Like every week, today we bring you an interview with a leading professional in the field of ecommerce and digital marketing. On this occasion we interview Fernando Angulo, Head of International Relations at SEMrush and international speaker.
What trends do you think are setting the ecommerce in 2018?
Images
One of the most important trends of this last year in the ecommerce world is the optimization of images and videos with 360 degree cameras. This type of images allow the end user to analyze the product you want to buy from any angle, giving a better idea of sizes.
Social Shopping
The two platforms with the best quality visuals on social networks are in 2018 the ideal scenario for merchants who want to promote their products without their customers noticing. These networks are Instagram and Pinterest. The main idea behind this is to make the end user feel attracted, influenced and impacted by a product, so that they buy it without leaving their social network.
Voice searches
According to ComScore, by 2020, 50% of searches will be done by voice. We can already see it today with the large number of voice assistants we have, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Home, etc. that for some years now have been a reality in our lives. Now suppose that only 20% of those searches are commercial, then we talk about an exponential growth in the use of assistants in ecommerce platforms, which gives a lot of space to the development of new technologies to implement companies that do not yet have it.
Machine Learning
The implementation of Machine Learning algorithms in ecommerce for the optimization of user experience, price, promotion of intelligent ads, customer support service, fraud detection, etc., are a reality that is growing and make things change faster.
Name 3 bad practices that you see in the day to day SEO of ecommerce, and how you would correct them
Security
Security remains a priority for e-commerce sites everywhere. Business owners should take steps to protect their e-commerce sites from hackers and viruses. They should use verified security practices to protect user data against fraud and theft. A good start to keeping your website secure is to migrate your domain from HTTP to HTTPS, which is a protocol specially designed to keep your data and your users’ data protected.
Website Speed
The desire to be able to have and accumulate more information about users by putting a series of applications and scripts on a website can cause it to become very slow. Even uploading non-optimized and large product images affects loading times.
To solve the problem with crawlers is highly recommended to use the Ecommerce crawler via Google Tag Manager, this way you can activate the most relevant metrics in your Google Analytics. For images, make sure you have photo compression tools in your arsenal such as Jpeg optimizer, tiny png or compressor images.
Chatbots
It is true that an internal helper who guides you and encourages you to make a purchase is a very powerful instrument of retention and conversion. The problem is when your company lacks one or when its logic is not helpful to the customer. If your business does not yet have a chatbot, perhaps you should observe how market leaders such as Sephora, eBay, Pizza Hut and others who increased their sales by more than 20% with this tool.
What do you think of the AMP? How do you think it will evolve?
The results of the experiments with AMP are generally very satisfactory, and note that many companies still expect more support from the AMP team for ecommerce. In my personal opinion, I believe that if you have the technical equipment and the budget to implement AMP in your product pages, do not hesitate to do so, this will surely be a good thing for your website in general, since more than 50% of ecommerce users use their mobile devices to make purchases.
The bad news is that it is still something complicated to do, so it can be expensive and time consuming. Now, if you use platforms like Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento, Joomla…, the implementation will be much easier.
In ecommerce, which KPIs of relevance do you think are often neglected?
The Average Transaction Value (ATV).
This metric is key to the success of an online business. Whether you run a traditional retail business or an e-commerce website, increasing your ATV is an ideal way to increase your company’s bottom line and overall success.
The average value of a transaction is the average dollar amount (local currency) that a consumer spends in your store, within a single transaction. To calculate your ATV, you must: take the total value of each of your transactions for a specific time period and divide that number by the total number of transactions your company had during the same time period. This will give you an average of how much each transaction was worth during that period. Generally, the higher the ATV, the more revenue your company generates on each customer who makes a purchase.
What does SEMrush offer to an ecommerce that other tools don’t offer?
One of the biggest sources of information about the activity of the ecommerce competition can only be found in SEMrush. With the Google Shopping product announcement list (PLA) report, you can know which of your competitors are promoting their products more intensively, the budget they spend and the products they promote the most.
In addition, content marketing for ecommerce is a very current issue throughout the industry, especially when it comes to product cards and their positioning by keywords. To get everything in order, you can perform an audit of the content of your e-commerce and review card by card the quality of optimization that has or ways to improve your existing content that has SEMrush prepared for you.
Those are two of the many tools you can find only in SEMrush.