I get asked fairly often why a marketing director should think of SEO as anything more than a way to get a product page onto page one of Google. I understand why the question comes up.
For years, SEO was pitched purely as a rankings exercise, and a lot of agencies still sell it that way. From where I sit, having built lead generation systems that helped scale a business past £65 million in turnover, that view is badly out of date.
SEO doesn’t just get someone to your website. It shapes what they believe about your brand before they’ve even heard of you, it answers the questions they’re asking three or four times before they buy, and it follows them right through to the moment they decide whether to come back.
I want to walk through each stage of that journey properly, because understanding where e-commerce SEO actually sits in the buying process is the difference between treating it as a line item and treating it as the backbone of your growth strategy.
Where Does The Modern Buying Journey Actually Begin?
Search still owns the front door of e-commerce. Data from Klarna’s 2026 research shows 44% of shopping journeys start on a search engine, ahead of 41% starting on a store or marketplace and 14% on social platforms. Separately, 68% of shoppers use search engines specifically to investigate products before they buy, and 81% of shoppers research online before purchasing, even when the eventual sale happens in-store.
What’s changed significantly is what “search” actually means. A growing share of that discovery moment is now happening inside AI platforms rather than a traditional results page.
Visits to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity grew 70% year-on-year to around 9.5 billion a month, and referral traffic from AI assistants into websites grew 796% between January 2024 and December 2025 across a large tracked sample. Around 51% of buyers now begin research with an AI chatbot rather than Google, a jump from just 29% in early 2025.
Why Discovery Is No Longer A Single Moment
Consumers don’t discover a product once and move on. EMARKETER research found 69.3% of shoppers discover new products at least weekly, and most consumers research a product at least three separate times before deciding to buy, with 22.8% researching five times or more.
High consideration, higher price purchases regularly stretch beyond two weeks of active research. This is precisely why a single optimised landing page was never going to be enough. Your brand needs to show up consistently across every one of those research passes, which is the exact principle we build every Essheo strategy around.
How Does SEO Shape The Research And Consideration Stage?
This is where I think most businesses underinvest, because it’s less obviously transactional than a product page, yet it’s where buying decisions are actually being formed. Consumers research products most heavily through online reviews and listicles, at 59.9%, ahead of visiting physical stores at 56.7% and search engines directly at 44.3%.
The Role Of Comparison Content And Buying Guides
Genuinely useful comparison content, buying guides, and “best of” style articles capture demand at precisely the point where a buyer is narrowing down options but hasn’t committed to a specific product or brand yet. This content typically ranks for lower competition, higher intent search terms than your core commercial keywords, and it costs meaningfully less to earn organically than to compete for through paid search at the same stage.
It’s also exactly the format AI platforms rely on most heavily when constructing summarised answers, so well-built comparison content earns you visibility in two systems at once rather than one.
Why Reviews Have Become A Core SEO Asset, Not Just A Trust Signal
Around 98% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase, and shoppers who interact with reviews and user-generated content convert at rates up to 161% higher than those who don’t.
Stores adding reviews to product pages for the first time typically see conversion lifts in the 10% to 30% range, with a further uplift once a product moves from a handful of reviews to several hundred, because shoppers read review volume as a proxy for genuine popularity.
Reviews also carry direct SEO weight. Star ratings displayed in search results through structured data can lift click-through rate by up to 17%, and pages using valid schema markup see click-through rates around 40% higher than pages without it.
The technical detail matters here too. Google requires the reviewCount and ratingValue in your schema to match exactly what’s visible on the page, and applying aggregated review schema to category pages rather than individual products can trigger a manual action. This is the kind of granular technical work that separates a properly executed SEO strategy from a templated one, and it’s a detail we check on every technical audit we run for a new client.
How Does SEO Influence The Final Decision To Purchase?
By the time a buyer reaches the decision stage, they’ve usually interacted with your brand, or a competitor’s, across six to eight separate touchpoints. Around 70% of consumers will abandon a purchase entirely if the experience feels inconsistent across those touchpoints, which means the SEO work happening on your product pages needs to align with what a buyer has already seen in reviews, comparison content, and earlier research.
Why Product Page Optimisation Still Decides The Sale
Site search behaviour on your own website is a strong signal of purchase intent, and it’s often under-optimised. Shoppers who use on-site search convert at around 4.63%, compared with 2.77% for those who browse without searching, a lift of roughly 1.8 to 3 times depending on the catalogue.
Industry benchmarks suggest between 30% and 50% of e-commerce visitors use site search during a session, and a zero-result rate above 10% to 15% represents a genuine revenue leak that’s often invisible until someone actually audits it. This is a detail we check early in any technical review, because a customer who searches your site and hits a dead end rarely comes back to try again.
Why AI Referred Traffic Converts Differently
Traffic arriving from AI platforms is smaller in volume than traditional organic search right now, but it behaves differently in a way that matters commercially. AI-referred shoppers spend 45% more time on site, view 13% more pages, and convert around 31% more often than visitors from other sources.
That’s a meaningfully higher quality visitor, which is exactly why we treat AI search visibility as a genuine growth lever at Essheo rather than a future trend to worry about later.
What Happens To SEO’s Influence After The Purchase Is Made?
I think this is the part decision makers overlook most, because SEO gets filed under acquisition in most marketing structures, when in reality it plays a role long after the sale too. Buyers who had a positive research experience, found clear answers, and trusted what they read are more likely to return directly rather than starting a fresh search next time, which lowers your blended acquisition cost over the following purchase cycle.
Well-optimised order tracking pages, FAQ content, and support documentation also capture post-purchase search queries, which reduces support burden and builds the kind of brand trust that shows up in reviews, which then feeds directly back into the research stage for the next customer.
Why This Makes SEO A Closed Loop, Not A Funnel
The buying journey isn’t really linear anymore, it’s closer to a loop where discovery, research, decision and post-purchase experience all feed back into each other, and SEO touches every single point in that loop.
This is the framing I always bring to a strategy call, because businesses that treat SEO purely as a top-of-funnel acquisition channel are leaving a huge amount of value on the table further down the journey.
Why Does Multi-Platform Visibility Matter More Than Ever?
Only 4% of buyers rely on AI tools alone for their research, while 77% use a combination of AI and traditional search together, which tells you plainly that neither channel has replaced the other, they’re operating in parallel. Around 90% of B2B buyers now use search tools including Google and ChatGPT together to research vendors, and the pattern for consumer e-commerce is following a similar path.
This is exactly why Google can no longer be treated as the sole measure of search visibility for an e-commerce brand. Your buyers are moving between Google, YouTube, Reddit threads, review platforms, and AI assistants within the same research session, often for the same product.
We built Essheo around Search Everywhere Optimisation for precisely this reason, ranking clients across Google, LLMs, YouTube and social platforms simultaneously, because focusing on just one of those channels means missing a large share of the moments where buying decisions are actually being formed.
What This Means Practically For Your SEO Strategy
It means your content strategy, technical foundations, and brand presence all need to be built with the understanding that a buyer might encounter you first through an AI answer, then verify you through a Google search, then make the final decision after reading reviews on a third-party site.
Every one of those touchpoints is an SEO consideration, whether it’s classic on-page optimisation, structured data, or the kind of earned third-party coverage that gets pulled into AI generated summaries. This is advanced, joined-up SEO work, and it’s genuinely not something a junior in-house resource or a generalist marketing hire can execute at the level needed to compete against well-funded competitors.
Ready To Influence Every Stage Of Your Customer’s Buying Journey?
I built Essheo on the belief that SEO deserves to be treated as a strategic growth function, not a rankings checklist, because that’s what I’ve seen actually move revenue when I was running acquisition for a business generating up to £1.75 million in a single peak month. Our clients have generated over £45 million in combined revenue over the last two years, built on strategies designed around the entire buying journey, not just the first click.
Every person on our team carries over eight years of experience ranking brands in genuinely difficult sectors, going up against major established players like MoneySuperMarket, GoCompare and uSwitch, so you’re working with practitioners who understand how buyers actually behave, not just how algorithms rank pages.
Whether you’d prefer a hands-off partnership with monthly reporting, or a hands-on collaboration working directly alongside your team, we shape the engagement around your business rather than a fixed template.
If you’d like to understand where your brand is currently winning and losing across the buying journey, from first search to repeat purchase, I’d genuinely like to talk it through with you.
Book a strategy call with me, and let’s map out where the real opportunity sits for your e-commerce business.