Have you ever dreamed about leaving your boring job to set up your own ecommerce store? Your own online store would give you financial freedom. You would no longer have to punch the clock or spend your days making money for somebody else. But wait. Before you jump, understand that succeeding in ecommerce is not easy. It requires hard work and skill. And yes, mistakes will be made along the way.
Successful ecommerce entrepreneurs rarely realize their dreams on the first try. Success in any business venture usually requires trying and failing multiple times before hitting on a winning formula. That is the nature of business. Where ecommerce is concerned, the one mistake that kills more online stores than any other is this: assuming customers will come on their own. Shopping e-tailers, where small and medium enterprises thrive, actually launched a booster package for e-commerce retailers to achieve online business growth.
Websites Can Be Meaningless
More than one ecommerce entrepreneur had set up an online shop under the faulty assumption that people would automatically come. They view ecommerce as being similar to that old Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams. Just build a website and they will come, right? Wrong.
At Webtek Digital Marketing in Salt Lake City, UT and Austin, TX (you can visit their website here: https://webtek.co/), the ecommerce marketing team puts a ton of time and effort into what is known as ecommerce SEO. What they do is a specialized form of SEO designed to maximize ecommerce exposure both on- and off-site.
Webtek’s ecommerce services would not be necessary if websites attracted buyers all by themselves. Obviously, websites do no such thing. They are largely meaningless in and of themselves. Therefore, it is the SEO expert’s job to bring visitors in. Once visitors arrive, then they can be convinced to buy products or services.
Websites vs. Ecommerce Platforms
Ecommerce SEO begins at the on-site level. If you don’t know what that means, consider that there are two options for setting up a new ecommerce store: building your own website or setting up a store on a popular ecommerce platform, like Shopify. Those who choose the latter could even get set up on a site like Amazon.
Operators who choose to build their own websites can still utilize Amazon and other sales channels. But most of their sales will take place through their own online stores. This requires that ecommerce SEO focus mainly on the big search engines. We are talking Google, Bing, etc.
An operator that chooses to utilize Amazon, eBay, or another similar online shopping platform has a secondary form of SEO to worry about. Simply put, they must make sure that their information ranks well on that platform’s internal search. Shopping on Amazon illustrates the point perfectly.
Its Own On-Site Search Engine
Amazon has its own search engine. It is built into the site. It is completely separate from Google and other off-site search engines. This means if you are selling on Amazon, your product pages have to rank well on Amazon’s search engine. At the same time, you cannot forget Google.
Your product pages have to rank well for both. You must concentrate on both on- and off-site searches for the simple fact that you want to capture both Google users and those who go right to Amazon to search for your products.
Ecommerce SEO relies heavily on keyword-rich product descriptions. However, the most successful ecommerce operators do not rest on product descriptions alone They create dynamic content they can share on their own websites. Many also create guest post content.
Needless to say, visitors will not stop by just because an ecommerce operator builds a website. If you are thinking of getting into ecommerce, don’t make that mistake.
