When ranking e-commerce sites, Yandex and Google favor the big players. Popular stores get the lion’s share of search traffic, with aggregators that Google is not so fond of getting into the top of Yandex.
Traffic
In the top of the output the best sites in terms of attendance, the more unicons – the higher the position. To grow search traffic is also necessary to promote in other channels. Sites from the top of the highest percentage of direct hits, transitions from mail, advertising and social networks.
ICS
Site quality index from Yandex is also a traffic factor and affects the position of e-commerce resource in search.
Assortment
Resources with a large assortment usually occupy 90-98% of the top 3 of Yandex. 45-60% are sites with a huge assortment. There is almost no room left for medium and small. For Yandex it is also important to have a large number of brands in the store. With one or two brands it is very difficult to get into the top of Yandex, their share is about 5% of the total number of stores, but it is easier to get into Google.
Site size.
The number of indexed pages and the number of relevant URLs are also important for ranking.
Regions, addresses and phone numbers
Stores with more than one office or branch are easier to get into the top of the results. For product queries sites in the top 3 of Yandex have at least some stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which is a fairly strong ranking factor. This factor is slightly weaker for Google.
The other parameters related to regions, addresses and phones work roughly the same way: multiple regions and multiple regions; multiple addresses and multiple addresses and multiple phones. All of these appear to be markers that the store has a serious offline projection – which means it can probably be trusted.
Commercial factors.
For high positions the site should be user-friendly. It should contain all the elements: a product showcase, prices, “Add to cart” and “Buy” buttons, high-quality photos and clear descriptions, and the ability to filter goods by parameters.
Availability of prices and order buttons
Prices are present on sites in 96-99% of Yandex results for product queries, on-page in 90-93%, and order button in 94-97% of cases on the site and 75-85% on the page. In Google the values are lower, but there is a strong dependence on the position of the site.
Showcase
Approximately 80% of Yandex search results for our “product” sample are section pages; another 15% or so are main site pages. And only the remaining 5% go to product pages. Therefore, during search promotion special attention should be paid to showcases: optimize the names of products, their text characteristics and photos, as well as adjust the filter for products by parameters. The size of the storefront should be large enough.
Communication with the user
All contact information must be present on the site. Phone number, email address, forms for feedback – chats, calls. And for the searcher, the presence of multiple phone numbers means that the company has several branches. Sites with toll-free 8-800 numbers tend to have an advantage in the results.
Other factors
Most of the sites in the top list have a description of payment methods, and the presence of cashless payment methods will be a plus. Of the methods of delivery the most important is courier delivery or self-delivery. Information about warranty is also important.
References and reference texts
Link mass remains an important factor in a site’s ranking. For example, a site in the top 3 of Yandex is linked from more than 3,200 domains, while a site in the top 3 of Google is linked from 2,800. In the top 30 of Yandex – from more than 400, Google – almost 1000. Not only the number of links and the “weight” of the referring sites are important, but also the nature of the link profile: it is good if the share of links leading to the home page is not too large – that is, the links to the site are sufficiently diverse.
Social Media.
Most of the top sites have groups in social networks. The most important social networks are Youtube and Facebook. They are followed by VKontakte and Twitter, and then, with a large lag, Instagram and Odnoklassniki.
As for “Share” links, their importance for product queries is about the same as, or even slightly weaker (especially, in Google) for the overall sample. Apparently, sharing products on social networks is not too common here.
Text Ranking.
Textual parameters in Yandex when ranking for commercial queries are strongly correlated with getting into the top 30 and only correlate much more weakly than in Google with position.
It seems that textual relevance is assessed by Yandex early in the ranking process, with quick pre-screening of candidates – and in the final ranking, textual factors are given low, if any, weight.
In Google, textual parameters typically correlate with position. This means that Google takes text into account in ranking in about the same way that it takes into account other factors – such as linking or commercial factors.
But there is one important exception. The occurrences of the exact query in page titles <title> and <h1> are statistically associated with being in the top 30. This also contradicts the principle of anti-buqualism – the impact of occurrences of exact query in other areas is usually weaker.
That is, for Google, unlike Yandex, it is important that the query is present in the title of the page in the exact form, without change.
SEO texts
Having dealt with link spam, Yandex decided to apply the experience gained to combat text spam – large text blocks on commercial sites.
To do this, they first had to learn to clearly distinguish between texts of different genres on the page – information blocks, menus, product cards, technical specifications, and so on. What is quite acceptable on the product card (e.g., repetitions of query words), in the information block can become a marker of low-quality text. After highlighting SEO texts Yandex excluded them from the text ranking.
For Google, the SEO block was always just text on the page. It didn’t matter where the word was found – in the SEO block or, for example, on the product card.
To solve the problems with SEO text, you have to figure out what information from the text is really useful to the user. Allocate useful data in separate compact text blocks. These blocks can be announcements with links that lead to a full article, for example, with the process of buying a product, where recommendations are given on the choice or use of products.
For Google, the decrease in text weight can be compensated for by increasing the product showcase and making its structure more complex, such as describing products more fully and extensively and adding one-line descriptions.
What to do
- Make sure that the textual relevance of the site pages is sufficient, taking into account the number of query words on competitors’ pages (in Yandex – without SEO-texts).
- Increase relevance through product cards and other functional blocks, not through SEO texts. Do not forget to make titles of products on the cards with links.
- For Google query should be included in the <title> if possible.
- In all other cases, query words placer, their synonyms, etc. are more important than query occurrences.
- Get rid of SEO texts – as a temporary solution you can hide them from Yandex behind noindex. Google does not handle this tag.
- All the important SEO-texts moved to the function blocks. Delete the rest.