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SEO the Secret Weapon in the E-Commerce Wars

It has been well documented that people use search engines to research and buy products online. They read reviews and descriptions, analyze ratings, research pricing, and compare these with other products. Generally speaking, when making the purchasing decision they are more concerned with what they get as opposed to who they buy it from. Of course the e-commerce site must offer a positive customer experience for the buyer and build a level of trust. However, in the nitty-gritty world of online retail sales the accessibility of product and price play the most important roles.

It follows from this that high ranking within the search engines for your ecommerce business is essential. Your business should be found for the general keywords for your business. Perhaps more importantly you should be found for all your products. This ensures the success of your online retail store.

The majority of e-Commerce businesses currently use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to bring customers to their sites. The pitfalls of this are that it focuses on the short term and is also a very expensive way of doing business.

According to Jupiter Media, as stated at the March 2005, Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York, "6 out of 7 clicks come from the organic listings as opposed to the Pay-Per-Click listings." This is valuable news for the e-Commerce industry. The value of organic search engine optimization (SEO) is obvious.

Natural SEO is thus becoming much more important for e-Commerce businesses. The demand for qualified e-Commerce SEO experts is high. However, the truth is that there are few SEO practitioners who are experts in e-Commerce.

Optimizing an e-Commerce site is no easy task. Many experienced SEO practitioners have problems optimizing for online retailers because they lack the necessary programming skills to optimize dynamic pages from shopping cart software. Un-optimized dynamic pages are often invisible to search engines. To compound the problem there are hundreds of different types of shopping cart software, each of which has different optimization requirements.

There are specific techniques involved in optimizing an e-Commerce site. These include:

• Developing web server output filters to enable title and Meta tag reconfiguration even when the shopping cart application doesn’t allow it. These filters have been applied to PHP and IIS with amazing results.
• Implementing sitemaps and other techniques to allow search engines to index the whole content of the site, even when cookies are required to access parts of the site.
• Advising clients on changes to their product titles and descriptions to match the consumers search.
• Developing product feeds to the major shopping engines including Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and BizRate to ensure maximum exposure for the products at prices far below current Pay-Per-Click prices.
• Undertaking usability research and analysis.
• Determining traffic, reporting and visitor conversion patterns.
• Increasing shopper retention.
• Reducing shopping cart abandonment.

By utilizing these techniques for your e-Commerce site you can ensure that the major search engines will index your entire product range and therefore increase the chances that all of your products will appear in the search engine results.

As an example, when these SEO techniques were applied to a large online marine supply store their year on year sales increased by 30%.

Poor SEO can lead to poor results and a lack of return on investment on your search engine optimization spending. Another example relates to a distributor of rugs and carpets that had used two other SEO companies with minimal success. After three months with an e-commerce oriented SEO campaign in place their revenues went up over 200%.

Additional SEO tools such as paid inclusion (including Yahoo’s SiteMatch) can be used to increase the frequency of spidering if there is a constant stream of new products to an e-Commerce site.

It is clear that the value of organic search engine optimization has been lost by many e-Commerce business owners. Whether the current focus on PPC is a result of peer pressure or the advertising success of the big search engine marketing companies remains unclear.

In an effort to keep up with their competition many online retailers face burgeoning PPC budgets brought on by the high cost of customer acquisition. When these retailers campaign for their online budget they are much more likely to get approval when they can demonstrate an immediate ROI. This has been another factor in the explosion in the popularity of PPC over Organic SEO because the rewards of organic SEO appear over a longer time frame.

However, it is now time for e-Commerce providers to look at how much true success they actually gain from their PPC campaigns. It is also time to re-evaluate the potential worth of introducing organic search into their online marketing campaign. The cost of PPC continues to increase dramatically as more retailers enter the space. Although the cost of implementing organic SEO will also rise with increased demand, a remarkable ROI for the service still remains. The savvy online retailer will budget for both PPC and organic SEO in their online advertising budget.

The true worth of this can be seen by looking at a major supplier of car and truck accessories products who were able to lower their per month PPC spending by $6,000 while increasing their overall profit. This was achieved by applying web and eCommerce analytics to an existing paid placement campaign. In addition to paid placement, they also embarked upon a search engine optimization strategy. This has resulted in increased visitors, increased sales and ultimately increased profits all from organic non-PPC traffic.

Copyright © Dylan Downhill and James Peggie

Dylan Downhill is the CIO and Technical Director and James Peggie is the Marketing Manager for Elixir Systems – a search marketing company located in Scottsdale, Arizona. www.elixirsystems.com

You can comment on this article at the Elixir Systems SEO Blog.

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