While the ultimate aim of an eCommerce business is to generate revenue, the name of the game is TRAFFIC. A solid SEO marketing strategy can generate consistent, FREE traffic for your online store.
Without traffic first, without getting eyeballs onto your website, nothing else matters and your business will remain the world’s best kept secret.
But, not all traffic is equal and getting quality traffic at a profit is harder than it used to be.
To scale and grow a profitable online store, you need a mix of three kinds of traffic:
- owned – from your own database, such as Klaviyo;
- paid – which is advertising; and
- earned – earning organic search traffic being the main strategy there.
You want to aim for 40% of your traffic and sales coming from organic search traffic, and when you do a great job of your SEO marketing you’ll generally find that your conversion rate from this traffic is higher than most other channels, probably with the exception of your email marketing.
To get more organic traffic, though, requires working on SEO marketing (search engine optimisation). And unfortunately, this activity is something you need to work on regularly and consistently.
It’s also the kind of digital marketing that evolves over time, as new technologies and platforms come into play and as consumer behaviour changes.
In this article, we share the top 5 SEO marketing trends for eCommerce businesses this year, and how you can incorporate them into your marketing.
1. Podcasts over blogs
Blogging has long been known as an SEO marketing strategy. Creating and publishing content on your website that relates to a high volume keyword search term or phrase, helps Google to send interested people to visit your site.
The trouble is, in 2024 there are now 1 billion blogs online, with only 7.8 billion people in the world to read them!
That is a LOT of competition for eyeballs! And makes it a lot more difficult to actually get some cut-through…
In comparison, there are currently only 4.2 million podcasts, which is vastly less competitive.
You can still publish content notes on your website and optimise that for search.
And you can also publish on podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, where your show name and episode titles can easily be searched for.
Plus, if you’re like me, you can also record your podcasts as videos and share those on YouTube, which is another major search platform!
2. Spend time on less popular social networks
Similar to the above point about the number of blogs compared to podcasts, it’s often easier to get reach and engagement when you post on social platforms that have fewer members.
Often, less popular social platforms have algorithms that gain more reach for your content more effectively. And any free visibility is gonna be welcome!
Secondly, their ad costs are often lower, meaning you’re likely to get a better return on ad spend.
So, whilst the most popular social media networks like Instagram and Facebook have more members, there are also far more businesses and advertisers trying to use these channels to get traffic to their websites.
It’s not that you shouldn’t use those platforms too – you should – but try adding others like TikTok and Pinterest into the mix as well.
Start by thinking about your ideal customer avatar and which channels they would frequent. Spend some time understanding those channels and then creating and sharing content.
3. Brand Building
Along with customer loyalty, brand name search queries are on the rise!
This is one of the reasons why you generally see an increase in Organic Search traffic and sales whenever you increase your social media ad spend.
Basically, more people are discovering your brand from that kind of advertising, but they don’t generally click and buy immediately from an ad.
Consequently, many will do a Google search for your brand name later.
Here’s how you can incorporate brand-building into your SEO marketing strategy:
- Publish value-adding blogs. For example, Styleware sometimes publishes recipes for food you can make and enjoy eating from their bowls.
- Make sure you add your brand name to your Meta Titles on your website.
- Publish a comparison piece on your website, such as ‘Your Brand vs Competitor Brand’.
- Do blog features and collaborations with other sites.
- Get some PR featured on other media platforms.
- Submit your brand and products to Gift Guides.
- Write your own content, Don’t use AI! (Except perhaps for help with idea generation…)
4. Copywriting vs AI
At this point, it’s important to know how Artificial Intelligence (AI) tech tools, such as ChatGPT, actually work.
These tools are very clever and can be extremely useful, there’s no doubt about it. BUT…
They are trained on all the content already available online.
Any blog or other content you create and publish online MUST add value and serve a purpose.
In fact, search engines like Google can tell if your content is or isn’t adding value or interesting to your audience.
I can pretty much guarantee that, if you copy and paste some text from ChatGPT to your website, your audience (and therefore Google) will be able to tell that it was written by a machine.
Be mindful that your content should be produced in order to attract traffic to your site, educate them about your products, and inspire your visitors to purchase from you.
It’ll only do that if the content is worth their time to read it!
By all means, use AI tools to help with brainstorming ideas or giving you some inspiration for starters.
But always, ALWAYS re-write it in your own tone of voice and using language you would actually use yourself. As a human.
If you’re still not convinced….
Human written content will out-perform AI written content 94% of the time.
5. Blog lengths
It used to be that you needed to write 3,000-word blogs to prove to Google that you had a certain authority over a subject.
Thankfully, for the non-writers among us, Social Media has retrained us on how we consume content.
Our attention spans are a lot shorter these days. Now, we lose interest more quickly before we move onto something else.
And the same goes for blogs. Shorter forms of content are now out-ranking longer blogs from an SEO perspective as well.
Here are my top x tips for blog writing:
1. Purpose (SEO blog, Value adding Blog, Brand Building)
2. Keyword research
3. Structure
4. Headings
5. Short paragraphs
6. Images (file names + alt text)
7. Video content
8. Anchor links (anchor link titles)
9. Meta titles + meta descriptions
10. Internal links
11. Backlinks
12. Leveraging other channels at your disposal to drive traffic
Wants some help getting more traffic and sales?
Book a complimentary eCommerce Growth Strategy session with us today. There’s no obligation to buy at the end of it, and I guarantee you’ll walk away with a much better plan for how you’ll grow your business and achieve your goals than you have right now!
