Two Solutions, One Firm - What happens when the same firm does Ecommerce Development and SEO
The story is the most familiar one in the history of Ecommerce. You decide you want to sell products online so you go shopping for a web development firm that can give you a professional design and the features you want. Once that’s completed you begin to think about how to market the site. You ask your developers if they do SEO. At this point you often get one of several three responses -
- Yes, we do SEO.
- No, you’ll have to find that somewhere else.
- SEO is a scam, don’t worry about it.
If they say yes most likely they know very little about what they are doing. People that are great at SEO usually can make far more money doing SEO than web development. If you can get ranked at the top of the engines why wouldn’t you be selling something yourself? Also, if they SEO experts surely they would have sold you on that when you came to them for web development.So why not just get a different firm involved? Because doing the best SEO for Ecommerce deeply effects both the way the site is designed and the way the site is coded. Another firm can get involved but the progress they can achieve is usually somewhat limited by how much they can get both you and your development firm to cooperate with their efforts.Solution - Find a firm that does both. And check more into their SEO track record than their design expertise (unless you’re trying to win a design award instead of sell products online) :)One case study we observed for the success of this approach was the recent platform switch by one of the Ecommerce SEO clients at Marketplace Earth. MPE did aggressive SEO for 2 years when the client decided to switch to the MPE Ecommerce platform (AdaptCommerce) and within 2 weeks SEO went from being 30% of their sales to 60% of their sales. It all came down to the SEO related intellectual property that was embedded in our platform and the way we layout the various pages.Remember, when you want to launch an Ecommerce site, always think marketing first and that SEO is the most important type of marketing for niche online retail.