Ecommerce Marketing and SEO Are Different – Here’s How

SEO and digital marketing have become so intertwined in recent years that firms tend to offer both services together. Webtek Digital Marketing based in Salt Lake City, UT, certainly does. Likewise for ecommerce marketing and SEO services. But Webtek is quick to point out that the two disciplines are noticeably different.

Ecommerce marketing is digital marketing designed to promote an ecommerce business. On the other hand, ecommerce SEO is a set of tools and strategies designed to help ecommerce websites perform well on search engines like Google and Bing.

Do the two never cross paths? No. And in fact, Webtek explains that ecommerce marketing and SEO overlap, intertwine, and more or less work together to help an ecommerce operator succeed. Still, it’s important to know how the two disciplines differ and why.

Marketing Is About Sales

The easiest way to understand the differences between ecommerce marketing and SEO is to talk about purpose. Marketing is about sales. That is the purpose whether you’re talking ecommerce marketing, general digital marketing, or even all school marketing and advertising.

In an ecommerce setting, marketing firms like Webtek utilize a range of tools and strategies designed exclusively for the ecommerce market. But they don’t stop there. They also use traditional digital marketing techniques and strategies. The idea is to leverage every possible tool to drive sales upward.

Typical ecommerce marketing strategies include:

• Retargeting Customers – Retargeting is the practice of utilizing things like email newsletters and PPC ads to encourage customers who have already purchased from you to come back and purchase again. Retargeting is a proven strategy for keeping happy customers engaged.
• Marketing Personalization – When ecommerce operators make use of marketing emails (and they should) making messages hyper personalized goes a long way. Personalization helps customers identify with a brand in a way that creates and enhances loyalty.
• Loyalty Programs – Speaking of enhancing loyalty, smart ecommerce operators further enhance it through a variety of loyalty programs that encourage customers to keep coming back. Loyalty programs market on their own.

There are other strategies I could get into, but we need to talk about ecommerce SEO before bringing this post to a close. Just remember that the primary goal of ecommerce marketing is driving sales.

SEO Is About Traffic

Where ecommerce marketing is about driving sales, ecommerce SEO is about driving traffic. Here’s another way to look at it: you cannot convert online shoppers to paying customers if they aren’t visiting your website. You need to drive traffic in order to support higher sales. That’s what ecommerce SEO is all about.

Ecommerce SEO utilizes many of the same principles as traditional SEO. Yet the nature of ecommerce itself demands doing things a little bit differently. For example, an ecommerce operator who sells on Amazon still needs to account for Google and Bing searches. But he also needs to account for searches done directly on the Amazon website. Amazon’s search engine needs to be accommodated the same way one would accommodate Google or Bing.

How the Two Work Together

Ecommerce marketing and SEO work together to drive traffic – including both repeat customers and new visitors – and then convert that traffic into sales. SEO gets people to an ecommerce site. Marketing encourages them to buy. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

If you run an ecommerce site that isn’t performing as well as you’d like it to, consider paying for ecommerce marketing and SEO services. Paid services are an investment, but they represent a worthwhile investment capable of significantly boosting sales to levels you might not otherwise achieve on your own.