Transforming Online Shopping
Using engagement to improve your Shopify site's Google rank
Last week’s post was about how to get more traffic to your Shopify site. Once you get some traffic coming in you need to engage it. Google’s key metric for Google is happy searchers. (If you want to understand how Google really works, download our free e-book “How to Outsmart Google”.) Google determines how happy searchers are by measuring engagement. In this post I’ll take you through how Google measures engagement and how to dial that in. Google fields 8.5 billion searches a day. They can’t send all their traffic on any one search to just one site. It would crash the site. So, moving up in the ranks is like starting a bike in tenth gear. It’s really hard and slow at first, but once you have momentum it gets easier and it goes faster.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is a bit of the snake eating it’s own tail. Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on your website’s link in search results after seeing it. Yup, you need to have created ads or high ranking content for this to come into play. It’s mostly for ads, and yes, Google rewards you when you buy ads. Adding CTR to the engagement score is Google putting a big fat finger on the scale for ads. Google believes that a high CTR suggests that your content is compelling and relevant to users. It can also mean that you have a knack for creating good ad copy. Read on, because there’s more to the story.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who leave your site shortly after visiting a single page. This is why having a compelling home page is so important. A lower bounce rate indicates that visitors are finding what they’re looking for and engaging with your content. Getting visitors to view a second page is the only way to reduce bounce rate. There are three questions you need to help visitors can answer quickly when they visit your home page.
- What are you selling?
- Why should your customer care? (What’s in it for them?)
- What should they do next?
Go ahead and take a moment to visit your site’s home page and see if it answers those three questions. It’s harder than it looks, and crazy important. I’ll wait.
Dwell Time (Time on site)
Dwell time is the amount of time users spend on your site. Longer dwell times suggest that visitors are finding valuable content, which tells Google that your site provides a good user experience. This is a simple time measurement metric. You can’t fake it and even a few seconds longer will move you up in the ranking. Getting shoppers to stay longer is not easy. You are competing against life for their attention. Lots of moving, flashing, things probably won’t help. Who is your target customer? What matters to them? Putting together tight collections and having compelling photography really helps with this. If your customer is cheap, offer lots of discounts. If your customer is chic, offer a sophisticated design. Here’s a post on leveraging cheap and chic as a differentiator.
Pageviews and Events per Session
This metric measures how many pages a user views during a single visit to your site. The more pages visitors view, the more it shows Google that visitors are engaging with your content. Pageviews are part of what Google counts as events. Events are the sum of all the things visitors do when they engagement with your site. Clicking a link, visiting a page, adding to cart all count as events. Getting visitors to view more pages and do more things that cause events to be counted is a big deal. It’s hard to get visitors to view even one more page, so getting lots of page views is gold. Shopify sites can add recommendation apps to their site. But I think it’s easier to make shopping faster and more fun. (Biased toward Stylaquin for this one.) You can’t increase the amount of time visitors have to shop, but you can make it faster to shop, so they have time to see more items.
Does Your Site Do This?
It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.
Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!
The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.
Comments and Engagement on Site
User-generated content, such as comments on blog posts or discussions in forums, count as engagement. Meaningful interactions on your site will signal to Google that your content is valuable and fosters a sense of community. Blogging about your products and linking to them is a good way to do that. Making it easy for customers to leave reviews is another way.
Instagram and Facebook are online fashion’s best friends when it comes to social engagement. Creating a real community of people you connect with, and offer valuable content to, takes time and focus. This is just another example of why having a very targeted audience is key to creating connection. Here’s a link to our free e-book on creating personas so you can focus your brand on your target customer. I don’t want to knock blogs and content. This is after all a blog post that you’re reading. But if you are a Shopify Store, you’re selling products. You don’t want them to go to your blog, you want them to go to your store. In the time it takes to create a blog post that will rank, you could created a boat load of instagram and Facebook posts that just show what you sell. Make them interesting, uplifting, pretty, funny and so on to get followers as well as click throughs.
Social media takes time to learn and master. Don’t try to get every channel going. You need a team for that. Pick the one that is most important to your customers and just do that one to start. If you already have a channel or two working, then branch out. Any channel can work, but it takes months to get it going and years to make it big. The TV show “Emily in Paris” is actually a good example of clever social marketing. It took our fictional hero a while to get the ball rolling even though she’s adorable, has a FABULOUS wardrobe, is a social media professional, and she lives in Paris. Work with what works best for your personal style and privacy needs.
Repeat Visitors
Returning visitors may be the ultimate signal to Google that users find your site valuable and are coming back for more. How do you get more repeat visitors? You have to create a compelling experience, and you have to have products that customers want. Wish lists can help. Setting up a good email program is another great way to get the same customers to come back. New items, sales, interesting info about the products all work. If you want to see a great example of how a family owned business can create quality email about their products, sign up for the emails at Cross Jewelers. Every email tells a story about a product, and they rarely are offer any sales, so they aren’t giving up any margin. It isn’t flashy, but it’s consistent and they’ve grown quite a bit over the years, so something is working.
Is there an easier way to improve your engagement score
Honestly, this is where Stylaquin is head and shoulders above anything else out there. It makes shopping fun AND it has an idea board that let’s shoppers save all the things they liked but didn’t buy. We’ve seen Dwell time go up 70%. We’ve seen product views go up over 180% when visitors shop with Stylaquin. We aren’t sure if visitors come back because it was just more fun, or if they wanted to see if what they left on their idea board was still there, but Stylaquin shoppers come back up to 28% more often, and they buy more when they do. Stylaquin is the total package for increasing engagement. Check it out.
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