Optimizing your efforts to result in higher traffic and conversion rates can be accomplished two ways: you can take the quick route, via a pay-per-click campaign, or you can do some work on the back end and opt for organic SEO results. Of course, organic SEO is going to take longer both to accomplish and to do, but the outcome is well worth it. Many experts suggest running both types of campaigns as diversity is key in online marketing. Here’s why you need to include organic SEO in your e-commerce marketing plan.
Why Organic SEO is Beneficial
Organic SEO, or optimization for your website that does not rely on paid placement with search engines, is something most of us do without necessarily realizing it. Just by starting a high quality website that focuses on a particular subject, you are unintentionally, perhaps, attracting the attention of search engine crawlers. In fact, the better your content and the more accurately you describe that content via meta tags, H1 headlines, page titles and image descriptions, the better your site will get ranked, naturally, for relevant keywords. And that’s a good thing; spammy sites have no choice but to try to drive traffic via paid placement because they aren’t ranked as highly and thus can’t achieve the same SERP (search engine results pages) results organically.
Another benefit of organic SEO is that it caters to real people, not just to search engines. Real people want good information and quality entertainment when they visit a website. Organic SEO techniques provide this naturally while also providing a way for visitors to find your site without relying on banner ads.
It takes time to experience the positive results of organic SEO, but once it starts happening, the effects are long lasting. As long as you keep up with website maintenance and continue to add new, natural content relevant to your primary keywords on a regular basis, your optimization efforts will continue to drive traffic to your site. A bonus? Other websites will begin to take notice as your pages rank higher and your good online reputation and natural links that occur will help you, too.
Of course, a very obvious benefit of opting for organic SEO is the cost – which is far less than pay per click advertising. You don’t have to worry about bidding on competitive keywords and paying an exorbitant cost-per-click rate, which is always a bonus for the e-commerce businessperson just starting out.
Essential Ways of Organically Optimizing Your Website
Since organic SEO results are achieved naturally, it’s best to just focus on doing what you do best – providing great content that fills a need for the visitor. You will want to incorporate many different types of content on your website for best results: text, video, audio, graphics, images, etc. Keep the good SEO flowing by adding new content to your pages on a regular basis; the easiest way to do this is through a blog.
Ensure that you add the appropriate descriptors to all the content on your site. As you upload a picture to use in a blog post, for instance, add a description that tells search engines what is in the photo, where it was taken, and who is in it.
Use keywords in each page title, blog post title, page heading and sub-headings. The more places you can use relevant keywords the better – but do so naturally, without stuffing them in.
And, finally, build links to your pages through the content on your site. Use the opportunity to create anchor text in your blog posts that link to a URL of content elsewhere on your site – which search engines love.