SEO is crucial in directing relevant traffic to your eCommerce storefront. Having a great SEO strategy is the key to attracting and engaging in the awareness stage of the digital customer journey.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation–it is the process in which you improve your site to increase its visibility for relevant keywords and searches. Organic Search, unpaid search results in a search engine such as Google, relies on good quality relevant content that matches the search query.

The term SEO is used to describe all activities that bring traffic to your website. In the industry, it is often also used to include digital marketing channels like social media.

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to all search-related activities, including your SEO with Organic Search and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), such as Google Shopping and Google Ads.
  • Social Media Marketing (SMM), such as manual creative posts on Facebook and Instagram, can be used for brand awareness and commerce activities.
  • Paid Social Media Marketing (PSMM) is paid-for advertising, including re-marketing, on social media platforms.
  • Content and Influencer Marketing relates to marketing activities that create relevant and shareable content about your product or service. This can be either paid or organic and self-created and self-hosted or shared content using influencers.

This article covers 4 SEO tips that will help you understand where you are and where you need to be on your SEO journey.

1. Focus on SEO

Why is SEO important for your business? Simply put, people search online constantly. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping skyrocketed, and the shift toward digital-first stores was accelerated. With more people shopping online, it is imperative your business is on the top of the search results, so you can start building a relationship with your customers early on in the digital customer journey.

The importance of SEO is not only limited to your eCommerce site. Omnichannel customer experience is quickly becoming the new norm, and SEO will also help you reach customers who prefer shopping in brick-and-mortar stores.

  • 72% of customers that did a local search visited a store within five miles (Source: Hubspot statistics)
  • 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else (Source: SEO Tribunal)
  • 88% of people who search for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit one of the businesses within 24 hours (Source: Nectafy)

2. Involve everyone in SEO

Who should be thinking about SEO? In short, anyone and everyone, especially if you want to attract new customers. Make sure everyone in your organisation is thinking about SEO and asking the relevant questions to improve it.

Ecommerce Managers: How do I drive better traffic to my site? Or how do I drive more traffic to my site?

Marketing Managers: How can I be more efficient with my digital marketing spend? Am I reaching the right audience at the right time with the right offering?

UX designers: Will my design block any good SEO tactics and eventually hurt the SEO of the site?

Developers: Will the way this feature is implemented hurt SEO? How can I optimise this site for better site performance which in turn also improves SEO?

3. Optimise constantly

Search Engine Marketing is continuously changing–therefore, you need to optimise constantly. For busier sites that go through content and feature changes, it is ever more important to keep an eye on SEO, and we would recommend having some form of SEO Roadmap with monthly actions on it.

A few things you should continuously manage:

  • Page speed performance optimisations.
  • Look at 40x and 50x errors and fix them.
  • Measure content against competitors by either adding or tweaking existing content.

4. Stay on top of changes by Google

The main talking points since 2020 have been around Google and its introduction of Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform based on real-world usage data. Google has released key metrics–a common set of signals critical to all web experiences–to measure your site.

  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Core Web Vitals will be a ranking factor for your website. Providing a great digital customer experience, including faster loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, will improve your search ranking. However, it is important to keep your content’s relevance in mind, as it will still be essential in your SEO success.

What should you be doing? Continuous measuring and optimisation are key for your SEO. Here at Vaimo, we have begun evaluating all of our internal and client sites to get ready for May 2021, when Google will start using Core Web Vitals. We have also invested in monitoring the pages so we can continually measure and improve.

Final thoughts

As we have covered, SEO isn’t something you can forget about if you want to drive more people to your store. It is an important part of your digital customer journey.

We have explained why SEO is essential, but you must not forget that content is king. Google is looking for the most relevant content to provide to its users, but users ultimately click on the results. So remember that you should be making pages primarily for the users, not just search engines.

Formulate an SEO roadmap and, on a monthly basis, check to see if it is working for your site. An excellent approach to manage this is the Batch Method; create a target list of products/categories, optimise, measure and repeat.

As the world of eCommerce changes and grows, you can be pushed and pulled in different directions and ultimately get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of critical areas to factor in. At Vaimo, we help our clients build and develop their digital strategies, tailoring technical solutions to suit each business’s specific needs. To share how we do this, we created a guide that breaks down each stage, showing you how to create your digital strategy roadmap.

Vaimo

Vaimo is one of the world’s most respected experts in digital commerce. As a full-service omnichannel agency, we deliver strategy, design, development and managed services to brands, retailers and manufacturers all over the world.

Our sharp focus, broad experience and deep expertise within B2B, B2C, PIM, Order Management and ERP integrations makes us a key partner for driving success in digital commerce. Our 10+ years track record of technical excellence coupled with our proven results in helping our clients succeed with business development, digital strategy and customer experience design is proudly manifested in our status as an Adobe Platinum Partner.

With local offices in 14+ markets across EMEA, APAC and North America and over 500 employees, we provide an international presence that allows us to cultivate close, long-term relationships with our clients.