What is Ecommerce SEO and How You Can Profit From It

Intro

Ecommerce SEO and AI Specialists without a college degree are better paid than engineers. SEO and AI are sophisticated skills, and you can acquire them if you are a curious individual. You can make the most money acquiring these future-proof skills and working for...

In this lesson you can learn what Ecommerce SEO and AI are and how you can profit from it. My name is Nedim and I have over 23 years of experience in SEO. This lesson is a part of the SEOLAXY SCHOOL, the place for you to learn Ecommerce SEO and AI for free. The SEOLAXY SCHOOL is a comprehensive course where you can acquire two sophisticated and high-paid skills without going to college. SEO and AI are two future-proof skills and you can acquire them if you are curious individual. So let's start.

What is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization.

What is Ecommerce SEO & AI?

SEO is the technique to optimize websites in order to rank them inside search engines and in that way to help people to easier and faster find what they search for. And what is Ecommerce? Ecommerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling products through online stores. So what is Ecommerce SEO? Ecommerce SEO is the technique used to optimize online stores in order to rank them inside search engines as high as possible for the right search terms and phrases, and that way help people to find physical and digital products they search for easier and faster. AI can help SEO Specialists in many ways to do their work better and faster. In this course we are focusing on Ecommerce SEO and AI to teach how to identify the biggest SEO potentials for online stores and achieve the best possible ranking inside Google, in order to achieve a significant increase of revenue and profit for online stores. People worldwide search in different places when they want to know or buy something, but most of them try their luck using search engines. The most popular search engine worldwide is, of course, Google, with a worldwide market share of 81%. Their search results are also showing answers and suggestions from their AI called Gemini. The second biggest search engine is YouTube, also owned by Google. Although Google is often showing YouTube videos in their search engine result pages. Users also search for solutions first by trying to find them directly inside YouTube. That is the case when users assume that they need a video to find what they are looking for. The third biggest search engine worldwide is Bing, with a market share of 4%, owned by Microsoft, and serving answers and suggestions from the popular AI called OpenAI, better known for their product called ChatGPT. The only exceptions worldwide we can find in China, with a 66% market share of the search engine Baidu, and in Russia where the search engine Yandex has a market share of 69%. Besides that, Amazon is claiming to have a large chunk of Ecommerce related search terms in the US, claiming to get almost half of all Ecommerce related search queries. Those numbers are very questionable, but Amazon is, for sure, relevant in the western world. But from a worldwide perspective, there's still too many countries where Amazon isn't present at all. In this course we're focusing on Google, because Google has the biggest revenue and profit potential for online stores worldwide.

How Can You Profit from Ecommerce SEO?

So, why are ecommerce SEO and AI Specialists without a college degree better paid than many engineers? It's simple and obvious. Here is a simplified explanation. The main goal of online stores is to increase their revenue and profit. Online stores with great SEO implementations get great SEO results. Therefore, in average, those online stores are making 60% of their revenue and 80% of their profits through SEO. Simply said, SEO will make online stores more money, so they are happy to pay you a lot to help them achieve that. Let's take a look what's the difference between revenue and profit? What margins are? Why they are so important? And why other marketing channels like search engine advertising - SEA and social media marketing - SMM are not able to deliver such great results in comparison to SEO. It's not complicated, I promise, just be and stay open-minded. It's addicting, not because of the possibility to earn a lot of money with it, because it is real fun. Besides that, being able to help others to achieve their goals is a great feeling. So let's dig in to see why SEO is so important for online stores. I have prepared a few examples of search engine result pages, shortly called SERPs, for so-called transactional queries.

Google Search Results for Transactional Queries

What are transactional queries? Those queries are queries or search terms you enter in Google in order to buy something, maybe a physical or a digital product. So a transactional query, the result page in Google looks like this - on top you find always a search box and most of the time you find three paid results. So those online stores are paying for every click on that result. And below them are usually 10 organic results, followed by two paid results, and then usually it loads even more results, so you don't need to click, just if you touch the bottom of that SERP - more results will be loaded. In another example you will see the search box, as every time on top of Google and a line of shopping results. We will show you a few examples. And followed again by 10 organic results and more be loaded. And sometimes you have even four paid results followed by 10 organic results. That's a very normal, average setup you can find. So let's dig into it. You can see that for those paid results you're using the platform from Google called Google Ads and, as an online store, you can be listed here as a paid result and you pay for every click on your ad. So you can be listed only once. So you can be listed inside those paid results. Or you do SEO and you can be listed in the results called organic results, and those clicks are for free. So if we summarize that up, we see that with the help of Google Ads you can be inside the paid results and that discipline and doing that is called search engine advertising or shortly - SEA. And if you are optimizing your website for the organic results - it's called Google Organic, and the discipline is called Search Engine Optimization or shortly - SEO. So that's usually what's happening there. And what's the big difference, what do you think how many users click on the paid results and how many on organic results? It depends for every query, so for every search term in Google that proportion is different. But, in average, you have this metrics. So only 20% of the users are clicking on the paid results and, in average, 80% are clicking on organic results. So we're just counting the clicks. Sometimes, users don't even click, so we call that a null click result, but we're not talking about that right now. So if 1,000 people are searching for something: 20% will, in average, click on the paid results, and 80% on organic results. That seems obvious because there are 10 organic results and only three or four paid results, but still 80% are clicking on those free clicks and only 20% are spending the money of online stores.

If you look deeper into that, we can see that if you are the paid result number one, so you take your money, pay Google for every single click, you can get 10% of all clicks if you're in the first position as a paid result. But if you are the first result in the organic position you can get the double amount of that, so 20%. And if you're in the last position - on place number 10 as an organic result, you still get 2% clicks in average. I repeat, that depends every time on the search term, on the query and it can vary a lot, so it can vary to the point where it is 100% to 0 and vice versa - 0 to 100%. But in average, for most of the search queries, especially transactional queries, it looks like this. There are different type of queries, but that's not the point to talk about it right now. So we take from this part we have. Most of the clicks are going to the organic results, and the first result, organic result, gets 20%, and the last organic result, on page one or inside those first 10 results, gets 2%. There are still other variations, so for some transactional queries you get four paid results or three, and just one organic normal result and then you get some Google Maps results. They are still organic, but they are between the usual organic results and then followed by just five or even less results. So you can see some SERPs have just seven organic results including some diverse displaying positions like Google Maps. On the fifth example we can see shopping results. I will show you in a minute a few SERPs who are looking like that and you got four organic results, and then again organic shopping results. So everything here in the color yellow is being paid for, and green and blue are free. Just blue is a little bit different than the green results. Sometimes you get also additional shopping results and you have here paid shopping results. And in the end of that SERP, you can find something called related searches, where Google seems to think that you didn't enter the right query so they are offering you some refinement on those queries you have inputed. And the sixth type of SERPs can look like something like this: you have one organic result and three video results, still organic, you're not paying for them. Usually from YouTube, sometimes Vimeo, or other platforms but they're below each other. Then you have the organic result number two and after that you can see special results. There are some boxes called rich snippets or featured snippets, so inside those featured snippets, in the last months, most often are shown the box called "People also ask". These are also organic results. If you search for courses, you will find a box only for courses, we will show you that example too, and some other featured snippets. It's a long list of what can happen here, but usually then organic results are following the typical ones. So let's see a few examples. Here in the US we are googling for the search term or the search query "washing machine". We call queries or search terms also keywords in SEO. There are many synonyms for the same thing. It means what you enter here is a query. If it's related to buying, it's a transactional query, and all queries are search terms. And people who are long, long time in SEO know that we sometimes call them keywords and still today you will find many people using that term for the same thing. So washing machines is the search term here, and as you can see in the US you have some filtering options, but the first thing you have are those sponsored shopping ads, it's also labeled as sponsored. Those are shopping ads. They are one beside another, followed by the first organic result.

And here we go, "People also ask" box. This featured snippet is called "People also ask" and below that two more organic results, then some buying guides, then again organic results and here are some organic shopping results. And below that then again something organic. Then some entries from discussions and forums, and then we come to the 10th result. That's what it looks like in the USA. And if we look in the UK market you won't find those filters. You see the distraction or more options in the United States compared to UK. That's because Google rolled out those features inside the US version, but not the UK version. Maybe because US users prefer more to use those filters and additional settings while searching. In UK it looks like in the rest of the world, without those filters, but still on place number one are paid ads, the shopping paid ads, Google Shopping ads, and then followed by four organic results, then "People also ask", then two organic results, then some organic shopping results. So you see the pattern? It's everything like we have shown here. So there are shopping results, then some organic results, then more shopping results, but this time free and then more organic results. Let's see for basketball shoes. It's almost the same. You see in the US, shopping ads, then four organic results, then some featured snippets with Explore brands and "People also ask", and so on, and so on. And in the UK we find the same pattern - shopping paid results, normal organic results, organic shopping results, and there we go, a few videos insert, "People also ask snippets" and so on. If you search for something else, let's say for cyber security courses, you will see the four normal paid ads. So for those transactional queries we have seen that on top are those paid shopping results, but for something normal where the color or the look is not so important, we see normal paid ads. That's what you usually see if you are working outside of transactional queries, but also inside it's very common to see those three or four paid ads, then the first organic result, then "People also ask", then two further organic results and then the featured box or the featured snippet for courses. Then again, organic results and then some videos and that's the end of the first 10 results.

In UK it looks almost the same just three sponsored ads, one organic and so on and so on. I will not call them by name anymore because now we are used to what they are, and here are some Excel courses. About four sponsored results in the US, two organic results, "People also ask", courses, videos and so on. It's repeating itself and in the UK there are no ads. Look at this. It's the same search term "Excel courses" and in UK, "Excel courses". You have no paid aids, or at least they are not showing them to me right now, because I'm surfing from Germany and sometimes I'm too lazy to open up a VPN connection to simulate two different countries, that would be overwhelming, but still we've got the idea. Sometimes Google is showing us shopping results on top, sometimes normal paid ads, sometimes no ads, followed by all organic different results. So that's important to know and to let those numbers sink in. It doesn't matter what results, are there shopping results or normal paid results on top, 20% of all users, in average for transactional search terms, click only on them, and 80% click on the organic results. So you get more traffic overall for all organic results than for those paid ads. And if you are number one for paid ads, you get only 10%, in average, of all clicks and if you're number one in organic results you get 20. And if you're learning to do this part of online marketing, then you are a search engine advertising Specialist - SEA Specialist, and if you're doing that for the organic part, you are SEO Specialist - search engine optimization Specialist. And we are now here learning how to become an Ecommerce SEO and AI Specialist. So you need AI to do that job even better than others. It makes it easier and faster. And we are precisely doing it only for Ecommerce, not for all other cases like if you're searching for a doctor or you're searching for a lawyer, or something else, if you're searching for anything else. So there are no local results, there are not informational queries, it's all about online stores, about ecommerce. And what has that to do with margins, revenue and profit?

How to Find the Number of Searches for Keywords on Google

We want to know how many people in the US are searching for the term "washing machines" per month. We use the tool called Semrush, for this lesson. You can get a 14-day free trial in the description and you can use it, try it out and see how you get along with it. It's really easy to use and you will now see why. If we enter "washing machines" inside this tool, inside Semrush, we get that 40,800 people in the US are searching every month for washing machines. If you take "washing machine", you see that 110,000 people are searching for washing machine. So it's better to be ranked number one for washing machine. And you can see here that, so from those 110,000 people, we now know, in average, 20% click on the paid ads, they're paying for each click $1.08, for every single click. How much do they pay for clicking on organic result? Exactly, nothing. So that's the big difference in that. So we input that in our calculation. Don't be afraid of spreadsheets, it's a simple spreadsheet and you will understand it in 30 seconds. So we have here the search volume. In SEO, if we talk about search volume, we're talking about the monthly search volume for a certain search term. So here we have 110. Not for "washing machines". For "washing machine". I need to correct that. And 20% of those 110 are clicking on the paid ads. So they're doing PPC, or I will just simply enter SEA - search engine advertising. And 80% are clicking on organic results, right. So we got it. So if we are number one as a paid ad, we get 10% of all clicks. And if we are number one in organic results, we get 20%. So, that we have repeated right now five times. Let it sink, remember those numbers. So 11,000 visitors, out of those 110, are clicking on the paid ads, and 22,000 on the organic results. For the first position, we are comparing the first paid position versus the first organic result. And those online stores, if they have an ad for washing machine, they're paying $1.08 so we need here to show that number. So it's $1.08 they're paying for each visitor, so in total, per month, they're paying $11,880 for those clicks. Only 2% of the people who are visiting an online store, in average, convert, which means, they're not converting to any religion, they're converting into buyers. They're converting from visitors to buyers, or from potential customers to customers. That's the average success rate, the average conversion rate of that. 220 people are buying or becoming customers through SEA. If you're number one in organic, it stays the same, but we have more visitors. 2% is the same conversion rate. Nothing changes in our online store. So the conversion rate is the same. We get the double amount of buyers.

If we are talking about washing machines, the average product price of a washing machine is $700. It's the same here. And we generate a revenue of $154,000 per month via Google ads and $308,000 over SEO. So that's the first distinguition between those two. SEO is capable of generating more revenue. So that's the revenue. We call that here organic revenue, because it's free. And here we call it paid revenue because we pay for it. And the product margin for washing machines is 20%. What's a margin? A margin is the amount of money you're making between the price you're paying from the distributor or the manufacturer, and the price you're selling that for. So if we buy a washing machine for $580, we have a margin of 20%, we are selling it for $700. We know if we sell it for $700, we have paid for it $580, we make $120 per washing machine. If we look up our revenue. We say 220 buyers have bought in average a washing machine for $700. We generate a revenue of $154,000. 20% of that is $8,920. That's what's left for us. Something seems odd here? Right? So if we take 20% off 154,000 - it's something like $30,800. What we need to take the cost away we have inputted into that. Our margin, our profit is being eaten by the cost we have generated by the clicks, for all the clicks we have paid for. So if we take $30,800 and take away those $11,880 we get and end up with a profit of $18,920. In SEO it's completely different. So we have a revenue of $308,000. We have a margin of 20%. We have no cost. So we generate a profit of $61,600. It's 3x more than in what we would generate in the SEA channel. Right? And it's only the double amount of buyers we've got. We made more profit by doubling the number of potential buyers and then the number of buyers. So easy, right? For one thing we pay for every click, for the other thing we don't pay, especially for the clicks. And we get more visitors or more potential customers for SEO than SEA, therefore we generate more profit. Right? Let's take another example. This time we will make this calculation assuming that we are on position 10 in organic results. If we are on the 10th place we get only 2% of all clicks, where we get in the SEA version, we get 10%. And in the end. I'm not going through every calculation here. Everything stays the same. We have the same search volume, the same proportion, ratio between those clicks and we get only 2% for our 10th position. We generate then 44 buyers and $6,160 profit. And if we pay for every click in the paid ads, we generate a profit from $19,800.

Even in the last position in the organic results we have profit enough and we try getting our way to the top of the organic results and for every step we take, our profit goes up, and up, and up. And there is no way to go in the paid ads beside placement number one, from the first place. There is no way to go. You cannot generate more clicks, it doesn't depend what you do. It's only 10% of the clicks and that seems like there is a huge potential in SEO, and a limited, but still very good, as we see in this example, potential for SEA. So let's take a look in something else, like basketball shoes. Basketball shoes have a search volume of 246,000. How do I know that? I go into Semrush: "basketball shoes" - and it tells me 246,000 people in the United States are searching for it and there is a click price of $0.37 cents for every click. We enter that into a spreadsheet: the new click price, the new search volume. We're still at number one. We have an average product price of $130. The margin for basketball shoes is only 10%, and now look at this. So we are paying $9,102 for all those visitors coming through paid results. And we generate a revenue of $63,960. Which sounds great, but if we have a product margin of only 10%, that means we are making $6396. And if we subtract the cost for all visitors, we are making a loss. So we are not even profitable doing paid ads. The same thing for being number one in organic results, For that example in a profit of nearly $13,000. So if we are on the 10th place here again, we are 10th in the Google organic results, we are still making loss through paid ads, but we are making a profit of $1,279 from SEO. So there is no case if you rank inside the top 10 with SEO that you're not profitable. Even lower than place 10, but let's stick to that, to place number 10. And I need to mention it, I'm here showing you the results of also pessimistic calculations from the SEO perspective, but I'm not changing anything for the paid results. Why am I talking about this? You are not guaranteed if you're paying for ads inside Google that you will be number one. You can also be number two in the paid ads, or place number three in paid ads. And then you will get even less clicks than here, and it can be more expensive. So what Semrush and other tools are showing here is just an prediction of the snapshot they have taken while doing that investigation the last time. But it doesn't need to be like that. It can be even more expensive, you cannot be guaranteed for place number one and this calculation does look then more terrible than it even already is.

Let's assume, just assume that we're making here that ratio too optimistical - 20 to 80%. Let's make it 50 to 50. It doesn't happen ever that you find for a transactional query that you have a ratio of 50/50 for non-branded keywords for those who are already a little bit into SEO. If you're taking normal transactional queries, there is no way you get 50% for the SEA results. Also, why I'm always correcting this? For the entertainment? No! Because we call SEA or paid results - PPC. You pay for every click. Pay-per-click, PPC. So this calculation looks even more terrible. If we take this into 50/50 you're just making a lot more loss. So if that would be positive, it would be more profit, but it doesn't make it prettier if you make that ratio look better. So from the SEO perspective there is more, or from the online store perspective, there is more revenue potential and a lot of more profit potential if we are doing SEO than paid ads. Paid ads are even, for some search terms like you have seen, profitable and for others search terms they are not profitable. And what you do in doing SEA, so doing paid ads, is that you turn off the ads for those search terms which are not profitable and keep going on with those search terms which are profitable. We call that ROI - return of investment. If you have a positive return of investment, you keep going with the paid ads, and if not you turn them off. That's great. But SEO is always profitable and therefore is more attracting to online stores.

What is More Profitable: SEO or SEA?

Let's see another example. Here, those cyber security courses. So we have a search volume of 5,500. How do I know that? We can google it: "cyber security courses" And we have here 5,400 search volume and a click price, a CPC of $14.76. Oh my God. So they are paying, let's say $15 for every click. That's a lot, you think. There are even keywords that are much more expensive, $60-70, up to $150 and even more for some attorney queries, for some medical queries, and so on. We are not digging into it. Just so you know that's not rarity that you pay for a click $15 or more. So we have a search volume, monthly search volume for this keyword, or this search term, of 5,400. Everything stays the same. We have just different costs and we generate 10 or, let's say, 11 course buyers with paid ads and 22 buyers with organic results as number one. The average product price for a cyber security course is $12,000. So it doesn't matter that it cost $15, right? So we generate the revenue which is written here, and you have a product margin of 100%. There is nothing which you need to pay for cyber security courses, no direct cost. You pay for some servers, softwares. But that's not nothing that goes into the normal product margin calculation. And we just subtract the cost for all visitors, which is $8,000 and we make a profit of $120,000. But in SEO it's double that money. And if you are number 10 in the Google results, we still make $25,920 profit. And here it stays the same for paid ads. That's great, it's profitable on both sides and it's this example I'm showing you that you see that on place 10 you can, depending on the product, generate a lot of profit even being on the 10th place. So let's see Excel courses. Semrush is doing, this tool we are going to use it a lot in this course, so if you want to learn SEO, this is necessarity. Take the 14-day full trial in the description so you're not limited by any functionalities which you usually are. Using that link you have no limitation. You can use it 14 days as much as you can and then later on you need to pay. And I would recommend every beginner learning SEO that they should buy this tool and because we are going to use it in almost every lesson, just starting here with basics. So we have 5,400 monthly search volume, a click price of $2.27. We enter that in our table: 2.27, 5,500. And we have a cost for all visitors of $1,200 and we have only average product price of $300. So that cost influences a lot our profit. It decreases it by almost a third, by $2,200, but still we are profitable. And if you're doing SEO, we are much more profitable, because we don't have those costs. And if you're number 10, we're making close profit as paid ads and sometimes it's the case, as we have seen, that we're doing profit or having profit with our SEO techniques, but we are making a loss for the paid ads.

Why are Online Stores Paying SEO Specialists More Than Others?

So that's for the first lesson, that's what you should know and hopefully you now understand why online stores are ready to pay you a little bit more than any other Specialist because you're adding a little bit more sauce to the profit in their online stores. And if they are having a huge margin, then the comparison to paid ads is lower, but if the product margins are slim, then SEO is the only way, sometimes, to make them profitable. Let's take an example of a generalistic online store who is selling the usual physical products and not a digital product like courses. There, the product margins are, almost every time, below 50%, and there's where SEO comes into the game and makes it a game changer. And the company becomes only more profitable by doing more SEO, and all other ways are closed, all other doors are closed through other online digital channels. Only SEO is the channel where they can scale their business and do lot of more things. Therefore, they're ready to pay you more as a developer, as a designer, as an engineer of their own products, because you are selling it, you are making the revenue, you making the profit. And they're ready to pay you for that service, because you know how to do it, you can promise them the results, if you're experienced enough and you will see how you can make those assumptions. How you can write down a road map and promise your customers what you can achieve. And that's what they want to hear, because the only thing online stores care, at the end of the game, is how much revenue and, especially, how much profit did they make. Hopefully, now you can see why you can become a high-paid Ecommerce SEO and AI Specialist, without ever going to college. Almost everyone can acquire those future-proof skills, SEO and AI, and help online stores to become more profitable.

Next Episode Preview

In the next lesson you can learn what SEO ranking factors are, why not all of them have the same weight inside the Google algorithm. What the most important SEO ranking factor is and how you can optimize it. You will also see why the job of an Ecommerce SEO and AI Specialist is mainly analyzing and giving advice, why you don't need to know how to code in any programming language and why your advices are very impactful for online stores. If you've got value out of this lesson, please consider hitting the like and subscribe buttons. Feel free to explore the SEOLAXY courses and amazing community at seolaxy.com. See you next time.