Importance of UX for an eCommerce site & How it Impacts your SEO?

---

What is UX?

When brands and businesses say UX, they mean delivering the right interaction for their audience. And these days, it has become extremely important for people.
Businesses spend thousands of dollars optimizing their UX. It has a huge role to play when talking about profits and the bottom line. Most of the top companies in the niche have a crisp UX on their website. Customers respond positively to an appealing UX.
UX is all about making your website more appealing and easier to read for the users. And it is crucial these days because people have a lot of choices. Several thousand brands are offering the same service as the other.
A professional UX design helps your brand stand out from the rest. It also helps considerably as a ranking signal.
Another thing about UX is that it is really hard to get right as it depends on several factors. A few of them are the size of the business, type of services, niche, ranking, and location, just to name a few. So to get this right, considerable research needs to be carried out. And you need to implement an effective strategy to get the best results.
A lot of people confuse UI and UX, but they aren’t the same. UI is more focused on form and function of a website. UX is a more intangible quality. It is more about how a user can get things done on your website.

Importance of UX on Ecommerce Websites

---

Ecommerce is perhaps one of the strictest and demanding online businesses right now. It reaches across the globe and handles complex transactions from hundreds of thousands of people. And another fact is that it is seriously competitive.
There are several eCommerce brands online that can sell customers anything they want. So it is difficult to make a dent in this industry because of the competition.
All that said, it is important for brands to be able to offer their customers a great UX. The audience is going to compare your brand with your competitors. And if your brand comes up short in the UX department, then they will opt for buying their goods elsewhere. Here are some statistics that are exclusive to eCommerce brands.

Ecommerce Statistics

• Every dollar invested in UX can net returns of up to $100.
• 70% of all abandoned shopping carts are due to a bad checkout process.
• 88% of users will not return after a bad user experience on a website.
• 32% of people would drop a brand they loved after just one bad experience.
• 1% of users feel that an eCommerce website meets their expectations every time.

As you can see, these are some staggering insights into how competitive eCommerce is. It also shows how important UX is to an eCommerce website.
Brands are walking on a knife-edge when it comes to customer satisfaction. But with enough focus and effort, you can also get a lot of customers in very little time. The point here is that if you spend time getting UX right, the rewards are great.

Bad UX Examples For Ecommerce

• Forcing users to login with an account.
• Long loading times.
• Having a busy homepage.
• Not disclosing pricing upfront.
• Having an insecure website or does not have an HTTPS protocol.
• Limited payment methods.
• Website crashes during user interaction.
• Incompatible with certain currencies.

There are a lot more bad UX examples, but the above are the most common. As you might have noticed, most of them are easy to improve. All it needs is a bit of effort and some research to get done.
The top eCommerce companies in the industry have a highly optimized user experience. It enables them to achieve a much higher rate of success.
For an eCommerce brand, the UX makes or breaks business for them. It is an integral part of their philosophy. Again, people are spoiled for choice when it comes to shopping. It makes UX the deciding factor when it comes to sales.
If you look at top eCommerce brands like Amazon and Walmart, they have streamlined their total experience.

• The way they set up their websites when it comes to navigation is clean.
• They have set the benchmark for good UX when it comes to eCommerce.

For new eCommerce brands, they are a great example to emulate. But the unfortunate scenario today is that not many eCommerce brands focus on UX. It delivers a very mediocre experience for most of the customers. It is one reason why most people are disappointment with eCommerce brands. But if you can focus on giving them the best experience, you will reap the benefits.

How UX Impacts Your Ranking on Search Engines?

---

When it comes to eCommerce SEO, there are a lot of factors at play. And as algorithms grow complex, even more variables are thrown into the mix.
UX comes under the newer category of metrics that brands need to fulfil. Search engines aim to provide a value-added experience for the user. And this directly correlates with this range of metrics.
UX isn’t just one thing; it’s many things that are clumped together into one. There is load time, mobile responsiveness, URL structure, tags, and many more.
The goal here is to help the customer get as much as possible from the website. Another consideration is that this needs to happen in as little time as possible. Brands are trying to reduce conversion times for their customers.
All these factors make UX something to be considered. SEO and UX are closely intertwined together. And eCommerce SEO has a lot to gain from a streamlined UX.
Most of the top eCommerce brands focus on creating great customer experiences. Having a tight UX profile also means that your brand has considerable reach through word-of-mouth marketing.
People talk about good brands, especially when it comes to eCommerce. So UX has a lot to give when it comes to eCommerce & SEO. And this is why brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on optimizing UX to newer standards. And the effect on rankings is powerful and direct.
For example, let’s take one metric from the UX group - loading speed. It is perhaps one of the oldest metrics in the book, and even today, it is the most powerful metric.
Today, Google prioritizes loading speeds above a majority of the ranking signals. Because a quick loading website is central to user experience, it highlights the amount of competition that is prevalent in the industry.
People tend to click away sooner than ever. So, the average bounce rate is climbing every day. All this makes loading speed even more critical for success.

How to Improve Your UX for Your eCommerce Business?

---

1. Create an Uncluttered Homepage

The first place any eCommerce brand should start on their UX optimization is the homepage. And for a good reason, because this is the face of your brand.
Customers who log on to your website will get to see this first. That is where the most important thing happens with your visitors - they become customers. And you need to align everything on your homepage to make this happens.
To start with, declutter your homepage. Too much information coming at the visitor can intimidate them. Opt for colours that are easier on the eyes. Also, use straightforward layouts that convey information.
Demarcate areas where you want your audience to focus. All this will have a noticeable increase in your ranking potential.

2. Improve Your Website Loading Time

As we’ve mentioned before, loading times are the crux of a stellar user experience score. All the top websites are focused on minimizing load times as much as possible. And this is for good reason because modern ranking systems prioritize shorter loading times.
Most of the top-ranked websites have load times in the higher 90% of all websites. Loading times are important because people tend to click away a lot quicker these days. A website has about 8 seconds to make an impression on the user. Failing that, they will just click on another link. It will make a huge impact on your eCommerce SEO.

3. Optimize Call To Action Text And Buttons

When you are an eCommerce brand, CTAs are an important mechanic. They help direct the audience to what they want. It also encourages them to take positive action, like buying or subscribing.
Ideally, the most common CTAs on an eCommerce website will be the “Add to cart” or “Checkout” buttons. The buttons should be visible in an alternative, catchy colour.
Along with this, using a method called Fear Of Missing Out is also common. Time-limited offers or sales fall under this category. By doing it, you can instil a sense of urgency in the visitor.
Research shows that they are more likely to purchase something that is under a sales deadline. Amazon does this through their ‘Lightning Deals’. Products can have huge discounts, but those expire in a limited period.

4. Leverage Social Proof For Your Brand

Another mechanism for getting better ranking signals from your website is to establish social proof. Social proof is anything that is user-generated that talks about the quality of your services. It can be reviews, social media posts, testimonials or emails.
Generally, social proof needs to be positive. As time goes on, you can also include negative comments and how you handled them. It is a great way to get more people to invest in your brand.
Social proof appeals to the emotional side of the customer. It is a powerful way to tilt the odds in your favour. As a brand, you need to ensure that what you post is legitimate. Fake data or reviews here can mean a lot of problems for you later.

5. Write Detailed Product Descriptions On Listings

When it comes to selling goods on eCommerce websites, there needs to be a listing of the product. In most cases, it is likely to contain 4 or 5 lines of text without many specifications or other data. It is the wrong way to do it.
Your product listings need to be detailed and informative. It needs to have important numbers that are useful to buyers.
A look at Amazon’s listing can give you an idea. There are entire sections dedicated to a single product. These make a difference when your website is selling advanced products or services.
Customers always appreciate it when you get into the details. You can even find comparisons with similar products at the bottom. All these can help a customer make an easier and quicker purchase decision. And it improves your conversion rate.

6. Add Personalization And Guides For Customers

For today’s eCommerce businesses, personalization is the name of the game. It makes customers feel more inclusive and special. And this can translate into increased sales.
There are several ways where you can add personalization. But before you delve into that, you need to set up data points.
Have a list of indicators compiled that can tell you various aspects of your customers. It includes:

• age,
• geolocation,
• product browsing history, and
• check out patterns.

It will help you to set up an accurate customer avatar. Later you can use this to build their personalization profile. And the best part is that you will find a lot of common people here. These can act as groups to whom you can push specific services or products. It will benefit your bottom line and help you with future sales as well.

7. Ensure Your Layouts Are Clean And Clear

Visitors come to an eCommerce website as they want to buy something. The objective here for the brand is to make this as easy as possible.
You can do it through dynamic layouts that can help visitors look through different products quickly.

• Make it clear without confusing the user.
• Use the colours sparsely with care.

You will notice this on most popular eCommerce brands.

• A majority of the backgrounds are whitespace, and they use colours only on splash screens or banners.
• The product listings are always on a plain background, as it gives a clean and uncluttered feel.

These things will help a customer to decide much more effectively about their purchases.

8. Make Your Website Easy To Navigate

Another key area to focus on an eCommerce niche is navigation. Like layouts, navigation is extremely important to help you sell products.
Customers need to browse back and forth freely without being slowed down. The key to improved navigation is to label the products and provide ways to get around clearly. It also helps to add categories so people can choose what they want a lot easier.
You can also make use of sidebars and CTAs. These are visual elements that make a website more accessible to the user.
Make sure that you do everything in balance. Overdoing any aspect of design will only give you bad results for eCommerce brands.

9. Consider Customer Feedback As Part Of Your Process

If you want to improve as a brand, feedback is an essential commodity. It is in your interests to have a specific feedback loop incorporated into brand building.
You aim to serve your customers effectively. So the easiest way to do that would be to listen to them. Make sure that you have a team to sort through feedback and deliver findings.
These can highlight problem spots in your marketing funnel you didn’t know existed. More often than not, it might be harsh. But you need to learn to take it in your stride.
You are looking at long-term goals and feedback helps you get good results. These might be in the form of emails, social media messages or even onsite reviews. The key is to work on them to make your website better.

10. Add Wishlists To Your Website

Wishlists are an indispensable part of the eCommerce experience. And implementing it is a crucial part of the UX today. A wishlist is where visitors can add products they are interested in.
Wishlist is a convenient way to store a list of things to buy at a later date. Otherwise, your customers would have to use other apps to do this. And this can be frustrating and lead them to click away.
Wishlists can even help track prices of products over time. Several websites also use wishlists as part of their customer avatar configuration. You can get a lot of insights into purchase behaviour by analyzing customer wishlists. And you can even email them discount coupons for a guaranteed conversion rate increase.

11. Enable Guest Checkout For Users

An eCommerce business needs to keep themselves accessible to all levels of users. It includes guest users who want to buy things off your website as well.
Guests are people who still do not have an account on your website. A lot of users might want to try your service first. And this is why they don’t subscribe to your services immediately.
Forcing people to create an account to check out their goods will only result in cart abandonment. You can still get the customer’s email. And in fact, this could be a much easier method to build your email list. You have a better chance of conversion here compared to other traditional methods.
Most big brands allow guest checkouts. There are several advantages to doing so.

12. Use Effective Popup Strategies

Any brand that uses popups effectively is going to notice increasing business metrics. And this is true with eCommerce brands as well. But the problem is that you need to be very careful with adding popups to your website. When not used properly, popups can be annoying and can turn people away from your website.

One of the ways you can use a popup would be to rely on exit-intent. It detects when users are going to leave your website. You can add in a time-limited deal or discount.

Using popups this way has a much better chance of success for brands. Another popup methodology that has a lot of success is timed popups. Several eCommerce brands use this to display products related to what the user is browsing or has added to the cart.

13. Never Use Automatic Videos Or Sliders

There is nothing users hate more than being blasted with an autoplay video as soon as they click on the website.
Usually, eCommerce users get aggravated with this problem.
Ideally, your website should be as easy on the eyes as possible. It shouldn’t include intrusive content of any kind. And also do not opt for sliders or parallax scrolling unless it is necessary.
The reason is that these are prone to errors when used with different devices. To make sure that none of these happens, opt for a simple website.
For an eCommerce website, UX is all about making it easy for people to access functionality. And your thoughts should be on getting the customer what they want as quickly as possible.

14. Opt For Geo-location Tagging

Location is a critical aspect of an eCommerce brand’s sales strategy. That is why you need to adopt geolocation targeting.
You need in-depth metrics to assess how successful your campaigns are. You also get location-specific information about what sells where. It allows you to predict sales according to specific locations and climatic conditions.
You can tailor your marketing campaign according to specific locations. It lets you pick and choose what you want to sell.
For example, some states in the US like Minnesota, have awful winters. You can stock winter equipment and supplies needed for the state ahead of time.
You can also customize language according to different locations. It is the key when it comes to a global eCommerce brand.
Geotagging can significantly improve an eCommerce brand’s sales funnel. It also improves the bottom line and revenue.

15. Add One-click Checkout

When trying to streamline the buying process, a lot of top eCommerce brands are implementing single click checkout.
One reason for this is that cart abandonment has grown unusually high. This year, it is at 76% according to certain sources. It is a huge problem because it means that 3/4ths of all sales are lost.
One-click checkout is a method to alleviate this problem. You might be surprised to learn the Amazon had the patent to a one-click checkout. When using one-click checkout, it was generating $2.4 billion in annual revenue.
As you can see, one-click can generate a huge amount of sales. But it has expired since then, and now most eCommerce platforms have been using it to improve sales.

16. Make Reviews Easy To Access

When you want to generate more sales, user reviews are an important tool that can leverage social proof. As statistics go, about 88% of all shoppers buy positively rated products. And if you are wondering about negative reviews, they have a role to play as well.
Negative reviews are where you can respond and convert them to your brand. It is an option to retarget those people and improve your revenue stream. As an eCommerce brand, you should never try to hide or doctor reviews. Make them easily accessible right on your product page.

Related : Tips for Your eCommerce Landing Page

Amazon has the ‘5 stars’ system right next to the product name. It even offers you the option of sorting according to user reviews. These are powerful methods that can increase sales.

17. Provide Different Payment Options

Payment is where the person concludes their business with your website. For eCommerce, this is the most critical part of the entire funnel.
Without payment, there is no revenue. Failing here means the entire process has been a waste of time and money. And eCommerce brands should make this stage as painless as possible.
One thing that can affect this step is not having enough options for payment. As a service provider, you must have all the popular payment methods implemented on your website.
Of course, you don’t need to include all of them. Here, some research into what is most popular with your audience can help. As an added functionality, you can also opt for various financing options. These can further improve your eCommerce website’s accessibility.

18. Optimize For Mobile Devices

For eCommerce brands, it should come as no surprise that mobile users are increasing. They accounted for more than 50% of the traffic in 2019. This year they will surpass that and become the most dominant source of traffic and sales.
As a business, you should gear your website to be mobile-friendly. The easier it is on a mobile platform, the better sales you will have. The one thing you should consider when you are implementing a mobile-friendly UX is screen size.
The smaller screen size means more scrolling for the user. You also need to keep the text size optimal for better reading. You can solve it by using buttons and drop-downs through the mobile site. If you haven’t paid attention to mobile optimization, you need to get on that as quickly as possible. It will help you to score big on eCommerce SEO.

19. Test Different Interactive Designs

An important part of the eCommerce website UX development process is testing. Even if you are the biggest brand in the market right now, you cannot forego testing.
An eCommerce business needs to improve its UX all the time. But the way to choose the right development path is through A/B Testing.
What this means is that you use a public opinion on different designs to choose. It can give you a lot of insights into your interactive designs. And this is important because the design is a major part of the buying process for people.

20. Connect With A Social Media Platform

Social media is a huge part of the digital ecosystem. And this rings more true for eCommerce than other industries. With close to 4.5 billion people using social media every day, social platforms are a huge resource.
The key is to use SM correctly for brand outreach. There are several benefits for eCommerce brands on social media. It is a lot easier to connect with your audience.
You can also troubleshoot product issues a lot quicker. It makes your eCommerce brand a lot easier to access for your users. People are also much more likely to buy products from a brand on social media.
71% of customers opt for eCommerce products with social media referrals. Also, social media platforms have an extensive suite of tools for information and ads. You can leverage them to your benefit.
Are you looking to improve your UX? Or Are you looking for help with eCommerce SEO? Then, drop your details here. Our experts will get in touch with you immediately.