The statistics certainly don’t lie about Amazon’s continued staggering dominance of today’s ecommerce market; the tech titan may have started off as a bookseller in the early days of the World Wide Web, but by 2018, its annual net sales in the UK alone amounted to a staggering 14.5 billion US dollars. It was also reported last year that almost nine in 10 UK shoppers use the site.
What does all of this say about how your own ecommerce store responds to Amazon? Well, it certainly suggests you could learn a few lessons from them.
So, here are a few steps that you might take to make your site’s product pages that bit more ‘Amazon-esque’ – for the better.
Make your product names as descriptive as possible
Of course, Amazon is effectively its own search engine – people are constantly using its search function to type in the names of products that they’re looking for. Accordingly, merchants compete hard to rank their products as highly as possible in Amazon’s search results.
A strategy that such sellers therefore often adopt, is loading the names of their products with highly descriptive and specific text, to help them to reach those prospective buyers who really are looking for that red, stainless steel, 1.7-litre, electric kettle.
What you might not have realised, though, is that it’s a method that could also greatly help your own ecommerce store’s products to rank highly in Google. Adding a few modifiers – such as colour, size, material and so on – to your product page names could go a long way to helping you to target the prospective purchasers who’re most likely to be interested in them.
Flesh out your product descriptions
It might seem to go without saying that if your product page titles are highly descriptive, the actual descriptions further down the page probably should be, too.
However, you might not have consciously noticed how Amazon makes good use of both bullet points and longer-form text descriptions on its product pages. Both of these aspects of a product page can be instrumental in informing Google of the relevance of the product for the searches that human users might perform for certain items.
Bullet points, of course, are highly ‘scannable’, which makes them great for quickly drawing attention to the key features and benefits of a product. Well-written extended text, however, can also considerably boost contextual search relevance, at the same time as helping human users who land on the given page.
Allow for user-generated content
How many of us haven’t found a review by an actual buyer of a given product helpful for informing our decision as to whether to purchase? More recently, questions and answers have also been added to Amazon’s product pages. Both of these features enable Amazon – and other online stores like your own – to use shoppers’ own language to augment the information already on the page and bolster the page’s chances of ranking well.
We’d add a caveat here, though: not all user-generated content will necessarily be good for the SEO of your e-tail store’s product pages. If such content is poor quality, irrelevant or outright spammy, the page’s relevance signals may become muddled, thereby undermining its ability to rank.
So, it’s a very good idea to have someone moderating the reviews your products receive. You might even go further in the Amazon-imitating stakes in this regard, by allowing shoppers to indicate which reviews they find most helpful. This means that the highest-rated reviews can be pinned to the top of the list – in the process, denying a prominent position to lower-quality reviews.
Would you like to learn more about the breadth and depth of the ecommerce web design and SEO marketing expertise we could bring to your own brand? If so, the Piranha Designs team is available on the other end of a phone or email inbox, whether you contact us in Gibraltar, London or Edinburgh.
