This article is an extract from my soon to launch eCommerce Technical SEO course – it is part of the Ecommerce UX Module.
Whilst the core objective of SEO is to drive and attract visitors to your website/Ecommerce store from search engines; the baton is handed over to User Experience (UX) when visitors arrive. The core objective of UX is to create an atmosphere and experience that nudges visitors/shoppers (split by personas) to take specific actions (as defined in customer journeys); pique their interests by effectively meeting their needs and expectations; addressing their concerns; and finally converting them.
UX hinges on users’ perception of your website. Great UX means great user and in the case of ecommerce; great shopper perception, which leads to a purchase and return customers.
Whether you like to hear this or not: Google prefers to rank ‘higher quality’ websites; where ‘high quality’ may imply websites with a more expensive look and feel i.e. top retail brands with not only the budget but the ability to execute UX extremely well along with engaging content (visuals and the written word). Brands such as Made.com, MrPorter.com, Booking.com and Amazon.com.
Google is in the business of serving the most relevant and highest quality results to their users, searchers. Google actually hires a third party team called “Search Quality Evaluators” to manually rate and measure the quality of pages it ranks in its search results. This team of search quality raters are handed over a 160-page “Quality Rating Guideline” document to manually cross-check each web page.
After their evaluation, they rate pages on the basis of two metrics:
It is important to note that they rate Pages and not Websites.
They deem a web page to be of high quality when:
In addition, the page and website should have most of the following:
Can you make your store look 10X more expensive i.e. make a £5 million revenue store come across as a £50million brand?
More importantly, in way that demonstrates your store’s expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness?
In the context of ecommerce ‘expensive looking’ sites typically demonstrate most of the above guidelines. User experience (UX) is a core means of laying out and establishing a website’s quality. In ecommerce, safety and trust are important factors to quality.
Here is a checklist of areas in Ecommerce UX that directly relate to SEO, you should pay special attention to:
Photo credits: Jeffrey Zeldman via Flickr (Creative Commons License)
This article is an extract from my soon to launch eCommerce Technical SEO course – it is part of the Ecommerce UX Module.
Whilst the core objective of SEO is to drive and attract visitors to your website/Ecommerce store from search engines; the baton is handed over to User Experience (UX) when visitors arrive. The core objective of UX is to create an atmosphere and experience that nudges visitors/shoppers (split by personas) to take specific actions (as defined in customer journeys); pique their interests by effectively meeting their needs and expectations; addressing their concerns; and finally converting them.
UX hinges on users’ perception of your website. Great UX means great user and in the case of ecommerce; great shopper perception, which leads to a purchase and return customers.
Whether you like to hear this or not: Google prefers to rank ‘higher quality’ websites; where ‘high quality’ may imply websites with a more expensive look and feel i.e. top retail brands with not only the budget but the ability to execute UX extremely well along with engaging content (visuals and the written word). Brands such as Made.com, MrPorter.com, Booking.com and Amazon.com.
Google is in the business of serving the most relevant and highest quality results to their users, searchers. Google actually hires a third party team called “Search Quality Evaluators” to manually rate and measure the quality of pages it ranks in its search results. This team of search quality raters are handed over a 160-page “Quality Rating Guideline” document to manually cross-check each web page.
After their evaluation, they rate pages on the basis of two metrics:
It is important to note that they rate Pages and not Websites.
They deem a web page to be of high quality when:
In addition, the page and website should have most of the following:
Can you make your store look 10X more expensive i.e. make a £5 million revenue store come across as a £50million brand?
More importantly, in way that demonstrates your store’s expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness?
In the context of ecommerce ‘expensive looking’ sites typically demonstrate most of the above guidelines. User experience (UX) is a core means of laying out and establishing a website’s quality. In ecommerce, safety and trust are important factors to quality.
Here is a checklist of areas in Ecommerce UX that directly relate to SEO, you should pay special attention to:
Photo credits: Jeffrey Zeldman via Flickr (Creative Commons License)