What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of enhancing your website's visibility through better ranking on search results. The ranking is determined by a search engine's algorithm that matches your website's content to the customer's search query. Most product discovery on the web takes place through search. It's no surprise that almost half of product searches start on Google, making your search rank crucial. A higher-ranking lead to increased organic search traffic to your site and attracts potential customers. Unlike paid advertising, SEO doesn't require payment per click for better ranking, and provides cost-effective, long-term results. Google holds 92% of the search engine market share, making it valuable to optimize your site for better ranking on Google. Other popular search engines include Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. How to increase visibility of your online store with SEO Keyword research Keyword research involves identifying the spec...
The Supermarket Parallel
When a customer visits a supermarket, he finds products beautifully organised in arrays of shelves. There are clear signboards over aisles indicating the categories of products. This structured approach of displaying products makes it easy for customers to purchase their products. Over the years, these companies have analysed customer purchase behaviour and have learnt that organising products in specific ways can result in increased sales. For example, keeping products that are frequently purchased together, like crisps and soda, can be placed next to one another to facilitate quick shopping experience. Alternatively they can be placed far apart to make the customer walk across the market, giving them a chance to explore and discover other products along the way. The latter increases the chance of increasing the basket sizes of customers who came to purchase specific products. Supermarkets also strategically place small but high margin items that are often impulse buys, like mint, chocolates and chewing gum near the checkout aisle. Customers look at them while waiting in line, and with a shrug and “what the hey” toss a couple into their cart. It is important to note that the aisle markers enable customers to quickly get products if they want, but strategic product placements have the opportunity to drive up sales and improve margins.
eCommerce websites have several parallels to supermarkets. The search bar is useful to locate specific products. However, you can follow multiple best practices to ensure better product discoverability and increase your average basket size.
Measurement is key
At the outset, we need to agree with the maxim, “You cannot improve what you don't measure”. We need to ensure that we have mechanisms to measure the impact of our changes. Next, we need to perform a few experiments, and record their outcomes. Finally, we need to compare the outcomes, and see which experiment fared best, and adopt them. Experiments are useful because businesses are different, their target customers are different, and the same solution may not work in all situations.
Methods of displaying products
Product recommendations
Recommendations can range from simple and manual, where you select the products that you want to highlight, all the way to state of the art machine learning based recommender systems that consider a variety of aspects to automatically make recommendations.
Banners
It is important to regularly rotate banner images to keep your website fresh. A dynamic site keeps your customers interested, and enhances the chances of discovering newer products. If you don't have access to graphic designers that are pocket-friendly, consider creating your own with tools from Canva or Adobe.
Menus
Menus are another way of helping your customers discover your products and categories. Ensure that your products and categories are well organised without making them too fine or coarse. In addition to showing your product categories or listing individual special items, you can also consider creating interesting product groupings, for example, to help sell long-tail products.
Where can products be displayed
An eCommerce website is typically browsable via different types of pages. We have the home page, the primary landing page that the customer visits when they land on your website. We have product catalogue pages a.k.a. the list pages, that displays a list of products by some criteria. We have search pages, akin to catalogue pages where the criteria are set by the customers via search queries and filters (and your secret sauce), and the product detail page that provides detailed information about a specific product. Further, a single page can be broadly divided into two parts - Above the Fold or Below the Fold. The content that a customer sees as soon as the page loads is called Above the Fold content, while content that a customers sees after scrolling down is called Below the Fold.
You should try to make the best use of the available real estate and maximise your Click-through Rate (CTR) - a metric used to measure the percentage of customers who have clicked on your widgets. And all real estate is not equally valuable. Above the Fold content on home page is highly valuable. So, ensure that you display only high value items there. These are typically achieved via banner carousels to maximise the chances of your customers clicking on eye-catching banners.
Customers who visit your product detail page have done so with a higher degree of purchase intent, and so, you want to help ensure that the purchase decision goes through, rather than distracting them with unrelated products. So, you can choose to not show anything above the fold, or if you want to display product recommendations or banners, display related products above the fold with the intent of guiding your customers make the best purchase decision. However, cross-sell items or unrelated products should be listed below the fold.
Banners and recommendations can be shown in several parts of your product catalogue, search results and other pages. Your template should be conducive to hold such widgets. Some websites display product recommendations during the checkout process, similar to the supermarket's candies. While some may be agree with this approach, some of us feel that all distractions in the checkout process should be avoided. Checkout pages are part of high intent flows, and distractions are probably going to reduce this. You can consider performing A/B testing to evaluate your decisions.
To summarise, use a good combination of the above techniques and ensure that your products are discoverable. These approaches can help improve your conversions. And lastly, don't forget to measure the impact of your changes, and use the ones that work to create a virtuous cycle. We hope you liked this post. Please do share your thoughts and comments.
Note
Omnibus provides easy to use applications to manage banners, product recommendations, menus and make your products highly discoverable. Click here to learn more about Omnibus.
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