In early June, the largest e-commerce conference was held – ECOM 21, the SEOWORK team took part as exhibitors and speakers with a report on the product approach to SEO and marketing. We have been working at the junction for a long time SEO + Product + Content + Marketing and we want to chat with you on this topic. In this article, we will try to summarize the essence of the grocery approach and describe how using it can help increase sales for large sites. We’d love to hear from you!
First, let’s define what the product approach is. Product approach Is a method of working on a product, service or service that allows you to get the desired result in an optimal way, without complicating the system and without doing too much.
In our case, an online store acts as a product, and ecom’s task is to develop it with maximum return in the form of traffic, conversions and sales.
The peculiarity of the product approach lies in the constant monitoring of key indicators and making decisions about changing the product based on the data, testing new ideas and, if successful, scaling them. We help ecom project teams receive data on key metrics of demand and project visibility, analyze competitors, monitor the technical condition of the site, measure the effectiveness of experiments and thus test hypotheses, highlight bottlenecks and help find growth points.
A product-based approach to working with the site will allow you to avoid situations when:
- SEO department does not influence content and assortment,
- the content on the site is not tied to the product, conversion and SEO,
but the plans and KPIs are presented as if everything is managed and even some results are still there.
This is a typical problem in ecommerce: there are requirements and plans, but there is no way to directly influence the result.
Why are we talking about this?
Based on Data Insight Research for 2020 33-56% online sales falls on the SEO channel. To manage conversions in ecom, it is impossible to abstract and not interact with the product (hereinafter, the product means a site – an online store) and content, and IT and product managers cannot close the issue with the effectiveness of the site themselves. And, finally, it is no secret that it is simply impossible to fulfill the sales plan only by purchasing or catching up with the audience.
However, inside we see the following picture:
The SEO department or an external contractor tries to fulfill the plan with their own methods, often just put 100 TOR, correct response codes, duplicates on unimportant pages, write down the megaadmina for managing tags or redo the directory structure.
How much money will it bring? And will it bring ?!
The specialists responsible for the product and content, in turn, are enthusiastically introducing new cool technologies, for example, rich content, but they do not get answers to simple questions:
- How will this affect orders?
- How will this affect SEO?
- How will this affect user behavior?
- Has anything changed after 2-3 months? Has the effectiveness of this implementation dropped to 0?
The only sure key to success in such a situation is consistency of SEO, Product, Content and Marketing.
What solutions can there be?
Measure all implementations that are carried out on the site and combine data from different departments. After analyzing the largest online stores in the Russian market, we have collected several local cases that will help increase the overall business profit through analytics and study of each of the areas.
Photos per page
Case x SEO
Let’s look at a simple example – photos on a product page.
First, let’s check if the number of product photos affects its ranking?
Based on the analysis of the search visibility of 5209 product pages of a large online store for 8638 product requests in Moscow, we compared groups of pages with different numbers of product photos. In Yandex and Google, the result is the same: the more photos, the higher the page ranks. In Yandex, the visibility of product pages grows in proportion to the increase in the number of photos. Product visibility on Google is highly correlated with the number of photos; the recommended number of photos for this site is from 5 pieces.
In other words, an increase in the number of photos on a product page can attract almost 3 times more traffic to the site.
Case x Conversion
Go ahead and go to conversions. How does the number of product photos affect its conversion?
Using the same sample, we analyze the number of conversions on pages with a different number of photos on the product card. Conversion on products in Google, and especially in Yandex, strongly depends on the number of photos.
As in the previous case, the best results are shown by groups of pages with 5-6 photographs – at least 1.5 times!
UGC content
Case x SEO
Let’s look at another example, analyzing the impact of UGC content, namely reviews, on search visibility. Should you motivate users to leave product reviews?
We analyze the search visibility of 3047 product pages of an online store of household appliances and electronics for 5056 product requests in Moscow.
As you can see in the graph, the visibility of pages with reviews in Yandex is almost 2 times higher, and in Google – 4 times!
Products on this site that do not have a single customer review are ranked much worse. The presence of at least one review in the card allows you to count on a significant increase in visibility in Yandex and a multiple increase in Google.
Case x Conversion
It is clear how to increase traffic to the page, now we will evaluate how reviews affect conversion. Using the same sample, let’s analyze review cards in Yandex and Google.
Obviously: with UGC content, the probability of a purchase increases on average 2 times!
It can also be noted that the presence of at least one product review and photos from customers can increase the search visibility of the product (provided it is available for ordering), and therefore traffic to the site.
We calculate the profit
If we conduct at least such simple analytics and evaluate the most profitable business solutions, then we can easily increase both conversion and traffic from search engines at one point, as we see in our example.
In our example, due to the received data, we made conclusions:
- for our site, the largest traffic flow (almost 3 times) is obtained when there are 5 photos on the product page;
- on conversions, the presence of 5 photos also gives an increase of at least 1.5 times;
- The likelihood of conversion increases with product reviews.
Why are difficulties and how to solve them?
Unfortunately, often in large e-commerce there is simply no “point” where you can connect departments, data and conduct such analytics.
We often face the following problems:
- no shared data source,
- there is no dedicated area of responsibility for synchronization.
Check it out? Do you have an answer to the question “at hand” now:
What are the numerical topical answers for the cases above for your business?
If you are at a loss to answer, your first steps towards a product approach might be:
- creation of the very “entry point” of data in several directions,
- appointment of a responsible person.
According to the experience of the companies we work with, such a process can initiate and control:
- SEO specialist, manager,
- Product manager, analyst,
- Analytics activist,
- Retail manager, possibly in his verticals.
The main thing is to designate who it will be))
An analytics tool that can provide numerical answers to many questions can be both an internal BI solution and external analytics platforms. Such systems can collect:
- data on commercial indicators: assortment, prices of goods from feeds;
- traffic (sessions, users), user behavior, conversions, transactions and revenue based on data from analytics systems (Google Analytics and Y. Metrica);
- product metrics about the number of reviews, photos, product description completeness and other product metrics;
- SEO / demand / technical metrics, for example, demand (WS), visibility metrics (% TOP,% Ptraf) and technical metrics (indexing, CTR, server response).
When working with BI systems directly, data will still need to be collected and processed.
When working with product catalog pages, we recommend separately carrying out content analytics according to the following main parameters:
Such an analysis will clearly show which content brings more results and what type of content creation is worth investing in.
As a result, the product approach and analytics tool will allow you to answer the questions:
- What works are effective in principle?
- How effective is work in different contexts?
- Where to put the effort (which subsections of the project to work with)?
- Where is the growth potential?
- What actions are effective and what are not?
- How effective are the actions?
And others that are relevant specifically for your business.