4 Reasons Why Your eCommerce Store Shouldn’t Rely On Google

If you have a need to boost traffic and increase the number of people coming to visit your website, you may think that the only way to do this is to rank higher in the Google search results. Over time, this might become a large part of your marketing strategy.

But before you go off and start concentrating on driving more Google traffic, have you ever wondered what would happen to your eCommerce store if Google changed the way they rank online stores? What if they, for some reason, decided to rank them down?  That would have a HUGE impact on your business if you were relying too heavily on the search engines for traffic.

You should start spreading your time and effort to lower your risks by using the many other traffic sources available for increasing your website traffic and targeting more potential customers. Here are the top four reasons why you should stop relying solely on the popular search engine.

Change In Algorithm

Google performs about 200 updates and changes in its algorithm every year. This is because doing so is one of the search engine’s measures to effectively eliminate spam. Every time there is a change in their algorithm, you can expect a significant change in your online site’s usual traffic.

In 2012, many websites that relied solely on Google reported a change in the volume of their visitors. In some cases the traffic went up, but in many cases in went down – sometimes by more than 60%! Link building would also be rendered futile as algorithm updates are known for invalidating linking schemes.

Nobody knows what is round the corner in regards to Google updates.  Your site could be perfectly fine for the next few years without being effected, or you could end up getting hit hard with the next update.  The point is that you should try to minimize the impact by using other traffic generation methods for your site.

Drop In Rankings

As your search engine ranking fall, you may expect the number of potential visitors to your site to also decline. Considering high rankings drive more visitors, a drop in rankings from #3 to pages 2 could result in a loss of up to 70% of traffic for a particular keyword.  Now that is just one page, but what if all your pages suddenly took a nose dive in the SERP rankings?  That could be a pretty significant drop in traffic.

Such a change would have a huge impact on your online business, so it is key to find and use other marketing channels to drive traffic.

Growth Of Other Channels

Mobile Internet usage is expected to drastically grow in the next two years, including this year. If expectations proceed, more than 50% of online traffic will be accounted to mobile users. It will certainly change the overall scope of required activities for search engine optimization.

Your eCommerce business should make it a priority to make your website mobile friendly, as this is the only way to make sure that you aren’t losing out on potential business.  Most traffic directed to websites on mobile devices tends to come from social media networks, not Google.  Even search engines have different search results on mobile devices than on desktop searches.

Future Changes

Microdata or structured data is expected to gain more importance in search engine optimization (SEO) in the near future. This is a unique mark-up language providing more information about content of websites to search engines for them to use. Google is actively pushing for the adoption of the system, which would change online site performance in natural search results.

Google can still be a reliable tool and partner in making your eCommerce store succeed and in all likely hood you are not going to just wake up one morning and find that all your traffic has disappeared.  However, it is important that you try to tap other systems that may complement and help bolster traffic to your website. It is important that no matter what changes that are made to the popular search engine, your site has other traffic streams to fall back on.  Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet, the more traffic streams that you have from multiple sources bringing you business, the less you have to worry about one failing.

Other than search engines, what other traffic sources help drive traffic to your site?  Do you worry that a Google update could have a big impact on your business, or are you not so bothered?  Please let us know by leaving a comment below!