According to the US Commerce Department, in 2011, retail spending in the US is approximately $4 trillion annually. Ecommerce is on the rise. In fact, many shoppers have decided to forgo the busy shopping malls this holiday season in favor of simply ordering online. While ecommerce is growing rapidly, it still trails far below in-store sales with only five percent of the retail sales market.

The retail firm RevTrax just released some interesting findings by a study on ecommerce and retail. They conducted two years of research and found that ecommerce sales are linked to future in-store sales. What they found is that for every dollar of ecommerce there were six dollars spend in-store with regard to paid search. This means that online sales are a conduit of sorts to bring customers into a retail store.

That got us here at Bella headquarters thinking, if paid search generates in-store sales, couldn’t the same be true for organic search? Absolutely! The process is largely the same: it is about matching keywords to what someone types into a search engine. With organic search optimization, the more relevant the keywords, the higher you’ll rank.

Organic search is good because once it is in place via articles, blog posts, directory listings or the like, search engines index them, pushing a steady stream of visitors to your site. With paid advertising, once the ad is gone, the traffic goes with it.

The long and short of it is, that when done right, organic search engine optimization can bring buyers to your store. With the advent of smart phones and mobile marketing, the process has been made much easier. If done correctly, organic search brings customers to your site and landing pages display coupons that customers can print out and redeem in-store. Here is what is really interesting – one of the other key findings is that 40 – 50 percent of the customers were new customers. This is quite remarkable in that these weren’t existing customers that were looking for a deal from a retailer. These are newly acquired customers.

Savvy retailers, who capitalize on organic search ranking, may find it to be a viable alternative to the costly advertising found on the many deal-a-day sites that are popping up all over the internet. Read more about what we have to offer as far as organic SEO.

Tags: organic search, paid search, search engine optimization