Ecommerce websites depend on one thing: traffic from qualified visitors who want to buy from you. To this end, is it more better for you to invest in SEO or in Google AdWords?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an effective way for an ecommerce site to bring more traffic, helping your site appear higher up in search engine rankings and, therefore, more click-throughs.
While you cannot directly pay to rise up the rankings organically, Google AdWords allows site owners to jump to the top of search results (or to appear on the right-hand side of a results page), in a yellow box: Google’s advertising space.
A nice feature about Google AdWords is that it works on a pay-per-click model: you only pay for direct leads to your website. Money is only deducted from your AdWords account when someone actually clicks on the ad and visits your website.
So which is better for ecommerce entrepreneurs?
If done in-house, SEO can be very time consuming. You have the option to outsource it to an agency, but that requires a significant investment over an extended period of time before you see the results. Good SEO depends on your ecommerce site playing to Google’s algorithm, and depends on the quality of your site content.
The time factor is important: it can often take at least six months of intensive SEO work before an SEO campaign starts delivering results to your website.
On the other hand, Google’s AdWords programme can offer much quicker results – a website owner can set up an AdWords campaign within 24 hours, with direct results.
Because of its pay-per-click model, AdWords can also be done on a much lower budget than organic SEO. AdWords allows you to set a cap on how much you want to spend on inbound leads, so that the campaign stops costing you money when you’ve reached your campaign budget.
AdWords also has the advantage of very nimble – you can experiment with different search terms (for example very niche searches versus broader search terms) and focus the campaign on a geographic area (ie just England, or just Britain, rather than the entire world).
So why would anyone choose to invest thousands of pounds in an SEO strategy instead of just buying AdWords click-throughs? The answer is trust. Online shoppers tend to trust main results rather than paid-for listings.
Regardless of whether you choose to invest in SEO or AdWords or both, it is vital to spend time analysing the results on your ecommerce website. Some campaigns will be more effective through AdWords (ie a Christmas campaign leading visitors to specific products on your ecommerce site), but having an SEO strategy is also vital for the long-term.
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