SEO

Why is SEO so important?

1. The majority of traffic comes from organic search

If you don’t have an SEO strategy for your store, you might be missing out on traffic and revenue. Online stores can expect 35% of total traffic to come from search engine results pages and 33% of revenue from this organic traffic making it the marketing channel that can produce the highest traffic and revenue, according to Wolfgang Digital.

2. Paid advertising costs are increasing and SEO is “free traffic”

If you’re generating most of your sales through paid advertising channels like Facebook or Instagram, this can eat into your profit margins. Although generating organic traffic takes time, it should eventually become your best acquisition channel which makes its costs sustainable. Putting work in to increase organic traffic through SEO may cost you time and effort, but its compounding effect makes organic traffic the best value for money channel to produce customers. SEO should never be an afterthought even though the return is not immediate.

3. Ranking first in search engines can get you up to 30% more daily traffic

There’s a joke in the SEO world that if you wanted to hide a dead body, you’d put it on page two. That’s because being in the first place gets the most clicks—disproportionately so compared to ranking in the 11th position.

If you happen to have a page that is performing well for organic traffic even without having done any optimizations for search, the likelihood is you can improve the page to bring more traffic, sometimes with the smallest tweaks.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the under-the-hood type of SEO. Like the fresh engine oil that keeps a car running, it often can’t be seen but can dramatically improve the search performance of your website. Technical SEO ensures that your website is optimized for search engine crawlers, has good page speed, and is mobile device optimized. It also optimizes your site for humans by making sure its structure, navigation, and internal links allow easy browsing, and that Meta tags are filled in so both search engines and humans know what the page is about.

If your website has discrepancies in these areas, it can stifle your rankings until errors are identified. By resolving these errors you’ll see the benefits like:

• Users engage more with the site because it’s faster and all important content and pages are easy to access
• Increased crawling activity from crawl bots because the site is easier to crawl, which increases organic traffic over time

• On-page SEO

  On-page SEO is the primary method of directly telling readers and search engines what your page is about. Search engines look for certain on-page factors that can help them in ranking your page on search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page factors include keyword and topic relevance, Meta information, the slug in the page URL, and your images, among other things. For more information on on-page factors, this Moz article is a great resource.

  Here, we’re going to cover the basics of e-commerce keyword research, how to decode search intent, and some content optimization tips to help your pages rank for their target keywords.

• An important takeaway for on-page SEO

  Creating an SEO-friendly page is about making the information digestible for the reader, not necessarily the search engines. It’s the formatting that can get readers where they need to go, through the use of headings, bullet lists, or numbered lists. It’s about reducing friction for the reader experience by helping them get there and easily find what they want. You may hear that length is a deciding factor on whether a page ranks or not. My take has always been, that if you have a monster-sized article or page, that’s because the topic deserves it and needs a 101 or beginners’ guide. It’s rarely a good idea to add more words to an article to hit a metric that promises a ranking page.