Why SEO - 15 Reason Why You Should Focus on SEO in 2020

What is SEO

Just in case anyone is unsure what SEO is all about, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process used for growing both the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a particular website or individual web page to users of a web search engine such as Google and today more than ever it is critical to the success of any online business or enterprise.

Why SEO?

This is a question many SEOs and digital marketers face inside and outside their organisations. SEO has been around for more than a decade and a half and continues to make up a gigantic share of traffic for any successful websites.

So much so, that in a recent global study ‘organic search‘ was identified as the largest driver of web traffic for most sectors and a crucial component in helping to deliver that all-important revenue.

The power of SEO at driving organic traffic is clear, organic search usage and share are outpacing growth in many other channels. Organic and paid dominated web traffic in 2019. So the need to optimise your pages for SEO is going to be even more key in 2020 as the organic search will continue to rise well above other search traffic.

15 reasons for understanding the role of SEO in 2020

Below we’ve listed out what we believe are the fifteen most important SEO points you need to elevate, understand and position in your marketing mix in 2020.

1. 1. Channel Share. Current research suggests that fifty-three per cent of all traffic to websites comes from organic search. Organic search delivers the most traffic to websites by a considerably wide margin.
  2. Search Share. On average, some 83 per cent of the traffic from search engines comes from SEO and only some 17 per cent comes from paid search.
  3. Share of Focus. Even though organic search accounts for the majority of web site traffic, a large number of companies continue to spend more money on paid search, in 2019 paid search controlled 15% of web searches.
  4. Long-Term Traffic Equity. While it’s true SEO does require an upfront investment. Once they’ve been earned, search engine rankings continue to have long-term continuance.
  5. Organic Traffic. Unlike other forms, SEO traffic has no media cost and can provide a substantial and measurable ROI – higher than most other channels. Search engines appreciate and reward content that is relevant to readers and written for them rather than for bots – hence why the need to focus on optimising for your target audience.
  6. Structure. The use of well-constructed SEO helps to organise your website and makes it easier for your visitors to navigate and transact throughout the site.
  7. Alignment. Marketing always works best when all channels are aligned and are delivering the same message – including organic search. The use of a multiple channel alignment strategy advances results across all channels.
  8. Brand Elevation. SEO success secures an increased share of voice in the search engine results pages, which is an integral component to the success of your brand and for creating consumer trust in your brand.
  9. Conversion. It is a recognised fact that SEO traffic often converts better than other channels since rankings often convey trust from the search engines, and while the paid search may help produce results quickly, it does lack authenticity and therefore should be paired with your SEO strategy
  10. Channel Synergy. While your other marketing channels generate demand for people to question, the search engine for products and services like yours. It’s vital to remember if your website is not there to collect the demand you spent money creating, your competitors will be only too happy to collect it.
  11. Market Consideration. Organic search is often a critical part of the research process, especially for products or services with a lengthy sales cycle. People tend to use search engines to generate a list of potential candidates for a product or service and then use them to collect opinions and reviews that help them make the buying decisions.
  12. Search and Social. While social media works in tandem with SEO; some queries are more sensitive to “fresh results,” and social signals, which can impact and determine the positioning within the search results. Social media is key to helping shape your brand’s presence online and drive traffic back to your site.
  13. Research. Continuous SEO research allows you to fully understand your user interests, which then allows you to build content that addresses and captures that interest.
  14. Content Distribution. By Concentrating on SEO and legitimate link building leads, it helps you to develop relevant, useful content that people want to share, and it encourages on-going digital word of mouth.
  15. Global Reach. By having a global reach, SEO can even provide you with dynamic translation and localisation that can help bring in new and unexpected customers from around the world.

The Final Word

Today’s switched-on marketer knows all too well that a resilient SEO strategy is by far the best way to appear at the top of the search engine results page and that the more search visibility your brand has, the more qualified traffic you can direct to your website.

So hopefully, the 15 reasons we listed here outlining why we believe the use of SEO should always play a prominent role in your marketing mix, will go a long way in helping you to focus and deliver the online results your brand deserves here in 2020.

How to Increase Sales Traffic to your E-commerce Website

Are you making it easy for consumers to make buying decisions and check out? Here’s our thoughts on how to remove any obstacles and increase sales on your e-commerce site.

More and more consumers are considering the social, environmental and ecological impact of their purchases and today, more than ever they are looking for a seamless experience from the brand.

As a result, successful e-commerce outcomes are shaped by understanding what consumers want, how they want it and by making the shopping experience easy for consumers to make a decision and check out.

This is how to increase sales to an e-commerce site.

Seamless Shopping

The concept of seamless shopping is all about making something easy to do. Seamless online experiences should apply to all websites, but it’s particularly critical for e-commerce sites.

Easy Navigation

Navigation is a reference to the menu used to help users find and buy products when and how they want. In this instance, the best approach is to make sure as much of the content is available by linking to the top-level categories from the menu.

For an especially large e-commerce site, this may mean linking to top-level categories that are several layers deep in the hierarchical structure. It’s important to focus on getting users to the most popular top-level categories and allowing them to take one more click to their desired destination.

If a category isn’t that popular it’s okay to only link to the parent category of the less popular category.

What your website hierarchy could look like this :

Home > Category A > Subcategory B > Subcategory C

Subcategory B is the parent category to Subcategory C. So if subcategory C isn’t especially popular then it’s fine to link to Subcategory B and let people drill down.

You aim to make it easy for people to find and buy the products they want. Remember the job of the menu is to help users go to the most popular sections of a website.

Conclusively, every category or page on a website stands or falls by how many links point to those inner pages. This is often the key to getting pages ranked, so the focus is on what a user sees making it easy for them – seamless.

List products by popularity

Always list products by their popularity, as opposed to their price points as this makes it easy for the users to find and purchase what they want. By listing products on the category pages by order of popularity you ensure that buying products on the site is easy for the majority of people.

Comparisons when shopping

Google’s quality raters guidelines define a high-quality e-commerce page as one that allows users to browse and compare products and while the ‘quality raters’ guide is not an indication of what is inside of Google’s algorithm, it does give you an idea of what kinds of sites Google views as desirable, and the kinds of sites it wants to aspire to rank.

Consumers like to research the features and know the specs of the products being considered, both online and offline. Accommodating consumers to help them with their research and to compare products in a manner they are inclined to do, fits into the concept of creating a seamless shopping experience.

Reviews Can Help Boost Sales

Reviews can help make the decision-making process easy. So you should always encourage users to return and leave reviews. Whatever you can do to encourage users to leave reviews will result in a win for you and shoppers.

In-fact by showing reviews it can boost the conversion rate by up to 270%, according to a research study undertaken by the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University.

Key research conclusions:

1. Displaying reviews can increase conversion by 270%
2. Reviews can make a positive impact on sales of more higher-priced items
3. ‘5 stars’ are often seen as being “too good to be true”
4. Early reviews have the greatest overall impact

How reviews can influence shopping

- Product pricing
- The Reduced degree of uncertainty or risk involved in making the purchase
- Average star rating
- The presence of negative reviews
- The number of reviews

The research also showed that online reviews were most important for high priced purchases, the more expensive a product the riskier the choice perceived to be by the consumer. They want to ensure that they make the correct choice, so online reviews go a long way to increasing conversion rates for higher-priced products.

Five-star perfect ratings, tended to generate sceptical feelings while reviews that scored less than five stars were perceived to be more trustworthy. Badges that indicated a reviewer is a “verified buyer” tended to increase trust in the review and increase conversions.

Customer Turbocharging

The factors for increasing sales and decreasing returns is exciting, researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania recently published research that examined how offline interactions drove sales and conversions.

Among the many things discovered was that a ‘personal’ type of online presence tended to cultivate better customers – they referred to this as turbocharging the customer.

Likewise, they discovered that traditional offline businesses that also delivered a personal interaction with a consumer tended to cultivate better customers who in turn purchased most often, returned to the store more often and returned less merchandise.

The idea of customer turbocharging may be something to explore, particularly for more expensive purchases, as the more personal touch may be ideal in helping a site convert more visitors and kick-start positive word of mouth referrals.

Mobile User Experience

Because consumers jump from laptop to mobile, it can be easy to disconnect on how the user experience is created where the desktop version might seem to receive more attention.

The Mobile Moxie Page-Oscope tool is very useful for testing web pages across a wide range of simulated devices to diagnose how they function, it’s also a useful tool for revealing where a webpage can be improved upon to generate more sales.

Increasing Conversions

The purpose of seamless e-commerce and good user experience is all about sales and removing the obstacles that prevent conversions is a way to increase sales.

Each discussion about how to structure the site navigation, how to create the best mobile shopping experience, or how to increase trust is a conversation all about conversions. When considering what should be done about a particular website issue, looking at it from the perspective of what can be done in a way to increase conversions will result in useful answers.

Final thoughts

The consumer expectations we have touched here aren’t necessarily new, consumers have always wanted a bespoke experience and great service from a brand, but now this has been accelerated through the rapid rise in technology. Today’s consumers are now more connected and always looking for conversation and seamless brand experiences.

Month: October 2020