eBay search engine optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in the performance of your listings and every seller who is serious about their business must take the time and learn how to do it properly. It determines the ranking of your products in relevant search results and if done right, can dramatically increase traffic, which subsequently impacts your sales.
First, we need to get familiar with Cassini – eBay’s search engine. Its algorithm decides where products and shops rank on the search results page. The higher up the page your product ranks for relevant search terms, the more visits you receive from potential customers, therefore the more sales you will make.
In this article we will provide a thorough understanding of what you need to know in order to give your listings the best shot at appearing on page #1.
After you read this post you will be able to:
- Apply different SEO tricks to improve your rankings
- Get more traffic to your eBay store and listings
- Analyze your overall performance and proceed accordingly
Writing the perfect optimized title
The main idea of the title is to be written for humans, not search engines. This means you have to choose keywords that people would use to search for a specific product.
Titles with relevant information that convey what you’re selling will be clicked more, which will lead to more visits to your listings. You are more likely to close a sale if the title accurately describes your product. We already covered a few important tips on building a title that will help you understand why it is such an important part of your listing.
That’s great, but how does it help with your eBay SEO? The answer is sales conversion rate.
Sales conversion rate
This is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors for a listing. Let’s say you have 2 sales from a 100 visits – that’s a 2% conversion rate (2/100). If you have 4/5/6/etc. sales for the same 100 visits, your conversion rate will be respectively 4%/5%/6%/etc., which means more people find your listing relevant to what they are looking for.
Don’t forget to check your store performance regularly on your seller dashboard.
The higher your conversion rate is, the better indication it is for eBay’s search engine that you are a good seller, and you will be rewarded by ranking higher in eBay’s search results.
Item specifics – they do matter
Item specifics are the filters that customers use to narrow the search. Customers won’t waste their time to go over thousands of listings as in the results shown below. They are looking to narrow the search as much as possible by using filters so they don’t have to scroll hundreds of pages to find the right product.
If you don’t fill in the item specifics, you may disappear from search results.
When creating your listing, you will find a section where you can add the item specifics. The more you add – the better is your chance of ranking higher.
Description
Your product’s description is one of the most effective tools for creating a search engine-friendly listing. Ebay suggests using about 200 words including most important keywords and phrases, comprising 5-7% of the total text. On average this means you will want to use the keywords about 10-15 times.
Keep in mind that search engines only read a certain amount of information per page, so flooding your description with non-relevant information or using too many keywords is not a good idea.
Price – the elephant in the room
Cassini has become quite smart and sophisticated in the past few years. It knows for example, what is a reasonable price to charge for a product and even looks at historical data to understand the price at which the particular product is most commonly bought.
“We know that if someone types in iPad for example, the average prices range between $300 and $800. So we know that is the price that most people searching for iPad are looking to pay. If you have a $2 iPad case, we know that that is outside of what most buyers are willing to pay and will not rank you.” – Todd Alexander, PeSA Internet Conference
Price your items attractive enough for visitors to purchase, but not too cheap that they fall out of Cassini’s perception of the value of the product.
Conclusion
The success of your SEO optimization will play a huge part in determining the growth of your eBay business. This is why you need to make sure that you implement the tips and trick we covered above. As you’ve seen, there are a lot of ways to bring traffic to your eBay listings.
Doing everything at once may be a lot of work but the key is to start with small changes (for example title optimization) and make it a habit to create every new listing the right way. With time, you will get better and better in it, so start today!
P.S. For the serious students
In order to be easier for you to understand and implement faster, we prefer to keep things lean on the blog, but I highly recommend watching the video below to gain a fuller understanding of Cassini and what eBay SEO means.
