e-Commerce SEO

The goal of your e-commerce site is to convert your visitors into customers. Visitor acquisition is therefore critical to your success.

The journey of these visitors to your site can take place over several days and stages: use of search engines, price comparisons, information through customer reviews, geolocated searches, discussions with friends on social networks etc.

In order to reach and attract these consumers, track their customer journey, then choose a comprehensive and complementary traffic acquisition strategy. The idea is to have presence on the various channels where your audience is likely to search for you.

Activate your visibility actions on these acquisition levers:

• Organic (SEO)
• Advertising(SEA): Google Ads, Shopping and display, Facebook Ads…
• Social (SMO): social networks and community
• Marketplaces and price comparators

There is no magic formula to increase the visibility of an e-commerce site!

As purchases are no longer linear – we search, compare, buy, withdraw from the purchase in many different ways – it seems essential to establish a multi-channel and global SEO strategy.

The key to success will then lie in monitoring statistics and measuring the return on investment (ROI) of each traffic source. The goal being:

• on one hand, to discover the most effective channels on which to focus your investments (they can vary depending on the products you sell and your target customers),
• and on the other hand, to optimise them by accelerating or reproducing what works: a particularly high conversion rate on a Google Ads advertisement or product promotion on Facebook, an increase in traffic – and sales – thanks to a price comparison engine or presence on a new marketplace, etc.

Organic SEO is a set of techniques aimed at optimising your site’s presence in search engine results like Google, of course, as well as Bing, Yahoo and their alternatives. And by “optimising presence”, we mean “positioning yourself in the first results”, especially when we know that 75% of search engine users would never go to the results referenced after the first page (source: Arekestall)..

First and foremost, to understand SEO, you must understand how the giant Google works. Since its creation in the 90s, the search engine’s goal has always been to help internet users find the information they are looking for by offering them the best possible results.

There is no human element to define the order of these results. Algorithms do the job, taking hundreds of different criteria into account. Among them: key words, lifespan of the domain, number of links, technical aspects, descriptions, the number of “interesting” pages, updating of information and even activity on social networks.

What you should keep in mind: your SEO strategy should be focused on three main levers which are 

• content,
• les links (netlinking),
• les technical and structural optimisations.

The main advantage of the Organic SEO lever for your e-commerce: it allows you to continuously generate qualified traffic over the long term. For a relatively low cost.

Its constraints: an SEO strategy needs to be worked on and written at the same time as designing the site. The algorithms of search engines change frequently, which requires skills and constant monitoring of Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) refers to advertisements on search engines, or on social networks.

This search engine advertising involves buying extremely qualified traffic through key words, on a Cost per Click model. We also talk about “sponsored links”, where the advertiser (the merchant) pays for each click made on their advertisements.

Among the various advertising network agencies on the Internet, the Google search engine – Google Ads – is a must. It consolidates the various online advertisement tools on the search network, Display, Shopping, YouTube and even Gmail.

More than one in two internet users use sponsored links when searching for a product (source: IFOP). Do you want to take advantage of the potential of SEA for your e-commerce business? Here are its advantages:

• visibility and immediate results,
• access to a very large audience,
• the possibility to target the right people, at the right time and in the right place,
• precise control of return on investment.

If search engine advertising proves to be essential, we will nevertheless note some limits:

• a regular increase in costs, linked to the increase in competitive pressure (positioning in the results works on an auction system, and very often, bidding between competitors))
• the need for real expertise to optimise the return on investment for every campaign.

Increase awareness of your e-commerce site and its audience by working on your organic SEO and your search engine advertising campaigns at the same time in a global Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy:

• sponsored link campaigns allow you to sell quickly, particularly when you are starting up your business, during sales, for a product launch…
• while optimising your positioning in the organic results increases awareness of your site and/or brand.

Organic results make it possible to strengthen positions on paid requests with great potential. Seeing organic results for a site combined with paid advertisements would increase the feeling of trust in a brand, which would encourage internet users to visit a site which had 2 types of results rather than another.

Social Media Optimisation is a set of methods aimed at increasing awareness of your site, and attracting visitors to its online store, through sharing content on social media (Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, to name a few).

The main advantage of a social media strategy for the visibility of your e-commerce: its reach – and, in turn, its potential to generate traffic – is undeniable (the number of users worldwide is close to 3 billion, or around a third of the world’s population- source: eMarketer). These figures, added to the latest innovations in advertising and online shopping, make social platforms an essential communication lever for e-merchants who are looking to maximise the visibility and awareness of their website whilst differentiating themselves from the competition.

Other points of consideration to take into account: the need to regularly post on these media, and to keep up with your e-reputation, in particular because of potential bad buzz.

Our advice: use this channel as an additional source, and not as the only source of visitors.

Listing your e-commerce catalogue on shopping channels such as marketplaces, affiliation networks and price comparators allows you to take advantage of the traffic of e-commerce giants such as Amazon, eBay or even AliExpress.

Major advantage of listing on shopping channels: traffic is, in essence, highly qualified, with a cost per click (CPC) or cost per acquisition (CPA).

To pull your products to the top of the results on comparators and other marketplaces, it is essential to work on the content strategy of your catalogue – keywords in titles and descriptions, attributes, quality visuals etc. – alongside your pricing strategy.

One drawback to note: each platform has its own listing rules, which also differ from the Google algorithm guidelines.