Google Traffic Drives Sales

There are two compelling reasons for you to consider investing in Google SEO. First, Amazon will reward you for sending traffic by increasing your ranking. You can also get a commission on sales but this is not your focus.

The second and most important reason is for you to start understanding what you need to do in order to “own” your own traffic and to be able to divert it wherever you want.

Google SEO can help you transition to other sales channels beyond Amazon by providing you with deeper insights into your customer preferences and interests.

That is the real nugget in all of this. Learn more about your customer and then sell them what they want. Insights into a tweak to your product, perhaps more robust packaging, or even a greater understanding of just how they use your product are gold. It all starts with building your own audience through SEO. 

In addition, by taking the time to optimize your Shopify or WordPress e-commerce site, it’s actually possible to get your products to rank higher than Amazon on Google search, driving sales with a far lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA). 

Margins are continually being squeezed, so a real focus on your CPA is a priority. A major merit of SEO is that the effects of the work are additive—the more you work at it, the lower the CPA for customers who find you from your marketing efforts. For example, a single blog post can drive sales of a particular product for years. SEO is the marketing method that keeps on delivering. 

SEO Helps Boost Traffic To Your Best Products (without ad spend)

Part of the SEO process involves writing content that targets specific steps in the buyer’s journey for your ideal customers. This content aims to answer all of the prospective customers’ questions about particular products or product categories, providing a valuable resource when making a buying decision. Consequently, Google rewards this type of content in search rankings.

SEO Benefits Grow Stronger With Time, Unlike Digital Advertising

SEO is a long-term business strategy that delivers better results the longer you work at it. Comparatively, you can spend thousands on running digital ads to drive short-term traffic results, but once those ads stop, so does the traffic—the benefits don’t continue—reducing your long-term return on ad spend (ROAS).

SEO is different from advertising in that it’s like planting seeds, as you’ll reap continued fruits from the labor long after it’s been done. That said, once the seeds have been planted, it takes diligent work for many months to get the best possible results—and building the technical framework alone is not enough.

There are two main categories of Google SEO: On-Page and Off-Page. 

Each has many steps that come at various stages of the entire SEO process. 

On-page optimization is focused on improving how closely the website content answers the questions ideal customers have about your products. Some of these elements include the following:

Keyword Research

A primary element contributing to on-page SEO is keyword research, which typically leverages various data-crunching tools to provide insight into what words are being used by people performing searches and the websites that rank highly for them. Keywords are parsed into the order of importance, and an optimal density range for each respective keyword is determined.

Written Content Creation

Perhaps the most commonly known stage of SEO is content production, such as blog postings or copywriting that’s on the home page. This content is created to speak to each step of the buyer’s journey, usually striving to answer a sweeping range of the “People Ask” questions found on the Google search engine results page (SERP).

Along with addressing how closely the webpage answers relevant questions, the quality of how the information is presented on the webpage is optimized as well. Headings, bulleted lists, and links to additional resources with strong authority on the topic all help provide a better experience for the reader, which the Google search algorithm rewards by boosting search rankings.

Keyword Density And Content Structure

When creating content for on-page optimization, keyword density is one of the leading factors that influence what content is written and how it’s structured. It’s critical that certain words are used in headings, for example. The number of paragraphs and the number of headings also impact the overall ranking of the page.

Alt Tags

Image “alt tags” are the behind-the-scenes text that provides a written description about the photo to Google and other search engines, so they know what they’re “looking at.” These tags help contribute to keyword density, structure, and quality of information ranking metrics.

Meta Descriptions

Similar to alt tags, meta descriptions help boost page rank by focusing on top-relevancy keywords and quality of information. These also provide the small snippet of text that users see underneath the main link on the SERP, which creates yet another opportunity to attract organic (free) traffic to your site.

One of the primary considerations for off-page SEO is building page authority and credibility in the segment. 

Google crawls all the websites in a particular category, eg Snowboards, searching for which ones have the most authority on the topic within that category. Google calculates this by analyzing the number and quantity of links to that particular webpage. More links aren’t enough—they need to be links that are from websites that already have a high-authority ranking in that category. 

For example, if Burton, a leading snowboard brand added a link to a blog post published on a local snowboarding shop’s website, that local snowboarding shop will get a boost in their local search rankings. Of course, this is a very basic explanation of how backlinking works but illustrates the concept.

Backlinks are like a vote. The more snowboarding customers trust the voter, the more weight their vote holds. While getting a high number of backlinks from lower-level websites in the space is helpful, getting even a handful of backlinks from high-authority sites can propel a site past its competitors in the SERP rankings.

White-Hat Backlinking

Obviously, a system designed this way opens itself up to people trying to game the system. When search marketing was first introduced, clever technicians caught on early and started creating links en-masse to build what’s known as “link farms.” These types of tactics are now known as “black-hat” SEO and can cause long-term negative consequences for websites. Don’t let anyone talk you into this!  

Google knows more about you and most other people on the planet than you realize. Like Amazon, they continually search out those who are gaming the system using black-hat tactics and continually update their algorithm to punish these types of websites. These updates seek to provide better search results by finding the websites that use backlinking in a way that truly helps end-users, which are known as “white-hat” SEO methods.

Results Tracking And In-Depth Page Feedback

Running in tandem with the on-page and off-page optimization efforts are tracking and reporting, which is used to continually gauge the effectiveness of the work and hone the process to maximize traffic results. 

Without this data, the SEO process has no guidance, and e-commerce companies have little evidence of how they’re benefitting from the strategy that’s been implemented. 

Part of the off-page SEO process involves setting up the correct data tracking of what matters most to e-commerce companies, such as cost per customer acquisition, return on ad spend per product, and heat mapping of where visitors click and focus their attention on the webpage. 

All of this translates to more informed decision-making for e-commerce managers that helps lower CPA, boost conversion rates, and increase customer lifetime value.

What Timeline Can You Expect For SEO Results?

The most pressing question when it comes to any type of marketing for e-commerce entrepreneurs is the timeline to get results. As anyone who’s spent money on advertising knows, getting sales results can be expensive, requiring a lot of traffic to justify the ad spend. In general, the faster the results, the more it will cost.

If your products have thin margins to work with, the necessary ad spend to get traffic can be prohibitively expensive. Still, the worst part is you stop seeing results the moment you turn off the ads—and stop spending money on them—preventing you from reaping any additional sales from those marketing dollars. All of the marketing content evaporates into the ether, never to be seen again by your ideal customers.

The alternative to this expensive and low-leverage way of generating traffic is Google SEO. While SEO takes longer to see measurable sales results from when first starting, the benefits of the effort are much longer-lasting than advertising. 

Once the initial SEO foundations are laid, and the page ranking authority has been established, you’ll enjoy a steady stream of organic traffic that’s highly targeted to reach your ideal customers at every stage of their buyer’s journey.

Timeline: 1-5 Months

During this phase of the SEO process, you’ll start seeing signs of traction in your analytics data. Search impressions will start to improve, page rankings will start increasing, and indexation improvements will begin to emerge. 

Traffic gains won’t be readily apparent at this stage, but the building blocks of traffic generation are being laid, evidenced by the technical metrics that matter most for ranking.

Timeline: 6-8 Months

You should now see a growth in traffic to your website pages. As these initial prospective customers continue through their buyer’s journey, with time, they’ll begin converting into sales. 

By nurturing the customer relationship with more SEO content each month, you’ll start driving repeat sales as well, resulting in a systematic marketing process that delivers long-term results that are measurable and sustainable.

There are plenty of SEO agencies out there to choose from, many of which claim to provide exceptional results in record time. 

Large SEO Agencies typically have strong portfolios of proven client results.

But for this very reason, it’s not uncommon for clients to get lost in the mix as just another number—and at a hefty price. If you don’t mind a very low-touch client experience and have a bountiful marketing budget to work with, this might be a good starting place for those who want to improve their website’s search rankings.

Boutique Agencies tend to focus on e-commerce entrepreneurs looking for a balance who want a balance of value and results backed up by robust case studies and proven experience.

They tend to have a large enough team to handle their client’s SEO needs without treating them like just another number, all while providing specialization in the e-commerce space.

Some clients have found success using Bliss Drive SEO who specializes in serving Shopify store owners and other platforms like WordPress and Woocommerce to convert traffic into sales.

You really need to shop around to find the best fit for your needs. It’s always a mix of expertise and value and finding the right fit for your style. Be sure to add them to your list. 

There are some great SEO Freelancers – if you can find them!

If your budget is very tight, finding a freelancer who’s running a one-person SEO operation may be an option. While it’s possible to find someone who knows the correct methodologies, they can quickly become overwhelmed with SEO work to do if they take on other clients, leaving your project on the back burner. 

If you go this route, it’s important that you understand the topics covered in this blog so you understand the core competencies your freelancer needs. Don’t just leave it to a freelancer to run the process on their own. You need to develop a very close working relationship and clear milestones to ensure you’re actually making progress in finding and driving your own traffic.

As always, ask us anything. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll know someone who does!