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Recently, I discussed elements of a well-optimized product page. This week, we want to talk about the most common SEO mistakes made on e-commerce websites:

1. Crawlability
2. Broken internal links
3. URL structure
4. Security
5. Slow load speed
6. Low word count
7. Duplicate title tags
8. Improperly formatted title tags
9. Missing alt text

1. Crawlability

Perhaps the most important and most often overlooked mistake website owners make is accidentally blocking crawlers, thereby preventing indexation in the search engines entirely. Also known as “spiders,” these robots “crawl” your website to determine what it’s about, how quickly it loads, what kind of experience it offers a human visitor and more. Google’s spider, for example, is called Googlebot.

The issue of a lack of what we call crawlability — the website being able to be crawled — usually arises from the website developer blocking crawlers during the development phase (rightfully so) and then forgetting to unblock them once development is complete and the site is launched. A file called the robots.txt file contains the instructions for these crawlers, and this is where the blocking/unblocking occurs. This file always lives in the root directory at site.com/robots.txt.

SEOs and site owners put what are known as Disallow directives in this file to prevent certain areas of a website (e.g. sensitive information, cart/checkout pages, etc.) from being crawled and indexed. Sites can also be too crawlable, potentially creating duplicate content, as is the default behavior of the Magento platform. Usually, during development, a sitewide Disallow directive will be put in the robots.txt file temporarily to block the entire website from being crawled until launch. If your site isn’t showing up at all in Google after being live for about a week, chances are this one tiny line of code is the culprit.

2. Broken Internal Links

Broken links are exactly what the name implies — links on pages of your website that don’t work, resulting in a “404 Page Not Found” error for visitors clicking them. Perhaps the URL of the linked page changed or the page indeed no longer exists. This leads to both a bad user experience and a red flag for search engines. Moreover, these broken links are no longer passing link juice to your internal pages as originally intended. You can easily identify broken links on your website by using an SEO crawler tool like Screaming Frog.

3. URL Structure

URLs on your site should follow a logical, hierarchical, tree-like progression, with branches getting smaller as you get further into the site. This both helps search engines understand the information architecture of your site and provides a good user experience for the visitor. Be sure to map this out during the design phase of your website; it’s much harder to change and reshape things later on.

Specifically, let’s say your e-commerce website sells rain gear and you have a subcategory page for Men’s Breathable Waders. It should be obvious that your navigation menu wouldn’t make this a top-level category from the homepage. Similarly, your URL structure should match this breakdown — instead of site.com/mens-breathable-waders, we want this page to reside within a smaller subcategory like site.com/mens/waders/breathable. If a user then wants to go back to check out other types of men’s waders, they intuitively know simply by looking at the URL that they can follow a breadcrumb up/back one level, thereby avoiding any confusion or ambiguity about the navigation.

4. Security

Google has been pushing for websites to adopt SSL (Secure Socket Layering) for a while now, even establishing it as an explicit ranking factor and enabling a “Not Secure” warning in the Chrome browser. Users are also more protective now than ever before about their data and privacy. It’s imperative that your e-commerce website has a valid SSL certificate and is served over the HTTPS protocol (think of the little green lock icon in your browser’s address bar), since you are collecting sensitive visitor information like credit card numbers and addresses. SSL certificates are both easy and free to get nowadays, and are even automatically included with platforms like Shopify.

5. Slow Load Speed

Users now expect a quick-loading web page, and they’ll bounce if your site is too slow. Amazon famously found that for every 1 second of latency, they lost $1.6 billion annually. Technologies and tactics like gzip compression, caching, image compression and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can vastly improve your website’s load speed. Use a tool like GTMetrix to test your load speed and identify areas where you can improve.

6. Low Word Count

Content is king! Search engine crawlers can’t “read” an image or video. They primarily rely on text to get an idea of what a particular page is about and where it should rank. Studies have explicitly shown that high-ranking pages are much more likely to have higher word counts than lower-ranking pages, with a strong positive correlation. Moreover, your product and category descriptions are the perfect way to provide useful information to visitors and encourage them to convert!

7. Duplicate Title Tags

You’ve probably heard of the infamous “duplicate content penalty.” Google doesn’t like to see more than one page that appears to have almost identical content on it. Title tags are the most important SEO element of a page, thus it’s important that pages don’t share the same title tag. Make sure every single page on your site has a unique title tag to avoid duplicate content. Most e-commerce platforms will not do this for you automatically; run a scan with Screaming Frog or SEMRush to see if your site has any duplicate title tags.

8. Improperly Formatted Title Tags

Similarly, it’s common to see title tags that are improperly formatted and not at all optimized. Most CMSs and e-commerce platforms will default to using the page title as the title tag if you don’t specify otherwise. For example, if you have a product called Red Widget on your site, the title tag generated will likely simply be “Red Widget.” This is far from ideal. Not only does it not help your SEO efforts, it doesn’t do much to entice the user to click through from the search results. Just remember you should limit this tag to about 70 characters. A better title tag for our Red Widget product might be “Buy Red Widget Today with Free Shipping from Widget Co.”

9. Missing Alt Text

Another oft-overlooked aspect of page optimization is utilizing alt tags for images. Again, search engine crawlers can’t “see” an image, so they rely on things called alt tags — simply a tag briefly telling the user and the crawler what that image is. Alt tags are an easy way to improve your SEO, compete for image-search results and improve the accessibility of your site for vision-impaired visitors who also rely on alt tags.

Alt tags should be written as plain text phrases with spaces between words. For example, the main image on our Red Widget product page would likely have an alt tag that simply reads “red widget.” You can be as descriptive as you want — going with “large red widget” or “small red widget,” for example — but don’t try to game the system here by using long phrases or sentences like “cheap red widget with free shipping.” Search engines can recognize and penalize that.

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here.

Looking to generate more revenue from your e-commerce website? Here, we’ll explore the following elements of an optimized product page as they relate to both SEO and conversions:

1. Title tag
2. H1 tag
3. Meta description tag
4. Description
5. Visuals
6. UGC
7. Structured data markup
8. Related products
9. Shipping and returns information

1. Title tag

Probably the most important SEO element of a page, the title tag is what shows up as the blue, clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP). The title tag also appears on the tab in your web browser. For an e-commerce site, this should almost always simply be the product name, perhaps with a separator and the store name as a suffix, if you have room. Title tags should be limited to about 70 characters, so choose your words wisely. Consider including any relevant keywords in your title tag if they can be naturally inserted alongside the product name.

The screenshot below shows the title tag as it appears in the SERP for a product from our client frogg toggs.

2. H1 tag

Similarly, the H1 tag of a product page should almost always be the product name as it’s displayed on the page. Much like the title tag, an H1 tag is the main heading of a page, telling the search engine crawler what the page is about. You should never use more than one H1 tag per page.

Note how on the product page below, the H1 tag is simply the product name.

3. Meta description tag

The meta description tag is a brief page description — limited to 160 characters —that also shows as a snippet in the SERP alongside the title. While this tag is not explicitly a ranking factor, think of it as a way to entice the user to click through to your product page from the SERP. The meta description tag will also usually be used as part of the link preview when a page is shared on a social media site.

The screenshot below shows how the meta description tag is generated in the SERP.

4. Description

Your product page should include a detailed description that explains all the features and aspects of the product. This description will serve as the primary written content of the page, so take the time to make it valuable and informative. Include keywords here, too, where possible.

Note the listing and explanation of features and sizing in the description below.

5. Visuals — Images and Video

Obviously, customers want to see what the product they’re buying looks like. Include large, high-resolution images so that buyers can see the important visual details of your product. Using keywords within the filename and alt text gives your image an opportunity to show up in a search engine’s image search results. Images and videos offer an opportunity to show and explain to the visitor important or potentially confusing features that are better served by visual presentation than by written copy. Moreover, search engines like to see images and videos on a page, as they’re valuable for the user.

6. UGC — Reviews and Q&A

Take the time to implement a robust reviews system for your website. Reviews provide social proof so that you can win the trust of your buyers. Not only will reviews boost conversion rates, but search engines also like to see this kind of user-generated content (UGC) on your page.

Another trend on the rise, made popular by Amazon, is showing a Q&A section where customers can both ask and answer questions about products. This is another means of UGC and can provide critical answers to questions your buyers may have, without them having to submit a contact form or send an email.

7. Structured data markup

Utilize structured data markup from Schema.org to take advantage of rich snippets in the SERP and make your product stand out. These include price, rating, stock message and more. Rich snippets can improve click-through rate from the SERP and subsequent conversion rate.

The screenshot below shows the structured data we’ve enabled for this particular product and how it appears in the SERP, including rating, reviews, price, and availability.

8. Related products

Include a section to cross-sell and upsell related products on your product page. This can be done in a sidebar, at the bottom of the page or after the Add to Cart button is clicked. Good suggestions here keep users on your site longer and lead to higher cart values.

Notice how on the product page below, we present related products in a section in the right sidebar.

9. Shipping and returns information

Quell buyers’ fears by providing pertinent purchase information directly on the page. This is another instance of eliminating friction in the funnel so that buyers don’t have to contact you or visit another page to learn about your shipping and returns policies.

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here.

Most marketers track and analyze a variety of metrics when it comes to their digital marketing efforts, especially for e-commerce. Some of the metrics are largely useless, others are very interrelated, and maybe only a few are the critical KPIs. Here, we’ll examine the most important metric of them all when assessing your e-commerce website. Specific to digital marketing and e-commerce, I’ll argue that the most important (and often most misunderstood) metric is Revenue Per Visitor, or RPV.

Marketers know to pay attention to Conversion Rate (CR or eCR) and Average Order Value (AOV). But many don’t realize that RPV is a composite metric comprised of these two that is an actionable data point in optimizing revenue performance. As the name suggests, RPV measures the amount of money a website makes for every visitor.

Let’s compare these three intertwined metrics to investigate why RPV is superior to the other two.

Situation 1: Focus on Conversion Rate

If we define a completed checkout/order as a conversion, then Conversion Rate (CR) is simply:

CR = Orders/Unique Visitors

For example, if 10,000 people visited your site last month and you had 100 orders placed, your Conversion Rate was 1%. If the number of visitors stays relatively constant, you can increase revenue by increasing the proportion of visitors who convert, thereby improving revenue performance while cost remains unchanged. This brings you more revenue for each marketing dollar spent, regardless of the channel (SEO, PPC, email, social media, etc.).

But what if your conversion rate rises for a lower-priced product you carry and simultaneously drops for a higher-priced product. Specifically, let’s say last month you got 900 orders for a $1 product and 100 orders for a $100 product. This month, you got 950 orders for the $1 product and 90 orders for the $100 product. Conversions increased by 4% (from 1,000 to 1,040). Specifically, your conversion rate for the aforementioned 10,000 visitors has improved from 1% to 1.4%. But revenue dropped by 9% (from $10,900 to $9,950).

Clearly, there’s more to the story.

Situation 2: Focus on Average Order Value

Average Order Value (AOV) is exactly what the name implies:

AOV = Revenue/Orders

In Situation 1, Average Order Value was the blind spot. For the first month’s $10,900 in revenue, the AOV was $10.90. For the second month, AOV dropped to $9.57 since visitors bought slightly more of the $1 product and less of the $100 product, resulting in the overall decrease in revenue.

Comparing AOV to your average cost per order, you can look at average profit per order. By keeping cost consistent and increasing AOV, you stand to gain a pure increase in profit per order.

But what if you successfully increase your Average Order Value by offering a minimum purchase discount, but fewer visitors convert as a result, leading to a drop in revenue? In this situation, Conversion Rate would be the blind spot when tracking AOV in isolation, as CR would drop with fewer visitors making a purchase.

Enter RPV.

Situation 3: Focus on Revenue Per Visitor and Eliminate Blind Spots

RPV is simple yet often misunderstood. It tells you how much revenue each unique visitor is contributing to your website.

RPV = Revenue/Unique Visitors

What makes it so powerful? To see that clearly, let’s break down the metric into its individual components.

We can rewrite Revenue as:

Revenue = AOV x Conversions

So, we can rewrite the above RPV equation as:

RPV = (AOV x Conversions)/Unique Visitors

Since (Conversions/Visitors) = Conversion Rate, we’re left with this result after some mathematical hand waving:

RPV = AOV x CR

We know revenue is king for any e-commerce business. And we know you need traffic to get revenue. Once you get traffic, theoretically holding it constant, we know you increase revenue by either increasing Conversion Rate or Average Order Value.

This is what makes the composite RPV metric so powerful — it encompasses AOV and CR in a single trackable data point, and eliminates the aforementioned blind spots. If RPV drops, we know that it could be due to an increase in unqualified visitors with less buying intent. You can identify this traffic by segmenting inbound channels. It could also mean customers are simply spending less in their cart, or are preferring lower-priced items to higher-priced ones, causing a drop in AOV. Segment your product performance to identify and investigate this trend.

I would argue that Situation 1 above is what most website owners find themselves in. They believe Average Order Value is a relatively stable variable dictated by their niche and target audience, and that they can only significantly influence Conversion Rate. Furthermore, I would suggest there’s a strong positive correlation between catalog size (number of SKUs) and AOV volatility (in terms of standard deviation from a non-negative “mean” value), making this line of thinking particularly problematic for larger e-commerce stores, especially when there exists a wide range of prices for products.

A few caveats …

To maintain the fundamental integrity of the RPV metric, we need to ensure a couple things:

• Use Unique Visitors, not Total Visitors — Each individual must count as one visitor. This is because the vast majority of first-time visitors to a website do not make a purchase. They usually want to shop around, research information and/or compare prices. Thus, using Total Visitors can ramp up the denominator on the RPV calculation, negatively skewing it and increasing its volatility.
• Segment your channels — Without strong analytics in place for your e-commerce site, tracking and improving the aforementioned metrics will be close to impossible. I’d argue the most important step in that process is to make sure you’re properly segmenting your traffic channels so that you’re able to pinpoint one that may be significantly influencing something.

How Can I Improve RPV?

Use the following tactics to improve RPV:

• A/B testing
• Upselling
• Cross-selling
• Free shipping thresholds
• Minimum-purchase discounts
• Volume discounts
• Abandoned-cart emails
• Reward/loyalty programs
• Live chat
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• Usability testing and User Experience (UX) optimization

As you can see, this famous alphabet-soup metric debacle can easily be solved by focusing heavily on RPV and by understanding its underlying components, through which you can increase revenue in the long term.

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here.

Usability testing is, as the name suggests, an attempt to evaluate a product’s usability, or ease of use, by seeing if its design fits the user’s natural expectations in an efficient, effective and satisfying manner. The user’s comments and “feelings” about the overall experience of using a particular product validate and dictate its design. This could be a teapot or a saltshaker, of course, but in digital marketing, we’re usually talking about a website or mobile application. It’s critical that the website or mobile app appeals to a person’s natural inclinations of how to use it. Usability testing ensures that this is accomplished, and it’s easier than you think.

Why Is Usability Testing Done?

Again, usability testing, also referred to as simply user testing, is the process by which the intuitiveness of a design is assessed. Any successful company will routinely test usability during production to make sure a design is used the way it’s intended. For a website, we’re referring to navigation menus, layout, button placement, features, verbiage and more.

People expect a great user experience (abbreviated UX) from websites and mobile apps. We call this user-friendly or human-centered design. Things like confusing navigation, broken links, unclear instructions and obstruction of information are the opposite of user-friendliness and can sometimes all but guarantee that a visitor will exit your website out of frustration, never to return. Moreover, that person may complain to their friends or post on social media about how Company X’s website was simply “unusable.” The converse is also true. Provide an excellent experience for the user, and they will buy your product, return in the future and sing your praises to their friends. Usability testing helps prevent the former and ensure the latter. The famous $300 million button is a great example of this. In short, usability = conversions = profit.

Additional, oft-overlooked benefits of usability testing include improved efficiency (e.g. more user-friendly internal systems help employees work faster and smarter), reduced development costs (since you’ll only have to focus on the important features and you can fix flaws early in the process without wasting time later) and reduced support costs (less time answering users’ questions, fewer returns, etc.).

When Is Usability Testing Done?

It’s a common misconception that once you do one round of usability testing, you can stop, or that a “best practices” approach obviates the need for testing. Wrong! ABT: Always Be Testing! Usability testing should be performed on a regular schedule, especially during different phases of development. Design trends come and go, and users’ expectations evolve with these trends, so this is not a set-and-forget process. Similarly, there is no one-size-fits-all user-friendly design. What works for Facebook may not – and likely will not – work for you.

Who Conducts Usability Testing? And Who Are the Users?

Ideally, you’d want someone with some UX experience facilitating the test, but if you don’t have one of those, anyone can conduct a usability test – it’s easy! All you need is the product (we’ll continue with a website as an example), a video recorder (screen recording software for a website), a microphone and a list of tasks. Thus, designers, developers, project managers and CEOs can all conduct usability tests.

Testing can be a completely internal process, where in-house employees do the testing, or you can hire users to come in and perform testing. There are also websites that offer remote, unmoderated testing, but I’ll talk about those more later.

How Do I Do It?

1. Identify users – It helps to have users similar to the real users of the product, but this is not absolutely necessary. Most human brains are similar in terms of performing tasks. Also, you only need five users.
   
   
2. Design tasks – Think of specific actions you want to test. These are referred to as “tasks.” An entire blog post could be dedicated to this concept alone, since writing tasks is probably the most important aspect of your study. I like to preface my tasks with specific scenarios to set the scene, making it feel more real for the user and emulating a true circumstance. For example, for the Fish Hippie website, I had users imagine they were shopping for a shirt to keep them cool in the summer heat, because we wanted to see if people were easily able to find the new line of performance shirts. One user commented, “That’s fitting, since it is really hot outside right now, so I would probably look for that anyway.” Tasks should be specific enough to eliminate any possible ambiguity, yet general enough to allow the natural journey to unfold, which of course is the entire point of usability testing. Avoid being suggestive or asking “leading questions” in your tasks. This introduces bias and defeats the purpose of being able to see how a user naturally solves the problem. The task sequence regarding the shirt example above looked like this:
   
   
   • a. With the summer heat rising, you want to find a shirt that will keep you cool. Shop to find a shirt you like that will keep you cool.
   • b. Is it available in your desired color and size?
   • c. What were the important factors in choosing which shirt to get?
     
     
3. Do the testing – Gather your materials, set up your testing location in a private room, get snacks, and invite observers – especially managers and executives – to watch live testing sessions. In my experience, they usually walk away fascinated at the issues found by having one person attempt to use their product, since it’s never as smooth as they expect.
   
   
4. Analyze the results – The results of the tests should be analyzed and summarized to present the information on users’ comments and the problems they encountered. I usually use a simple bulleted list for this. If you have many issues that need fixing, you may want to rank them by priority.
   
   

A Word on Websites That Offer Remote, Unmoderated User Testing …

If you need a quick and dirty usability test, something like UserTesting.com – a website where you provide tasks and pay to get a video back from a tester completing them – is probably fine. But for any other case, I much prefer in-person testing. Here’s why:

Body language

For web-based services, you’re usually not going to be able to see the tester’s face, thus you can’t see facial expressions such as a “surprised” reaction when the user suddenly encounters something unexpected. This happens often, which leads to my next point.

Probing questions

Perhaps the most important reason why in-person testing is better is the ability to talk to the user. You’re able to ask probing questions, which usually give you more significant insights than the user’s unsolicited flow of thoughts. For example, if a user is surprised, you can ask, “Was there something that happened that you didn’t expect there?” – which is usually followed by an answer like, “Yea! I thought when I clicked this button, X would happen, but Y happened instead!” Moreover, remote users may sit in silence while scrolling and hovering, forgetting to constantly think out loud, which is very common. In-person testing allows you to ensure there is a constant stream of thought and say things like:

What are you thinking now?
What made you do that?
What are you looking at?
What are you doing now?

Q&A

In-person testing allows for questions and answers from both parties. I’ve also found that simply being in the same room and periodically saying “OK” and “That’s very helpful” cause the user to think out loud much more than they otherwise might in an unmoderated environment sitting at home.

Observers

As I said above, observing a live testing session can be a very rewarding and eye-opening experience for someone who is unfamiliar with the process and who naively assumes the product will definitely work the way it’s intended. Remote, unmoderated testing doesn’t allow for observation.

Time

Testers for sites like UserTesting.com have an incentive to spend as little time as possible doing a test. This causes them to not care as much and simply fly through the process. I should know – I used to be one! Thus, tests from these sites are usually only about 15 minutes long. Furthermore, it can be argued that these users eventually become “expert testers” after doing it so much, which affects the authenticity of your data. Real consumers will not be expert testers.

Deeper data

Because of the aforementioned aspects, you’re able to gain more meaningful insights from in-person usability testing, such as the psychological motivation behind specific behaviors, instead of the strict interaction with the product in isolation. I believe by solely using remote, unmoderated testing, you’re limiting yourself to discovering only “top-level” issues.

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In summary, usability testing is extremely important; it directly fuels profits. It should be done on a regular basis, can be done by anyone, and is relatively easy to do. Opt for in-person, facilitated testing over remote, unmoderated testing for better testing, more meaningful insights, and more impactful results.

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here. Go check it out.