You’ve spent hours calculating the perfect online store. You have top-notch product pictures, zippy product descriptions, and a sparkly new website. Your spare bedroom now doubles as an inventory warehouse, and you spend all your free moments creating stellar social media content. You put your website live, and no one shows up. Where are all your customers?

Welcome to ecommerce. In the age of Amazon, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace, the battle to ecommerce success is fierce. However, there’s one weapon that can help you win the war. That weapon? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. SEO is so complicated. Is it really necessary? In short, yes. According to an annual study by FleishmanHillard, a whopping 89% of consumers use search engines to make buying decisions. Ultimately, you want people to decide to shop with you. Based on this statistic alone, you can’t afford to ignore SEO.

The good news is that you’re not in this alone. There are tons of experts who specialize in ecommerce SEO services. You don’t have to become an SEO wizard. You just have to decide to invest in SEO. Are you still skeptical? Keep reading.

SEO Increases Traffic

If you owned a brick and mortar store, foot traffic would be vital to you. You’d want to make sure your business was in a high-traffic area, so that the potential for customers to pop in would be high. It’s no different with ecommerce.

You want potential customers to be able to find you. Optimizing for search engines allows people to find you when they’re looking for what you have to offer. Ultimately, what SEO does is increase traffic to your online store. More traffic means more potential paying customers.

According to Invesp, the average ecommerce sales conversion rate sits at around 2.63%. This means that approximately 2.63% of people who visit an ecommerce website will make a purchase. To increase your sales and revenue, you must increase the number of people visiting your store.

For example, if you had 150 unique visitors in a month, based on average conversion rates, you could expect to sell a little under four products a month. On the other hand, if you had 15,000 unique visitors in a month, you could expect to hit around 395 customers a month. That’s a huge difference.

Traffic is essential, and SEO is one of the surefire ways to gain organic traffic.

SEO is an Investment, Not An Expense

One of the biggest concerns of business owners is expenses. Especially if you’re just getting started or struggling to hit profit goals. However, unlike most business expenses, SEO is an investment. You can expect a return, and the results are long-lasting. It’s not like a pay-per-click campaign where you must continually re-up your budget to see results. SEO results last.

Assuming you choose to hire an expert for ecommerce SEO services, your return on investment should be incredible. With excellent companies, you can see a return of nine times what you put in. Reassessing your perspective on SEO as an investment versus an expense can help ease any worries you have about spending extra money.

Like any good investment, SEO doesn’t depreciate over time. Other marketing strategies leave you refilling the funnel repeatedly to see consistent results. SEO doesn’t work that way. In fact, SEO initiatives grow on themselves. Search engine optimizing your website with correct header tags, backlinking, guest posting, and other SEO tactics increase in value over time. You can’t simply undo the SEO work that’s already been done.

That’s the one important thing to keep in mind with SEO, though. Results do take time. It’s not an overnight road to success. It takes a concentrated strategy over time to see the results start pouring in. So, the quicker you get started with SEO, the faster you’ll start seeing results.

SEO Is Not an Option

If you truly want to have a prosperous ecommerce business, you have to prioritize search engine optimization. It’s the only option for ranking organically in search engines, and it’s a reliable way to increase your customers. Without SEO, you’ll be forced to continue to spend money to have any traffic, and often those returns are lower than what you see in a good SEO campaign.

SEO is a science, and the truth is that your competitors who are killing it are likely already employing search engine optimization. Whether you want to be the next Jeff Bezos, or you just want to keep a roof over your family’s head, search engine optimization is a critical component.

The best part is, you don’t have to be an expert. You can hire a skilled team for all your SEO ecommerce services and still come out ahead. Don’t wait to get started because your ecommerce business needs search engine optimization.