E-Commerce Search Engine Optimisation : What you need to know...and why!
Be part of the e-commerce explosion by good use of SEO
If you're a retailer in today's market (and let's face it... things are tough out there at the moment for any retailer!) then you really need to think long and hard about your potential sales channels and how to maximise your potential customers.
Intelligent Retail are here to help... so here are some statistics that might push you along in your marketing decision making process:
- The use of the Internet has shown a 5% increase year on year to date... which means more of your potential customers are online.
- The UK has by far the most active set of Internet users in Europe, with around 22 Million daily users and the highest monthly time spent online (at around 21 hours per user per month).
- Worldwide sales via e-commerce websites (such as those produced by Intelligent Retail) are climbing at a rate of around 10% per year. At the moment there are around £28,000,000,000 (yes that's £28 Billion!) worth of worldwide sales via e-commerce websites!
- Sales from UK based e-commerce websites alone account for over £540,000,000 at the present date. That represents a good chunk of all money spent on retail goods in the UK!
- E-Commerce sales made to UK customers account for over £200 for every person in the UK, just for the last quarter of trading for 2008. This means a good portion of all sales are made via e-commerce websites!
Given the statistics above, if you are a retailer you must now be wondering why you are not rolling in cash. The answer? Well even the best e-commerce software won't give your business large amounts of extra turnover and profit without promotion. That's where specialist e-commerce search engine optimisation comes in.
If you're currently a user of the Intelligent Retail 'Connect' software, You'll know the benefits of having a great ecommerce website. E-commerce search engine optimisation builds on the product level optimisation of the Intelligent Retail 'Connect' website software by promoting more generalised areas of the website, thus targetting a large range of long and short tail phrases. We do this by optimising specific pages within the website and add content which is optimised and focussed on particular ranges of keyword terms.
Long tail and short tail? What's that then?
Well in plain terms, long and short tail refers to the types of searches that an internet user makes in a search engine such as Google. It has been proven many times that people searching online will move from a generalised term (such as 'jewellery'), through repeated searches to more specific search phrases such as 'hand made jewellery' and to a specific search such as 'alex monroe hand made jewellery'. Only then will a purchase usually be made. This shows that it might be good for company profile to be top in the search engines for short tail phrases such as 'jewellery' but as an online retailer it won't make you rich.... unless you also have many long tail phrases to back this up! Think of it as having a lot of bites from many differently flavoured pies... the more your range of pies the better experience you get!
So now you have the facts, what's your next move
Well, for one thing, you should seek out an e-commerce search engine optimisation company who specialise JUST in e-commerce search engine optimisation. Using a general Search engine optimisation company just doesn't make sense...
Trust us on this...it's MUCh better (traffic wise and also conversions wise) to have a larger share of traffic coming from a very large number of smaller traffic keyphrases than having a large number of visits to your website from one (very large) traffic phrase. So why is this?
Well... For one thing, you don't want to expose yourself to the search engines too heavily. Although emphasis on traffic is being moved away from the search engines in favour of social networking websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, having good solid placements in the search engine results is still a must for frequent and meaningful online sales, and given this it makes much better sense to have a good spread of results to forward traffic (and potential sales) than just a few. If you rely on just a few 'trophy' phrases, then you are facing potential disaster if Google, for example, decided to change it's algorithms to favour brand related terms above all others (which, infact is what has just happened!) If you have a good placement for brand and non-brand terms then you are more or less protected from any such change.
Come back soon for more tips and advice!