What does it take for an ecommerce site to rank on the first page of the search engine result pages (SERPs)?
Searchmetrics - with its historical database spanning nine years and more than 250 billion pieces of information - created an industry-specific (ecommerce) keyword set to find out. The following visual from Searchmetrics shows a few examples of the keywords used for the analysis in its whitepaper.
So, what did Searchmetrics discover? A quick rundown is provided below (but more context is
found at Searchmetrics):
- Just three percent of the top 10 ecommerce pages make use of AdSense or Adlinks.
- Ecommerce websites amongst the top 20 search results have less than a third as many social signals as the overall average.
- The file size of ecommerce pages in the top 10 is more than 30 percent larger than the average file size across all sectors.
- The number of interactive elements on high-ranking ecommerce websites is almost 40 percent higher than in our benchmark analysis.
- Across the top 10 Google positions, ecommerce pages have, on average, 70 percent more bullets per list than the overall benchmark.
- In ecommerce, URLs on the first page of the Google search results have 70 percent more internal links than the overall benchmark.
- Across the top 20 of Google's search results, well over half of ecommerce pages have an online store above the fold. This is more than double the overall average.
- Ecommerce pages in the top 10 almost all (99.9 percent) have the TLD .com.
- Video plays a less significant role in ecommerce than for websites in general. Only 35 percent of ecommerce pages in the top 10 have embedded videos.
- The word count for ecommerce URLs in the top 10 is around 25 percent higher than the overall aver­age.
Here are the findings compared to general benchmark analysis: