It has been well documented that people are using 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 are buying 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. You should be found for the general keywords for your business. Perhaps more importantly you should be found for all your products. This is how you can ensure the success of your online retail store.
The majority of e-Commerce businesses are currently using 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 is unmistakable.
Natural search engine optimization (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.
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.
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 the majority of e-Commerce business owners. They have jumped on the Pay-Per-Click bandwagon in an effort to keep up with their competition. Whether this is as a result of peer pressure or the advertising success of the big search engine marketing companies remains unclear. However, it is now time for e-Commerce providers to look at how much true success they gain from these campaigns. It is also time to re-evaluate the potential worth of organic search engine optimization as a means of growth for their online business.
Copyright James Peggie
James Peggie is the marketing manager for Elixir Systems a search engine optimization company located in Scottsdale, Arizona. www.elixirsystems.com
