Your eCommerce business can only perform to the best of its capacity when it is visible to the right set of target audience. By saying that, we mean to imply that people should find your business in the first place while they are looking to shop for items of their choice. Great visibility and enhanced traffic are your key eCommerce business saviors. Attaining these two is something that every eCommerce business owner wants to.
eCommerce business operates one way- through enhancing the online reputation of your eCommerce business. Well, that can be either done through Search engine optimization (SEO) or Social Media Optimization (SMO) where the businesses work to generate traffic on their shopping website or blog.
A lot of times, people use the two terms interchangeably when they think of the methodologies/strategies/techniques/tactics that can help them increase the number of visitors to their eCommerce website and drive a greater percentage of sales.
Difference between SEO and SMO
Although both of them are meant for obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results pages of a search engine and increasing the visibility of your business website, there is quite a difference between the two.
On one hand, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about helping your website naturally rank higher through optimizing the content on the website such as the posts, Keywords, page titles, URLs, inbound links, mobile-friendly content, and similar components.
However, Social Media Optimization (SMO) is about using social media channels and communities such as RSS feeds, social news and bookmarking sites, video and blogging sites, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, etc. to increase the awareness around your brand, product, or event and make it viral.
Using SEO for your eCommerce business
Using Search Engine Optimization for sorting the visibility and traffic of your eCommerce website is highly favored by a lot of eCommerce website owners. The top reason behind this favoritism can be the budget-friendliness of the SEO approach to strengthen the online reputation of your business. After all, you cannot disagree with the fact that Search engine optimizations reduce online marketing budgets. The truth is that every dollar spent by an eCommerce business on SEO will keep working to directly increase sales every day of every year in the future. So, that’s a smart deal.
It is said that Search Engine Optimization of your eCommerce business works to definitely improve your Google rankings, which means that more visitors turn up on your website and hence, the probability of selling more stuff drastically improves. SEO for e-commerce website works in such a manner that marketers can focus on increasing the search visibilities of certain products and make them rank ahead of the competition.
When a business resorts to adopting the right approach at amplifying their site’s SEO, they are creating an enabling scenario to attract organic traffic. This organic traffic is really interested in their products and might end up making a purchase. Hence, it is fair to say that SEO for eCommerce helps to build brand value and attract loyal customers.
Using SMO for your eCommerce business
Social Media Optimization is aimed at creating a buzz about your eCommerce offering or the business, on a whole. It helps you weave awareness about your eCommerce brand and its product and services through the judicious use of social networking sites and other online communities. SMO can definitely be termed as a great method compared to the traditional marketing methods and it has its own perks when it is about assessing its suitability for eCommerce websites.
Speaking on the larger good done by the SMO strategy, eCommerce websites can amass a huge collection of backlinks to their own website so that they can come up among the top searches. Social Media Optimization is also about targeting a specific customer group which is demarcated based on segments such as age, location, gender, preference, spending capacity etc.
You probably now know that Social Media Optimization helps generate product awareness, increase sales, or improve customer opinion about your eCommerce offering. Hence, eCommerce business marketers can appropriately use social media channels to kickstart a marketing campaign for their products or services. They then have to take care of the readers’ interest and their engagement on a personal level.
Its all about shares, Direct Messages, and caring about individual concerns. Surveys, product reviews, and incentive programs are also some of the methods that may be used to obtain feedback through Social Media Optimization. If you are thinking about the stuff involved in the Social Media Optimization of an eCommerce business, here it is.
- Researching social sharing trends and getting the data for your own offering and relevant prospects.
- Creating social media properties for your eCommerce business to amplify the reach on such communities
- Rightly placing the ‘Sharing’ buttons on prominent places
- Implementing Organic methods of promotion
- Incorporating great sales tools such as video content
- Engaging with the follower base and making them feel valued
- Photo carousel to increase curiosity
- Not making your social media just a stream of business product pitches
- Truly engaging the potential customer base by integrating your customer service strategy with the social media strategy.
- Taking care of all that Social Media Analytics
- Getting into the good books of your followers; being a responsible business that also inculcates Corporate Social Responsibility
Verdict
eCommerce is all about sales, driving monetary advantage, and retaining the customer base. When so much is at stake, it won’t be fair to individually favor one of the above eCommerce strategies i.e either the Search Engine Optimization or the Social Media Optimization. The right way to go about marketing your eCommerce business, the website, and its offerings is to approach it with the right mix of moves meant for Search Engines as well as Social Media. Hence, it is fair to conclude that a mixed approach of SEO, as well as SMO, is probably the best one for eCommerce businesses.
Conclusion:
A lot and lot of offline businesses are taking the eCommerce way to drive a higher percentage of sales and building a faithful customer base. They are coming up with custom e-commerce solutions to make sure that they are ahead of the competition and their industry counterparts. This involves impressing the Search engines as well as building a strong brand presence across social media channels i.e the SEO and the SMO, respectively.
