SEO the Secret Weapon in the E-Commerce Wars

by Dylan Downhill, 1/16/2006

The Opportunity

It has been well documented that consumers use search engines to research and buy products online. They read reviews and descriptions, analyze ratings, and research pricing as they compare products and vendors. A successful e-commerce site must offer a positive customer experience and build trust. However, in the nitty-gritty world of online retail sales, probably the most important success factors are the accessibility of the product and price.

It follows then that high rankings in the search engines are essential to the success of an e-commerce site, because high rankings make the products more accessible to the online shoppers. The site should rank highly not just for the general keywords that describe the business, but, ideally, all of the words that describe the products sold on the site.

The Challenge

There are two primary methods to achieve high rankings in search engines. One is to optimize your website naturally, i.e. organically, so that search engines rank it highly for your important terms on their search results pages. The second way to achieve high rankings is to buy Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads that appear on search results pages. Which method drives the best traffic for online retailers? According to a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research and presented at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference in March, 2005, "6 out of 7 clicks from the organic listings as opposed to Pay-Per-Click listings."

Clearly, high natural listings in the search engines are key for a successful e-commerce site.

In spite of this fact, many online retailers still focus exclusively on PPC advertising to drive traffic to their sites. The explosion in the popularity of PPC advertising for e-commerce sites is likely due to a variety of factors, including the ease of setting up campaigns, competitive peer-pressure, and the ease of budget approvals based on the lure of quicker returns on ad spend. The rewards of organic site optimization, although greater than PPC, appear over a longer period of time.

Go to article page:

Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper

Titles are some of the most vital parts of your site, especially if it consists of a series of articles. Yet they're also some of the most ignored elements of all web pages, and more difficult than you'd think to do correctly. You have to realise that you're not writing headlines - it's more interactive than that. Read 'Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper'.

Article categories

Latest articles

Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?

Like it or not, the keywords and phrases you select to describe your site within your META tags and body text can make or break your listings in the search engines. It's a sad fact that most companies are targeting the wrong keywords and losing traffic as a result. Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords. Read 'Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?'.

Professional Keyword Research Strategies

Keyword research is an integral part of any SEM initiative, whether it may be PPC or SEO, so it's important to do it right. Its also important to do it right from the start, Google spiders (the bots that indexes web pages) can takes up to months before they cycle to your site, so if you target the wrong keywords initially, it could take months to fix. Read 'Professional Keyword Research Strategies'.

Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?

Long tail keywords is a term you will often come across in SEO circles, and basically refers to the less popular keywords that get fewer searches per month in the search engines, but are easier to rank highly for, because there are far fewer sites competing for that term. Read 'Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?'.