Long gone are the days when we had to step out of the house to drive towards the nearest shopping mall and buy a pair of shoes or a new set of art supplies. These days, we plop down on the couch, take out our smartphones, browse through an online store, click add to cart, and then check out. It’s really that simple and quick; you can even expect your order within one to two business days. This is basically how the retail world works now.
Shopping centres are going extinct while online shopping stores are booming and proliferating like mushrooms in the wild. This is good because retailers are transforming their brands and operations to suit the digital world. They’re turning product shelves into product pages and categories and turning their cashier counters into shopping carts and checkout pages. Taking inventory has never been easy or computerised; taking stock of customers preferences and likes has never been more intelligent and intuitive, and promoting products or services has never been more ingenious or challenging, at the very least for retailers. It’s undeniable that e-commerce is the newest, shiniest new trend of this generation, and it’s more than likely here to stay for decades. This industry is worth $4,182.6m in November 2024 retail sales alone, and that’s just for a month. Simply put, e-commerce is incredibly profitable, which is why retailers have shifted to the digital platform for their main business. This is what we call e-commerce.
Let’s Talk About E-Commerce and Optimisation
E-commerce, at its simplest definition, is a website that sells products. It’s an online store, which has the same qualities of a physical store too, in the sense that it needs to be promoted, marketed, and advertised to the target customers to earn a profit. In the digital world, this is called ecommerce optimisation. Basically, e-commerce optimisation is all about improving the visibility of your website online, especially on search engines like Google. The concept here is that the more traffic your online store has, the higher the potential that this traffic will turn into sales. Of course, this means profit and revenue for you. Ecommerce search engine optimisation (SEO) focuses on enhancing the design of the website, the descriptions of the products, the ranking in search engines, and essentially the overall shopping experience of online users.
How Do You Optimise Your Website?
The answer is, you don’t. That is, you don’t do ecommerce optimisation yourself but instead outsource this service to a trusted and experienced ecommerce SEO agency. Retailers are usually not tech-savvy, and you don’t have to be. What you need to focus on is your business operations, specifically your products and your customers. Leave the search engine optimisation in the care of expert hands, ones who can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your online shop and create tailored SEO strategies on how to overcome these flaws. Let’s talk more about these in the next part…
What Can a Seo Agency Do for Me?
The main objective of optimising your ecommerce website is to increase its visibility on search engines and therefore your target customers. For this, you need to put your business in the hands of an expert who can curtail their strategies to suit your needs. Specifically, an SEO agency can do the following (and more!) for you:
- Keyword research and optimisation – It’s not as simple as identifying “mechanical keyboard” and “wireless keyboard” as the target keyphrases of your business. You need a list full of keywords and phrases that are the most influential keywords of your business. Preferably, these should be keywords that your target customers use. For this you need the SEO agency to do the research for you and come up with a data-driven list of keywords that are exactly what your primary clients search for when they browse on the internet. More than coming up with a list of keywords, an SEO agency will also help you optimise your website using these keywords, whether it’s creating content based on these keywords, using these keywords for the title tags, page titles, alternate text, landing pages, and so on.
- On-page SEO enhancement – When you take a look at your website, you might think, “Oh, it’s fine.” But when an SEO agency takes a look at your website, things may be fine but your website would definitely need a lot of tweaks and fixes before it can be called search engine ready. You’re probably not as familiar with how websites work or how web pages are enhanced and made ready for high traffic. This is exactly why you need an agency to have your back to spearhead enhancing the website design with beautiful themes and clever web pages so that it’s optimised for business.
- Technical SEO audit and fixes – Like we said, the best thing about having an SEO agency as your partner for your ecommerce is the fact that they will be able to audit your online store and assess the flaws and loopholes in your website so that they can devise an SEO plan that will boost your website at the top of search engine rankings.
- Competitor analysis and strategy development – When it comes to business, especially an online business, it’s always the goal to stay ahead of your competition. An SEO agency helps you understand the business industry much better and especially lets you stay ahead of your competition through improved search engine rankings and high traffic.
Ultimately, the primary goal of ecommerce optimisation is to improve the shopper experience through an increase in visitor traffic and search engine visibility. When there’s traffic, it’s much easier to convert these visitors into shoppers, which means profit and growth for your business. A great business model isn’t a guarantee for longevity in the ecommerce world. These days, entrepreneurs like yourself have to think outside the box to always stay in and ahead of the game. Search engine optimisation is definitely one SUREFIRE way to go!