Why You Need SEO For Your eCommerce Business

Today we talk about why you need SEO for your eCommerce website. But more specifically we hit these 4 main points:

• Google Pay Per Click is more competitive and once you stop paying for ads you stop getting traffic.
• SEO is long-term. Invest in SEO now, it will pay bigger dividends as your business grows in the next few years.
• The future of SEO is voice search. Learn about it today!
• Scaling your business with the power of SEO.

Christian: [00:00:17] Hey.How's it going? I hope you're having a nice day. Welcome to another episode.Today we are tackling why you need SEO for your e-commerce business. We'retalking about pay-per-click versus SEO, why SEO is a long-term game, we'retalking about the future of marketing, and some other things here and there.Are you ready?

Aaron: [00:00:40] I'mready, and I'm curious about the here and there kind of stuff. So that's kindof interesting.

Christian: [00:00:47] Yeah.

Aaron: [00:00:47] Allright. So the first thing is about pay-per-click. So SEO versus pay-per-click.SEO, if you do not know, is Search Engine Optimization. It is organic. So whenyou go to Google and you're searching for something and the top search result,that's SEO. The things above those top search results are these little ads.You'll see like it says ad next to it. That's the pay-per-click stuff, and ifyou have an e-commerce store, you can absolutely run ads for people who aresearching for keywords like remotes or t-shirts or whatever else. But a lot ofother people are doing that as well, and depending on your industry, it couldbe very expensive. For example, clothing could be anywhere from 10 to 15dollars per click. Not ten dollars for somebody to buy, but 10 or 15 dollarsfor somebody to click to your website. So that's why this SEO is very importantis that once you've gotten traction for it, it's just a matter of maintainingit. And it's organic, and it will build on itself. You'll start ranking forother terms. Instead of just t-shirts, maybe cotton t-shirts or dri-fitt-shirts, and you'll start getting more traffic that way versus pay-per-click.You have to pay more money to get in front of more keywords.

Christian: [00:02:01] Andthe other thing is like with pay-per-click once you stop paying, then you stopgetting those leads. So with SEO, you have the ability to basically organicallyover years be able to draw in traffic to your website. Obviously, yes, youstill have to pay, but you know, with pay-per-click once you literally stopusing it, you stop getting the leads because your ads won't show up.

Aaron: [00:02:28] Right.I think that's a good segue into our next one which is actually SEO is longterm, and by long-term, it really just depends on the competition level for thewords that you're ranking for. But for you to see any type of real results, wealways tell people it's going to be three to six months before you really startseeing stuff, especially if you're brand new. Now if you've been around for 20years and you have an older website and you have content that you've beenputting there, more than likely you're ranking for some things, and it's just atweak or two that you can start ranking for things. But if you build a brandnew site or if you've never put anything on your site except for a phone numberfor people to call you, it's going to take you a while because there's beenpeople who've been doing it for years, and it's not like it's going to happenovernight where you're just going to start ranking for something.

Christian: [00:03:16] Right.So it's very important as an e-commerce business to have an actual blog andactually introduce new content, maybe even videos and use social media to youradvantage, but I guess what we want to reiterate here is that you need to startnow and start early. Even if you're brand new, start doing something nowbecause it will benefit you in the long term.

Aaron: [00:03:39] Right.I don't remember the exact statistic, but your blog now is going to benefit youfor the next couple of days. Say, if you write it today, but it's really goingto pay dividends in the next 12 to 24 months. So you want to create contentthat's evergreen, which means that it's not necessarily going to go out ofstyle or it's still going to be relevant today, but you really don't startseeing the dividends for Google to start crawling your website, which justmeans it's looking for keywords to help people find you. You really don't startgetting a lot of that traffic for like a year. So this is a long-term strategy,and we'd like to just kind of have that ahead of time. Some people will tellyou that you can get ranked on the first page of Google or number one on Googlein two or three days or maybe a month. That in our world is called Black Hat.Google is smarter than ever, and more than likely you'll be penalized, and yourwebsite will never rank for anything. So try to stay away from that and justunderstand SEO is long term, but if you want a business that's going to belasting longer than a year or two, then SEO is an absolute must for thatproject.

Christian: [00:04:46] Exactly.Aw snap.

Aaron: [00:04:53] Snap.Yes. That brought me back to that Lil Jon song. Snap your fingers. Do yourstep. That song.

Christian: [00:05:00] Mm-hm.Yeah.

Aaron: [00:05:01] Anyway,so Christian's going to record a video of himself doing that. So you guys cancheck it out.

Christian: [00:05:06] Forsure.

Aaron: [00:05:07] Anyway.So this is our favorite part of the podcast. If you're new here, thanks fortuning in. Make sure you click that subscribe button. Well, we like to share alittle bit about who we are and then just anything that's going on or anyfeatures or new stuff that we have coming up. So we are a digital marketingagency, and we focus on social media marketing and website design. And we dosome other things like SEO, that we've mentioned here, and we're based inAllen, Texas. One thing that we have coming up is on August 1st. We still needto finalize the time and everything. We've talked about this in the past. Whatwe're going to do is social media workshop. It's going to be seven dollars, andit's going to be for potentially 30 people. We're going to have a couple oftopics and really get into like a mastermind of how business owners can usesocial media to actually engage with their customers and grow their businessinstead of just posting these shared articles and wondering why they're notreaching their audience. So if that's of benefit to you or you feel like youwould get some value out of that, please shoot us a message on Instagram orFacebook. It's @BitBranding for everything, and we'll give you more detailsdepending on when you're listening to this episode. We may have more detailsthat we can send you a link to, but as of this recording, we don't haveanything yet.

Christian: [00:06:20] Word.Thank you, Aaron, for the lovely message from our sponsors which is ourselves.All right. So let's move on. We're talking about why you need SEO for youre-commerce business. So our third point here is the future- We're going to talka little bit about the future of marketing which is voice. You've probablyheard a lot of commercials or people who have purchased Amazon's Echo or EchoDot with Alexa. There's also Google Assistant.

Aaron: [00:07:00] Isit Cortana? Whose-

Christian: [00:07:00] Cortanais Microsoft. You have Apple's Siri. Apple just recently also, I think, lastyear came up with the HomePod, which is basically the same thing as the Echoand then the Alexa Amazon stuff. So what we're trying to say here is that voicesearch is going to be the future of marketing at some point. People are goingto be talking about how to optimize their websites for people who are searchingusing their voice in their homes, you know? You don't think about that now, butin reality, people are probably searching for- Hey, Google, what's the bestpizza place around here? You know, and Google's probably going to give them,what? The top three choices that they find online. So it's very important tostart with SEO now and also start thinking about the future of SEO and howvoice is going to change and evolve what we know of SEO right now. Right nowpeople when they search on Google or Bing or Yahoo, they might scroll down tothe first page, maybe even go to the second page, but when someone is voicesearching like that, Google Assistant or the Apple's Siri is not going to name10 different results for that person to choose from. More than likely, it'sgoing to go with the top 1 to 3 results and go from there. So it's veryimportant that you need to be ranking for those particular keywords, whateverthey are, when people are making those searches.

Aaron: [00:08:40] AndI guess one thing that really came up to me as Christian was talking about thisis that with our voice, we're going to search for something that's going to belonger tail than if we were going to be typing it. So what that means is thatsome people want to rank for pizza place or best pizza, and that's like ashort-tail keyword, but if you could rank for something in this area, hey,Google, or hey, Siri, can you find me the best deep dish pizza place in Allen,Texas? That's probably going to be pretty easy for you to rank for because nota lot of people are doing it, but that's how we're going to search for it.We're not going to be like hey, find deep dish pizza. No. We're going to searchfor specifically in North Texas or Collin County or in Allen or wherever else.So make sure that you're doing long-tail keywords necessarily instead of justshort-term keywords and try to rank for pizza because more than likely that'snot going to happen, and Google probably won't pull you up anyway for that.

Christian: [00:09:43] Mm-hm.

Aaron: [00:09:43] Allright. And our last thing here is more and more people are shopping online, andthat means that there's more stores, more e-commerce businesses starting up.That's probably why you're listening to this podcast. That's probably how youfound us, which by the way tell us if you found us on, you know, Apple iTunes orSpotify. But the point is that you're starting an e-commerce business, and thatmeans that competition's only going to grow. Some people expect that e-commerceis like- It's like the Internet age in the 2000s where people were justbuilding websites to build websites, but now we have e-commerce where it's veryearly on. I mean, merchant service has just barely gotten into stuff where wehave like Apple Pay. The future is going to be- I think Christian told me awhile back about a card or something like that changes a code or something. Ican't remember exactly what you were talking about, but there's just a- Themerchant services are changing dramatically. So if your customers can't findyou online, it's going to be very hard for you to grow your business in thesense that - we'll go back to number one here - you're going to have to pay toplay, and that's really not scalable. So the whole point for this podcast isthat if you want to sell something online, you have to be found online withoutnecessarily having to pay. You can supplement the payment, but like Christiansaid, if you do SEO and you do it well, it's going to last you a lot longerthan trying to do a pay-per-click. And if your competition's doing SEO andyou're doing pay-per-click, if we're looking at a five-year game, they probablyare going to outperform you because they can stay around for the long game, andyou may not be able to scale with that.

Christian: [00:11:21] Exactly.And by no means we're shying people away from doing pay-per-click. I think agood combination of both pay-per-click and SEO is a great strategy. If you cando both, definitely do both.

Aaron: [00:11:34] Yes.Okay. Yeah, that is a very good point. Yes, we do a pay-per-click for peopleand Facebook ads, whatever. So. And Instagram. So that's all important, but theSEO, I feel like the reason we did this episode was because e-commerce isgrowing. And a lot of people are just focusing on hey, I just want to run theseInstagram ads, but that doesn't necessarily build your brand. It just istransactional and not really sustainable. So.

Christian: [00:11:59] Yeah.All right. So there you have it. Why you need SEO for your e-commerce business.We talked about differences between pay-per-click and SEO. Talking about thefact that SEO is long term. We talked about the future of marketing which isvoice search, and then lastly, the competition is just growing and growing andgrowing. This is just- We're tipping the iceberg as far as e-commerce goes. Sothere you have it. If you are listening to us via your iPhone or computer, youcan definitely go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. I don't know if theother podcasts platforms have the ability to do a review, but if you find out away to do it, definitely leave us a review and let us know how we're doing. Wewould love to hear your feedback on our show, and if you know anyone who runsan e-commerce business and you've listened to this episode, share this episodewith them. You can actually go to bitbranding.co/podcast, and you will find allthe episodes right there. They're pretty easy to share. Just kind of copy thelink and share it with whoever you want. All right. That's it, right?

Aaron: [00:13:10] Yes.Talk to you guys next week.