments.
Improve your store’s search engine rankings and get more sales with SEO
There’s no doubt that you can get more sales for your online store and improve your search engine rankings by doing off-page SEO. Link building in particular.
Let me show you:
Brian Dean of Backlinko shares how one of his readers managed to increase his online store’s referral traffic by getting quality backlinks:
At our Bulgarian store, we managed to get almost 3,000 organic traffic sessions for 3 months, just a month after our launch. Bare in mind that we are using a brand new domain for the store.
Also about 80% of our referral traffic is coming from our link building efforts.
Moreover SEO is our top revenue source and top orders source:
(eCommerce metrics from Metrilo)
This result is the outcome of just about a couple of weeks of link building.
Benefits of SEO link building for eCommerce
- You pay with your sweat. Perfect for bootstrapped stores.
- Your product margins won’t shrink like the stock market.
- It’s scalable.
- If targeted correctly brings people that intent to make a purchase.
Drawbacks of SEO link building for eCommerce
- If not done well, Google might penalize your store. Do I have to say no paid links?
- There’s no such thing as “fast link building”. Getting quality backlinks to your store takes efforts and a lot of hustling.
This post is a comprehensive guide to off-page link building for eCommerce. Use it and apply it today to improve your store’s search engine rankings.
I’m going to share with you, my best actionable advice on link building for eCommerce Feel free to share it with other eCommerce folks.
What Makes Your Online Store Link– Worthy?
The web is built on links, right?
But what motives a site owner to link to your shop.
Here’s the deal:
Nobody cares about your online store.
The sooner you get used to this, the sooner you’ll become better at link building. People care all about:
Them, them, them
There are many ways to make your online store more attractive for people to link to, but the most important one is:
Be useful
The less valuable your content,
The less likely you are ever to receive a link to it.
Eric Ward, writer of “Ultimate Guide to Link Building”.
Ward continues by saying that the most useful sites are those that provide rich quality content on a particular subject on which the author is an authority.
Imagine you sell supplements. The supplements market is a competitive one.
What most store owners do when they launch their online store:
Take the default distributor’s product copy and pictures and throw it on a basic product page with a “Buy now” button.
While that approach might be fast, it’s not the best way to be useful and get people to link to your online store.
On the opposite, check what Bodybuilding.com is doing for their product pages:
Gosh, so much useful information!
There are tons of content on every facet of this product.The whole page is using a custom-built design that looks like a magazine review. There’s info on the servings, tastes, way of consuming, ingredients and loads of customer reviews. It could be the best resource on the web about this whey protein.
Bodybuilding.com is an excellent example of how an online store can add rich, relevant content and build a community around its products. Also make sales along the way.