After getting banned from Google and Facebook, I learned why every ecommerce store should focus on SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a buzzword in recent years. Many areas of e-commerce have been implementing strong SEO strategies for some time, but e-commerce is still slow to catch up with others. Ecommerce stores have been trained to use paid methods like Google Shopping Ads, Facebook Ads, and other social media ads to get people to click on their store. However, with the ever increasing cost of acquiring new customers, eCommerce store owners should jump into SEO and develop a solid content strategy for long term growth and lower their costs to acquire. new potential customers.

The one-legged stool

As I mentioned earlier, the cost of attracting new customers to your ecommerce store is going to continue to rise. If your store is solely dependent on paid traffic, say from Google Shopping, and Google decides you’ve violated one of many advertising policies, all of your traffic dries up and you’re out of business. No traffic means no sales and no sales means you are bankrupt by the end of the month.

Relying solely on paid traffic channels is like having a one-legged stool. It is much safer for the health and longevity of your business to have more legs under the stool, in case a leg is removed. SEO is one of those legs that you need to apply. Not only is this free traffic, but as long as you provide valuable information to readers, there is no risk of being deleted in the same way that paid channels can shut you out.

The results of a well executed SEO and content strategy take time. Often times, an ecommerce store won’t see significant organic traffic for 6-12 months after these first pieces of content are posted. But if you keep implementing and producing strong, useful content, the effects worsen over time.

I was banned from Google and Facebook

I share all of this from my own experience as an eCommerce store owner. I was relying solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic and, for some reason, in early 2019 both platforms decided that I had violated a policy. After that point, I couldn’t go back to their good books.

I went down the SEO rabbit hole out of desperation to get traffic and started producing content that buyers in the research phase would find useful. I posted other top product by category content to help customers choose wisely, and when those pieces of content started ranking, I got more traffic than ever before. To give you an idea of ​​the timeline, I started posting content in February 2019, and by June I was already getting traffic and sales. Over time the traffic kept growing and I continued to produce useful content. In 2020, I generated over $ 2 million in sales through this organic strategy from a single ecommerce store.

If I hadn’t started with SEO, I would be bankrupt today.

Start before you have to

Don’t do what I did and wait for the wheels to drop after one or more pay channels drop the ban hammer. Start by writing a few pieces of content to get started. You don’t need a five-year content strategy from day one.

For ideas on what to write, you can write a guide to your niche and what to look for when choosing the right product. You can answer the most frequently asked questions you receive. When people type this question into the search engine and your post helps them, you will be recognized over time as the go-to place for research and answers. Then people will trust your store and prefer to buy from you.

There are literally thousands of blog posts you can produce to get more traffic, but the important thing is to get started. Over time, you’ll learn more advanced content strategies that you can apply to create a better ranking chance. If you can implement some semblance of a content plan in your eCommerce store and stick with it, you’ll look back a year from now and wonder why you paid so much for visitors in the first place.