The following is a guest post written by Gonzalo Gil, founder and CEO of 3dcart.

There is an old saying, one that you’ve probably heard before. It has been attributed to many different people and culture, its true origins lost to time. “If you give a man fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.”

While this is true for so many different areas of life, it’s especially true when considering the importance of SEO for eCommerce. For those starting an online store, learning about SEO is essential to building your business.

Young businesses spend a significant amount of money to drive traffic to their website. Mostly through online pay-per-click advertising, but sometimes through sponsored posts on social media.

When you spend money on advertising, it’s akin to being given a fish. In the short term, while your campaign is active, you may see an increase in traffic (though that doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in conversions). But, once the campaign is over, so is the traffic.

However, when you teach a man to fish, he can eat for a lifetime. SEO gives you the opportunity to eat for a lifetime. SEO is the way to reach customers when you have a small budget.

So, what makes SEO so important for your Ecommerce site?

It can be attributed to a few things: SEO best practices help you improve the functionality and performance of your website, it helps customers find you, and it will drive organic traffic to your website for the long term.

As a bonus, it can also be a cost-effective tool that saves money on advertising. Whether you are just starting out, or an eCommerce veteran, SEO can serve your website.

How does SEO improve the performance of your website?

Google cares, not just about the content of your site, but also how well it works, and how it performs.

SEO has done one thing really well, and that is to create a standard of usability. If a website design is not responsive, if too much traffic shuts it down, if it doesn’t flow well, Google will find out and consider it as a ranking factor.

So, the sites that are optimised for search engines and implemented the best SEO practices, tend to perform better and offer a better shopping experience than sites that aren’t.

That’s important because according to Search Engine Journal, 91.5% of the traffic will be shared among Google’s first page results. If Google has issues with your website, then you aren’t going to be among the top results listed, which means missed traffic.  

Don’t think that you can throw money at this problem to make it go away, because less than 10% of traffic goes to paid advertisements on Google (you might as well be relegated to page 2 results).

SEO helps customers find you

Shoppers are using search engines to help them make educated decisions about their purchases. When your website is not optimised for the search engines, it’s going to be hard for potential customers to find you.

That alone means you are losing sales to competitors that figured out how to rank higher than you.

Even loyal customers will likely seek out Google when searching for your website, and that means they will likely be exposed to competitors and might decide to make their purchase with someone else.

By optimising your website, you will increase your rankings and gain organic traffic.

With conversion rates in the United States sitting at about 3%, for every 100 visitors who visit your website you will get about 3 new customers.

Now, imagine you are organically ranking on Google’s first page. The number of potential customers goes up exponentially at this point.

SEO drives organic traffic to your website, for the long term

When you run ads, your business can make sales.

Unfortunately, if you stop the ad campaign, or if a competitor outbids you, the plug is pulled, and it’s over.

SEO fights that phenomenon organically. SEO doesn’t have an expiration date. SEO builds on itself, which means as long as you are continually applying SEO principles while building your website, new SEO content is just going to strengthen existing SEO content.

Your SEO grows stronger with time. How many ad campaigns can say that? The beauty of using SEO to drive organic traffic to your website is knowing that you can go to bed at night and SEO is still working for you.

You can go on vacation, and SEO will continue to drive traffic to your website. You can walk away for months at a time, and if your SEO is well done, you may not even see a difference (though we don’t recommend that tactic for entirely different reasons!).

SEO is cost effective

Advertising costs a lot of money. Let’s be honest, most of us employ a “trial and error” tactic at evaluating our advertisements channels. That can also be expensive. SEO isn’t.

Truth be told, a motivated person can find out what they need to do for search engine optimisation on their own site.

Starting with an SEO-friendly e-commerce platform or website builder can help expedite the process.

This is valuable for small and medium sized businesses. It gives them the opportunity to compete with major players.

Small and Medium sized businesses don’t have to compete with large businesses for commercial time slots or other types of traditional advertising.

They also don’t have to pay for PPC advertisements. By using SEO strategies, they can rank on the same pages as large organisations, and that provides a valuable opportunity for growth.

The bottom line

SEO is valuable for an eCommerce business. Whether you believe that it’s more valuable than PPC advertising is irrelevant. SEO doesn’t have to cost anything, but when put to good use it can provide valuable exposure to maximise conversions on your website.

Not only can it help maximise conversions, but it drives traffic.

Think of SEO as just another tool in your business tool box. If you aren’t already using SEO strategies right now, take the leap. Make the change. Learn to fish.

Gonzalo Gil is the founder and CEO of 3dcart, a leading online store builder, ranked as the best eCommerce platform for SEO. As an eCommerce expert, Gonzalo works with businesses of all sizes to help them build their online presence and succeed in selling online.

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