Statistics and some simple SEO metrics can help you improve user experience and you can get them without having to work too much. BigCommerce stores are fairly well designed from an optimization standpoint, but as anywhere in marketing, you need to work your product.
And the product we're talking about is your store with its graphic elements, functionality, content and promises. In my opinion three things make me bounce once I land on a BigCommerce store which has no sign of being taken care of:
- using the default template - You know one thing? A few other dozens of BigCommerce stores use the very same template right now. Unmodified. No sign that you want to stand out. And I get to see a LOT of stores daily. The base templates are ok, they are good looking, but you need to stand out. Work on them. Put some cash on the table and make it as you want it, not as you've received it
- stale content - "This is a blue jacket". Really?! Unless I lived under a rock my whole life I need more information than that. Why would I buy your blue jacket when the next store says "awesome blue jacket"? One of the first rules in optimization: put some meat on the product pages. If not, SEO hell awaits. Greedily.
- bad (horrific) design - Do you like the design of this site? I doubt, yet there are BigCommerce stores that look this way. But wait, there's more to this: music is on autoplay. Yes, you must love that they do everything to keep you away. What's more interesting is that some of these stores make some sales. As Chris Silver Smith explains here, sites like these are saved by their age, lots of content on the page and quite some backlinks.
Okay, show me those statistics and spare me the rant
It should be of no surprise that most of my posts mention the same thing over and over again and that some other posts have a motivational aspect. Having original product description in each of your 30k products will require lots motivation from you since spending lots of thousands of dollars is not an easy decision.
So, if you read Hubspot's post about website experience you will discover the following statistics:
- single-page checkout outperforms a two-page checkout by 21.8% - see the study here
- 73% of online shoppers will leave your site if you request too much data on checkout - seems too much? read more about this here
- make it easy for online shoppers to find a product in less than 30s - find more info Hubsports link mentions before the list
- 5% of new customers who make a purchase with a company return to the site, and only 3% make a second purchase - study here
- 40% of people leave your site immediately upon entry - it is all about bounce rate here
- 61% of the customers read reviews before buying - I guess this is a no brainer
These are cold, hard facts we need to act upon. Knowing the general picture we can better understand what happens on our website and how our customers are thinking.
You mentioned SEO metrics...
Yes, and form those I want to show a small example from the world of bounce rate. In SEO bounce rate is a percentage of people who leave your website upon entry. If a page had 80% bounce rate that means 8 out of 10 people simply push the back button or close the tab.
And, here is another aspect of bounce rate: if you have short "how to" pages or long posts like this which are able to offer the answer your visitors need then you will get a high bounce rate too. That doesn't mean that the given page is bad.
This is why we need to bring in another SEO metric in place: average time on page. What is interesting is that if you have a bounce (someone comes to your page and then leaves no matter how much he stayed on that page) there is no time on page recorded.
That being said you need to look at the bounce rate AND average time on page. Of, course all these need to be correlated with visits and/or other metrics, but let's keep it simple:
Looking at the above image I see that I need to improve on the pages with SEO misconceptions and the one about zombie traffic. And I have now a hint: they are long posts. The other ones can be read in about the time you see listed there so I can say that it is almost ok (it is never perfect).
Moving forward, you can see that having an online store is not child's play and that SEO is not just a buzz word. Learning a bit of it and practicing will help you get your BigCommerce store in the front lines.
There is still the question: "Manuel, why do these others rank better than me when I see that they are a step behind on some SEO activities?" Well, the answer ranges from "I don't know", to "Google likes to play too much", to "Don't look at that, analyse, do what they do good and overtake them". It is never easy.