Online sales are accounting for more and more of the UK’s retail industry sales. Companies are now expected to have a strong online presence, not only for existing customers to use but for customer catching too. The office for national statistics found 12.4% of all Uk retail sales were online in 2015, a rise of 11.4% from the previous year (Office for National Statistics, 2015). For retail companies, websites are quickly becoming their primary form of income, and driving traffic to their website is their primary concern.
Companies look to increase the amount of traffic coming through their website as it not only provides more opportunities for online sales, but also contributes to increasing revenue the site creates through digital advertising. A study found 70% of website visitors came through a search engine, and 91% of them came from organic search links as opposed to paid search links. 32.5 % of users click the first search result and just over 75% click one of the first 5 (Chitika, 2013). Therefor companies have looked to increase their page rank on various search engines, primarily through the use of SEO.
Since the early 2010’s Google and other search engines have had an increased focus on social media activity in order to determine a page’s rank. Likes, shares and other signs of engagement are seen as difficult to artificially manufacture, however ensuring your websites contains social media links which encourage engagement from users is good example of how to use SEO in the modern day. Most large online retailers like Amazon contain share options across multiple media platforms and have looked to push their customer engagement.
Natural inbound links still remain the key factor to Google’s and many others algorithm, however keyword rich titles, URL wording and clear titles are examples of factors easily optimised to make a site higher ranked. As Jerath, Ma and Park (2014) found keywords and the positioning of keywords in text, titles and the URL are still vitally important. For a retail company, they must consider all possible search term a potential customer would use when looking for a product they offer.
Many have argued SEO will eventually die out , search engines like Google and Bing are constantly evolving their algorithms to reduce the ability to artificially increase a page’s ranking and try to deliver the result most appropriate to the search. They argue increasing the quality of your website will naturally increase the page rank of your site, and there is no need for SEO and trying to trick the algorithm. As mentioned before social media is now a large part search engines algorithms, suggesting aspects like good PR are more effective for driving traffic to websites.
The danger is no-one outside of the search engines themselves know all the factors which influence page ranking with there often being thousands of factors influencing the algorithms. Add this to the ever growing amount of mobile visitors which brings with it new factors, and SEO can become a very complicated process which distracts from the functionality and design of the website itself. Brian Dean compiled a list of 200 ranking factors, but as the algorithms are normally private much of it is speculation. Google’s algorithm alone is predicted to change more than once a day so the weight of the factors can constantly change, albeit not normally by large amounts. For retail companies, attracting visitors is only part of the process, they must also have a website infrastructure to ensure customers stay and purchase as well as become repeat visitors.
SEO is a constantly evolving process however, and looks to evolve with the algorithms. In the 90s keyword stuffing and meta tags were the tactic, the 2000s saw link bombing and inter-linking was seen as the most important aspect to SEO, in 2011 social media marketing and vertical search inclusion was key. While some argue SEO is dying, I would argue it is an evolving process which holds just as much importance as before, but needs to be constantly worked at to continue to drive traffic to a website. “Good content is still the most important success factor with or without SEO”. While companies need to understand a high quality website should be the base to help increase traffic to the website, search engines will always run on algorithms. SEO is about understanding what the algorithms value most and marketers will always be able to leverage that, therefore a company not performing SEO is always liable to be left behind by competitors as the algorithms change.
References
Chitika. (2013). The Value of Google Result Positioning. [online] Available at: https://chitika.com/2013/06/07/the-value-of-google-result-positioning-2/ [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].
Jerath, K., Ma, L. and Park, Y. (2014). Consumer Click Behavior at a Search Engine: The Role of Keyword Popularity. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), pp.480-486.
Office for National Statistics. (2015). Retail sales, Great Britain: June 2015. [online] Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/bulletins/retailsales/2015-07-23 [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].