Increase online presence, brand awareness, and sales. Make your website more customer and search engine friendly. Grow organic and paid traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
Without getting enough organic traffic any ecommerce business becomes unsustainable in long run. The online customers are continuously increasing and with the rise of middle class and digital penetration in developing countries the e-commerce business will achieve greater heights. In this scenario it is crucial that your website should be ranked high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Almost all the customers make search about product or service they want to buy. In search results if your website does not figure in first page, then it is more likely that the customer will not click on your webpage even you have best quality. Therefore, getting high page rank and maintaining it all the time becomes crucial for getting success in e-commerce. Due to cut throat competition in etrade, making it to first page is difficult but possible by applying various search engine optimization techniques (SEO). These techniques are broadly divided into two categories.
Everything which can be done within website to optimize and make it search engine friendly is called on page optimization while rest of the activities which are used to promote the brand is called off page optimization.
The big corporations are making presence in every corner of the earth. They have large resources at disposal and famous brand name. By offering huge discounts they are making inroads in capturing the local market and making local business owners helpless. Therefore, the globalization and ecommerce has become both challenge and opportunity for local retail business owners. To compete with these ecommerce giants, it is crucial that small business owners should come on online platform. They need to increase online visibility.
Google prefer local business by making online presence of local businesses through “Google my business” free service. The business owners can list their products and services by providing business name, contact details and other relevant information. This listing of business is part of local SEO so we can say that whether you are online marketer or not, online presence of your listing is must.
The behavior of consumers have changed , before visiting the local shop they perform online search query whether is there any shops in nearby area which can cater their needs or not, so imagine if they don’t find you online then you are losing new customers and giving opportunity to your competitors who have already made online presence.
So how SEO is important for small and medium businesses? The time has gone when SEO was more relevant to big corporation and medium businesses. The outreach marketing plans of big corporations to find and capture new markets has become the challenge for existence and sustenance of small and medium businesses. The big corporations are setting new consumer behavior trend so it is important that small and medium businesses should align themselves with these new changes.
The listing and online presence adds the credibility to small business so when customers make search and find business online they can have more confidence in such businesses because customer see them as genuine business entity.
Most of the small businesses are not even having online presence so this gives unnecessary edge to big corporations which are not living any stone unturned when it comes to digital or off line marketing. Be it online or off line business visibility over internet is must in twenty first century trade. Even if you are offline business the online presence compliments your overall visibility and brand awareness locally, nationally and internationally.
In coming time the volume of ecommerce business will increase manifold so more and more customers will buy making online search. Therefore this behavior of shifting of customers from offline to online will be a loss for offline businesses if they don’t make online presence.
Even if a small business decided to tap online customers how it would compete with big companies. Just making website will not attract organic traffic if website doesn’t come in first page for search engine results pages. This is where the SEO can help small and medium enterprises to improve the page rank. If enterprises are able to do this then they will attract more new local customers but also the national international customers.
Now days the focus of search engines is more on quality content. They find it through backlinks of high domain authority. So both content and quality backlinks have major impact on page rank. SEO not only help in creating quality content but also earning backlinks. This extra cost should be considered as an investment which will give more lucrative dividend in future. If enterprises are not will to make this investment at least they should do SEO themselves by focusing on specific keyword which is unique for their business .The SEO focusing on specific area along with local location can outnumber the big companies in search results.
The online presence of small businesses makes them open for 24 hours a day, they are never closed to online customers, and this can earn extra revenue for them. Being in social media increases the conversion rate because social media establishes relation and trust when a business is continuously responding to customer queries nearly on real time.
The big companies offer heavy discounts to customers during festive season and hence the off line businesses are facing heat. Through newsletters, emails and product reviews the customers can be kept into loop and they can be informed about new products and discounts. It is seen that building email list and marketing through it increases the conversion rate. The quality and loyal customers can be attracted. These customers will further spread word of mouth about the business entity.
Therefore online presence and SEO techniques can help small and medium firms to grow and reach to large audience. In the present scenario online marketing and SEO is not only related to large companies but also became more important for small and medium owners.