How much does organic search contribute to the success of e-commerce? It’s more than we think.
We all know that Google currently holds around 92% of worldwide search engine market share. This certainly makes a typical organic Google listing featuring websites or e-commerce sites the digital equivalent of moment of truth.
Boasting 26% average organic CTR (Clickthrough Rate) for the first Google mobile search result and 32% as the average organic click-through rate for the first desktop search result, more than 53% of incoming visitors are accountable as the average percentage of trackable website traffic is attributed to organic search listings alone.
Moz predicts that SEO (organic search) presents 20 times more traffic opportunity than PPC (paid ads on Google) on both desktop and mobile.
To understand just how much traffic (visitors) an e-commerce site gets (or any site gets) and to know how you perform in terms of search engine listing visibility, clicks from search, resultant visitors from search engines, you’d have to look at industry averages your e-commerce site possibly falls into.
Following SEO reports specific to your industry gives you more insight on how your competitors perform with respect to search.
Typically, the competition you have for relevant keywords and key phrases, the harder it is to rank.
Note: Just because it’s harder to rank doesn’t mean you don’t focus on SEO at all. Make SEO work for your brand by focusing on content, Google’s extended SERP features, and more.
Google’s experiments have a direct impact on e-commerce SEO. Typical websites and e-commerce businesses now don’t just compete with their competitors. They also compete with Google’s own list of features such as PPC ads, maps, flights, hotels, Google Shopping, Images, Videos, and more.
Your e-commerce search performance is directly hit with Google’s own responses (top of page) for certain types of businesses.
Local businesses compete with map listings. Travel businesses compete with Google’s flight tracking or flight price display widgets.
According to SEOClarity, a shocking finding was that more than 95% of apparel industry keywords triggered a SERP feature owned by Google.
In a nutshell, you are likely to compete with Google when it comes to organic search real estate.
Unless you find a way to weave yourself in, you’ll be out. This means that the total contribution of organic search for e-commerce revenue can dwindle. Fast.
The moment you embrace (and work on) long tail keywords and key phrases, you take some pressure off of your back as far as e-commerce organic search performance or e-commerce SEO performance goes.
Using long-tail keywords (and trying to rank for such keywords) gives you more room ton create content that your potential customers are searching for.
Because you have more opportunities (and medium volume traffic potential), your opportunities to lead with content marketing, to make impact, to build a sustainable brand are amplified.
Using long-tail as a sustainable organic search strategy for e-commerce helps you aim for long-term and prolonged growth.
If you find that it’s getting harder for your rank for organic search, adopt the long-tail strategy led by systematic and long-term content marketing. If you have a healthy catalog of products, make use of elaborate product descriptions while dedicating more effort on optimizing, tracking and tweaking Product information fed to Google Shopping, Google’s organic search results.
For instance, take advantage of the catalog + Google Shopping program. Let your images show up on Google Images. Make use of the “Popular products pack” listings that Google offers (occupying 75% of SERPs). If you can, use local search, paid Google Shopping, maps, schema-led snippets, reviews, online ratings, social proof, and more.
A large part of e-commerce success, sticking to the percentage of traffic you get from organic search on Google, also depends on your e-commerce store speed, e-commerce store design, layout, and the overall user experience on the e-commerce store.
Leading way to product descriptions and product copy (convincing and persuading customers) to a robust and intuitive checkout experience.
Most businesses tend to focus so much on “getting traffic” while ignoring what happens “after a click”.
Tweak and optimize store design continuously in an effort to boost conversions, generate leads (so that customers are led into your marketing system) and revisit leads with digital channels you have control over (such as email and SMS marketing).
