Improving E-commerce Web Performance

E-commerce is growing faster than ever, not just with traditional brick and mortar retailers or large corporations, but also with social media influencer, small businesses, YouTubers, and really just anyone who wants to sell anything online.

It seem like whenever you go onto social media, whether that be YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere else, there seems to be someone trying to push a new product from there very own line of merch. And its no wonder why; there has never been any easier time to start an e-commerce store. Companies like Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, and many other similar such platforms provide easily accessible tools that can scale anyone’s product idea into potential profit. The emergency of social media shopping in 2018 has also made entry into e-commerce more accessible. Social commerce now makes up 5.9% of the e-commerce market sitting at 64.8bn USD in sales value¹. User penetration is expected to reach 53.9% in 2024 with an estimated wopping $3,647.00bn USD in sales revenue².

This being said, a large market doesn’t mean guaranteed sales for all.

With so many new players in the market, it’s also never been more important to stand out your competitors.
Globally, around 252,000 websites are created every day, with an estimated 12 – 24 million websites³ or more already running. If the market size by global e-commerce buyers sits at around 2 billion, that’s only 50 customers per website. Only about 1 million or 4% of these sites make over $1000/year. Fewer yet will make enough income to hire even one full time employee.

You may be thinking now, what you can do to improve your e-commerce site and differentiate yourself from competitors.

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned from working with the worlds largest online retailers that you can use to improve your e-commerce website.

E-commerce SEO

E-commerce websites face unique SEO challenges that are specific to their nature and structure. Here are some of the more common e-commerce-specific issues we’ve noticed most companies overlook:

Duplicate Content: E-commerce websites often have numerous product pages with similar or identical content, which can result in duplicate content issues. Search engines may penalize sites with duplicate content, leading to lower rankings. Implementing canonical tags, writing unique product descriptions, and using pagination properly can help address this issue.
Thin Content: Some e-commerce websites may have product pages with minimal content, such as short descriptions or only images. Thin content pages may struggle to rank well in search results. It’s essential to provide comprehensive and unique content for each product, including detailed descriptions, specifications, and user reviews. This being said, if you have product pages that just don’t work well with SEO, another option is to make sure to mark them as “non-indexing” pages to make sure they are not crawled by search engines and don’t impact your SEO score. You can do this by removing the robots.txt block and using a ‘noindex’ directive.
Faceted Navigation: E-commerce sites frequently use faceted navigation to allow users to filter products based on various attributes like size, color, and price. However, faceted navigation can generate multiple URLs with similar content, leading to duplicate content issues and crawl budget wastage. Implementing URL parameters properly, using rel=”canonical” tags, and setting up URL parameters in Google Search Console can help manage faceted navigation.
Product Availability: Products on e-commerce websites may go in and out of stock frequently. When a product becomes unavailable, its page may return a 404 error or remain indexed without the option to purchase. Implementing proper handling of out-of-stock products, such as redirecting to similar products or displaying related items, can prevent negative SEO impacts.
Product Reviews and Ratings: User-generated content like product reviews and ratings can provide valuable information to both customers and search engines. However, if not managed correctly, reviews and ratings may lead to issues like thin content, spam, or duplicate content. Implementing structured data markup for reviews and ratings and monitoring user-generated content for quality and relevance can help mitigate these issues.
Pagination: E-commerce websites often use pagination to display multiple pages of products. However, pagination can lead to duplicate content issues, especially if URLs for paginated pages aren’t properly handled. Implementing rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags, using canonicalization, and ensuring that paginated pages have unique titles and meta descriptions can help address pagination-related SEO issues.
Site Architecture: The structure of an e-commerce website’s navigation and hierarchy can impact its SEO performance. Poorly organized site architecture can result in orphaned pages, inefficient crawling, and difficulty in indexing important pages. Implementing a logical and hierarchical structure, optimizing internal linking, and creating XML sitemaps can improve site architecture and enhance SEO.
Product Variations: E-commerce websites often sell products with multiple variations, such as size, color, and style. Managing product variations effectively can be challenging, as each variation may have its own URL and content. Implementing structured data markup for product variations, using canonical tags, and ensuring that each variation has unique content can help optimize SEO for product variations.

Addressing these e-commerce-specific SEO issues requires a combination of technical expertise, strategic planning, and ongoing optimization efforts. By proactively identifying and resolving these challenges, e-commerce websites can improve their search visibility, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately drive sales.

User Experience

Depending on what type of product you sell, one of the first things you might want to consider is the physiology of choice. Too many options can overwhelm users, leading to decision fatigue and decreased conversion rates. You may have noticed this if you’ve ever visited sites like Zara and H&M, or found yourself endlessly scrolling throw Amazon’s over 30,000 results for items like Iphone chargers.

There’s a great article in Business.com⁴, it’s also covered in countless other article in Harvard Business Review, HubSpot, Ted-talks, etc. It’s the quote below though that really hits on what is possible when it comes to implementing this concept in e-commerce site.

“An Italian recipe blog reduced its myriad options on two different pages. This small change produced an increased clickthrough rate from 2.7% to 12.3 % on one page and from 3.6% to 11.5 % on another.”
Jamie Johnson

E-commerce websites can mitigate choice overload by carefully curating product selections, categorizing items into manageable groups, and providing clear filters and sorting options. Going back to the topic of SEO, providing a better user experience can also decrease overall bounce rates, an essential component of search engine optimization. By presenting a focused range of choices, websites can make decision-making easier for users, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversions. After all, do your customers really need Iphone cables in 50 different colors, or are they more likely and probably happier to just buy black or white?

Another things that seems to be quite common mainly with small and medium sized business is their affinity for marketing promotions. You like many others may have been annoyed by the countless email signup prompts, account creation pages, referral schemes, and everything else that puts a barrier between you and your purchase. A study by Baymard Institute’s suggests 24% of abandoned carts happen because the site wanted customers to create an account. Companies like Shopify call this “friction⁵“, and in their words this means, “any part of the user experience that is overly difficult or confusing. This includes everything from a poor checkout process to unclear shipping fees.“

This isn’t to say you should completely abandon all of these interactions on your website, after all, some might be essential to your business or provide an enhanced customer journey in the long run. Try to keep the number of pages from entrance to purchase at a minimum. If you can keep it around 4 to 5 pages, you’re probably in a good position.

A good policy is to try to purchase a product from your own site and think about which interactions either didn’t provide any value to your journey or where just down right annoying.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to e-commerce, we are just scratching the surface here with all the ways you could improve your business. Like all things digital marketing, what’s really needed is a holistic approach. The key to e-commerce business success in marketing lies in understanding and targeting the right audience, maintaining a multi-channel presence, implementing a comprehensive content strategy, optimizing for search engines, utilizing paid advertising effectively, nurturing customer relationships through email marketing, leveraging social proof, analyzing data for continuous improvement, prioritizing exceptional customer experiences, and embracing adaptability and innovation to stay ahead in the dynamic e-commerce landscape.

There are no “hacks”, quick fixes, or one size fits all strategies. So get out there, try something new and find out what works for your business.

What’s next?

In future blogs we will dig into the specifics of SEO as it relates to e-commerce as well as UX deign and other e-commerce related topics. So be sure to check back next week for more in-depth content. If you want some help improving your e-commerce performance or are just interested in ready some of our other blogs, click the links below.

Blogs

Digital Marketing

SEO

Sources: