In today’s rapid shopping landscape, 39% of consumers actually start their search for products to buy on search engines. Thus, Search Engine Optimization is an indispensable part of every quick commerce business. If you want to generate healthy traffic on your quick commerce platform, you need customers in specific regions to discover your instant mart products online whenever they are looking for a quick delivery. For this, quick commerce platforms should emphasize local SEO, enriching their content with relevant keywords.
Search Engine Optimization determines the best and most popular, and most useful websites based on the customer’s search phrases. Focusing on SEO is of prime importance as it significantly affects your website’s rankings on the search engine. Moreover, for quick commerce businesses, product pages also need to be optimized according to the keywords and preferences common among customers of selected groups and areas that are more likely to order a certain product.
Ranking a quick commerce website can be tricky since you need to optimize your keywords, ensure that the platform is user-friendly, check for lagging product images and videos, and so on. However, these optimizations are necessary to avoid a high bounce rate.
In this blog, we will explore some of the key reasons why SEO is extremely important for the success of quick commerce businesses.
Top 5 reasons why SEO is important for quick commerce businesses
- SEO ensures organic visibility to target customers: Google and other search engines drive traffic to your quick commerce platform. According to a report published by Forbes, the first page of results on Google drives 71% of online search traffic. In fact, it is expected that in the coming years, the percentage can go as high as 92. If your platform is not visible on Google, it will not be visible to the customer either. A recent study shows that the first organic result in Google search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%.
Hence, search engine optimization is important to ensure your website can rank among the results on the very first page of the search engine. Moreover, the introduction of featured snippets and other features on Google, like ‘people also ask’, ‘near me’, and ‘close by’, has further increased the importance of SEO.
As quick commerce businesses mostly derive their revenue from customers who are looking for quick delivery, it is very important to optimize the platform with local keywords that will lead region-specific audiences to your platform. A study by Ahrefs shows that featured snippets appear in 12.29% of the search results.
- Improved sales with higher traffic: 81% of people conduct an online search of any product they want to purchase before actually buying it. Hence, if your quick commerce business is not visible on the first page of the search results, you may lose out on a lot of potential customers online.
SEO plays a great role in boosting sales by giving your website an opportunity to find the target customers. As your website becomes visible to more people, there will be greater chances of conversion and more products bought.
- Cost-effective marketing strategy: SEO is the most cost-effective marketing strategy for any business, including quick commerce businesses. Paid campaigns and ads can only get you so far on the internet. For starters, there is no certainty that the ads you launch will indeed lead to conversions. It can make you lose out on funds as you have to pay for every click on your ad, whether or not they lead to the purchase of a product.
On the other hand, the costs of traffic, clicks, impressions, and conversions resulting from SEO strategies are zero. Paid campaigns like influencer marketing and PPC last only as long as the campaign is active. You will only see results from paid campaigns as long as they are active. These marketing efforts will have to be ruled out as soon as your marketing budget gets tight. An effective SEO campaign can keep the mill running without resulting in increased costs during such circumstances.
Moreover, stepping up the SEO game for quick commerce businesses has also become important because of the constant updates to Google’s algorithm. Google’s BERT update, EAT principle, featured snippets, and so on require SEO experts to constantly evolve their strategies to make businesses easily discoverable online. For quick commerce businesses, SEO is the most cost-effective method of optimizing traffic-driving processes in a sustained manner.
- 360-degree perfection for your website: SEO not only optimizes your website content to make it more appealing and easily discoverable to the audience. A solid SEO strategy takes care of every little requirement of your website, from layout and navigability to loading speed and link building. Devising your website properly from every angle will help to fetch organic search engine rankings, as Google’s algorithms contain several criteria for ranking a quick commerce website.
Making your website more friendly for smartphone use, speeding up page loading, and implementing greater security for user activities on your platform are considered ranking factors. For website content, factors like authenticity, meta content, keywords added at their proper places, informative snippets, etc, demand SEO experts as well as content and marketing teams to research well and deliver relevant content. All these factors are included in SEO and ensure that the customer experience on your platform can stay optimal.
- Long-lasting results, adding to other marketing efforts: Done properly, SEO can be a pillar for all your marketing efforts for your quick commerce business. As compared to paid marketing campaigns, organic search results can generate long-term benefits for your business. SEO ensures that you maintain a consistent, healthy position among the search engine results pages. The longer you can stay on top, the more will be your click-through rate will be.
This means more people will click on your website when they are searching for products similar to what you can offer, and there will be higher chances of them being converted into loyal customers. This is more effective than paid ad campaigns or influencer marketing, as you can easily get back to square one if you exhaust your budgets without much increase in conversion and sales. But SEO is a process that is built up slowly and gradually, taking care of every little aspect from web development to content marketing.
Though SEO is an ongoing process, it needs continuous monitoring for success. Constant improvements and adjustments have to be made to your SEO strategy by identifying pain points. This effort adds to your existing position among the results, unlike paid campaigns, where you have to start from zero every single time.
SEO also contributed to augmenting other marketing campaigns. Sometimes, when visitors leave your platform after not purchasing, paid campaigns, social media platforms, and other forms of marketing can remind them of abandoned purchases to bring them back. Thus, SEO works hand in hand with other marketing avenues. Since customers have already visited the platform, brands can create more effective retargeting ads and marketing messages.
SEO thus helps businesses to gain first-hand information for highly successful, aligned marketing campaigns. These are the top 5 reasons why SEO is crucial for quick commerce businesses. With SEO, these businesses can increase website traffic, drive long-term visibility, and complement other forms of marketing.