SEO is important for eCommerce because, when SEO is done correctly, your eCommerce website can get thousands of visitors for product-specific, non-branded keywords each month. While paid advertising can essentially do the same, SEO optimization continues showing results even when you don’t actively work on or invest in SEO.
According to Think with Google’s 2019 year review, 83% of shoppers used online search prior to visiting a store. Insider Intelligence also reports that 49% of online shoppers start their product search on a Search Engine like Google.
With Google ramping up on their More Ways to Shop initiative, it will become increasingly more important to optimize your product pages, collection pages, and even blog content for the various different enhanced search results that merchants can grab on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), like:
- Getting featured in a shoppable product grid
- Having a product carousel display for your website,
- Product images appearing on the side of your search results
Check out these images for various different SERP results for the search query “buy white sneakers”:
In comparison, this is what a paid ads result looks like:
Paid results will appear at the very top and very bottom of a Search Engine results page, so they’re still very important for visibility. However, in order to compete with rich search results, you will need to invest in eCommerce SEO, as well.
Schedule a free discovery session with Fire&Spark to identify how SEO can help your eCommerce business reach its full online potential.
