E-commerce SEO – the difference between online success and failure

Do you e-tail? Lots of companies do and it’s a fast growing part of the UK economy.

The UK e-retail market grew in August with sales up by 15% compared to the same month last year. According to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) UK shoppers spent an estimated £4.4billion online during the month, equivalent to £72 per person. Analysis organisation eCommera reports that over two in five (42.6%) of Brits are now shopping online at least once per week. 70% of UK households use the Internet for buying goods/services. The main motivation seems to be price savings.

• 60.4% of people believe they get a better bargain than on the high street.
• 50.8% state convenience of having items delivered as their main reason for shopping online.
• 39.3% say it’s the sheer range of choice available online.

There’s gold in them there e-commerce hills. Or so it would seem.

As well as being potentially lucrative it’s also worth bearing in mind that e-commerce can be extremely complicated as well as extremely competitive. Get it right and you open yourself up to potentially huge worldwide markets 24/7, 365 days of the year. Get it wrong and you could end up an also ran with all the costs involved in setting up and marketing an e-commerce site but with none of the returns. Much of your success will rely on your profile. Search positioning won through well-applied SEO and online marketing.

However attractive your site and however compelling the deals on offer, if you’re nowhere to be found then you simply won’t be doing the numbers. SEO can often be THE difference between the success and failure of an e-commerce site. If you are serious about e-commerce success then you have to be serious about your SEO too.

SEO for ecommerce

Is your SEO team confident? Even more important, is it capable when it comes to SEO for ecommerce sites? Do your SEO execs have the experience to get you where you need to be i.e. sitting pretty at the top end of Google?

A professional ecommerce SEO agency will be able to guide your SEO strategy on a range of areas. The most suitable ecommerce platform for example that offers SEO friendly URLS to enable you to integrate your keywords or keyword phrases.

They’ll understand the importance of XML sitemaps and the need for your site to be quickly and effortless crawled by the search robots. They’ll know too that the bots feed off text content but hate duplicate content. And that tags need to be completed and that your site has clear and consistent coding and architecture.

Getting your e-commerce SEO right is a serious business. It is the difference between success and failure. Make sure you talk with a serious e-commerce SEO company.