SEO for Ecommerce Store

[J_Abhi]

I have been doing SEO for an Ecommerce site for the last six months. I have also been creating content for blogs, and we have achieved high rankings for most of the blogs and collection pages, typically on the first or second page. However, the organic traffic is not growing at the expected rate. Do you have any ideas on what needs to be done?

[RedBar]

Do you have any ideas on what needs to be done?

Ok, I'll have a go ... IF you've done everything correctly then you have two options:

1. Wait and see what happens.
2. Join the pay-to-play classofied ads scheme.

Your question is perfectly valid however you are asking precisely the same as thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of other SEOers who are trying to fathom out what it is Google is doing / attempting.

How are your rankings in othe SEs?

[RubicCubed]

I am in ecommerce as well. Where we sell (USA), Google's SERPS are all ads above the fold for buyer intent searches - making it near impossible for buyers to find our goods in organic results even with #1 organic rankings. What you are doing, by creating blog content, can be helpful if you use this content to direct users to your store/products. However, the traffic hitting these pages are more likely to be further away from making a purchase and will be less likely to click out and into your store/products.

SEOs are taking a lot of heat/blame in the ecommerce industry because clients, much like what you described, are not seeing results. It is up to SEOs to view the SERP layouts Google is using, to identify how Google's ad spam is hiding organic results, and to inform clients of this. Clients need to have their expectations greatly lowered and to be educated on how Google's ad spam impacts organic results. I can say with much data behind me, that ranking #1 produces 5-10% of the organic traffic it did just last year because of Google's ad spam. What I see is similar to what others performing SEO for stores have posted as well. So for SEOs, this is not good because there is no way to rank above Google's ad spam and clients are still blaming SEOs for little to no return on their SEO investment. Maybe SEOs should not take on ecommerce clients to save their own reputation?

Actionable things you can do is to have unique content/images and solid site SEO (easily found privacy policy, terms, company info, etc. to build trust). If not done so already, create product feeds that can be included in Bing and Google for free. You won't get much traffic from free product feeds, but should Google ever decide to add some diversity to their ad spam your client's products (with unique content/images) will be ready. Work on building partnerships with other sites that may have potential buyers to send to your client because in this day circumventing Google is becoming increasingly important. Good luck. It is a very difficult time to be in ecommerce because we find ourselves being attacked by Google's greed.