E commerce retailer eBay
Writing
Assignment 4
The
e-commerce retailer website I chose for the blog post is www.ebay.com. I am long time user of the site,
using it for purchases and for pricing researching mostly. Having never studied
the website from an SEO and web analytics perspective, I felt it would be very interesting
look at eBay’s use of both, especially with the very intense competition they
have from so many other large retail sites and other auction sites similar. Based
on the data, Ebay.com
is May's leading resale site in the U.S. It received 95 percent of total
traffic sent to the top 11 sites at 659.1 million visits. As a peer-to-peer
marketplace platform, Poshmark.com is the second runner-up, receiving 2.4
percent of the traffic at 16.4 million visits. Whether by its longer foothold
in the market, being founded in 1995, eBay seems to welcome brand
recognition by consumers of all generations according to one article (ROSHITSH,
2019).
Alongside
identifying the sites with top traffic, the results showed the top traffic
sources directing to the top resale sites, in context with year-over-year
visits for secondhand market players, and peer-to-peer marketplaces such as
Depop, Poshmark, ThredUp etc.
After direct
visits, search
is the largest source of traffic to the category. The combination of
organic and paid search
accounts for nearly 21 percent of all visits, driven heavily by organic. This
vital information for eBay and their digital marketing team.
E-mail marketing
and social media are the next largest contributors of traffic to the top resale
sites, and eBay receives 95.1 percent of all email traffic sent to the category.
According to the data, eBay also receives most of the social traffic sent to
the category at 88.4 percent.
What
tools/techniques/approaches is the eBay using? Opening the SEOquake extension
we added to our browsers on the eBay main page gave the following information:
|
Alexa rank |
Google index |
Bing index |
SEMrush ... |
Select |
SEMrush s... |
Page
|
Domain
|
Backlinks
|
Under Page Info it shows price and previous
price as the top keywords. Internal links at 405 and external links at 106.
The Page SEO Audit
contains a lot of useful information and seems to give Ebay a very good report
overall. Posted below the Page SEO audit are the areas of possible concern:
The Page SEO Audit shows: Passed:15 Error:2 Warning:5
Text/HTML ratio: 7.58% — ouch! Your websites
ratio of text to HTML code is below 15%. We suggest adding a lot more text to
your website. ( this was only bad reading on SEOquake for Ebay). Under the Tips
section for this section it stated “The text to HTML ratio is not a
direct ranking factor for search engines but there are many factors related to
the ratio that indicate best SEO practices and thus may indirectly result in
higher search rankings. Please follow this article to get more information.”
Mobile Compliance : Under AMP it states: “It
seems that this page does not have an AMP version. If you are a publisher, you
should think about creating Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is an easy way to
make your pages load instantly on any mobile device.”
Being that eBay is not a publisher
this should not be an issue. The only other posting of concern was the following
and more will be writing about this later.
Google Analytics: “Google Analytics is not
monitoring your website. We suggest taking advantage of this great tool.”
The
reason eBay does not use Google Analytics is because of it has its own version.
In researching this paper, I found that eBay has its own search engine or has
given a name to the algorithm that the search engine uses, called Cassini. In
both Google and Cassini search engines a search will show up multiple versions
of the same product. It will give you duplicate content. Search for a product
on eBay and the results will be multiple listings of the same product from
various sellers. This makes eBay SEO very different to Amazon, for example. A
search on Amazon will usually not give you duplicate content. To stand out from
all the other listings on eBay for products just like yours, it is important
that you tweak your listings to keep Cassini happy. eBay’s SEO works
differently to Amazon’s, for example, in quite a substantial way. When a
customer searches for a product on Amazon, it shows them one listing which may
have multiple sellers attached to it. On eBay, all listings are shown, whether
they are duplicate listings owned by different sellers or not.
SEO
is the detailed practice of optimizing every part of a web page to make sure
that a search engine ranks it as high as possible. Search engines are also
smart enough to look at your listing and establish how useful your eBay listing
is. Cassini looks at your listings completely to see if they are good enough to
show. Cassini asks 3 things: Is this listing what the buyer is looking for, is
there enough relevant information, does it help, educate, or entertain the
user, or just sell?
Optimizing
your listings and your eBay store for SEO consists of 2 different areas, Product
and Seller specific SEO. Product
specific SEO consists of more traditional SEO practices. It is
based on the correct use of relevant keywords and is similar to SEO for Google
and WordPress blogs. Seller specific
SEO is the way that your shop operates and how much value you
provide to a customer. Quick response times and/or history of positive
feedback, for example. the best possible keyword search for your eBay listings
is to use long tail keywords.
A new term I learned in researching eBay is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
the process that search engines use when they read a web page
(or eBay listing) and look for the most common words and phrases used. LSI
looks at synonyms of these words and checks if they are mentioned on the page,
too. The frequency and quality of synonyms used, tell the search engine how
relevant your page is to the keyword that is being searched.
One of the best ways to find the
eBay keywords for your product is by using a third-party eBay SEO tool. Some of
the best programs to use for eBay keyword research are Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs,
and Terrapeak. eBay is clearly on top of or ahead of most internet sights when
it comes to digital marketing.
Is on-page SEO set up to
facilitate better data collection? From the research I did (still very much a beginner)
eBay seems to be excellent in collecting data and I do not find I have a real
ability to offer significant adjustments. I have done general Google searches to
find an item to buy and eBay listings come up. eBay and Google have been in
great conflict over digital marketing and SEO. eBay had complained many times
about Google’s treatment in the Google algorithms. As eBay's
problem with Google SEO continued, management stated publicly that it had a
solution, they lunched a "Structured Data Initiative" to improve listings on eBay so they
would be more search-engine friendly on its own site and on search engines such
as Google.
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