The global eCommerce will presumably cross the $6.8 trillion level by the end of 2025. Despite that, it is quite a challenge for small and emerging businesses to gain visibility and build trust in a heavily competitive eCommerce landscape.
Forward-thinking eCommerce businesses are integrating AI into their process to boost the outcomes of their search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) campaigns. Studies suggest that the market value of AI SEO in the eCommerce sector will reach $64.03 billion by 2034.
Over 56% of marketers are already using AI for developing and implementing SEO strategies. AI SEO offers significant benefits, such as up to a 45% increase in organic traffic on your website and over a 38% boost in eCommerce conversion.
Before we delve into how AI SEO benefits eCommerce businesses, let’s first talk about the battles small and budding eCommerce setups have to fight on a day-to-day basis to win the game of visibility and success on digital.
Challenges Small-Scale and New-Sprung eCommerce Businesses Face
Cutthroat Competition
eCommerce has eased the way for traditional businesses. Starting and managing an online business has become easier than ever. But this has ignited a fierce competition in the market; each retailer on marketplaces, like Amazon, and in Google search results is putting the best of their efforts to catch the attention of their buyers.
AI SEO can give them an edge over the competition and help boost their visibility on search engines.
Cart Abandonment
eCommerce websites should follow the standard checkout flow principles. Ideally, the checkout process on your website should not be longer than 5 or 6 steps. The shorter, the better!
Studies indicate that over 20% of buyers abandon the cart owing to the lengthy and complicated checkout process.
Having a longer and more complex checkout process is not going to affect your website’s ranking and visibility on search engines. However, following a standard checkout flow will add to the overall user experience (UX) on your site, which is one of the search engine ranking factors.
With AI-enabled SEO audit tools, flaws in your checkout process can be identified and resolved quickly.
Lack of Personalization
Personalized recommendations have a significant role to play in helping a buyer stay on site and buy. It also improves customer experience, reduces cart abandonment, enhances engagement, builds trust, drives loyalty, and boosts sales.
AI- and ML-powered SEO tools can decipher consumer behavior and help you send personalized recommendations to each visitor. They allow you to create a tailored shopping journey for each of your customers.
Besides, eCommerce businesses have to deal with operational and logistics-related challenges, data privacy & security issues, and cybersecurity threats, apart from meeting customer expectations and staying compliant. Negative reviews from customers are a nightmare for businesses that have an online presence.
What is AI SEO?
AI SEO is a faster, more effective, and more advanced version of traditional SEO that involves using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to audit, analyze, brainstorm, and implement search engine optimization strategies that perform.
The technique or practice of using AI, or artificial intelligence, for SEO implementations is called AI SEO, and it can help eCommerce businesses starting from keyword research and SERP analysis to content optimization and creation.
How to Use AI SEO to Supercharge eCommerce Performance
Leading eCommerce businesses have already started using AI for optimizing their website for better performance on search engines. 65% of marketers have seen better SEO results after integrating AI.
Moreover, 67% of businesses agree that AI helps them automate repetitive tasks. 75% of businesses, like iCustomLabel.com, use AI tools to lower the amount of time they spend on confusing, nerve-wracking tasks like keyword research and Meta tag and ALT-TEXT optimization.
Finding Content Ideas
AI can be a great tool for generating ideas for content creation and writing. You can fetch tailored topics or title ideas for your content calendar based on your keyword, audience, and style or tone of your content.
Content Outlining and Writing
AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and others can efficiently and promptly write articles, blogs, emails, META titles & descriptions, product descriptions, webpage content, and a variety of content to support your eCommerce SEO goals. You can save hours and days of time this way.
Though, it is itself a debatable topic whether AI-generated content is good for your SEO campaigns.
But it is always a good idea to use humanized content that has been created/written or at least edited by a human.
Keyword Research
If you are in the early stage of optimizing your eCommerce website, experts suggest that you should start with keyword research. AI tools can generate a list of keywords relevant for your products and services in almost no time.
However, you should consider using a commercial-grade SEO tool for this purpose, not GPT or any other similar chatbots.
Analyze SERP or Competitors on Search Engines
You can quickly analyze the pages of your competitors ranking in top positions without spending weeks on this tiresome task. Give your AI assistant a prompt to analyze the website links of competitors and your keywords, and it will give you detailed yet easy-to-understand information about each of your competitors.
Keyword Integration
ChatGPT and Gemini can help you optimize content with your primary and secondary keywords. It boosts the visibility of your product pages and article/blog submission (backlink) campaigns on search engines.
Aside from generating content, planning keywords, and competitor analysis, AI SEO can help eCommerce businesses to repurpose their existing texts, images, and videos for other marketing channels, like social networks, emails, newsletters, slides, snippets, and Shorts and Reels.
Small and growing businesses can start with free or limited-version AI tools; however, to make an impact on the user and to amplify the performance of your eCommerce setup, you must invest in best-rated AI-enabled SEO, content creation, and analytics tools.
