Search engines are a vital source of traffic for all digital enterprises including information publishers and service providers but it is ecommerce retailers that often have the most difficulty in terms of optimizing their presence within the channel.
Fortunately, Searchmetrics recently released its "Ecommerce Ranking Factors 2017" report revealing some of the most important ranking factors for online retailers including:
+ AdSense/ad links: Ecommerce websites that avoid the use of external, third-party advertising are found amongst the top-ranked search results more often.
+ Facebook total: Ecommerce URLs amongst the top 10 search results have, on average, one-quarter as many social signals from Facebook (total number of likes and shares) as the top 10 pages when calculated for all sectors.
+ File size: The file sizes of the top 10 ecommerce websites are over 30 percent larger on average, when taking all industries into account.
+ Interactive elements: Higher ranking ecommerce pages contain more menus, buttons and other interactive elements than the overall average.
+ Internal links: In ecommerce, URLs on the first page of the Google search results have 70 percent more internal links than the overall benchmark.
To see if you're working to master search, test your knowledge of industry happenings in this month's Quiz Time (answers are at the bottom of the page).
1. Ecommerce pages in the top 10 search results almost all (99.9 percent) have this:
a. The .com top-level domain
b. Videos playing on the homepage
c. Calls-to-action above the fold
d. Low word counts on the homepage
2. What is CloudBleed?
a. The name given to Google's latest algorithm update that takes into account the technology used to power ecommerce sites.
b. A black-hat SEO tactic that uses a competitor's hosting environment to get a competitive edge in search rankings.
c. A cross-industry hack impacting on-premise servers.
d. A vulnerability in code that resulted in people's sensitive data (passwords, private messages) from popular services like Uber and Fitbit being returned in the search results.
3. Bing and Google recently agreed to do what:
a. Merge cloud offerings to defeat AWS
b. Share technology secrets
c. Suppress piracy sites in search results
d. Get all their employees together for a game of flag football
4. According to a new study from Clutch, marketers' primary goal for their content marketing initiatives is to:
a. Improve reputation
b. Increase their company's online visibility
c. Get more social followers
d. Create way more content than their competitors
5. The percentage of SMBs willing to invest in search engine optimization is:
a. 95 percent
b. 17 percent
c. 2 percent
d. 75 percent
See answers below!
1. a (Searchmetrics); 2. d (Cloudflare); 3. c (Website Magazine); 4. b (
Website Magazine); 5. b (
Website Magazine)
